Chapter Six: Writing My Own Biology
For most of her life, I believed biology was something written in permanent ink.
It was in the textbooks my teachers assigned, in the diagrams of cells and organs neatly labeled in bright colors. Biology, they said, followed rules—predictable systems, balanced hormones, orderly cycles that worked the way nature intended.
But I had learned something different.
My body didn't always follow the neat instructions printed in those books.
Some nights I would sit at my desk with my biology notebook open, staring at diagrams of the endocrine system. Tiny arrows pointed from gland to hormone, from hormone to response, as if the human body were a perfectly organized machine.
I would trace the lines with my finger and quietly wonder why my own body felt like a language i had never been fully taught to read.
The diagnosis had given me answers, but it had also given me questions.
PCOS.
Four letters that had suddenly become part of my identity. Doctors described it with clinical calm—hormonal imbalance, irregular cycles, metabolic shifts—but none of those words captured what it felt like to live inside it every day.
They didn't explain the moments when my emotions felt overwhelming for reasons i couldn't always name.
They didn't explain the exhaustion that sometimes crept in even after a full night of sleep.
They didn't explain the strange tension of being nineteen and feeling both strong and uncertain inside my own skin.
Late one evening, I sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor surrounded by scattered notebooks. Rain tapped softly against the window, the steady rhythm filling the quiet room.
I had been reading another article about PCOS.
At first those articles had frightened me. They spoke about symptoms, long-term effects, things that sounded bigger than the life i had imagined for myself.
But something inside me had slowly begun to shift.
Instead of reading them like warnings, I started reading them like instructions.
Not instructions about what I couldn't do—but instructions about what I could learn.
I picked up a pen and began writing in the margin of my notebook.
My body is not broken.
The words looked strange at first, like a sentence I wasn't fully convinced of yet.
For so long I had treated my body like an unpredictable stranger. Something that embarrassed me with irregular cycles, sudden mood changes, and unexplained waves of emotion.
But what if it wasn't an enemy?
What if it was simply different?
I leaned back against my bed and stared at the ceiling, letting the thought settle slowly in my mind.
Biology, i realized, wasn't always fixed.
Bodies adapted. They changed. They learned.
And maybe I could learn too.
Not just about hormones and symptoms—but about myself.
About the rhythms my body followed. About the signals it sent when something was off balance. About the quiet strength it carried even on the days it felt complicated.
For the first time in a long while, I didn't feel like biology was controlling my story.
Instead, I felt like I was beginning to understand it.
I closed her notebook and whispered the sentence again, this time with more certainty.
"My body is not broken."
Outside, the rain continued to fall softly against the window, and I realized something i hadn't fully believed before.
The life written in my DNA might shape my journey.
But the way I understood it—the meaning I gave it—was something only I could write.
And slowly, carefully, I was learning how to write my own biology.