The Mirror

On my bathroom mirror there is a blue index card, taped up with regular old invisible tape. The card itself hasn’t faded, but you can see the marks where the tape has been peeled off and stuck back down, because I’ve moved it from mirror to mirror, or sometimes pressed it to another card when I needed the space for a different affirmation. It says, “Each minute I spend caring for myself is a minute I take back from the people who drained me.”

That note has been there since December, when something happened that brought a lot of things full circle. It was not just one moment, but the weight of many. The grief of losing my mom. The loneliness of moving to a new country where nothing felt familiar. The reality of selling off my things and leaving behind the people who had always loved me most. And then the unexpected blows that came after, the kind of catastrophic turns you never think will happen to you when you make a big leap toward a new life. All of it together broke me open, and I fell into a depression so deep that even brushing my teeth felt like moving a mountain.

I quit taking care of myself. From the outside, you probably would not have noticed. I still got dressed. I still posted pictures. I still smiled when I needed to. But on the inside, I was sinking. The days I did manage to take care of myself, the days I forced myself out of the house and into the world, those were the days that felt like small resurrections. People might not have seen it, or even believed it, but it was work. It took everything.

That is the part that is hardest to explain. It is not pretending. It is not “fake it until you make it.” It is actual labor. You drag yourself into the light with both hands, inch by inch, until something shifts. It drains you. But when you manage it, when you win one of those small battles, it deserves to be recognized as real work.

For me, one of the deepest scars has been an imbalance of power. I gave authority to people who had no business holding it. I valued their opinions more than my own. And when I failed to meet their expectations, the crash was hard and unforgiving.

Trusting people too much is not always about self-worth. Sometimes it is about exhaustion. You get so tired of carrying everything that letting someone else make the decisions feels like relief. It feels like you are saving energy, but what you are really doing is handing over the wheel of your own life. And when the wrong person is steering, you can find yourself in a ditch before you even realize you are off the road.

That pattern, the habit of trusting too much and giving up control, has left other people making choices that shaped my life in ways I did not want. I can look back now and see the exact moments I surrendered that control. And then comes the grief. Grieving the pieces of myself I gave away. Grieving the moments and years I cannot recover. Grieving as I recognize old traumas I did not understand at the time.

Breaking that cycle has been brutal. You don’t just wake up one day and snap out of it. You hit your head on the same post over and over until you finally realize you are walking into the same trap. Some people see it the first time and never go back. For others, like me, the roots of the pattern run so deep you think you are trimming a branch when really the rot is buried at the base.

I wish I could say I never hand over that power anymore. I still do. But I see it faster now. I recognize sooner when someone is pulling me back into fog. And instead of fighting to defend myself to people who have no intention of listening, I can choose silence. There is more strength in staying quiet, in letting someone else spin their version of me, while I sit in the truth I know.

The better use of energy, I am learning, is to turn toward the people who actually speak life into me, the ones who show up when I am crumbling, the ones who nurture instead of drain. Those are the voices worth listening to.

Which is why the notes stay taped to the mirror. They are not there just for convenience. They are there to confront me. Every time I brush my teeth or wash my face, I am forced to look myself in the eye, forced to see the person I abandoned too many times. Those scraps of paper are my rebellion. They are kindness and defiance in the same breath. They are me choosing myself, over and over again.

I am not yet at the place where I love everything I see in the mirror. But I am still here. Still working. Still trying. And maybe that is what this blog really is. Not a polished version of healing, not the pretty after-photo. Just the persistence of coming back, again and again, to the work of living.

So if you are asking yourself, like I have, “Why does this keep happening to me?” maybe the answer is not simple. But maybe it starts with this: be honest about where you gave your energy away, and start taking it back, piece by piece. Write it down if you have to. Tape it to your mirror.

Because that is what I see every morning and every night. A blue index card with words I refuse to let go of, held in place by tape that has been pulled up and pressed back more times than I can count. It still sticks. And so do I.