A few months shy of my 21st birthday, about to graduate from UC Berkeley, I learned that my first love had died in a car accident. We'd parted ways only a few months earlier, when he'd returned to Brazil to study. His last words to me, before our phone call cut out, were, "I'm still in love with you."

And then, however long later, the steering wheel of his car crushed his lungs when someone took a turn too wide on a winding road. I still have the email in which his dad described the excruciating pain of identifying his body.

There's much more to that story—a trove of firsts, longings, delights, and discomforts, all made crystalline by the finality of death—but what lingered in my mind today was what came after. Not the immediate aftermath, in which I roved up and down the halls of my apartment building and along University Avenue, unabashedly sobbing in public for days, but what came after that.

At the time, I lived in an adorable loft apartment with an exposed brick wall and a spiral staircase, perched atop an old movie theater. The top of the marquee served as a little balcony I could creep out onto to smoke cigarettes in my vintage dresses and stained black hair. Diogo had stayed with me in that little dollhouse before he left, and I can still almost, almost remember what it felt like to press my butt into him as we spooned, when I wanted him to make love to me. After his death, I found it unbearable to be in that loft, in that bed, where we had once spooned and made love.

So I hurled the mattress over the railing and down into the studio part of the apartment, where I made myself a little nest. I suspended sheets overhead to create a tent and spent the remainder of my time at Berkeley watching Sex and the City on repeat on a junky little TV with a built-in VCR.

When I moved to San Francisco on my 21st birthday, the mattress and VCR came with me to the Tenderloin, where we continued watching Sex and the City on repeat. I don't remember much about that time except how deeply lonely I felt. Released from the structure of the educational system, I had nothing to anchor me. No one told me what to deliver or do or be, or whether I'd done a good job of any of it. There was no A to validate me or B- to berate myself into being better. I felt like I was leaking, like my seams were splitting open and I discovered that what was inside of me was actually nothing.

I've been watching Felicity lately. Not really watching, exactly. Mostly letting it play while I move around my house, the familiar voices filling the rooms. I've watched it before, many times, and there's something about having those people around that feels almost like having a mother nearby. Someone going about her business, making noise in the next room, asking nothing of me. The sounds of her rhythms, a comfort of their own.

It occurred to me today that I haven't done this in a long time. Not like this. Not since I was 20 and someone I loved had died. Except nobody has died this time. Or maybe something has; I don't know.

At 42, half a lifetime later, I might be splitting open again. I might be leaking. Inside, there might be nothing at all. Or perhaps what I thought was there isn't what I thought it was.

Today I saw a picture of myself that destroyed me.

A few weeks ago, I took the girls to a three-day ancestral skills gathering. We camped in the blistering heat, and while the girls whittled spoons and made dream catchers and sewed prayer pillows and roved wild in feral groups of kids for hours on end, I learned to process a rabbit. In a small circle of women, with many tears and tender strokes and expressions of gratitude for his life, I killed him with my own hands, then skinned and butchered him and made him into stew. The whole experience felt deeply ancestral and embodied—equal parts grief work and prayer and survival.

I loved this trip. It was exhausting and demanding and anything but restorative, and also such a grounding experience. My girls sobbed when we left, because their souls so clearly crave this level of freedom, community, and hands-on exploration.

And today, the photographs taken by a professional photographer during the event were released.

There were two of me. One in which I'm holding my dead rabbit, my face pinched and red and grim. And another standing in the evening circle before our collective feast on the last night. My body is a series of compressed bulges and waves.

I look enormous. And without criticizing a larger body in general, I literally don't even recognize myself. How quickly my mind erased the magic of that experience in penance for how I apparently looked while it was unfolding. How quickly it all unravels—my joy, my presence, my delight in having been there—the moment I become conscious of how I might have been perceived. I am giving away my most powerful memories in submission to an imagined judgment.

But it's also a weight I carry, in this case literally. My pants don't fit, and it's become nearly impossible to find clothes that feel right. My hips feel heavy. My belly is soft and rolling in ways I never thought possible. Despite a rigorous commitment to health, to acupuncture and naturopaths and good nutrition and rest, I just keep ballooning, and here we are again.

I'm coming apart at the seams.

This isn't about weight, even though it is. Even when I weighed over 20 pounds less, I hated myself. I have, quite honestly, hated myself my whole life. I've treated myself horribly. I've been remarkably unkind. I have been my own harshest critic.

It's about the things that have contained me this lifetime. And I'm realizing, yet again, that what I've allowed to contain me for a long time is other people's approval. But what comes with that, even when approval feels good, is the ever-present possibility of their disapproval.

And lately, people have disapproved a lot.

The HRT doctor immediately suggested I lose weight. That's what really opened this can of worms—the painful confirmation that the ways in which I fear I'm being judged are sometimes quite real. That people can and do disapprove of me. It's not just a phantom; it's in the room with me.

In my parent-teacher conferences this year, for the first time in my entire career, two different families expressed disappointment in how I'd handled certain difficult situations. One parent explicitly said she no longer trusted me. School has felt strained and tenuous at times; I'm recognizing the ways in which I cannot make it all work for everyone, all the time. Despite my best efforts, with so many small humans working at being human, things get sticky.

And suddenly, I'm no longer good. I'm not acceptable. I'm not making everyone happy.

In other ways, too, I'm no longer making people happy. I find myself increasingly unwilling to hold up certain people who look to me for comfort or companionship. I'm not responding to every text. I'm not available for constant reassurance. I'm not saying yes to social engagements I don't want. I'm burrowing in, returning to myself, and I can feel how that disappoints those who've grown accustomed to my willingness to always be there.

And what then? When you've spent your whole life making sure everyone's happy all the time, what happens when they're not? Do I fall apart and become nothing? Am I too much and also nothing at all?

Part of me is lonely because I'm contending with explicit disapproval for one of the first times in my life. Part of me is lonely because I can seemingly no longer exist in relationships in which I'm valued only for what I can provide. I want reciprocity. I want radical acceptance. I want to be understood and loved and cherished as human. I want appreciation for the fleshy folds of both my body and my imperfect choices.

And in so many ways, it feels impossible. We live in a world that hates fat people, that hates our flaws, that teaches us to constantly seek approval and improvement, that coaxes us into buying or doing or giving up more so we can hate ourselves less. And I've spent my whole life believing it.

And yet, something in me is increasingly unwilling to keep participating. I don't want to keep asking other people to tell me who I am, even when I like their answers. I don't want to keep measuring myself against their pleasure or disappointment, their approval or disapproval. I'm tired of being so available to everyone else's experience of me.

I saw those pictures today and I wanted to text everyone I know. I wanted them to tell me I was okay, that I'm beautiful, that even if I'm fat, I'm still lovable, that I'm good, that I'm allowed to take up space on this planet.

And I did text my sister. But then I stopped.

A past version of me would have kept going. She would have tried to soothe the pain with an avalanche of noise, with a million pings for reassurance. But instead, I took a bath and cried. I felt my discomfort and my sadness. I grieved the body I once had. I grieved the body I believe I should have. I grieved my sheer exhaustion at continuing this battle with my physical form for over 30 years now. I grieved the possibility of passing it on to my children, even when it's quiet.

And then I turned on Felicity. The familiar voices, the same few bars of music drifting in and out of scenes, the rhythms of a world I know by heart. I puttered through the house, preparing for school, making an early dinner, shuffling books from one shelf to the next, and kept my earbuds in, listening to the story unfold.

As I listened, I thought of Diogo's death. I thought of the loft nest, Sex and the City, my previous unraveling.

Maybe once every 21 years, we're required to renegotiate the rules. It's the emotional equivalent of moving—putting your hands on every scrap of your life and deciding whether to take it with you as you shift the space that once held you.

Maybe this time, I'll finally drop the need for approval. Maybe this time, I'll come home, all the way, back to myself.

Suddenly I remembered waking up at four this morning, desperate to fall back asleep but suspended in that liminal space, trying to retrain my brain. I'd been repeating the same words to myself: I am healthy and radiant. I am at home in my body. I am healthy and radiant. I am at home in my body.

I've lived a lot of places over the years. I've moved more times than I can count.

But this time, the move is within. I'm landing at home in this body. I'm arriving here. However many folds or freckles or aches it has, it is mine.

And it's uncomfortable here. Almost more uncomfortable than it was before, when I could busy myself with everyone else's opinions, when there was always something to improve or someone to please. There's no distraction in simply being here. No one to tell me I've done a good job of arriving.

But I'm here. I'm here with all I tried to abandon or criticize into disappearing for so long. I'm here with my sadness, my flesh, my painful stories. I'm here with this radiant discomfort, but for once, I'm going to stay. I'm going to stay with her no matter what. Because she deserves my love, not because she earned it, but because she's here, too.