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 Overcame Body Shame at 31 With a Bedside Journal
By Hannah, 31 — Brooklyn, NY
Overcoming body shame was never something I expected to do in a notebook. I always imagined it would happen in a therapist’s office, or during some dramatic turning point — a breakup speech, a solo trip abroad, a moment where everything just clicked. Instead, it started on a Wednesday night in November, in my studio apartment, with a pen that was almost out of ink and a blank page I didn’t know what to do with.
I’d moved to Brooklyn four months earlier. Technically, I moved for work — a freelance illustration contract that gave me an excuse to leave Salt Lake City and everything I’d been quietly suffocating under for three decades. But really, I moved because I didn’t recognize myself anymore and needed a place where no one else would expect me to, either.
The notebook was a leftover. One of those soft-cover Moleskines I used to buy in bulk for sketching. I found it in a box I hadn’t unpacked, sitting on top of a Bible I also hadn’t unpacked. I put the Bible in the closet. I put the notebook on my nightstand. And that night, I wrote the first honest sentence I’d written in years.
Why I Started Journaling About My Body
The sentence was this: I don’t know what I like.
Not in some grand, existential way. In the most basic, physical way. I’d spent my twenties inside a community that treated the body as a problem to solve — something to discipline, cover, control. Desire was a test you were supposed to fail gracefully. Pleasure was a word that only showed up next to the word “guilty.” I absorbed all of it. I was good at absorbing things. I could hold my breath for years without anyone noticing.
Moving was like finally exhaling. But exhaling, it turns out, doesn’t automatically mean you know how to breathe normally. I’d left the structure, but the shame was still in my posture. In the way I changed clothes with the lights off. In the way I flinched at my own reflection getting out of the shower. I was free — technically — but my body hadn’t gotten the memo.
So the notebook became my way of asking questions I’d never been allowed to ask. Not big, philosophical ones. Small, embarrassing, tender ones. What does my skin actually feel like when I pay attention? What temperature do I like the shower? When was the last time I touched my own arm and didn’t feel weird about it?
I wrote every night. Sometimes just a line or two. Sometimes a whole page. I kept it messy on purpose — no prompts, no structure, no rules. After thirty-one years of rules, the last thing I needed was more of them.
What I Learned About Shame and Self-Discovery
About three weeks in, I noticed something. The notebook entries were getting longer, but the shame was getting quieter. Not gone — quieter. Like a radio station losing signal. I’d write something like I liked the way the sun felt on my stomach today while I was drawing and my first instinct was still to cross it out, to edit myself. But I’d trained myself to leave everything on the page. No crossing out. No taking back.
It was mid-December when I wrote the entry that changed things. I’d been lying in bed, reading — just reading, nothing remarkable — and I became aware of my own body in a way that felt new. Not sexual exactly. More like… present. Like my body was a place I was finally standing inside of instead of hovering above. I picked up the notebook and wrote: I think I’ve been living outside my own skin for a very long time. Tonight I came back.
I stared at that sentence for a while. Then I cried. Not from sadness. From recognition. The kind of crying that happens when you say something true and your body confirms it before your brain catches up.
After that, the entries shifted. I started writing not just observations but desires. Tiny ones at first. I want to take a bath with the lights off. I want to buy lotion that smells like something I actually chose. I want to sleep without a shirt and not feel like I’m doing something wrong.
I did all of those things. Each one felt enormous. Each one felt like nothing. That’s the strange math of overcoming body shame — the things that terrify you beforehand are so ordinary once you do them that you almost can’t believe they ever had power over you.
The Night I Stopped Apologizing to Myself
January was the hardest month. The holidays had pulled me back into old patterns — phone calls with family, the familiar weight of performing normalcy for people who didn’t know I’d left the community, not just the city. I could feel myself shrinking again. The notebook entries got shorter. One night I wrote just two words: I’m allowed.
I didn’t even finish the sentence. Allowed to what? I didn’t know yet. But I wrote it like a reminder, like taping a note to the bathroom mirror. I’m allowed.
It was around that time I ordered something from HiMoment. I’d seen it in an ad on Instagram — the kind of ad the algorithm serves you when you’ve been searching “self-care” and “body awareness” at 1 a.m. I spent twenty minutes with the item in my cart, then closed the browser, then opened it again, then closed it. Finally, I bought it the way you rip off a bandage — fast, before you can talk yourself out of it.
When it arrived, I put it in my nightstand drawer. Next to the notebook. It sat there for four days before I used it. And when I did, I cried again — but this time from relief. Not guilt. Relief. Like my body had been waiting for me to show up, patient as an old friend, and I’d finally knocked on the door.
That night I wrote the longest entry yet. I won’t share all of it here, but the last line was: I am not a problem to be solved. I am a person to be felt.
I read that line back to myself three times. Then I turned off the lamp and slept better than I had in months.
How Journaling Changed My Relationship With My Body
It’s April now. The notebook — the original one — is full. I’m on my third. They sit in a stack on my nightstand, spines soft from being opened so many times. I don’t write every night anymore. Some nights I sketch instead. Some nights I just lie there and notice things — the weight of the blanket, the sound of the radiator, the particular quality of Brooklyn darkness that’s never really dark at all.
I’m not “healed.” I don’t think that’s how it works. There are still mornings I avoid the mirror. Still moments where an old voice whispers that I’m too much, too soft, too wanting. But now I have a practice — not a perfect one, not an Instagram-worthy one — just a quiet, nightly habit of telling the truth on paper. And the truth, it turns out, is that I have a body that can feel things. Good things. Mundane things. Things that don’t need to be earned or justified or apologized for.
Last week, a friend asked me what had changed since I moved. She said I seemed different — not happier exactly, but more here. I thought about it for a long time before answering.
“I started keeping a notebook beside my bed,” I said.
She laughed, like I was joking. I smiled, because I wasn’t.
The notebook isn’t magic. It’s just paper. But it gave me a place to practice being honest with myself when I didn’t have anywhere else. It taught me that self-discovery doesn’t have to look like a revelation. Sometimes it looks like a half-finished sentence at midnight. Sometimes it looks like writing I liked that without explaining why. Sometimes it looks like a woman sitting up in bed at 31, ink on her fingers, finally believing that her body is not a thing to be managed but a place to come home to.
I keep the notebook on the left side of the nightstand. The pen on top, uncapped, ready. Every night it asks me the same silent question: What did you feel today?
And every night, I answer.
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 I Learned to Date Myself at 32 and How to Actually Relax When You’re Alone. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
