Chapter 1 | Entry Ten

"Before the world taught her to be anything, she was already everything."

I was seven, maybe eight.

I remember the dress, white, frilly cotton with tiny yellow flowers, the kind that swished when I moved. I remember putting it on that morning and feeling something I didn't have words for yet.

Beautiful.

Not because anyone told me. Not because I was trying to be.

Just because I felt it.

I stood in front of the mirror in my bedroom, and the sun was pouring through the window, warm and golden on my skin. I could see the dust floating in the light, and I remember thinking it looked like magic. Like the whole room was full of tiny stars just for me.

And I started spinning.

Slowly at first, watching the dress lift and swirl around my legs. Then faster. And faster. Until the room blurred and my laughter spilled out of me like it had been waiting there all along, like my body couldn't hold all the aliveness inside.

I spun until I was dizzy, until I collapsed on the floor, breathless and giggling, the sun still warm on my face.

I didn't know yet that beauty could be a burden.

I didn't know that aliveness would make people want things from me.

I didn't know I was supposed to be smaller, quieter, less.

I was just me. Whole. Free. Radiant without trying.

And I've spent decades trying to get back to that.

Trying to feel that alive again. Trying to feel that beautiful without needing someone else to tell me I am. Trying to remember what it was like to take up space without apologizing, to laugh without wondering if it was too loud, to feel without worrying it was too much.

I didn't lose that girl because she wasn't enough.

I lost her because the world taught me she was too much.

That her light made people uncomfortable. That her aliveness needed to be controlled. That her beauty was something other people got to decide the value of.

And so I learned to fragment.

To offer pieces instead of the whole.

To dim myself so others could feel brighter.

To perform beauty instead of being it.

But she's still here.

That little girl in the white dress with yellow flowers, spinning in the sunlight, laughing because her body was alive and that was enough.

She's still here.

And maybe all this longing, all this aching, all this searching for someone who can hold all of me

Maybe it's just been her, trying to come home.

—Still that girl