“Hi, my name is Amber, and this is how I lost 100 pounds.”

That’s how I imagine the future starts. Like the opening line of some grainy YouTube video filmed in soft lighting with sad indie music underneath it. A girl with hollow cheeks and healed eyes talking about “discipline” and “self-love” like she discovered some secret door everyone else missed. Sometimes I picture myself there so vividly it hurts. Smaller hands. Smaller face. Collarbones sharp enough to hold silver chains against them. The kind of body people describe with words like effortless, even though nothing about becoming a person again is effortless.

I used to be 130 pounds.

Now I’m almost a hundred pounds heavier than that and sometimes it feels like it happened overnight, like somebody inflated me quietly while I was distracted trying not to die. Depression does that. Staying inside too long does that. Eating because your body wants comfort but your brain turns comfort into punishment. Eating because time passes slower when your mouth is full. Eating because there has to be something to look forward to at night.

A year and a half disappears quickly when you’re miserable.

Sometimes I try to imagine losing it all. Not just the weight, everything attached to it too. The heaviness. The shame. The paranoia every time somebody takes a picture of me. The way I avoid mirrors unless I’m prepared to ruin my own day. I want that movie transformation so badly it embarrasses me. I want to wake up one morning and feel tiny. Light. Untouchable. I want people who haven’t seen me in years to stare too long when I walk into a room.

I want to be the girl everyone secretly envies for surviving herself.

But then there’s the ugly part of my brain. The part that wants results fast enough to count as self-destruction. Restrictive enough to feel holy. The part that thinks maybe suffering is proof you’re doing something right. I know exactly how I could lose the weight quickly. Six months. Obsession. Black coffee. Nicotine. Gum. Falling asleep hungry enough to feel proud of it. I know the rituals already. I know how people disappear.

And the worst part is I know it would work.

At least for a while.

Until the brain fog starts. Until my hair starts thinning. Until my heart starts acting like an old fluorescent light flickering in a dead hallway somewhere. Until food becomes the only thing I think about and every conversation feels far away and dreamlike because starvation turns you into a ghost before it kills you.

I know it isn’t sustainable. I know it would probably destroy me in slower, uglier ways. But there’s still a part of me that romanticizes it anyway, and I don’t know if that part ever fully leaves a person once it moves in.

But there’s another version of me too.

A version I want almost just as badly.

The girl who runs for fun. Which sounds fake, honestly. Insane even. But I’ve seen girls like that before, flushed cheeks, headphones on, somehow using movement to survive instead of punishment. Girls who ride bikes on warm evenings and go hiking every weekend and drink water and stretch in the morning sunlight like their bodies are homes instead of enemies. Girls who lose weight slowly and become strong at the same time. Lean muscle instead of disappearance. Health instead of decay.

Sometimes I think if I could combine both versions of myself, the obsessive discipline and the genuine desire to live, I’d become unstoppable.

Like I could turn all this self-hatred into fuel.

I think about tattoos constantly too. New tattoos. Sleeves. Black ink crawling up my arms and across my ribs. I want to be covered in art someday, but right now I don’t even want to decorate this body because it feels temporary. Like graffiti on a condemned building. I look at my arms and think, not yet. Wait until they’re beautiful again. Wait until you deserve it.

Which is such a horrible thing to think about yourself.

Sometimes I want to get so sick people finally notice how bad my brain actually is. Like if I got thin enough, frail enough, someone would intervene dramatically and tell me I almost died and suddenly everything would make sense. Sometimes I think about eating disorder rehab in the same cinematic way people think about car crashes, terrifying, but weirdly validating. Proof that something was really wrong all along.

I know those thoughts aren’t good. I know they’re ugly and irrational and dangerous in ways I don’t even fully understand yet. But they live in me anyway. Quietly. Constantly.

And I don’t know if they ever completely go away.

Maybe this future version of me, skinny, tattooed, running through parks at sunset, smiling with all her teeth, still hears those thoughts too. Maybe healing isn’t becoming a different person. Maybe it’s just learning which voice gets the last word.

I don’t know.

Right now I’m still here. Still heavy. Still staring at old photos trying to find the exact moment my body became evidence of my sadness. Still dreaming about becoming one of those miraculous before-and-after stories people repost online because they want to believe transformation is real.

Maybe it is.

Maybe a year from now I’ll reread this from a smaller bedroom in a smaller body with stronger legs and clearer eyes. Maybe I’ll finally understand that losing weight was never really about wanting to be skinny.

Maybe I just wanted to feel worthy of being seen.