I never expected to live with a chronic illness at such a young age. I was only 20 when I found out that I was sentenced to life in a body that will forever feel like a prison. The day I found out that I was diagnosed with Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS, formerly known as Polycystic Ovary Syndrome or PCOS), was the day I was told that my illness has no cure. 

PMOS confines women to quality of life that destroys their physical, mental, and social well-being. I felt trapped. When I learned that PMOS ruins women’s lives, its abbreviation changed for me, PMOS is now short for: Pissing Me Off Syndrome. It felt like the end for me and my body. 

One of the ways PMOS manifests in the body is through weight gain. Living through these changes, I was confronted once again with the same anxieties that had shaped my relationship with my body since I was twelve years old. I thought adulthood would free me from these insecurities, but instead I found myself returning to them as if I were a child again. My body began to feel unfamiliar to me. I no longer recognized myself and I felt like a shell of the person I once was.

After years of medical consultations and extensive research, I searched for art that could reflect the realities of living with PMOS. I found very little and I was dismayed. While some representations of body image existed, they rarely captured what it means to inhabit a woman’s body that changes, struggles, and persists under the weight of PMOS. For the first time in my life, cinema failed me. In that absence, I began to think about the countless women whose experiences remained unseen and underrepresented—not only in art and films, but also within medical and patriarchal systems that have long neglected women's health, women’s bodies, and women’s liberation. A Tender Awakening emerged from that absence, from a desire to create a film that I longed to encounter where women living with PMOS could see themselves reflected with tenderness, complexity, and care. I and this film will always live by: there may not be a cure for PMOS, but there must be art.​