i choose me

the one where embodiment is reclamation

This week I sat with writing prompts from Christopher Sexton's "Undress Your Voice" class and ended up going back to my six-year-old self. Not to relive the moment. To rewrite it, instead.

you're the kind of girl guys fuck, but don't date

at six, Dorothy and Toto
go down the yellow brick road
while he takes from me
what I can’t get back

at sixteen, Panic! plays
the soundtrack in the back
of a black BMW
while I give him the best of me

at thirty-six, Taylor swoons
Dress as I change the sheets
and lay the plans for
a future that was always my choice.

Three ages, three relationships to the same wound. At six, it was something done to me. At sixteen, it was something I gave away. At thirty-six, it’s something I get to rewrite.

This isn’t a piece about what happened. It’s about the relationship I’ve had with what happened — and how every other relationship in my life shifts when that one changes.

Image by Nat_Purple

S.M. Hallow writes that “to be caught in a story is to be caught in a wheel that has been propelling itself on thousands of years worth of momentum.” In How to Survive This Fairytale, a malicious narrator keeps forcing the main character to relive his worst moments. The real threat isn’t the Evil Queen. It’s the internal one — survival instinct tangled with imagined judgments, past trauma, and social conditioning. The trappings of how things should be.

I know that wheel. The uncle who took what wasn’t his. The boy who took what I offered and threw it away. A story with thousands of years of momentum behind it: you are the girl trauma chose. This is what being a survivor looks like.

Erving Goffman called it the working consensus — the shared agreement that shatters when the room learns something it decides is damning. Sophie from that final scene wrote an essay on The Drama that offers one answer to what comes next: someone reaches across the table and chooses you anyway. Love as arrogance. Love as moral choice. But in that moment, it’s still needing someone on the other side to decide you’re worth reaching for.

I don’t want to live at that kind of table anymore.

There’s a version of love that begins with being chosen. And there’s a version that begins with having already chosen yourself — where you come to the table not because you need someone across from you, but because you want them there. Where the choosing is mutual and sovereign, not desperate and dependent.

That’s the love I’m building now. Not the kind where I lay down my best and hope it’s enough. The kind where I’ve already decided I’m enough, and the person across from me gets the overflow.

Image by Nat_Purple

In How to Survive This Fairytale, the breakthrough comes when the survival story becomes a love story through choice, not rescue. Hans and Cyrus don’t fall together by destiny. They choose each other — knowing they have also chosen themselves first. For if they could really have what their hearts desire… it would mean they would never be together again. To choose themselves first, would mean not choosing the other.¹

It is only when they are at peace knowing that they can own that choice of self, that they feel acceptance in choosing the other.

I believe that Sophie was right about the diner scene in The Drama — Charlie reaching across the table IS love. But more than that, I think it’s also Emma knowing she doesn’t need Charlie to give her his hand. That she will be just fine without it because she chooses herself.²

I’m choosing too. The toxic patterns — stolen, devalued, reclaimed — aren’t a wheel anymore, they’re an arc. I’m not the girl wondering if she is worth anything because a boy or a mean girl, or society told her she wasn’t. I’m the woman walking out of the room, speaking to her younger self with clarity and unconditional love.

For years, my relationship with myself was the loop, returning to the same moments expecting a different feeling. But somewhere between reliving and rewriting, there’s a third way: witnessing. Sitting with my six-year-old self not to fix what happened or rewrite the ending, but to say: I see you. I’m sorry. You were always enough. Sitting with my sixteen-year-old self and saying: I see you, too. I’m sorry. You didn’t know yet.

Those are relationships too. Maybe the most important ones.

Image by Nat_Purple

But here’s the part I struggled with at first: sovereignty comes with authority.

Which is why some of the prompts from “Undress Your Voice” we were asked to sit with around nourishing ourselves like a lover or thinking about the kink of refusing to betray ourselves again or the erotism of choosing a path no one approved of… felt daunting to me.

But the truth is…

The reclamation of self isn’t complete until it’s felt.

the truest fairy tale

have you ever felt
the earth shake
quiver, tremble
when you finally say

no?

it happens
slowwwwly
and then
like a 

rising snake of pleasure

between your dimpled
thighs 
and charts 
the treasure map

of your scars

up, up, up
through
the peaks and valleys of
perfection

until

it hisses nonsense
silly, reverent
commanding,
winding

a moan comes

from your mouth as 
a single phrase
achingly tender
hauntingly brutal

i choose me.

Image by Nat_Purple

So here’s the thing I’m learning, readers: sovereignty isn’t a destination. It’s a relationship — the one you build with yourself after you stop letting everyone else narrate.

And once that relationship changes, every other one does too. The love you give. The grief you carry. The body you live in. The stories you refuse to stay caught in.

The fairy tale isn’t the one where you’re chosen. It’s the one where you choose yourself — and mean it so deeply your body shakes.

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This week’s doorways:

• What this week asks for: The willingness to look at your oldest wound — not to relive it, not to analyze it, but to change your relationship to it. To ask: who’s been narrating this story? And what happens if I take the pen back?

• What tends to get in the way: The wheel. The inherited story that says you are the person things happen to. The belief that sovereignty means doing it alone, or that reclaiming your body is too much, too fast, too loud.

• What becomes possible if we walk through: Every relationship shifts. The love you build starts with overflow instead of hope. The grief becomes witnessing instead of looping. And the body finally catches up.

How to enter:

• Quiet entry: Write three lines — one for who you were when the wound happened, one for who you became in response, one for who you’re choosing to be now.

• Active entry: Name one relationship in your life that changed when you stopped letting someone else narrate your story.

• Wild entry: Write the thing your body has been holding. The thing your chest knows but your mouth hasn’t said yet. Let it be ugly and true and yours.

In The Sanctuary:

This essay came from sitting with writing prompts that asked me to feel things I’d been thinking about for decades. If you want a room where that kind of work is held — not fixed, not therapized, just witnessed — come sit with us.

1. One character’s true desire is to remain in his swan form. But that means living forever in that form without the other character ever again. And for the other character, it is knowing that in true love, in order for that character to truly be their happiest version, they have to let them go… have to let them own their true form even if that means never being with them again.

2. STOP what you are doing and go read Sophie’s essay on The Drama. I believe it to be the BEST analysis on the film I’ve read (and I’ve read mannnnny at this point). She takes such a nuanced and beautiful approach to it that many other film critics are missing.

the drama and the unbelievable arrogance of falling in love with someone on purpose