A Reckoning In The Sun

The Day I Stopped Burning Myself Alive

(Me and my mom and pops)

The revelation didn’t come in a quiet room or a ceremonial space.

It came outside, in the sun.

I was tanning, lying in the warmth, guiding myself through a deep hypnosis. Something I was doing many times a day. My body had just come through one of the most physically and emotionally debilitating years of my life. I had worked relentlessly to heal. To rebuild trust with my body. To come back home to myself.

And yet, there I was again, asking my body to endure something it had already endured far too much of.

I was tanning to look more like them.

To blend in.

To fit in.

As a child and teenager, I moved between different worlds, different backgrounds, different expressions of beauty and belonging. I loved people deeply whose bodies, cultures, and identities were different from my own. But I didn’t yet have language for the confusion that can arise when love, comparison, and belonging quietly intertwine.

So I adapted.

As the hypnosis deepened, my awareness dropped fully into my body. And suddenly, without warning, a truth rose up from somewhere far deeper than thought.

My soul spoke. Loud. Fierce. Unmistakable:

“You just healed so much… and here you are hurting yourself again.”

The words didn’t land softly.

They shattered me.

I began heaving… deep, uncontrollable sobs tearing through my chest. The kind of crying that comes from the gut. From places words never reach. My whole body shook as decades of grief poured out of me—grief I didn’t know I had been carrying.

There was no debate.

No justification.

No spiritual bypass.

I sat up, gathered my things, and quit tanning that day.

No easing out.

No “one last time.”

No negotiations.

Just a clean, immediate stop.

When the Subconscious Reveals the Pattern

In the days and weeks that followed, as I continued working with the subconscious, the deeper root surfaced.

In middle school, one of my closest friends was Puerto Rican. She had dark hair, brown eyes, and a deeper tone to her skin.

My father loved her. He often called her his “other daughter.” He would say casually, repeatedly—that she looked more like him than I did.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it.

But the body remembers what the mind explains away.

Somewhere deep inside me, a belief quietly formed:

This is what gets love.

This is what gets chosen.

When you’re young and navigating different cultures, families, and identities, those messages don’t land intellectually. They land in the body. In the subconscious.

My obsession with tanning was never about beauty.

It was about worth.

About trying to resemble the people I loved so I could feel included.

About reshaping myself to belong.

So I pushed my body past safety.

Ignored long-term risk.

Rationalized harm.

All in service of a wound I didn’t even know was still directing my life.

Grieving the Girl Who Was Still Trying

When this truth surfaced, I didn’t rush to fix it.

I stopped.

And I grieved.

Not politely.

Not quietly.

I cried for the young girl who was still trying to belong.

Still adapting.

Still believing love required modification.

I gave myself months to sit with that wound—to let it move through my body, to let the nervous system soften, to let the story unravel at its own pace.

Healing doesn’t always look graceful.

Sometimes it looks like sobbing in the sun as your soul finally refuses to let you abandon yourself again.

From Compulsion to Ceremony

Six months later, I reached for a bottle of fake tanner.

And everything was different.

Because how a woman touches herself matters.

It reveals whether her touch comes from reverence or from an unconscious attempt to correct something she believes is wrong.

For years, my touch had been rushed.

Transactional.

Disconnected.

Now, it became ritual.

I paused before I began.

I breathed myself fully into my body.

I let my hands move slowly, intentionally, over my skin.

Not correcting.

Not proving.

Anointing.

Each stroke became a quiet truth spoken directly into my cells:

“I see you.”

“I’m here.”

“You don’t need to earn my love.”

A Closing Reflection on Belonging, Identity, and Embodiment

So much of what we call “self-care” is actually shaped by unexamined longing.

Longing to belong.

Longing to be chosen.

Longing to feel at home in our own skin.

When we grow up navigating different cultures, family dynamics, and expressions of beauty, it’s easy to internalize the idea that love requires adaptation, that we must look, move, or be something else to fit in. These beliefs rarely live in the mind. They live in the body. In habits. In rituals we never consciously chose.

This is why embodiment matters.

Because the body is where belonging is either negotiated or reclaimed.

True healing doesn’t ask us to reject our past selves or judge the ways we coped. It asks us to bring unconscious patterns into the light with compassion. To understand why we did what we did. And then to choose again, this time from awareness instead of survival.

When a woman learns to listen to her body instead of overriding it, something profound happens. She stops seeking belonging externally and begins cultivating it internally. Her identity softens. Her nervous system settles. Her touch becomes kind.

That moment in the sun wasn’t just about quitting tanning.

It was about ending a quiet negotiation with self-abandonment.

And choosing—finally—to belong to myself.