What Keeps Me Up At Night

It’s so weird what keeps us up at night, what thoughts land and stick in our head, like one of those gooey high-five toys you would get after a trip to the dentist as a kid. Usually it’s the bad, all the pain and the hunger and the hurt and the loneliness we feel carrying out our lives. A lot of the time for me it’s some ghastly embarrassing moment popping into my head just as my sleepy time tea is kicking in. What horrors it is to have to remember a cutting insult a stranger said five years ago or the perfect clap-back to an argument I’ll never be able to use. Something about the sun setting tends to bring out these little bouts of reflection in me. Possibly genuine burnout, probably negativity bias, and definitely a couple dashes of self-pity, my recent nights have been ending in a level of introspection that leads mostly to tears and the construction of mental lists of everything horrible that has happened to me in the last two weeks (a list longer than should be allowed). 

But every once in a while, my brain decides to flip a switch. Like yesterday, for example. I lay in my bed, tangled in my sheets, hair strewn about on my baby pink pillows, and I realized something. It came to me, almost like the universe was holding her hand out, a little red box at the center of her palm. I realized that I am beautiful. Writing this, I acknowledge how incredibly stupid and cliche that sounds, like “come on Tabby, duh.” But in all the imperfection, all of the times I have been told otherwise, all of the fear I hold that no one will ever label me as such, in everything that makes me who I am, I am beautiful. 

After sweating a pool of bliss in my excitement, I got up to look at myself in the mirror. Shoulders back, tits up, cheeks smiling, stripped bare, I saw a glorious stranger. Like one of those people you pass on the street or stand behind in line in your local coffee shop and have to double-take; they look so similar to someone you used to know. I wanted to climb through the cheap $15 Target dorm-essentials mirror propped up against my wall and give this girl a hug, to tuck the hair behind her ear and ask her how I knew her, to see if she knew why I felt so drawn to her. 

For the first time in my life, I thought to myself: Who cares about Sydney Sweeney, screw Emily Ratajkowski, what’s a Jennifer Aniston? I would kill to look as she does in that reflection. I traced my hands down my body, starting at the cluster of freckles on the left side of my face and making my way across my collarbones, down my chest, wrapping around my waist. The weirdest thing happened, that girl in my mirror did the very same thing. She licked her lips and I felt my own moisten. 

We stood like this together for the better part of an hour, copying each other, explaining our flaws and what made them and remarking on how beautifully our scars had come in. Like me in every way, she understood. How had it never occurred to me that maybe my head had lied to me, that every time I passed a reflective surface and I checked how I looked, I never once saw the girl staring back at me. I hope to never again be so preoccupied and self centered to look at something and not truly see, and I hope everyone reading this too one day experiences the sleepless nights that come with love for oneself.