FEEDING OURSELVES.

A year-long story—written from the messy middle— about learning to let go of the old stories about my body and coming alive to feeding myself fully.

This might be your story too.

The first four essays here are free, so you can read them and decide if this story resonates with you.

After that, the journey continues for paid subscribers.

First essay: Feeding Myself

Second essay: The Slow Way

Third essay: On Why I am Writing This

Fourth essay: Weight Watchers, 1984

When was the last time you felt really good in your body? 

I don't mean that you felt like you looked good. Or that you lost enough weight to fit into a certain size of clothing you believed you should be. Or that someone else told you that you look good.

I mean you. You felt good in your body. 

You were embodying your body. You felt fully alive in it from your heart all the way to the end of your fingertips and toes. 

In fact you felt so good in your body that you didn't even think about how you looked. You were just existing in your body, swinging your arms, solid on your feet, feeling like you were walking on sunshine. Here. 

What percentage of your life have you spent feeling like that in your body? 

90%  50%  20%

If you’re like me, a Gen X woman—I was born in 1966; a teenager in the 80s—and grew up thinking you had to be smaller and smaller and smaller to be successful and loved, then that percentage of time you have spent in your body feeling good? 

It might be smaller than you can comprehend, looking back.

I was trained to mistrust my own hunger. Maybe you were too.

We were the girls of margarine tubs and Tab soda. Snackwells cookies. Special K for dinner. Women who pinched the soft part of their stomachs in fluorescent dressing rooms and said, I have to lose weight. I'll start tomorrow.

Tomorrow has been going on for 40 years.

I'm done.

But here's what I've learned, at nearly 60, after decades of heroic inward journeys: the story about our bodies was never just about our bodies. It was one of many old stories we were handed — about how much space we were allowed to take up, about what made us worthy, about what we had to shrink and silence and suppress to be acceptable in a world that preferred us smaller.

Smaller. Smaller. Smaller. That was the whole instruction.

I have another name for the women who are ready to stop following it: tender-hearted warriors.

A tender-hearted warrior is a woman who has struggled through enormous adversity and deep self-doubt — and who learned, slowly, to stay open anyway. To not run from her feelings. To shed the hard armor she built to keep herself safe, and discover that what lives underneath it is not weakness. It's wisdom. Bittersweet wisdom, earned through every difficult journey she survived.

This newsletter is that journey — applied to food. To hunger. To the noise in our heads that has never once made us happy and has stolen decades of peace at the table.

Feeding Ourselves follows the structure of the Story of the Tender-Hearted Warrior, learning how to change our minds, step by step.

I'm writing four essays for each stage of the heroic inward journey — the call, the refusal, the crossing, the long middle where nothing is certain, and the slow return to ourselves.

Some weeks I might feel free. Some weeks I might eat three cookies standing at the counter and wait for the old shame. Some weeks, the old voices might get very loud right before they leave.

I write it all down. Not as a guru. As a witness. As a tender-hearted warrior who is still on the path.

If you grew up between the 1950s and the 1990s, you inherited a thousand invisible rules about food and your body. You learned to override your hunger. You learned to call that control. You attacked yourself without questioning why.

This is where we learn something else. How to listen again. How to eat when we're hungry. How to stop when we've had enough. How to sit at the table without negotiating our worth.

This is not a plan. It's a crossing. And it is a tender-hearted warrior journey.

I'm in it. Writing my way through. You can walk beside me.

Why this is a paid newsletter

This is not content. It's a crossing.

This work cannot happen in the performative noise of the open internet. It needs a quieter room. A room full of women who are ready to let go of the old stories.

You don't have to be certain. You don't have to be ready to do it perfectly. You just have to be willing to begin.

If you've spent decades harassing yourself when you eat, come walk this path with me.

If you've spent decades trying to be good, you can learn to let it go.

For $5 a month, you'll receive the weekly essays as I write them — the honest record of leaving diet culture behind and learning, slowly, to trust my body again.

Paid subscribers are the only ones who receive new essays. You're not reading from the outside. You're stepping onto the path with me, in real time.

You'll also be part of the conversation — leaving comments, sharing your own experiences, and joining the monthly live gatherings I host on the last Saturday of each month. We'll talk together, listen together, and make this crossing less lonely.

Subscribe to walk this journey with me.