These articles are for you if:
- Your body has changed in ways you didn't choose and you're trying to figure out who you are now
- You're dealing with a diagnosis that's rewriting your relationship with your health
- You're in perimenopause or menopause and tired of being told it's "just hormones"
- You're navigating weight, food, and body image in a way that feels different than it did at 25
- You're trying to move or fuel or care for your body without all the shame and shoulds
Common questions these articles explore:
- How do I grieve the body I used to have while living in the one I have now?
- What does it look like to manage a chronic condition or recovery without making it your entire identity?
- How do other people handle menopause, cancer, weight changes, or other physical shifts without pretending they're fine?
- What's the difference between taking care of my body and punishing it for changing?
- How do I advocate for myself in medical systems that don't always listen?
What you can expect to learn:These conversations won't tell you how to "bounce back" or "optimize" your body. You'll hear from people learning to live with diagnoses, managing symptoms that disrupt their lives, navigating menopause without a roadmap, or rethinking their relationship with weight and movement. You'll find permission to be angry, scared, or grieving about what your body is doing - and also curious about what kind of relationship with it might be possible now. Enjoy!
Many of us assume that hard times will happen one at a time. If you get cancer then you deal with the cancer, then the aging parent, then the teenager, then the genetic test results. You catch your breath between rounds. Mindy Uhrlaub did not get that version. The Marin ...
This article includes discussion of pregnancy loss and death of a parent. If you don’t want that…this may not be a good read for you. Some of us spend years building the perfect plan, only to have the grind of daily life dismantle our plans and dreams piece by piece ...
It’s possible that many people don’t recognize the moment they stop taking care of themselves. Especially when it doesn’t arrive as a dramatic breakdown. Sometimes it comes in handfuls, the way Karen Rudolph’s hair came out in the shower during the worst stretch of her life. A former nurse turned ...
Some conditions arrive with a diagnosis and a treatment plan. Others arrive before you do. Congenital rubella syndrome, a condition caused when a mother contracts German measles during pregnancy, is the kind of thing that doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It shapes every organ, every bone, every system. ...
There is a version of a good life that gets handed to you before you are old enough to question it. For Courtney Boyer, that version came packaged inside an evangelical Christian upbringing, complete with a checklist: wait for marriage, support your husband, manage the household, raise the children, and ...
A single conversation about a puppy’s vaccines changed everything Sarah Dawkins thought she knew about health, healing and herself. At the time, she was a registered nurse with years of training and clinical experience, working in a system she had dreamed of being part of since childhood. She had no ...
Some of us think we know what we want to do with our lives until life interrupts the plan. For Christine Davies, that interruption came in the form of a medical diagnosis that upended her original path toward medicine and eventually pointed her toward something she hadn’t anticipated: becoming the ...
Imagine waking up every morning with your mouth simultaneously on fire from habanero peppers and scalded from a sip of too-hot coffee, except there is no pepper, no hot coffee, and the burning never stops. That is how Peggy Sharr, a clinical psychotherapist and trauma specialist with 20 years of ...
Most people who struggle with binge eating do not look like they are struggling. From the outside, they are the capable ones, the driven ones, the people who seem to have it all figured out. They are running meetings, maintaining relationships, checking every box a successful life is supposed to ...
Some people get sober and expect the unhappiness to lift with the alcohol. Lisa Manzo did exactly that, white-knuckling her way through an entire year without drinking, only to wake up on her one-year anniversary angrier than she had ever been. The drinking was gone, but the weight was still ...