Member-only story
How I stopped apologizing for existing and learned to take up space
A newborn love, a pandemic, a weirdly shaped house, and a stolen fir
Imagine being so confident and reckless that you’d steal a seedling from a forest to plant it in your garden.
It takes an amount of self-assurance I can’t even fathom. It must come from being welcome, wanted, and desired; from the conviction of having the right to occupy a place in this world, of even belonging there. Of being the master of it, enough to dig in the living soil.
Home was never a place, to me. Right from the start, I wasn’t welcome — I had been a mistake, a slip. Maybe that’s why I developed a conflictual relationship with the space I occupied — it was always too much, but not just that, it was the wrong space.
The wrong shape — soft where it was supposed to be bulging, swollen where it should’ve been flat. At thirteen, my body was a disgrace. I wasn’t at home in my flesh.
I didn’t feel whole, and at the same time, I felt there was a little too much of me. That little too much that prevented me from breathing when I squeezed myself in a skirt too tight, that little too much that kept me out of conversations for fear my words would overflow and embarrass me, like buttons popping off — that little too…
