Learning To Love Myself Re-imagined

There was a woman before him. She liked mornings at windows and loud music that shook the walls and pineapple on pizza and the specific sovereignty of a life that answered to no one. She had opinions she held without apology and friends she called at midnight and a body she lived in without monitoring. That woman disappeared inside a love that looked like devotion and felt like starvation, and the disappearing was so gradual, so celebrated, so mistaken for commitment by a world that rewards the woman who gives everything and penalizes the woman who keeps something for herself, that neither she nor anyone watching noticed the woman was gone until the love left and the vacancy was the only thing standing in the mirror.
Learning To Love Myself Re-imagined is an original poetry and prose collection born from the soil of Alex Aubrey’s bestselling Learning To Love Myself. Across sixteen poems and four unflinching sections — The Holding On, The Letting Go, The Wreckage, and The Learning — Brooks traces the full, unglamorous architecture of a woman who disappeared inside a love and is rebuilding herself from zero: from the mornings she surrendered and the music she silenced and the opinions she traded for “I don’t care, wherever you want,” through the last time she chose him over herself and the leaving that wasn’t brave but was arithmetic, through the withdrawal that felt like detox because love is a chemical and the chemical doesn’t care about your Monday-morning decisions, to the list on the refrigerator and the cereal over the sink and the first date with herself at a bookstore in a yellow dress where she discovered that the woman she was becoming was someone she liked.
This is a book about the woman who disappeared and the woman who came back. About the blueprint that said surrender yourself as collateral against the abandonment. About the virus that said you are hard to love when the truth was you were just in rooms that were too small for human size. About the list of things she forgave that she shouldn’t have, kept in her body instead of on paper — in the jaw, the shoulders, the stomach, the chest, the hips. About the staying that was her love language and the bleeding that was quiet and the “Enough” at a mirror on a Monday at 6 a.m. that cracked the foundation. About the hum she found in the quiet after the noise — the low, steady, self-generated frequency of a woman who is choosing herself in ordinary rooms every morning with coffee at a window and the choosing is the love and the love is not a destination. It is a daily decision. Made in kitchens. At counters. In yellow dresses. Over sinks. One no at a time. One pineapple at a time. One morning at a time.
Letting you go was the beginning. The learning is the rest of her life.