Sobre Mim - Reine

And what of the crown? It is not made of gold or jewels. It is made of small, fierce recognitions: the day you walked away from a relationship that diminished you; the morning you spoke your truth even as your hands trembled; the night you forgave yourself for not knowing sooner. Each of these is a gem. Each is a victory.

But a queen does not beg for a throne. She recognizes that the throne has always been within. reine sobre mim

The words feel like a coronation whispered in two tongues. Reine —French for queen, carrying the weight of Versailles, of elegance, of a crown not borrowed but earned. Sobre mim —Portuguese for "about me" or "over me," intimate and grounded, like the turning of soil before planting. Together, they form a manifesto: I am the queen over my own story. And what of the crown

To declare "reine sobre mim" is to perform an act of quiet revolution. It means waking up and deciding that your own voice is the one that finalizes the law of your life. It means looking in the mirror and seeing not a collection of flaws to be edited, but a sovereign face—the face of someone who has survived, who has softened and hardened in all the right places, who no longer needs permission to exist. Each of these is a gem

There is a Portuguese word, saudade , that has no perfect translation. It is the longing for something that may never return. But sobre mim is the opposite of saudade —it is the presence of claiming what is here, now. It is the refusal to live in the ghost of a past self or the mirage of a future one. The queen does not rule over what was or what might be. She rules over this breath, this choice, this moment.

To be reine sobre mim is to accept that you will sometimes be misunderstood. Queens are. It is to know that your reign will not always be easy—there will be rebellions of doubt, coups of anxiety, whispers of imposter syndrome. But a sovereign does not abdicate at the first sign of storm. She anchors. She breathes. She remembers that the crown stays on, even when the wind howls.

For years, I lived as a subject in the kingdom of others. I handed the scepter to expectation, to the gaze of the crowd, to the loud voices that told me who I should be. I learned to curtsy before approval, to measure my worth by the applause of a room that was never truly mine. In that court, I was a servant—polite, accommodating, exhausted. I built altars to "should" and burned my own desires as offerings.