I was at the gym, mid-set, breath trembling, body alive with effort. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror — just a flicker of movement, a flash of reflection — and suddenly, the world tilted.
Panic bloomed in my chest, wild and suffocating. My pulse thundered in my ears as my mind spun stories faster than my breath could catch them. You’re going to fall. The equipment will break. You don’t belong here.
It was absurd, really. That machine had held hundreds of bodies — bigger, smaller, taller, stronger. It had held me before. But in that moment, the old ghosts stirred. My mind decided to be cruel.
It distorted my reflection into something monstrous, a funhouse version of myself, larger than life yet hollow inside. The mirror became a weapon, each glance slicing away at my confidence.
Sometimes, I look in the mirror and I see truth — strength carved into my muscles, resilience in the set of my jaw, a woman who has fought her way through shadow after shadow. But other times, that old narrative creeps back in, whispering poison: You’re too much. You take up too much space. You don’t fit.
It’s like a crow landing on my shoulder — familiar, unwelcome, persistent. I’ve learned not to swat it away too quickly, but to listen. Because beneath its cawing there’s usually something deeper: fear, shame, memory. The echoes of all the years I believed I wasn’t enough.
So I breathe. I place my hand over my chest and feel the flame there — steady, defiant, alive. It flickers in the dark spaces of my doubt, reminding me that I’ve walked through worse fires and emerged whole.
The panic eases when I remember what is real:
My body is not my enemy.
The mirror is not my judge.
The crow is not my truth — only my reminder to return to it.
Healing isn’t the absence of distortion; it’s the courage to see beyond it.
It’s meeting your reflection with softness, even when your mind tries to twist the image.
It’s whispering back to the voice that says you don’t belong here:
I do. I am here. I am enough.
And when I leave the gym, sweat-slick and shaky, I carry that flame with me — a quiet defiance against every lie that ever tried to shrink me.
Because I am not a distortion.
I am not the cruel whisper.
I am the crow’s song and the steady flame —
reborn again and again,
learning, always,
to see myself clearly.
Crow and Flame 