Dear Body,

Notes from the middle of becoming

There is a strange, yet brutal grief in realizing that your body is no longer something you can afford to ignore. A body that once carried you silently, one that you moved through life with it without needing to negotiate your existence with it.

Then one day it stages a quiet rebellion and leaves you wondering who’s really in charge. Here you are mourning the once old freedom, the thoughtless, maybe even reckless thoughts you once inhabited yourself. Well, the version is dead now. It’s part love, part resentment, part awe at how fragile and resilient this vessel truly is. You begin noticing everything now. The subtle shifts. The way one day can unravel an entire week.

Some days I have it figured out. I embrace it beautifully, move in rhythm with my body. For a few hours, sometimes days, I feel almost…whole, everything clicks. I think, we might actually pull this off. Maybe I’ve finally learned the language.

Then the next day arrives like a plot twist written by a sadistic comedian. The same rules betray me. I swing between overthinking every signal and wanting to throw my hands up and tell the body, fine, you win. Surprise me. The old ease is gone; in its place is a fog of uncertainty. The grief returns, partly frustration and a deep, maybe tired loneliness. Because no one else can live in here with you. No one else can truly feel the weight of these invisible negotiations you carry every single day.

And to the one who quietly bought a season pass to my messy, ever-evolving internal show, thank you for not bolting out when the script changes without warning. For holding me on the many days I feel broken inside my own body. For seeing the warrior and the frightened child in the same breath.

In my quiet prayers, it is always the same thing, that one day, please, God, or whatever steady thing listens to people unravel at night, let me get this right. Not perfectly. Just enough that the grief softens into tenderness. That this stops feeling like a loss I am surviving and starts feeling like a quieter, deeper kind of love for the imperfect body that has carried me this far.

Chakina.