My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
How I Learned to Love My Body Again — A Personal Journey
By Jasmine, 28 — Miami, FL
Learning to love my body was never something I thought I would have to do twice. The first time happened when I was sixteen and discovered that my hips could tell a story the rest of me was too shy to speak. Dance gave me that. It gave me a mirror — literally — and the belief that what I saw in it was worth watching. But somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-seven, that mirror became something else entirely. A scorecard. A list of things that needed fixing. And the conversation I finally had with myself, standing barefoot on cold tile at two in the morning, is the reason I am writing this now.
I should explain. I am a dancer. Was a dancer. Am a dancer. That sentence alone tells you how confused I have been. I trained in contemporary and Afro-Caribbean styles through college, performed with a small company in Miami for three years after graduation, and then — slowly, and then all at once — I stopped. Not because of an injury. Because of exhaustion. The kind that lives in your bones and makes you forget why you ever loved the thing you built your identity around.
When I Stopped Recognizing Myself in the Mirror
The studio where I used to rehearse had mirrors on three walls. You could not escape yourself in that room. For years, that was the point. You watched your lines, corrected your posture, studied the way your body moved through space. It was technical. Clinical, even. But it was also intimate, in a way that is hard to explain to people who have never spent four hours staring at their own reflection while sweating through a leotard.
When I left the company, I did not just lose the stage. I lost those mirrors. I lost the daily practice of looking at myself and seeing someone capable. Instead, I had the bathroom mirror at six in the morning before my shift at the front desk of a physical therapy clinic, and the only thing I saw was tired.
I gained weight. Not a dramatic amount — maybe fifteen pounds — but on a body that had been precisely calibrated for a decade, it felt seismic. My thighs touched differently. My arms felt heavier. I started avoiding mirrors altogether, which, for someone who had spent half her life in front of them, felt like losing a language.
My friend Keisha noticed before I said anything. She is the kind of person who asks how you are doing and then waits through the silence until you actually answer. One night over cheap wine on her porch, she said something that lodged itself in my brain: “You talk about your body like it is someone who let you down. But maybe you are the one who left.”
I did not have an answer for that. Not yet.
The Night I Started Getting Reacquainted With Myself
It was a Wednesday. I remember because Wednesdays were my early days at the clinic, and I was home by seven. I had been reading something online — one of those articles about body neutrality versus body positivity — and it mentioned this practice of standing in front of a mirror, not to judge, but just to look. To notice. To be in your body without narrating what was wrong with it.
So I tried it. I stood in my bathroom, took off my clothes, and looked.
The first thirty seconds were brutal. My eyes went straight to my stomach, my hips, the stretch marks on my inner thighs that had arrived quietly sometime in the last year. Every old choreographer’s voice flooded in — lengthen, tighten, lift. I almost turned away.
But I stayed. And after a minute or two, something shifted. I stopped seeing a body that had failed at being a dancer’s body and started seeing a body that had carried me through three years of grueling rehearsals, a cross-country move, a breakup, a career change, and approximately nine hundred shifts at a front desk where I smiled at strangers while my feet ached. This body had done so much. And I had not thanked it once.
I started crying, which felt ridiculous and also completely inevitable.
That night, I did something I had not done in months. I ran a bath — not a quick shower, but an actual bath, with the good salts Keisha had given me for my birthday. I lit a candle that smelled like eucalyptus. I put on an old Erykah Badu album. And for forty-five minutes, I did nothing but exist in my body without asking it to perform.
Later, in bed, I reached for the small device I had ordered a few weeks earlier on a whim — a HiMoment wellness kit that had been sitting in my nightstand drawer, still half in its box. I had bought it after reading something about pelvic floor health for dancers, but honestly, I had been too self-conscious to use it. That night, the self-consciousness felt quieter. I was not performing for anyone. I was just — paying attention. Noticing what felt good. Remembering that my body could feel things other than tired.
Those fifteen minutes before sleep were mine. Not the clinic’s, not the old company’s, not anyone else’s. Just mine.
What I Learned About Body Confidence After Dance
I wish I could tell you that one night fixed everything. It did not. Learning to love your body is not a single revelation — it is a practice, like barre work, like stretching, like anything worth doing. But that night cracked something open.
I started small. I began doing a five-minute mirror check-in every morning. Not to evaluate. Just to say hello. To notice my shoulders and consciously drop them. To look at my face without immediately cataloging what needed concealer. Some mornings it felt powerful. Other mornings it felt stupid and I skipped it. Both were fine.
I started moving again, but differently. Not choreographed sequences or technique drills. Just movement. Dancing in my kitchen to whatever came on shuffle. Rolling my hips while waiting for the coffee to brew. Stretching on the living room floor while watching terrible reality television. My body started to feel like mine again — not an instrument I had to keep in tune for someone else’s performance, but a place I actually lived in.
I also started talking to other women about this, which was terrifying and then relieving. Keisha told me she had gone through something similar after her second kid — that her body felt like it belonged to the baby, to her husband, to everyone except her. A woman at the clinic, a retired teacher in her sixties, told me she was more comfortable in her skin now than she had been at thirty, and that getting reacquainted with herself had been the most important thing she did after her divorce. These conversations made me feel less broken. More human.
The truth that nobody prepares you for is this: your relationship with your body is not a fixed thing. It changes. It needs maintenance. It needs tenderness. And sometimes it needs you to stand in front of a mirror at two in the morning and say, out loud, “I am still here. You are still here. We are going to figure this out.”
How Self-Care Changed My Relationship With My Body
Six months have passed since that Wednesday night. I am not back on stage. I do not know if I will be. But I am dancing again — teaching a beginner’s class at a community center on Saturday mornings, which is humbling and joyful in ways I did not expect. My students are mostly women in their thirties and forties who have never taken a dance class. They are nervous and clumsy and brave, and watching them discover what their bodies can do reminds me of what I forgot.
My nightstand ritual has become a small, quiet part of my week. Not every night. Maybe two or three times. It is not dramatic or transformative in the way wellness content sometimes promises. It is just — a conversation. Between me and my body. A check-in. A way of saying: I see you. I am not going to ignore you anymore.
Last week, I was getting ready for bed and caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I was wearing an old tank top and underwear, my hair wrapped up, no makeup. And instead of the litany of corrections, I heard something quieter. Something that sounded almost like kindness.
“There you are,” I said.
It was not a grand moment. There was no music swelling, no dramatic lighting. Just a woman in a bathroom, talking to herself. But it was honest. And honestly, that is enough.
The conversation I had with myself in the mirror was not a single conversation. It is an ongoing one. Some days it is gentle. Some days it is harder. But I keep showing up for it, the same way I used to show up to rehearsal — not because I had to, but because something in me still believed it was worth the effort.
It is.
Have your own Hi-Moment to share? We’d love to hear it. Send your story to [email protected], or tag us on Instagram with #MyHighlightTime. You may also enjoy: How to Actually Relax When You’re Alone and At 32, I Finally Learned How to Date Myself. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
