IN EVERY ROOM, WRONG.

Content note: this essay contains descriptions of body image, unsolicited comments about body size and weight, and references to unintentional weight loss.

The large wooden shutter creaks as one of my roommates opens the kitchen window to air out the apartment. Butter is sizzling on a skillet and she presses down her sandwich onto it to toast it. She and my other roommate slowly recite Italian vocabulary aloud while their language exchange friends — two Florentine girls — listen and help them with pronunciation. I walk past the tiny living room right next to the kitchen and take a seat at our makeshift dining table. One of my roommates playfully teases, so how many Italian men hit on you today? I suppress my laugh and wave off their question, but their friends turn to them with curious expressions. My other roommate fills them in on the male attention I've been getting here in Florence. Their faces exchange a knowing look. One of them shrugs — it's very common, she says. Italian men appreciate exotic features in a foreign woman. I'd spent months trying not to be the American. I had outrun one label. I hadn't considered I'd be reduced to what I looked like instead.

It started long before Florence.

At every family gathering, a tita I hadn't seen in months would find me across the room, make her way over, and take my wrist in her hand. Ay, you're so skinny. You need to eat. Said with genuine worry, her grip soft and concerned. I know she loves me. I know she means it. That's the thing — it was never unkind. My cousins would joke about taking me out to eat so I could get fat, which just meant healthy, which just meant more. No matter what I ate, they said, I stayed thin. They said it like a mystery. Like something that needed solving.

I was working at a clothing store once, helping two women find jeans. The sizing ran differently there — 23 through 32, nothing like the standard American scale. One of the women, white, looked me up and down, half smiling, and said: so what are you, a 20? I remember the way it landed. Half joke. Full sting. She was a stranger I was trying to help.

What I didn't understand then was that my body had become a conversation I wasn't invited to.

The titas noticed my height too. I've been taller than most of them since I was ten or so, and every time they saw me they'd say so — surprised, almost wistful, like they were paying me a compliment and making a small confession at the same time. Ay, so tall. I wish I had your height. I was being praised. I understood that. And still there was something strange about being ten years old and already being told what your body meant to other people.

Then there was the skin. A girlfriend in high school, white American, mentioned she had a tanning appointment coming up. I wish I could tan as easily as you, she said. My skin burns before it gets tan. She meant it as a compliment too. I was aware, even then, of the irony — that in the Philippines, fair skin is idealized, chased, taking up half a grocery store aisle in whitening soaps, lotions, serums and oral supplements. That my complexion, just normal to me, was simultaneously too light for some rooms and aspirational in others. I was in the middle of a contradiction I hadn't asked to be placed in.

When the stress came and the weight dropped without my permission, the hands came with it. Fingers pointing at my arms. A gentle grip around my upper arm followed by a slow shake of the head. People told me to be careful about shirts that showed my clavicle, about crop tops that exposed my ribs. It shows, they said. They were right. It showed. And somehow even that — even my body at its most depleted — was something for other people to see, to comment on, to worry over out loud.

None of them meant harm. I want to say that clearly. But there is a particular exhaustion in being loved loudly, in the body, by people who don't realize they're teaching you that your body is a public thing.

Italy showed up again, differently.

I was with my family in Puglia, in the south, at a resort. A boy — couldn't have been older than ten — watched us walk by and pointed at each of us in turn. Cinese. Cinese. Cinese. Out loud. Without hesitation. The word landing on each of us like he was naming something obvious, something that required no further thought. We were Asian. That was enough. That was all.

I think about that boy sometimes. Mostly with a kind of tired wonder at how early it gets installed — the instinct to point, to label, to collapse an entire archipelago of seven thousand islands into a single word that isn't even right.

It wasn't just him. Over the years, people of other Asian ethnicities would approach me without introduction and begin speaking — Thai, Khmer, Burmese — as if I were one of them, as if my face had already answered a question they hadn't asked out loud. I never knew how to feel in those moments. A little disoriented. Strangely, quietly offended, even though I couldn't fully explain why. Maybe because being misread by strangers is one thing, but being misread by people who know what it is to be misread — that one sits differently.

Back home in central Maryland, the misreading was quieter but just as present. My middle school, my high school — predominantly white, in the late 2000s, in a neighborhood that hadn't yet become what it is now. There were other kids who weren't white. Enough that you knew you weren't alone, not enough that you ever forgot you were in the minority. You didn't need anyone to say anything. You could feel it in the ratio of the room. The way your skin color announced you before you could introduce yourself.

And then there were the boys — there are always boys — who thought Filipino was a funny word. Who would say Philippians instead, like the Bible book, like it was a joke, like the name of an entire people was an amusing sound to make with your mouth. I don't think they knew they were being cruel. That was almost the point.

In Florence I had been exotic. In Puglia I had been Chinese. In Maryland I had been a brown girl in a white hallway. Three different rooms. Three different wrong answers. None of them mine.

Here is what I know about getting dressed.

I know that crop tops show my midriff and I feel delicate and feminine in shirts with a sweetheart neckline. I know that flare jeans make my legs look miles long. I know that dresses and skirts with high slits accentuate my height and make me feel elegant. I adorn my body with pieces that make me feel like me — like how I want to move through the world. Not to look thin. Not to perform anything for anyone. Just to feel like myself, which I have learned is its own quiet act of courage.

I didn't dress for any of you.

I've been told what my body means in Filipino households, in white American hallways, in Italian piazze. I've been pointed at, praised, worried over, reduced. And somewhere underneath all of it, my body was just here — mine, the whole time — waiting for me to come home to it.

The turn didn't announce itself. It came quietly, the way most true things do.

There's a photo from last year. My sister and I, mid-laugh, the kind of laugh that takes over your whole face before you can stop it. My hand is on her belly — she was pregnant then, with my niece, and I was so full of excitement I could barely contain it. My arm in that photo is visibly thinner than it is now, evidence of a season of stress I was only just leaving behind. I notice it when I look. And then I notice everything else — her smile, my smile, the joy that is so clearly the whole point of the image. My body in that photo is not the subject. It never was. I am.

That's the gaze I'm learning to trust. Not the tita's worried grip around my wrist. Not the Italian boy's pointing finger. Not the girlfriend at the tanning salon, not the boys who laughed at a word they didn't understand, not the stranger in Florence who explained me away in two words. Mine. The one that looks at that photo and sees joy first.

I didn't dress for any of you. I never did. I just forgot that for a while.

I think about the girl at that makeshift dining table. The butter still sizzling in the kitchen, the Italian still being practiced aloud, the comment still settling into the room like it was nothing.

She didn't know yet that the attention — all of it, every version of it, from every room — was only ever seeing the surface. A complexion. A height. A body that could be pointed at, categorized, explained away in two words. They saw a sliver and decided it was enough to know me.

But I am not a sliver.

I have been in every room. I have been handed every wrong version of myself — the exotic one, the Chinese one, the too-skinny one, the not-Filipino-enough one. I have held each one for a moment, confused, and set it back down. None of them were mine to keep.

What's mine is everything underneath. The part no one else's gaze has ever been able to reach.

The only sovereign gaze I want to answer to is mine.

I just had to come home to it first.