Who is this person, I ask with red-rimmed eyes, trying to put on a thin smile to convince myself it might still be me?

I touch my face. What is this jawline acne that seems to expand every morning when I wake up?

Wrapped in a cream-coloured towel, the woman in the mirror tilts her head, leaning toward the tiny speaker as if a stranger on the cellphone holds the secret to her own skin.

“I cured my acne with anti-inflammatory foods,” the voice chirps, bright and hollow. “Click the link in my bio to—”

She turns off her phone.

I meet my reflection. The woman in the mirror looks like me. She wears the skin I’ve grown into. Her smile is like mine. Her movements mirror my own. My bathroom mirror isn’t lying to me, but it’s not explaining anything either.

The fluorescent lights glare down, illuminating, pointing at every inflamed blotch, every rageful flare I can’t ignore, no one can ignore.

~

My acne returned with a vengeance in the summer of my twenty-fifth year after a particularly stressful semester. The breakouts began travelling slowly from my back to my neck.

Heat wells behind my eyes, and tears begin streaming down my face, over the new acne that makes my own skin feel so unfamiliar.

Panic, anger, and grief grip my stomach. I look away from the mirror, turn off the lights, slide into bed, with my towel still wrapped around me, in the fetal position.

I don’t understand. I eat whole foods. I try to eat organic. I work out. I spend time with nature. I drink water, and sure, I still drink maybe a bit too much caffeine, and I could do better with my sleep, but still… I don’t know what is happening in my body.

My limbs uncurl, and from where I lie, my eyes catch a soft light spilling across the bathroom counter, hitting the silhouettes of cleansers, creams, and prescriptions. They stand there like tiny, noble soldiers–each one promised me an answer, a solution meant to be trusted. And yet, the flare persists, and the cost of trust spreads across the counter.

I turn on the bathroom light and meet the version of myself I don’t know how to take care of. Tear-stained eyes. Caving shoulders. A body that doesn’t feel familiar.

The estrangement nestles somewhere deep and quiet, then suddenly it’s sharp. Visceral. Heat rises. Teeth clench. Something, somewhere, in me, shifts from despair to rage.

Why is my body speaking a language I no longer understand?

~

International Women’s Day comes and goes like a headline—a flurry of stories about polished sentiments of empowerment. But the sun sets, the headlines move on, and you are left alone in a body you still don’t recognize.

I thought I had a decent grasp and understanding of myself. I thought I had become more intentional with how I was supporting my body.

My body tried to warn me, it sent signals. At first, it came in whispers–waking up feeling exhausted, with brain fog–dysregulation and disorganization.

My mental capacity displayed itself in irritability, overstimulation, and small tasks taking insurmountable energy.

My body was screaming at me. It was staging a coup. I ignored it, not intentionally, not out of malice. I was illiterate to the new lessons my body was trying to teach.

The acne was everywhere. Visible. Uncontrollable. Unavoidable. It hurt. It was debilitating for me. It made the invisible visible, and that’s when I realized I didn’t need quick-fix solutions; I needed understanding.

This realization did not stop at my skin.

I began to take note of how little I knew about the vessel I lived in, not just signals or symptoms, but the systems.

It takes me back to health class in grade eight. When understanding the human body meant being handed a Ziploc baggie of tampons, condoms, and a pamphlet with bold red letters–“Pregnancy Prevention.”

We were taught how to stop a process, but never how to understand the process itself.

We needed to know the weight of the change. They call it a ‘passage into womanhood,’ but they forget to mention it’s a biological overhaul. Our brains are remapping themselves every month; our hormones aren’t just ‘drifting,’ they are commanding our sleep, our energy, and our very thoughts. They need our attention.

But in the syllabus, there wasn’t a section on hormones. Not what they are, what they do, how they shift, how they billow through our sleep, skin, energy, and mood. No education on stress responses.

Simply don’t get pregnant; you’re too young. There are lots of sexually transmitted diseases out there; be careful.

Nobody talked about the rhythm of a woman’s body and how hormonal phases work within the 28-day cycle. In one phase, you feel anchored, the next phase energetic, another phase tender, and then you wake up feeling formidable.

In my experience, girls were taught how to apply a Band-Aid, how to control our symptoms, and how to take a pill when something feels wrong.

Rarely are we taught how to interpret our symptoms and what is going on in our biology.

In my exploration of self, I learned that my body moves in a rhythm. It’s a monthly cycle of 28 days, 672 hours. I had been trying to live that cyclical physiology inside a world that expects consistency.

My body unfolds across the month, while others reset on a twenty-four-hour hormonal cycle.

For many men, testosterone follows a circadian rhythm, rising in the morning, declining in the afternoon, and resetting overnight.

That realization brought me to Dr. Mindy Pelz and her book Eat Like a Girl.

Her work felt like a translation, not another prescription.

Dr. Pelz frames hormones as cyclical phases to support, to work, eat, and rest alongside. It’s a synchronistic relationship of timing and listening, working with the body rather than demanding it to behave the same every single day.

In building a new relationship with my hormones, I began eating differently when my energy rose, and I grounded myself in new approaches when my vitality dipped, learning to nourish the phase I’m in.

You can share a bed, a breakfast, and go to the gym together, but you can’t share a biological clock. To truly support your body, you have to support the system it’s actually operating within.

Hormones can feel overwhelming, but I began to understand them as chemical messengers that tell the body what to do and when.

The big ones are estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, and they’re present in both men and women; the difference lies in their quantity, timing of their release and each hormone’s sensitivity to stress.

Estrogen boosts resiliency and social drive. It strengthens bones, supports mood and cognitive function, and influences skin and collagen production. For women, it rises in the first half of the menstrual cycle and peaks before ovulation.

Testosterone, on the other hand, is a spark. It’s a current in both men and women, but has higher levels in men. It regulates body composition, supports sexual function, mood and energy levels. In men, it ascends and descends in twenty-four hours; for women, monthly.

Progesterone is a stabilizer. In the menstrual cycle, it follows ovulation and prepares the body to hold, soften, and slow things down. It’s a driver in sleep, body temperature, and calmness.

The turnaround … The pivot … the 180-degree turn.

During this monthly cycle, my body goes through hormonal phases. The ebb and flow of estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone are crucial to my emotions, mood, sleep, energy, and appetite.

Women’s bodies are constantly preparing for pregnancy and are sensitive to changes in stress depending on which hormones are dominant. Estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone fluctuate across the menstrual phases: follicular, ovulation, and luteal.

This was where the information finally began to translate. The science was no longer abstract; it was an anchor. A sense of familiarity settled in, like a map finally unfolding, and the patterns of my own life became visible.

There were days when I felt energized, kinetic, and connected. There were times when the feeling was that nothing could get in my way. I felt confident and social. This is during the follicular phase, where estrogen in women rises and energy increases.

The ovulation phase came next and I felt bright, acute, creative, motivated, and electric. A short phase within the month, but a powerful feeling of rhythm and intuition.

Then I craved warmth, soft blankets, and cozy cuddles. My body asked for softness because its patience was low, noises felt deafening, and my skin began to war with me. This is the luteal phase, where progesterone is supposed to rise, and the body begins to turn inward. It’s the body preparing for a potential pregnancy.

And then everything settles, resets, and the cycle starts again. Menstruation–a time when the body is extremely sensitive to stress.

A dance my body has been swaying to for years, and only now have I begun falling in step with it.

As I began to live by the cadence of my biology, the dialogue shifted. This new fluency, this rhythmic dance with my own systems, completely transformed how I saw and felt within my own skin.

Our hormones respond to our nervous systems, our stress, and whether they’re being nourished.

And this was the moment, the cusp of realization, and when I stood back and reflected on the last few years of myself. I saw all the moments when I brushed off the chronic stress, the pressure I acclimatized myself to, and the way I pushed through debilitation.

I look back with fondness at the version of myself who worked through hormonal crashes, who normalized the exhaustion and irritability, the sudden dips and surges, the cortisol spikes and inflammation, the way my skin flared and my sleep fractured, and called it normal, called it productive, called it discipline, called it being a student, instead of recognizing the damage I was doing to my physiology.

My skin wasn’t the start of the story; it was where the story surfaced.

The acne and the breakouts weren’t deviant, random, or a punishment. It was a plea for help, a lifeline, and a form of communication.

It wasn’t just about the way I was sleeping or eating, but about how I was living. And I didn’t just learn about hormones or the cycles our bodies go through, I was learning how to listen.

For my 25 years, I’ve always been someone who believed that the harder you pushed, the longer you ran, the cleaner you ate, the better the results.

But the human body is not an engine; it’s not a machine. It’s a breathing responsive system that embodies how you feel.

Stress settles, accumulates, and eventually manifests itself somewhere. In myself, it showed up on my skin.

At first, I saw it as a failure until I began approaching it with gentle curiosity. And when I started this new relationship with my skin, with my inner workings, I began to learn my body’s needs, its timing. The goal was never to control it, but to fall in step with it.

International Women’s Day will come and go again, but I will still wake up in this body, only now, I don’t feel estranged from it. My skin is not my enemy, and my hormones are not chaos; they are messengers.

Somewhere between the science and late-night listening, I felt like I made a friend through Dr. Mindy Pelz, without ever meeting her, as someone who handed me a map and reminded me that my body was never broken, only speaking a language I hadn’t yet learned.

And now, when it speaks, I will listen.