when the floor rose to meet me
the day i fainted, my body laid down, insisting on pause. it was my new beginning.
it’s been a little while since i wrote to you. in that space of self-care and grace, i kept circling back to the moment my body first asked me to listen — and how everything changed from there.
the day my body asked for rest, it didn’t whisper.
it took the room away.
i was in a warm studio that smelled like eucalyptus and old wood, the kind that remembers a thousand bare feet. third inhale of a sun salutation, palms pressing together, when the edges of the room blurred like watercolor meeting rain. my teacher’s voice grew syrupy and distant. someone’s mat squeaked. then the floor rose, holding my body, gentle and insistent, as if to say, enough now. i folded into it. the ceiling turned to milk. for a breathless moment, i was nowhere and everywhere—heat, ringing, the space behind my eyes grew infinite and black, a cool hand found my wrist.
i didn’t cry until later, when i sat on the curb with my water bottle trembling against my lip. the sidewalk felt like an altar that had seen this before: a woman who’d been sprinting through her life and finally met the bill.
it hadn’t come out of nowhere. it had been years of travel for work—airports at dawn, hotel lamps that made everything feel like late afternoon, meals eaten standing beside suitcases. espressos to numb the migraines. my camera bag had a groove in my shoulder that never fully left. i learned lighting on the road and how to be tender with strangers in fifteen minutes flat. what i didn’t learn was how to be tender with the person who carried it all.
that faint in the studio was the start of it all, though i didn’t know it then—the first breadcrumb on a trail that would lead me to the word i would later learn to live with: p.c.o.s. the irregular tides. the exhaustion that didn’t listen to caffeine. the way hunger and hormones and heat braided themselves into a fog. i came home at last, back to l.a., ready to “recoup,” but it was already too late for the version of me that only knew how to collapse and call it rest.
that half decade, i treated rest like a rescue boat i hailed for once i was already drowning. i drowned almost weekly. for six years. i never showed it.
after the faint, i started listening in a new register—the low animal register of body-truth. my rituals got small and homely. nothing instagrammable. nothing that would win me any kind of applause or recognition. i didn’t become a different person. i just started letting a different pace belong to me.
i began to eat before i was empty.
not as discipline but as devotion.
an apple cut into moons,
a spoon waiting in the jar like a tiny oar,
a handful of salted nuts rattling in my pocket
while i worked.
i stopped before the cliff.
when my head began to buzz,
i didn’t power through.
i opened a window,
let the city’s breath remind me
how to inhale my own.
i named things before i numbed.
instead of disappearing into a bright screen,
i scribbled three lines on the back of an envelope:
i am carrying ____.
it feels like ____.
i think it needs ____.
and i learned to arrive before i answered.
three heartbeats of silence before replying,
sometimes my hand pressed lightly to my sternum,
checking if i was home.
i used to think rest was the bed at the end. now i was learning it needed to be the ground beneath.
travel had taught me efficiency; fainting taught me reverence. i began to build softness into the bricks of the day: water before email, sunlight on my eyelids before opinions, stretching the places my bag once bit into like i was apologizing to my own fascia for years of carrying. i lit a candle while exporting photos—ceremony for the ordinary. i lowered the bar for “worthy of pause” until the bar disappeared and the pause was just part of the hour. a part of my days.
there was grief. of course there was. grief for the girl who mistook endurance for love. grief for the body i had treated like a pack animal with pretty saddlebags. but there was also relief—quiet and faithful—as if the floor that had caught me in that studio was teaching me how to be held. how to hold myself.
on a tuesday, the kind that feels like loose change in the week’s pocket, i realized i hadn’t said i need rest in a while. not because i’d become superhuman, but because rest had stopped being a thing i begged for and started being a way i arranged light, food, breath, and boundaries. my cycles were sometimes ghostly. some months were storms. but i knew how to put my phone in another room and let my nervous system audition for calm — and finally nail the script.
and now, in the middle of my days, i feel a kind of balance i once thought was impossible. not perfection, not control, but a steadiness that holds me. there is peace in the way my mornings open, in the way my body trusts me again, in the way i can move through the hours without bracing for collapse. i live in rhythm with myself now, not against myself — honest and unhurried.
if you came over right now, i’d hand you a glass of water and point to the little list on my fridge—three questions that remade my life:
what is my body asking for before it begs?
what can i put down that was never mine to carry?
what small softness can i bring into the next ten minutes?
this is not a miracle story. it’s a design story. the floor will still rise to meet me if i forget. but most days i meet it halfway. most days i walk on something i made for myself: a soft ground stitched from pauses and kindness.
the day i fainted in yoga was not my failure. it was my threshold. it was my body turning the lights up and saying, look. and i did. i looked until my life changed shape around the truth.
rest is not the place i collapse; it is the rhythm that carries me — the ground that keeps me steady in this life.
what i found on the other side was not only survival, but a quieter life where balance has room to breathe. peace is no longer something i chase on retreat days; it hums inside the ordinary of my life. i have become someone my younger self would never believe: steady, held, whole enough to rest before i break.
but even that has its compromises… a story for another time. :)
x
cibelle
what about you? what small softness could you add to the next few moments of your life?
some of us are just now learning to land gently, after years of performing flight. others are still crawling out of the ache. but we all carry the shimmer of wings. and when we remember how to feel again — truly feel — the light softly returns to the body. and that’s what this room is for.
stay open. the ache is proof you’re bound for something more.
i hope this letter reached you in the moment you most needed it. i’d love to know what it stirred in you, even just one word. it tells me who’s in the room with me.
💌 if you want to keep walking with me, experience my first breath here. it’s free to subscribe. it’s soft. it’s sacred. and i’ll meet you there with letters like this every week.
what to expect in upcoming letters:
☼ visibility and the fear of being fully seen
☼ post-relationship clarity and self-choosing
☼ burnout and rebuilding from the inside out
☼ identity shifts in early motherhood
☼ ancestral strength and silenced women
☼ self-abandonment and the rise after
☼ resonance, risk, and saying yes to what you deeply feel
Your letter, is profoundly moving. The way you've articulated the journey from burnout to intentional, embodied rest is a masterful piece of writing—a true testament to the power of simply, finally, listening.