EVE EVERYDAY

Sometimes, when I feel small or a little wobbly, I do a ridiculous thing: I ask a machine to stitch me a story. I tell it, "Make me laugh. Make me ridiculous. Make me enormous." It spits back this image of a woman hovering above a city, with a cape like a gull's wing and lightning framing her like an angel’s halo. She looks at once tired and utterly convincing. That look is the best part: the face of someone who has remembered, halfway through microwaving leftovers and texting "On my way," that she is, in fact, indisputably dramatic.

Her name in my head changes depending on the mood. Tonight, she is Nariman the Zen. Other nights she's Nancy the Noteworthy. Her suit is ridiculous: sleek black armour traced with veins of electric blue light that hum with minor inconveniences like overdue emails and unmet expectations. The emblem on her chest is a stubborn glyph, the sort you get when you combine optimism and thrift-store couture. Her cape flaps like it’s auditioning to be a banner while a thunderstorm composes itself into a soundtrack.

But what I love most is the smallness beneath the spectacle. Look closer and you can see the crease near her eyebrow, the one that says she's been waking before dawn to get to school on time, the one that says she's learned how to fake being okay so many times that practice made it almost pretty. And that pose of power? It’s borrowed and rewoven over an entire human life: grocery lists, an impossibly tiny car, houseplants she’s convinced are rebelling. She is, in equal parts, ridiculous and heroic...heroic because she keeps showing up even when nothing extraordinary has promised to turn up.

In the story I tell whenever I look at her, she began not with some world-altering event but with a tiny, awkward refusal. One Wednesday...the kind of day that is mostly uneventful, yet demanding...she decided not to be small in the ways that hurt. She refused to let someone else’s actions set the temperature in her chest. She refused, that week, to carry a shame that had no right to her shoulders. The refusal was the spark. The suit and the storm were the machine’s embellishments, because the machine knows how to gild a small rebellion with thunder and lightning.

Her powers are not what you expect. She cannot lift washing machines or predict the crypto market. But she does have the uncanny ability to show up for herself. She can finish things she starts, and she can own up to her mistakes. She can hold the line between being generous and being spent. When people around her combust into panic, she somehow becomes a small island of zen, not because she’s unshakeable, but because she learned the wonder of breathing and uses it like punctuation. Lightning? It’s mostly mood lighting. The blue veins in the suit pulse when she remembers to say, ‘no more’.

The setting is important; it is a quilt of lights, windows that contain other smaller dramas: someone taking a bath at 2 a.m., another playing online games with strangers, a third person typing messages that are never sent... She watches these scenes with empathy because she, too, knows fear, anxiety, and rejection, and she knows about regret and loss. She shines her light hoping to illuminate the darkness, not like a superhero, but more like a nervous, affectionate lighthouse keeper. And sometimes what she does is not battle the storm but shine quietly until it stops feeling so sharp.

The machine-magic that made her is smug and generous in its dimensions; it knows how to sell a narrative. But the truth she embodies is that heroism is often a series of tiny, unremarkable choices: sending loving thoughts and prayers to the one that walked away; being graceful in the presence of fear; insisting on boundaries even when you stand to lose something or someone. It hurts like hell, like pulling a splinter out.

So, is this a fanciful, pointless exercise? 100%. But sometimes it's worth remembering that if you are not the heroine of your own epic tale, what kind of life are you choosing for yourself? Is it a bit of a tickle at a time when your nerves are raw and tears reside behind heavy lids? Again, 100%. And did you allow yourself to come undone at the sight of your dysfunction? Maybe for the briefest moment when the notification first hit your feed and the memories came flooding back... It was then that you removed your cape, folded it away, and remembered who the hell you were. So, you carried on with your day, washed the dishes, wiped the kitchen table clean, checked the time, and texted that someone who understands subtext and sadness.

So, when you ask the machine to make you laugh, to conjure a woman who is bravely, theatrically certain, what you’re really asking for is to remember that you can be both tired and tremendously brave, aging and kickass. The giggle comes when you recognize the mismatch: that absurd image and the brave woman who shows up every day in an Abaya, not a cape. The quieter, better laugh comes when you realize the mismatch is the point.

You do not have to be lightning to be a light. Sometimes, believing you are the hero of your own story is an outfit you try on in a bad mood and it fits better than you expected. Try it on.

And if you ever feel discontented or small again, ask the machine for another portrait. Let it show you the lightning. Then go fold your cape and do the small things that save you every day.