The version of me I'm making
On pilates, clean kitchens, and becoming someone on purpose.
She goes to pilates even when she doesn’t want to.
Not because she loves it that day. Not because she woke up motivated. But because she made herself a deal: show up anyway. Move. Then come home.
She keeps the house clean. Not performatively clean, genuinely clean. The kind where every room feels like the person who lives there is taking the whole thing seriously.
She puts on cream before she goes to sleep. She cooks for herself, real food, not just what’s fastest. She changes out of her pajamas even on days when no one’s going to see her.
She says no.
This one is maybe the biggest. She used to say yes to everything because she didn’t want to disappoint anyone. She used to reshape herself to fit whatever the person in front of her needed. She didn’t think of it as losing herself. She thought of it as being easy to be with.
Now she says no and waits to see if the world ends.
It doesn’t.
This is who I’m building.
She’s not there yet. There are still days when she skips the cream and says yes to something she didn’t want to do and eats whatever’s in the fridge standing up. But the direction is clear in a way it hasn’t been in a long time.
For most of my life I was good at taking care of things. Projects. Other people. Budgets. I made sure everything ran. I just forgot to put myself in the list of things that needed taking care of.
The strange thing about loss is that it strips everything down. The version of yourself you kept for other people. The identity you built around being someone’s partner. The routines that were really someone else’s routines that you adopted because it was easier. When that falls away, you’re left with something you maybe haven’t looked at closely in a while.
Yourself.
Just you, in your apartment, at 11pm, with your laptop and your clean kitchen and the person you’re quietly, steadily, on purpose trying to become.
I don’t know exactly who she is yet. But I know what she does.
She goes to pilates even when she doesn’t want to.
For now, that’s enough.
If this landed, I’d love for you to subscribe. I write here about the slow, specific, unglamorous work of building yourself back up.
:)
I think one of the hardest lessons has been accepting that recovering yourself is never a straight line.
Some days you keep every promise to yourself. You go to Pilates. You eat well. You say no. You feel like you're finally becoming the woman you've been trying to remember.
Then one day you don't.
The old patterns show up. You people-please. You stay in your pajamas too long. You eat just carbs. You wonder if you've lost all your progress.
But that's the illusion.
Healing doesn't move in a straight line. It moves like tides. Like seasons. Like a spiral that keeps bringing us back to familiar places, not because we've failed, but because each time we return, we meet them with a little more awareness than before.
For a long time I thought consistency meant never falling back. Now I think consistency is simply returning. Returning to yourself. Again and again, without turning the detour into an identity.
Maybe that's what rebuilding really is. Not becoming a woman who never struggles, but becoming a woman who knows the way back to herself every single time.