Note: This post is part of my Memoir Writing Series, available exclusively for paid subscribers. Thank you for your support.

Hello Everyone,

I’ve gotten my first round of feedback on my YA novel, and the good news is: the four readers who gave me feedback made it all the way through.

That might sound like a low bar, but it’s not something I take for granted. Between the numerous books and audiobooks I’ve read or listened to, I’ve abandoned dozens of them over the last ten years. Not necessarily because they were bad, but because something about them didn’t pull me in within the first three or four chapters. As a reader, I know how often that happens, even with books I wanted to love. So when my own readers made it all the way through mine, that mattered to me.

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A few weeks ago, I started wondering if I had writer's block — I desperately wanted to finish the first draft of my teen novel. Every morning I'd think, I'll work on my novel, and then I’d feel a pound pound pound in my head, take Tylenol and watch TV instead until my two-year-old son, Barney, woke up. The guilt came fast. I never finish anything. Why can’t I write? What’s wrong with me?

It turned out I wasn’t lazy, or blocked. My head was in pain, and even though I had been through intense periods of pain since I developed kidney disease in 2024, I forgot how much pain can impact motivation.

Here’s what happened. On July 4th weekend, my family went to Rehoboth Beach with my parents and my sister’s family. My sister and I were gathering the kids for an early morning outing when the world started spinning and I felt like I was going to faint. My father took me to the local hospital, and I spent the day there thinking it could be my kidneys. Instead, I was released with a diagnosis of vertigo and pills to cover me for three days. When I called to make appointments, my ENT couldn't see me for almost two weeks, and my neurologist for eight.

The next week, the vertigo-like symptoms were worst in the mornings, and I stretched the medication out — one pill on the morning after dropping Barney off at daycare when the prescription called for three pills, three times a day. Running low on medications, and with the migraines and nausea not getting any better, I had my dad take me to urgent care. The doctor wouldn’t treat me for vertigo — my symptoms didn’t fit, they said, since I was swaying instead of spinning.

The ENT ruled it out too, offering antibiotics for nasal fluid, which I knew wasn’t the issue. So I called my neurologist’s office and grabbed a last-minute appointment with the PA two days later.

The PA was amazing. He listened to everything I was telling him — and told me it sounded like vestibular migraines, not vertigo. He gave me samples of one medication and scripts for another, and told me if the first one didn’t work, we’d try the second. I didn’t have to go back just to get another prescription, which my physicians often do — he trusted me enough to let me try things and see what worked. Within two days, I felt like a totally new person.

But here’s the part that surprised me the most, looking back. It wasn’t the dizziness. It was how little I could get done, and how much that started wearing on me. My days shrank down to getting Barney to school, then taking my meds and lying in bed almost all day, then picking him up, playing with him, feeding him, bathing him, putting him to sleep. I couldn’t touch my book. Writing felt impossible, and I felt completely demotivated. And when I wasn’t writing, I lost my sense of purpose.

There’s something powerful about waking up, processing something and creating something else that might benefit others. Yes, taking care of Barney mattered — but outside of that, I wanted something that was mine. And not writing started grating on my mental health on top of everything else.

Another thing that gives me a sense of purpose, and one of the hidden blessings of writing these Substacks has been the correspondence it’s brought me. Sometimes out of the woodwork I’ll get an email saying my writing provoked some deeper thought, and I get a window into someone’s world.

One of the people I’ve been doing this with is a friend from Colorado. We knew each other from the Jewish community — never close, but always liked each other. She started writing to me after she found my Substack, and somewhere along the way it turned into something that felt like sharing intimate thoughts with an old friend.

I told her I was feeling demotivated with the migraines and struggling to finish editing my teen novel. She offered to read it for me.

When the migraine meds finally started kicking in, I felt the pull to write again. I kept telling myself, I’ve got to finish this book for her. I’ve got to finish this book for her. Whether that motivation made rational sense or not, having a reason outside myself — telling myself, this is for someone else — was enough to pull me back to the pages. It reminded me of my five-year-old niece, beaming over a drawing she’d made for someone, searching their face for a reaction.

Around the same time, my friend wrote something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about — that thinking through pain is pretty much impossible for everyone, and that it seemed like I was being extremely hard on myself about not being motivated when there was a very significant physical reason that would make anyone feel that way.

I don’t know if I’d have put it that way myself, but she was right. Once the pain actually lifted, everything opened back up — the writing, the motivation, all of it, faster than I expected.

I'm not sure I'll remember this lesson the next time I'm struggling. But I do know that this week I finished the first draft of my book, and I’m grateful to be writing this letter to tell you.

I’m now waiting on feedback from a few friends before I do another editing pass and get it in front of more readers, and eventually for line editing. Super excited. More to come.

Love,
Danielle

PS. The picture above is a photo of Barney and me at dinner after I started feeling better.

If this resonated with you, I’d love to know. Leave a comment — even if it’s just one word.

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Writing this newsletter brings me genuine joy, and knowing you’re out there reading means everything. If this resonates with you, consider subscribing — free or paid. To my paid subscribers — thank you. Your support helps me keep writing and gets my memoir and teen novel into the world.

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When we talk about nutrition and kidney disease, we spend a lot of time talking about lab values—potassium, phosphorus, sodium. What we don’t talk about nearly enough is what those food restrictions can do to our relationship with food.

For me, every blood test used to feel like a report card. If my potassium was high, I restricted. If my phosphorus was high, I restricted even more. Over time, I began wondering whether kidney disease doesn’t just change what we eat—it changes our relationship with food.

In this episode, I sit down with renal dietitian Jennifer Kurzawa to explore a question I don’t hear asked very often: What happens when a medically necessary diet collides with a complicated relationship with food?

We talk about the emotional side of the kidney diet, why patients so often receive conflicting nutrition advice, and how clinicians can help people build a healthier relationship with food while still managing a chronic illness.

Whether you’re living with kidney disease or simply interested in how medical diets shape our relationship with food, I hope you’ll find something meaningful in this conversation.

What We Talk About

I met Jennifer at the American Kidney Fund conference. After hearing her speak—and after my own experience on dialysis and a lifetime of complicated feelings around food—I knew I wanted to ask her the questions I’d been carrying around for years.

In our conversation, we discuss:

• The difference between eating disorders, disordered eating, and food addiction—and why those lines can blur in kidney care.

• How a kidney diagnosis can quietly create cycles of restriction, guilt, and, for some people, binge eating.

• Why patients often receive conflicting advice from doctors, dialysis dietitians, and transplant teams.

• The emotional weight of food restrictions, including guilt, comfort eating, cultural traditions, and the shame that can come with a “bad” blood test.

• Whether kidney care is beginning to recognize the importance of asking patients about their relationship with food before dialysis begins.

• How to start rebuilding a healthier relationship with food while still living with a chronic illness.

About Jennifer

Jennifer Kurzawa is a registered dietitian with more than 30 years of clinical experience, including over 25 years specializing in kidney and dialysis care. She has served in leadership roles across dialysis organizations and on professional boards, including the Council on Renal Nutrition.

You can find Jennifer on LinkedIn or reach her at jenniferkurzawa@hotmail.com.

Coming next week: Jennifer joins me again for a broader conversation about food, guilt, restriction, and our relationship with eating—one that extends well beyond kidney disease.

If this resonated with you, I’d love to know. Leave a comment — even if it’s just one word.

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Writing this newsletter brings me genuine joy, and knowing you’re out there reading means everything. If this resonates with you, consider subscribing — free or paid. To my paid subscribers — thank you. Your support helps me keep writing and gets my memoir and teen novel into the world.

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What the Hell Do I Eat?

That was the first thought I had when I was put on a renal diet at the start of dialysis. Low sodium, low potassium, low phosphorus—three minerals that suddenly seemed to be in almost everything I ate. After receiving some worksheets as part of my “education,” I didn’t think, This is manageable. My only thought was: What the hell do I eat?

Before kidney disease, my relationship with food was already complicated. For years I moved through long stretches of overeating and weight gain — followed by periods where I’d lose it and manage to keep it off. But even then, the struggle didn’t go away. It just became less apparent. I tried everything to manage it: Weight Watchers, SlimFast, high-protein or low-fat diets, and calorie counting. When the urge to overeat or binge hit, it came with a specific physical feeling, like I wanted to jump out of my skin. An anxiety pulsed through me until I drove somewhere and bought the specific ice cream, cookie, or chocolate from a particular store. Where I struggled was with the amount I ate and how often it happened. Loneliness, exhaustion, overwhelm—those were usually underneath it.

I've tried the things eating disorder specialists recommend. Meditation. Mindfulness. Exercise. Therapy—Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in my earlier years, and later work focused on healing my inner child and the past experiences that shaped my relationship with food. I eventually became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker trained in various modalities. I understand the psychology of behavior change. I know the coping strategies. All of it genuinely helped. But I could be exercising regularly, working on self-care, and feeling emotionally stable and still feel pulled toward food — still overeating.

The most useful framework I encountered wasn't from a therapist. It came from an online course by Kathryn Hansen, the author of Brain Over Binge. The idea that stayed with me — and I'm paraphrasing here — was that you're never going to completely heal the past to fix disordered eating. When a craving hit, she encouraged sitting with the discomfort rather than fighting it. Nourishing your body adequately rather than restricting. Asking the questions: Am I lonely? Exhausted? Do I need movement, comfort, or connection? Sometimes naming the need softened the craving. Sometimes it didn't, and the discomfort simply had to be weathered. It wasn't a clean solution, but it shifted something in me. Even so, I still had periods of struggle.

Then kidney disease arrived, and the entire calculus of food changed.

Most people understand a low-sodium diet—it’s salt, and we’re all told to eat less of it. Potassium and phosphorus felt much more abstract because I’d never had to think about them before. Then my kidneys stopped regulating them, and suddenly they became impossible to ignore. After my transplant failed, my potassium climbed so high after eating two bananas that I was given insulin and albuterol while nurses monitored my heart, waiting for my levels to come down. I couldn’t believe two bananas could put me at risk for a heart attack. It was terrifying.

Phosphorus was different. Instead of sending me to the hospital, it quietly followed me everywhere, showing up on ingredient labels and bloodwork, and in muscle and joint pain.

Knowing what those minerals could do made the restrictions easier to understand, but not easier to live with. My diet eventually settled into something that would have seemed completely backwards to me before kidney disease: white rice, white bread, limited lean proteins, berries, apples, peppers, onions, and zucchini. Most dairy and meat disappeared. Whole grains were largely out. Leafy greens, tomatoes, and melons became foods I either limited or avoided. After years of hearing that whole grains, high protein, and leafy vegetables were the healthiest foods you could eat, it felt strange to realize that “healthy” wasn’t a universal category. Healthy depended on the body you were living in. What mattered wasn’t what everyone else considered healthy. What mattered was what my kidneys could handle.

Every blood draw became a report card. During dialysis I had labs every other day. Now it’s usually once a month, though this spring, when my kidney function had a slight decline, I found myself back to weekly bloodwork for a while. Those numbers determine everything—whether I need to change medications, tighten my diet, or simply keep doing what I’m doing. Food stopped being something I simply enjoyed. It became something measured, adjusted, and recalculated every time my lab results came back.

Recently, as some of my restrictions eased slightly, I noticed something I hadn’t expected. The old feeling came back. That jump-out-of-my-skin anxiety. The pull toward ice cream, toward chips, toward just more food. The desire to drive and get my large-portioned dreamed-of dessert, eat some in the store, take the rest home, and devour more. Even though it was a more kidney-friendly binge, it was still a binge. It probably spiked my potassium and phosphorus, and with several of my medications already increasing my risk of diabetes, it’s a risk I can’t afford.

We know that prolonged restriction and lack of adequate nutrition often strengthens cravings. It’s part of our biology, something researchers have documented for decades. I’ve been living with medically necessary food restrictions for more than two years now, minus two glorious months after my kidney transplant when I ate whatever I wanted. The body remembers abundance. It also remembers deprivation.

A friend visited recently and showed me an app she uses to track her food. It didn’t quite fit my needs, but it led me to the app, KidneyPal. I use it constantly, not because I enjoy tracking food, but because it helps me protect a body that’s become much less forgiving.

The app changed the way I looked at food. Before downloading it, I mostly relied on the handouts my dietitian had given me and foods I’d gradually learned were “safe.” Once I started scanning barcodes, I realized how much variation existed within foods I thought were interchangeable. Many grocery store white bread brands are fortified with phosphorus additives — so I started making my own bread. One version of Cream of Wheat at my local Giant is fortified with minerals I need to avoid; the version without it is only sold at Mom’s Organic Market and costs several dollars more. Again and again I found myself paying more for foods with cleaner ingredients. I realized I wasn’t just eating for kidney disease anymore — I was eating around a food system that wasn’t designed with health in mind.

The less processed a food was, the easier it became to understand what I was actually putting into my body. That’s how I ended up making my own bread and sauces. Not because I’d suddenly become interested in baking or “clean eating,” but because every ingredient I could control was one less thing I had to worry about.

It also made me realize how much privilege is built into eating well with kidney disease. It takes time to compare labels, energy to cook much of your food from scratch, transportation to reach stores that carry less processed options, and money to afford them. I’m fortunate. I’m not on dialysis right now, I’m not working outside the home, and my husband and I can manage the extra expense. Many people with kidney disease don’t have those advantages.

At a kidney disease advocacy conference, I met people navigating versions of this same reality. Several were taking GLP-1 medications for diabetes or weight loss. Others with functioning transplants had understandably returned to eating the foods they’d missed for years. Standing there, I couldn’t stop thinking about how tangled all of this is. Diabetes is one of the leading causes of kidney disease, and many of the communities with the highest rates of kidney disease also have the least access to fresh, affordable food. Then, once someone develops kidney disease, they’re asked to follow one of the most restrictive diets I have ever experienced. The foods that are cheapest and most accessible are often the very foods we’re told to avoid.

What I’ve never once been asked—not by my nephrologist, not by a renal dietitian, not by anyone on my medical team—is what my relationship with food was like before kidney disease. Every time my bloodwork changes, I receive another worksheet. Eat less potassium. Watch your phosphorus. Reduce your sodium. Adjust your protein. Those conversations matter, but no one has ever asked what years of medically necessary restriction feel like, or what happens when that collides with a lifelong history of disordered eating.

I remember asking one renal dietitian to help me visualize 1,500 milligrams of sodium. “Could you translate that into teaspoons?” I asked. “I don’t know what a milligram looks like on a plate.”

She shrugged.

“I don’t know. You’ll have to look it up.”

That conversation has stayed with me because eating isn’t just physiology. It’s habit, culture, comfort, celebration, addiction, grief, and the way many of us soothe ourselves after difficult days. Yet kidney care focuses so heavily on the chemistry while leaving the psychology almost entirely untouched.

At that same conference I mentioned earlier, a woman told me she'd spent decades restricting calcium and phosphorus, only to end up with brittle bones. Protecting one part of her body had quietly affected another. It made me wonder how many people are navigating not only kidney disease, but a complicated relationship with food that nobody ever thinks to ask about.

As I started looking into this, I expected to find a substantial body of research exploring what happens when medically necessary dietary restriction collides with a complicated relationship with food. There is extensive research on chronic kidney disease. There is extensive research on eating disorders, binge eating, and the psychology of restriction. There is also growing research on ultra-processed foods and food access. What I found remarkably little of was research asking what happens where those worlds overlap.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be speaking with a renal dietitian and an eating disorder specialist because I think that gap deserves far more attention than it’s getting. After two years of appointments, medication changes, and bloodwork, I’ve realized something.

I’ve spent countless hours being told what to eat. Whether my numbers are holding steady. Whether I’m being compliant. But the mental and emotional weight of living with a disease where food is both necessary and restricted — where cravings collide with consequences — is rarely part of the conversation. That part, no one asks about.

If this resonated with you, I’d love to know. Leave a comment — even if it’s just one word.

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Writing this newsletter brings me genuine joy, and knowing you’re out there reading means everything. If this resonates with you, consider subscribing — free or paid. To my paid subscribers — thank you. Your support helps me keep writing and gets my memoir and teen novel into the world.

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On May 30th, I met Lucky — a 10-pound, 11-month-old bichon-maltese-poodle mix — at his foster’s home with my husband Ian and two-year-old Barney. He jumped on my lap immediately. Sweet. Playful. I thought: I have to take this dog home.

I got the house ready over the next two days. On Monday morning, I went to pick him up.

What followed was twelve of the most chaotic days I’ve had in a long time.

They say when you adopt a rescue dog, expect a general adjustment timeline of three days of decompression, three weeks of learning routines, and three months of building trust. I knew this going in. I’d adopted before — Louie, a bichon-poodle mix, back in 2009. He was calm from the start, easy to house-train, and happy to come along wherever I went. Yes, he had his quirks — separation anxiety, some marking as he got older — but he was my loyal, loving companion. If he had something in his mouth, I could take it without so much as a growl.

Lucky was a different dog. I expected that. What I didn’t expect was the extent of it.

The next day, he vomited a few scrunchies. (I don’t wear scrunchies.) I texted the foster: Does Lucky eat things he shouldn’t? The response: Not that we knew of.

And so it began — though none of it had been flagged. Before adopting, I’d spoken with the foster directly. No major behavioral concerns, they said. The rescue had actually noted he was good with kids. Had I missed something obvious? Lucky had simply never displayed this side of himself, or no one had noticed.

The resource guarding revealed itself quickly. Lucky would snatch a toy from Barney, and if I tried to get him to drop it, he’d snarl. If I tried to trade — a treat for the toy — he’d sometimes trade, and sometimes scarf down whatever he had as well as the treat. Once, when I caught him eating a wrapper and tried to take it from his mouth, he bit me and broke the skin. It happened to Ian too. We chalked it up to the puppy not liking anything removed from his mouth, so I kept the floor immaculate and tried to avoid things like trash on our walks. I managed the environment obsessively.

I went back to training videos — I’d done extensive training with Louie, and wanted to refresh what I knew. But I was also searching for something I hadn’t encountered before: how to handle the behavioral issues Lucky was showing. Lucky quickly learned sit, down, stay — but the moment there was any added stimulus, all of it went out the window. And whenever someone played with him, he’d get overstimulated, the nipping would escalate, and it was hard to settle him.

So I hired a trainer who specialized in behavioral issues — on top of the group classes I’d already signed up for. She focused on self-regulation, calming activities, and stricter environmental management. It helped, but it also meant Lucky spent more time separated from us, whining and barking while I tried to slowly work on the separation anxiety. The crate was its own disaster: he’d poop and pee in it, shred whatever mat was underneath, and once got out entirely and chewed up the bottom of the door frame.

Through all of it, Lucky could still be genuinely sweet — cuddly, playful, happy to curl up in my lap. That’s what made it so hard. He wasn’t a bad dog.

Meanwhile, Barney figured out how to climb out of his crib. Not once. Multiple times. So we converted the crib to a toddler bed. Night one: he kept coming out until 2 a.m. Night two: 10:30. Night three: I found him asleep on the floor outside my room at midnight, moved him to his bed, and found him back on the floor at 6 a.m.

Ian and I divided and conquered. He took cleaning and dog walking; I took walking Barney back to his bed, over and over, while managing my own fraying nerves.

The vet visit was the turning point.

I brought Lucky in to discuss his pica, his separation anxiety, and his behavioral issues, hoping to explore medication. He snarled at me when I put on his leash, despite using treats to make it a pleasant experience. He also snarled at the vet when she examined his teeth.

While I was explaining how overwhelmed I felt, she stopped me.

“The resource guarding and snarling around mouth-touching at this age is concerning. You could keep this dog, but it will be a ton of work — and you have a toddler. Biting is a real risk. I think you’re in over your head. I work with a rescue, and I think you need to tell them this isn’t a good fit.”

I burst into tears. And I knew she was right.

I had never returned a dog. The idea felt like failure. But I thought about the eleven days behind me — the constant vigilance, the cleanup, the fear every time Lucky and Barney were in the same room. I wasn’t just stressed. I was scared — scared he’d bite Barney, or bite me again. (I’m on immunosuppressants. An infection doesn’t stay an infection — it can turn into sepsis.) And Barney was scared too. A two-year-old shouldn’t have to be anxious in his own home.

I contacted the rescue, kept things factual (I’d been in touch since the beginning), and told them this wasn’t a good fit, but was crying the entire call. Then it was a terrible 24 hours — the kind where you cry in waves, second-guess everything, and wonder if you’re making the right call even when you know you are.

When I dropped Lucky off at the foster’s home the next day, he walked back in, ran off to join his pack, wagging his tail, and didn’t look back at me.

I drove home and cried. Then I felt the relief wash over me — real, deep relief. The frenetic energy lifted. I could breathe again.

Here’s what I’ve been sitting with since:

There’s a healthy kind of stress — the kind that signals something needs to get done. And there’s another kind, a relentless, grinding stress that signals something isn’t working, no matter how hard you try to make it work. I’ve felt both in my past, and I felt it now. Learning to tell the difference is one of the most important things I know.

Hiring a specialist matters. My dog trainer helped. So did the child therapist I worked with when Barney was struggling with tantrums at eighteen months. Both taught me versions of the same thing: stay calm, manage my own nervous system first, co-regulate, then focus on skill building. The same instinct that helps me as a mom is what I needed to tap with Lucky.

But there was one important difference.

With Barney, I can tolerate a great deal of uncertainty because he’s my son. I can wait through the long, slow process of growth and change. I’m his mom and that’s my job.

With a dog who was resource guarding, biting, and snarling around a toddler, I couldn’t afford that same approach. I couldn’t wait for the possibility that things might improve. My first responsibility was to keep my son safe.

So I let Lucky go. Not because I gave up, but because I paid attention to what wasn’t working. It was also in Lucky’s best interest to find a home that was a better fit.

I still want a dog. I miss the walks, the companionship, the particular comfort of an animal who loves you and who you love back. I had that with Louie. I know it exists.

It just wasn’t Lucky.

Goodbye, Lucky. I know you’ll find your home — one that’s the right fit, with the right people, where you can relax into being exactly who you are. Our home will be ready for another pup someday. Maybe when Barney’s a little older. Maybe when the right one finds us.

Until then, I’m returning to the thing I apparently need right now: a bit of calm.

If this resonated with you, I’d love to know. Leave a comment — even if it’s just one word.

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Writing this newsletter brings me genuine joy, and knowing you’re out there reading means everything. If this resonates with you, consider subscribing — free or paid. To my paid subscribers — thank you. Your support helps me keep writing and gets my memoir and teen novel into the world

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In February 2025, I had run a successful living donor campaign, received a kidney transplant, and suddenly felt better than I had in over a year. It felt as if someone had placed a new battery inside me. My energy returned almost immediately. My body started working again, and so did my mind.

I wanted to tell everyone how life-changing living donation could be for people like me in kidney failure. Shout it from the rooftops. Turn the whole experience into something bigger than myself. I saw myself becoming a survivor, a spokesperson, a writer — someone who embodied the transformation of living donation.

I started pitching stories and articles to various new outlets and publications. A local news anchor agreed to have me and my living donor, Brad, share our story on a major news station. A friend who’s a journalist connected me with a local magazine that planned to put our story on the cover. I had also written a feature that was going to be published in an independent magazine. I was on top of the world.

With this newfound energy came another idea: I would start a nonprofit helping people under 40 run campaigns to find living donors. I would model it after the nonprofit that helped me find mine.

It was the perfect hat for my next move. And it wasn’t just fantasy. I had spent my early career in community engagement — doing outreach work in my twenties, then building a successful career counseling practice through my thirties. This path would draw on the same skills and strengths I’d built my career around. After years of burnout in career counseling, it felt like a door reopening.

Then, in April 2025, my transplant failed.

The TV segment was pulled. The magazine features were rescinded. The nonprofit idea — and any real return to work — went back on hold. And with it, the identity I had already started building collapsed almost overnight.

I’ve spent over a decade as a career counselor, watching people’s dreams fall apart because of layoffs, mergers, bad managers, industry shifts, or now AI. In America, we are what we do. So when work stops working, it doesn’t just feel like a professional problem — it feels like an identity problem. I understood that dynamic intimately.

For a while, I just sat with it: the loss of the identity I’d begun constructing and the uncertainty of what would come next.

Then, during the long year that followed, I reached for a different hat.

I started writing.

I launched a Substack, and somewhere underneath my genuine love of putting words together was a quieter hope: maybe this was the door. Maybe I could become a writer, a memoirist, someone whose story found a wider audience. I had played the fantasy out in my head enough times during recovery: what if my story became the book? What if the book became something people actually read and brought me recognition?

So for a while, I watched the stats: tracked the open rates, follower counts, likes, refreshing the page every few hours.

Then eventually I realized something surprising: I didn’t want algorithms shaping my relationship to creativity. A thoughtful email from a reader saying my writing moved them motivates me far more than numbers ever did.

So I removed all social media from my phone — because I enjoy the writing, not the chasing.

But I’m glad I tried the hat on.

Then, nearly a year after my transplant had failed, I was introduced to Maria Young.

Maria is a long-term COVID survivor. In October 2019, she contracted the virus, was hospitalized, and eventually placed in a medically induced coma for 69 days. When she woke up, she had to rebuild everything: her body, her understanding of what had happened, her sense of who she was now.

What struck me immediately was that she had built exactly the kind of life I had once imagined for myself.

She became a public figure. She shared her story widely, built a platform, started a nonprofit. If you search “Maria Young, long-term COVID,” you’ll find interviews, articles, features — all the visible markers of someone who transformed illness into purpose and public identity.

In many ways, she had done the very thing I thought I wanted to do.

But when we talked for hours, I learned about the parts that don’t appear in articles or interviews. The spotlight doesn’t sustain itself — you have to keep feeding it and staying relevant. COVID was no longer the top feature in the news. The nonprofit eventually became part of a larger organization. Staying visible itself became a kind of work.

And eventually, she had to ask herself a question I’d already been quietly asking too: is this actually the life I want, or just the identity I imagined wanting?

That conversation shifted something for me. Even if I had done everything Maria had done — which I would be damn proud of — what would happen afterward?

Maria’s story also clarified something about the nonprofit idea. I still believe deeply in helping younger people find living donors. But building and sustaining a nonprofit from scratch — finding funding, writing grants, managing infrastructure — may not actually be the hat I want to wear.

What I do want, I think, is the meaningful part of the work itself: community engagement, outreach, helping people navigate one of the hardest experiences of their lives. Maybe I could build a program under the umbrella of an existing organization, instead of doing it alone.

And quietly, I’ve already started testing the waters — creating videos to help others run living donor campaigns, doing some grant writing. Less fantasy. More reality.

Hearing Maria’s story didn’t make me envious.

It made me feel like I had just gotten a glimpse of a road that was never really mine to take — even though I had wanted it for months.

It also reminded me of something I used to ask my career counseling clients all the time: how do you actually want to spend your time and energy? Is there a way to test a fantasy — to learn about the realities of it — before restructuring your entire identity around it?

Two weeks ago, I attended the American Kidney Fund Summit in Washington, D.C. — learning about legislation that impacts kidney patients and then sharing my story directly with my representatives. And somewhere in those two days, another question surfaced: could I do this professionally? Could community engagement and outreach in the kidney space become a career, not just an experience I’m passing through as a patient?

I got to try on another hat.

I loved learning about the legislation and talking to my representatives about policy that could genuinely improve people’s lives. But I also spoke with people living with kidney disease — many whose situations were harder than mine. I heard what they were carrying. While the work felt meaningful, it also felt emotionally heavy in a way I hadn’t fully anticipated.

And I realized I couldn’t yet tell whether that heaviness meant the work wasn’t for me, or whether I’m simply still too close to it — still a patient first, not yet far enough from my own experience to know what this would feel like professionally rather than personally.

What I’m taking away from all of this is something my career counseling background probably should have taught me sooner: identity is not a destination. It shifts. It gets rescinded. It folds into something larger. It gets tested. Sometimes it circles back around.

And in my case, it literally has. I tried on several hats recently: the survivor-turned-spokesperson, the writer building a platform, the nonprofit founder, the advocate on Capitol Hill. They all had their upsides and downsides, and I didn’t have to commit to any of them permanently. Though I’ll admit — some fit better than others.

There’s still discomfort in all of this. Not the kind that comes from lacking clarity, but the quieter social discomfort of not having a clean answer when someone asks, “So what do you do?” I tend to say career counseling because it’s easy — but it doesn’t feel accurate anymore.

But I’ve come to realize that’s a different problem than the one I originally thought I had. I’m not without identity. I just don’t have a label that fits neatly on a name tag right now.

I also want to acknowledge what makes this kind of exploration possible for me. I receive disability support, I’m in a dual income household, and have had some financial support from our families. And my limited physical energy — which some days feels like nothing but a constraint — has also become its own strange kind of gift.

Because I can’t simply throw myself headfirst into something, I have to be intentional. I have to test things slowly, observe honestly, and ask whether something is actually fulfilling before committing what little energy I have to it.

Most people never get that forced pause. They keep building, chasing, producing, without stopping long enough to ask whether any of it is truly working for them.

I didn’t choose this slowness, but I’m trying to use it well.

So in the meantime, I’m not waiting for clarity to arrive fully formed. I’m generating it — through volunteer work, writing, conversations, and the hats I try on and sometimes put back down. Each one teaches me something real, as opposed to what I once imagined from a hospital bed.

I don’t know what identity I’ll step into when I eventually return to work. I don’t even know when that day will come.

But I’m learning to hold these questions more loosely — to try on hats without needing any of them to become permanent.

And to me, that’s progress.

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Hi Everyone,

For the last few months, I’ve been slowly starting to look for a dog to adopt. There’s a little one I keep thinking about — a 10-pound mini poodle mama dog — low to medium energy, good with children, already potty trained — available for adoption in a few weeks. She had some birth complications, which I can relate to. I don’t know if it will work out. But I can’t stop thinking about her.

If you know me, this probably doesn't surprise you. I've wanted another dog for several years, but it took a friend reading my astrology chart to finally put into words why.

I was recording a podcast with my friend Daniela last week. We were talking about how I’d been feeling lonely. About what I wrote in my essay “Knocking on Doors” — how I missed having a best friend next door — the kind of friend where you share and do everything with.

I’ve almost always had at least one of these friendships throughout my life. Right now, while I have close friends, I see them almost monthly, not daily.

Daniela named an archetype present in my chart — the Mermaid. A person who seeks deep union — with nature, with another person, with an animal, with something beyond yourself. My former mentor used to call it merging. I recognized it immediately.

And I recognized the shadows — from years of my own work: the way I can lose track of where I end and others begin. That persistent sense of not quite belonging anywhere, always slightly homesick for somewhere I can't name. The tendency to see people as I wish them to be, and then crash when reality hits. There have been times I've become what someone else needs until I've lost my own voice. I know these patterns. I've lived them, and done a lot of work around them.

What the Mermaid names — what I've been circling for months — is the merge itself.

I think that’s why I’m writing a novel right now about a teenage girl who wants to be popular. Because what she really wants isn’t popularity, it’s merging. She wants closeness and intimacy.

I’m working toward a different type of merge — one with an animal.

The animal merge, in my experience, is its own category. Dogs aren’t complicated. There is only presence. Someone to be with you every day, someone you can talk to — and while they don’t talk back, they look at you adoringly. The weight of a body against yours. The specific endorphin release of petting fur — maybe only matched by smelling the top of a baby’s head. In a way, a dog is the neighbor I wrote about in “Knocking on Doors” — but always home, always glad to see you, no complications.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve seen people on kidney disease forums talk about wanting a dog — wondering if it’s okay on dialysis, or on immunosuppressants after a transplant. It's people reaching for a particular kind of contact that few other relationships provide.

Some people have asked why I want a dog when I have a toddler at home and so much on my plate. My son merges with me too, at moments, and I love it fiercely. But children are supposed to differentiate. That’s their developmental right. He wants cuddles sometimes and independence other times, and the balance keeps shifting, as it should.

A dog just wants to be with you, and being with them doesn’t bring out the shadow side of the merge the way people can. And in general, I’ve always found them to be far more reward than work.

I know the merging is an archetype in me. I know I will likely always long for it. But there is a specific thing that a dog provides that I don’t know how to get any other way.

Strangely, when I started my search, our senior dog Maya was still with us and seemed like she would be for a bit. Then her health declined rapidly over the weekend, and yesterday we had to put her down. She was devoted to my husband in a way she never quite was to me — more like a cat with me, coming to say hello when she felt like it, keeping mostly to herself.

But losing her brought back my bichon-poodle Louie, who I had for over thirteen years. The weeks of sadness after he died. The dreams I still have of petting him, just hanging out with him. The grief that isn’t quite like other grief. It’s so wordless and physical. I miss the weight of him on my lap, the walks, and the pets.

I felt sad for losing Maya, tired from the long week of caring for her and taking her back and forth to the vet, and a deep sadness for my husband’s loss. My heart breaks for him.

Though he’s not sure he’ll be ready for a new pup anytime soon, I still can’t stop thinking about that little mama dog. I sit with the longing, having wanted one for so long.

There’s nothing like a dog.

Love,
Danielle

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Hi Everyone,

My memoir is on hold, but I’ve completed the first draft of my teen novel, I Want to Be Popular (the tentative title). I wanted to share the first chapter with you, to show you what I’ve been working on and to thank you for all your support.

With love,
Danielle

Chapter 1: Sixth Grade — Lake Needwood Middle School — Day 1

The long yellow school bus groans to a stop at the end of the street. Two older, lanky boys linger at the curb waiting, and a gray Lexus SUV idles on the other side of the road with a mom and her son inside.

Sadie Gerhardt stands there by herself in her new light blue flared jeans that match her blue eyes, a pink flowered shirt, pink sneakers, and a pink backpack with her initials monogrammed on it: S.I.G. She studied the latest trends in Teen Vogue and Seventeen over summer. Her mom took her shopping before the first day, so she’d have stylish clothes—last year she went to private school, so she mostly wore uniforms. She felt proud when she looked at herself in the mirror that morning.

Her hair is pulled up in a ponytail. She’d love to wear it straight with a few loose waves toward the bottom —the way the girls in the magazines wear it — but her hair doesn’t comply. Her blond curls seem to have a mind of their own, and what they want is to frizz.

She squares her shoulders. “I’m going to be popular this year,” she whispers to herself. “I’m going to be in the popular clique and everyone is going to like me.”

She’s been repeating it like a mantra all week. She hopes it works.

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Hi Everyone,

I’ve been thinking a lot about knocking on doors lately.

Not metaphorically — literally. What I experienced growing up. That spontaneous get-together with a neighbor, who happens to be your best friend. Where kids are riding their bikes or playing together, and parents are hanging out, drinking wine or scotch in the front yard.

Though I didn’t have kids at the time, I had it again in my late twenties and early thirties. My friends and I all lived in the same neighborhood — Washington Park in Denver, Colorado — and we would randomly walk to each other’s houses to hang out, text to go to dinner last minute, or plan impromptu get-togethers and stay up into all hours of the night. While we were on social media, it wasn’t being used for doom scrolling at that time.

I miss what I had growing up in the 1990s, and what I used to have in the 2010s.

Maybe that’s why the first draft of my teen novel is almost finished — it’s about a preteen who believes that being popular is a matter of life and death. When you learn what happened to her in fifth grade, you begin to understand why. All she really wants is connection and belonging, something that has been a challenge at some point for most teens, and has become even harder with the advent of the internet and social media. This story has been in my head for years, and finally it’s coming out on paper.

I believe I’m writing it because it’s a quiet season in my life. My two-year-old son, Barney, is at daycare during the week because I’m exhausted. As much as I would have liked to either worked or be a stay-at-home mom, I don’t have the bandwidth living with kidney disease. I love being with him when he’s not in daycare, but time can feel slow. Being around other people—whether my family, close friends, or people I’m just getting to know at synagogue—makes the time pass so much faster and makes me forget my fatigue.

People always ask about silver linings when you’ve been sick, and one of mine was the connection I felt during medical crisis. The visits, the get-togethers, the constant stream of visitors — though I barely had the energy, I loved every bit of it. Now that I’m not in crisis, that intensity and frequency has faded. I’m grateful for the relative physical stability I have right now, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the closeness and care that came with being in crisis.

Living in DC hasn’t helped. Back in Denver, so many of my friends were self-employed — a spontaneous lunch or a mid-week hike was always possible. Here in DC, most of my friends are back in the office five days a week, especially with the current administration’s return-to-office mandates. The flexibility just isn’t there anymore.

In addition, my own schedule has its quirks — I’m a morning person by necessity, and chronic illness means I’m down for several hours in the afternoon. But outside of that, I’m surprisingly easy — I’ll come to you, or bring Barney on weekends, who is mostly an easy toddler — though I’m a pain in the ass to eat out with because of my dietary restrictions.

When I talk to friends — whether single or married, with or without kids — so many of them say the same thing: they’re lonely. Everything is scheduled weeks out and often canceled last minute. You meet someone, try to make plans, and then life gets in the way before any real bonds have a chance to form.

I keep my monthly meetups with a few close friends, and those make a huge difference for me. But it’s not the same as having a best friend next door, or that constant stream of visitors from when I was sick.

So I write. I let my protagonist chase what she really wants — real connection and belonging— in the 2020s, where cell phones, social media, and everything being performative make it harder than ever. She eventually finds it. Writing her is my way of processing my own search living with health limitations in a noisy, overscheduled world.

I know this season will shift, just as all seasons do. Though I have a desire for more, I also have an acceptance for where things are, and I’m not trying to force anything. In the meantime, I get to live as three people — as the writer living in the now, as my twelve-year-old self, and through the eyes of a twelve-year-old who is not me, but wants belonging more than anything in the world.

Honestly, we’re all the same.

Love,

Danielle

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If you prefer to watch this episode in a video format, please visit my YouTube channel here.

This episode of Pondering Aloud feels close to my heart. In honor of National Kidney Month (March 2026), I sat down with two remarkable individuals who have changed my life: my living kidney donors, Brad Bernstein and Renee Larson.

We tackled the “burning” questions that recipients like myself have about asking someone to become a living kidney donor, that go beyond the logistics— about pain, about asking someone to do something you wouldn’t do yourself, about watching a transplant fail, and about whether my story was the only reason they said yes.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• My journey: How giving birth in 2024 led to unexpected complications and kidney failure, and the campaign for a donor that followed.

• The amazing response: Why over 90 people stepped up to learn about becoming living donors, and how both Brad and Renee ultimately gave me the precious gift of time and hope.

• The honest reality of donation: Brad and Renee get candid about the physical pain, surprises in recovery, and the powerful “blip” of discomfort versus the lifelong impact of donation.

• Motivations and legacy: Both donors share what truly inspired them to step forward. It’s a heartfelt discussion about community, legacy, and seeing the ripples of generosity.

• Fear and asking for help: We discuss why it can feel so daunting to ask for a living donor, and how sharing your story might reach someone in ways you’d never expect.

• When things don’t go as planned: Brad reflects on his experience when my first transplant failed after only a few months, and Renee on donating so that I could hold a voucher for the future.

Our stories together show the best of humanity, and we hope this episode encourages both future donors and recipients to lean into hope, compassion, and community.

Key Takeaways:

• For recipients: Don’t decide for others — share your story and let people make their own decision about donation. You never know who it will inspire, and it may not just change your life, but others’ too.

• For potential donors: Do your research, speak to those you trust, and know that you’re supported throughout the process. Living donation may be the most meaningful thing you ever do.

• For recipients: Asking is hard, but you’re giving someone else the gift of meaning and legacy.

Resources & More:

• If you’re considering living donation or need a kidney, don’t hesitate to reach out and start a conversation. Your campaign can help you and others.

• For National Kidney Month resources and support, I have a list of resources on my website here: https://danielleroessle.com/resources/.

• If you have specific comments or questions for Danielle, Brad or Renee, feel free to post in the comments and we’ll be sure to get back to you.

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Note: This post is part of my Memoir Writing Series, available exclusively for paid subscribers. Thank you for your support.

There’s a particular kind of uncertainty that comes with not being sick enough for dialysis or a kidney transplant, but not well enough to feel like I’m on solid ground. That’s where I am right now. And ironically, my memoir seems to be in a bit of limbo too.

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I usually record an audio version of these posts, but my body isn't cooperating this morning. So today it's just the written version.

“Close your eyes and try to meditate,” my pelvic floor therapist says to me as I lie on thin paper that covers the massage table, the kind that rips the moment you touch a finger to it. She wants to place long, thin dry needles into the scar tissue on my abdomen to loosen the tightness there, since the muscles in the abdomen all work together.

This is my second round of pelvic floor therapy. I started the first during dialysis, stopped after my kidney transplant failed, and only recently resumed when my doctors noticed I hadn’t regained enough strength — which could turn into incontinence or back issues as I age.

“I don’t want to close my eyes,” I say back to my therapist as I stare at the baby boy blue wall with a small TV monitor affixed in the middle. Behind it I can see white putty and what looks suspiciously like toilet paper, as if whoever hung it ran out of fasteners and improvised.

Below my line of vision, I see her hands, and I feel a poke and a slight push as the needles are placed in me.

“You need to find a way to meditate,” she says.

“I’ll close my eyes after you’re done,” I respond. “But I want to see what’s happening to my body before I do.”

As she pushes the last needle, she says, “All done. Now try to close your eyes and relax.” She’s explained it before — that the mind–body connection is important with pelvic floor therapy.

As she leaves the small room, I start to tear. I don’t want to close my eyes. It doesn’t feel safe.

Instead, I look around.

There’s a poster about pre-diabetes on the wall in front of me next to the TV. To my left is a single-paned window with broken blinds mostly pulled down, except for the last quarter showing the view outside that overlooks the deserted White Flint Mall, once a well-known shopping mall, now a ghost lot of rubble and debris with greenery growing over it. I can hear the buzz of traffic from Rockville Pike, the large highway in front of the building, though I can’t see it.

I think about the line: “In the great green room there was a telephone, and a red balloon, and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon,” from Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon.

So I make up my own version.

In the small blue room there was a heater turned on one afternoon and a poster about pre-diabetes that would make a nutritionist swoon.

My body begins to calm as I notice the trashcan to the left of me sitting on top of a stool next to the heater, quietly buzzing.

I had recently listened to a lecture by on the purpose of stories. He talked about why Goodnight Moon works so well — how it begins by orienting the child to the room, first creating stability and security, and only then begins saying goodnight to everything one by one, creating gratitude.

I can’t help but wonder if it was divine timing that all these medical complications happened to me when my son was young. I’m definitely one of those moms who loves singing The Wheels on the Bus and other children’s songs because they describe what we see.

The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.

Some of my friends find children’s music obnoxious. I don’t. I love singing the songs with my son, and I notice they calm my nervous system too. It isn’t all that different from keeping my eyes open when I’m getting pelvic floor needling, which also helps me feel calm.

Seeing what’s happening gives me a small sense of security — the ability to say, okay, I know what’s happening to me. If something feels wrong, I can say stop. If my therapist were to hit something the wrong way, I could see it.

And while I’d love to think I trust my physical therapist, in truth I don’t. It makes me think back to first grade gym class when our teacher had us do a trust exercise where one girl would fall backward and the other girls would catch her.

What the teacher didn’t know was that the girls I was paired with were bullying me. When I fell backward, they didn’t catch me. Luckily something in my intuition told me to place my hands behind me so I didn’t get hurt, though my young ego definitely did.

So no, I don’t fully trust my physical therapist, and I don’t really trust my doctors either — though some I trust more than others. In every interaction I want to say to them, I’m sorry, but I only partially trust you, which really means I don’t trust you at all.

But I trust my eyes in the moment.

I look around the small blue room with the diabetes poster that would make a nutritionist swoon.

As a trained therapist, I know the goal is to create a sense of self-safety, and I do. But if I’m fully honest, self-safety and self-trust are also a little iffy. I don’t fully trust this body anymore, so I grasp for the things around me that I do.

The heater.

The poster.

The toilet paper.

In the small blue room.

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Deepak Chopra’s name was discovered in the Epstein files, and my Substack feed blew up. Essays appeared in my inbox within days, illuminating the dark side of the wellness and self-help industry.

What they described was damning. Writer and publicist for the self-help industry, wrote about the guru economy — where charisma is rewarded and accountability is avoided. — who holds a doctorate in Religion and Psychology and spent nearly two decades inside the personal development industry as a believer — counted how many times Chopra’s name appeared in the files and pointed to the near-total silence from self-help influencers with millions of followers. And physician-author wrote about the broader pattern: how self-help leaders wield power and influence in ways that corrupt — and how spiritual communities can be skilled at emotional processing yet avoidant when it comes to taking moral stands.

I read all of it. I thought some very strong points were made.

And then I kept thinking about something that wasn’t being said.

Because here’s the question I keep sitting with, as a previous consumer of these industries: What happened to our critical thinking? Has it been pushed aside when it comes to spiritual seeking and consumerism — or perhaps we were never taught it in the first place?

I say this as someone who has been a devoted consumer of this world. I’ve purchased Wayne Dyer and Louise Hay books. I’ve read The Secret — a book that is, let’s be honest, terribly written and ridiculously vague, and yet I still felt the pull of it. The seductive promise that your thoughts are magnets, that alignment and good health are available to you if you have the right beliefs, that the right mindset is the bridge between where you are and where you want to be.

I came to this material the way many people do: in a vulnerable moment. I was in my early thirties. I went through a hard breakup, was not married, and was childless. My life was not what I’d imagined.

In 2016, I befriended two entrepreneurial women from a networking event who had become followers of a “miracle healer.” They had each claimed he had healed their chronic illness. I didn’t have a chronic illness at the time. But I had many desires — for love, for healing, to bring in the partnership and family I wanted. So I signed up.

The healer’s premise was that chronic illness came from people being dishonest with themselves — that the illness served some hidden purpose they weren’t acknowledging, and they’d stay sick until they let it go. In my case, the absence of love and children was supposedly because I had “mixed desires.” To heal, I had to go into my unconscious mind, confront what I was clinging to that “wasn’t working,” and make radical change.

What followed for a while felt like true enlightenment. The work was hard, but epiphanies and euphoria followed. There was a community, a shared framework, a language that made sense of everything. I felt like I belonged and was making progress. Several months in, something started to feel off. My mentor kept prodding me, and I felt like I was digging for something that wasn’t there.

And then one day, the tenor of a session with my mentor changed. She accused me of not being honest with myself and not sharing my radical truth. I said to her, “I am telling my truth.” She responded, “I can feel within that you’re not. And you’re wasting my time.” I apologized and said I would reflect on why I wasn’t telling my truth, even though I didn’t believe it. I thought humility was the right response.

At the next session, I was told I wasn’t doing the work. And then I was thrown out of the program. Just like that.

The two women I had befriended — the ones who had brought me in, with whom I had felt a special kinship — ghosted me. When I saw them at a networking event afterward, they didn’t even make eye contact.

I was devastated. So embarrassed that I had somehow failed the program that I told no one. I carried it quietly, like a small, private humiliation. I eventually worked through it in therapy, several years later, because it had bothered me for that long.

While this healer was not at the level of influence of Deepak Chopra, he made an impact on me and others — I’ve since found negative reviews of his program online — and I would argue he ran a predatory system.

I am sharing this story now because it frames my next point.

Before I go further, I want to be precise about something, because this argument is easy to misread.

I am not saying that people in their most vulnerable moments should have protected themselves better. When we are in crisis — grieving, sick, lost, heartbroken — the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for discernment and critical thinking, goes mostly offline. We are neurologically primed for certainty, for belonging, for any framework that makes the unknown feel manageable. That is not a character flaw. That is biology. And it is exactly what predatory systems are built to exploit.

The neurochemistry of spiritual highs is real too. The euphoria of feeling like you’ve finally found the answer. The belonging of a community that speaks your language. The flood of chemicals that makes you want to keep going back and tell everyone you know. There’s a reason the coaching industry fills up with new coaches after a Tony Robbins seminar. There’s a reason people stay in these ecosystems for years. It feels genuinely good. And when it’s hard to sustain that feeling on your own, you go back to the source.

So no — this is not about blaming anyone for the moment they walked through the door. This is not about the victims named in the Epstein files. And this is not about people raised in environments where questioning was never safe — including religious cults. This is not a judgment on anyone’s most desperate season.

This is about what happens when the prefrontal cortex does come back online — the moments when we’re no longer in crisis. The content we keep consuming in those more stable states. The long-term relationship we develop with the material and the people who deliver it — the discernment we quietly stop bringing to it — or perhaps never brought in the first place, because no one taught us how.

This is the conversation I think we owe to ourselves.

For me, that reckoning came in the form of a diagnosis. When I was diagnosed with End-Stage Kidney Disease, some years after being pushed out of that program, everything I had absorbed from the self-help world got tested.

Manifest perfect health. Positive thinking produces positive outcomes. Mindset over material conditions. These ideas, delivered with such certainty and warmth, started to crack under the weight of actual lived experience. I did not manifest my disease. My mindset did not make me susceptible to it. And my radical truth that it fucking sucked was not going to change anything or make me well. I hemorrhaged while giving birth to my son and have struggled with kidney damage and major health issues since. The rules I’d been learning didn’t hold.

I’d been lucky enough to find my way to a writing teacher several years before I got sick — Brian Morgan of Think Deeply, Write Clearly — who reintroduced me to something I hadn’t actively practiced since high school. I want to be clear: this framework, and essay, isn’t something I arrived at on my own. Brian re-taught me this. How to actually think about what I was taking in. How to distinguish an earned observation from an opinion dressed up as fact. How to notice when I was regurgitating someone else’s thoughts instead of forming my own — or at least acknowledging it wasn’t my own.

It brought me back to a 7th grade English teacher who pushed a classmate to stop repeating what others thought and find their own idea. To an 11th grade English teacher who wrote on the chalkboard the difference between an observation and an opinion — and insisted that conclusions remain open to renegotiation.

Critical thinking is a skill worth developing, and practicing. And somewhere along the way, we stopped teaching it and stopped demanding it of ourselves. I know I did.

I think back to my graduate social work program, where certain theories were taught as absolutes — not as tools to introduce critical thinking. The times I offered critical thinking, I was told I was being critical, as if the two were the same thing. They are not. So I understand, viscerally, how the silencing happens. I was trained into it in an academic setting before I ever walked into a wellness program. While I did not choose to leave my graduate program, I’m do not financially donate — that’s my small act of defiance.

I also want to name something: the kind of critical thinking I’m describing isn’t equally available to everyone. It requires exposure — a teacher who modeled it, an environment where questioning was rewarded rather than punished, enough stability to step back and examine what you’re consuming. I had graduate training and still got swept up. I was also lucky enough to find a writing teacher who reintroduced me to these skills — not everyone has that access. It also requires practice. Not dissimilar to the tools I learned as a therapist — when things get hard, the tools you’ve practiced are the ones that stick. If we’re serious about building this literacy, it can’t only be an individual responsibility. It has to be taught, modeled, and made accessible. Which means it has to be taught and prioritized, over and over again, in our educational system.

Here’s what I had to learn after I got sick, and what I think is worth saying plainly:

I am not just a passive receiver of content. I am a participant in this ecosystem. Every time I buy a book, attend a retreat, watch a post, or enroll in a program, I am casting a vote. I am part of how this economy stays alive, and part of how it decides what to keep producing — and what to keep believing.

I am allowed to ask: Who is this person accountable to? What is the full context of what they are presenting? What happens to people who disagree? What does this framework ask me to simply accept without question?

These are the questions I wish someone had handed me in 2016 — when I started doubting the program and chose to ignore those doubts. The program I joined asked me to simply accept that doubt itself was a failure. The moment I voiced something that didn’t fit the framework, I was out. And I was so conditioned by then to equate the community’s approval with my own progress — that being expelled felt like proof I had failed — not proof that the system couldn’t tolerate pushback.

That's the mechanism worth understanding. Not just in the program I joined. Across the self-help landscape, yes — but also in the news we consume, the media we trust, the ideas we let in without question.

Lisa Braun Dubbels, the publicist mentioned previously, calls for greater literacy — our ability to recognize genuine wisdom from wisdom repackaged for profit and scale. I'd take that further: we need to reclaim critical thinking itself. Not just the concept, but the idea that thinking critically about something is not the same as rejecting it. You can find value in a book and still interrogate its premises. You can be spiritually open and intellectually curious at the same time. These are not opposites, no matter how often the industry implies they are.

The self-help world, by design, often asks us to prioritize feeling over thinking — and calls it embodiment. Trust the feeling. The mind is what keeps you stuck, they say. But real embodiment is something different: learning to inhabit your body while quieting anxious mental chatter, not abandoning your mind altogether. What these systems tend to do instead is turn all thinking inward — endless processing of feelings, with no critical lens directed at the framework itself.

I am arguing for and. Feeling, thinking, and action. Openness and discernment. Critical thinking — which is not the same as criticism, though sometimes criticism is exactly what’s called for, especially in the case of the Epstein files.

Because predators love a framework that keeps people inward-facing, overfocused on emotion, and easy to influence. So do powerful institutions. And so, if I'm honest, does the part of me that would rather feel certain — absorbed in my own processing — than sit with complexity and take action on a moral stand.

My deeper analysis of this industry lives in my memoir. But this moment — the Chopra headlines, the overdue reckoning — is exactly why it also belongs here.

The self-help and wellness gurus are, hopefully, being held more accountable. The institutions that amplify and protect them are, temporarily, being held more accountable. Sadly, I think — like so many cultural reckonings before this one — it will be temporary.

And we, as long-term consumers with ongoing choices, can choose to learn and practice critical thinking — so that in the next moment of turmoil, we have more access to it. This doesn’t just apply to the self-help world. It applies to the news we consume, the media we trust, the ideas we let in.

That kind of discernment is agency. And I think it might be the most genuinely empowering tool the self-help industry never quite got around to selling us.

Thank you for being a paid subscriber and supporting this work. Your support makes it possible for me to keep sharing these reflections with you. And thank you to Brian Morgan, for inspiring this essay, for reintroducing me to critical thinking, and for his insight that the absence of it in our education is itself part of the problem.

I always appreciate hearing from readers. What’s coming up for you as you take in these recent events?

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If you’re afraid to ask for a living donor because you’re scared no one will step up, I understand.

I was terrified too.

But living donation is not a zero-sum game. When someone donates, it expands the pool. It helps more than one person. And for many donors, it becomes one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives.

You are not selfish for asking. You are not weak for needing help. And you don’t have to do this alone.

Dear Kidney Warrior,

If you’ve been thinking about running a campaign to find a living donor, this is to encourage you to do it. It’s everything I wish someone had shared with me so I didn’t feel so alone when I ran my campaign.

The Comments That Broke My Heart

I saw a post from former model Bijou Phillips about needing a kidney transplant. I was excited—maybe someone famous with a bigger voice than mine would start educating others about the power of living donation.

Then I read the comments.

“I need one too, she’ll have to get in line like the rest of us.”

“I’ve been waiting on a kidney for 11 years. Can I get a headline!?? On to dialysis like the rest of us peasants.”

I was upset, not because people were angry—anger at this disease is completely justified—but to see such despair.

Why We Feel Disempowered

I had developed End-Stage Kidney Disease in February 2024 after giving birth to my son. I ended up on the list for a transplant myself. Several close friends and family stepped up to test to be living donors and were medically eliminated.

I felt heartbroken and powerless. And incredibly alone.

This disease is lonely because people who don't have it often know very little about it. I remember reading a Reddit post where someone said they believed dialysis was a cure. Even in my circle of support, people didn't know the realities of living with kidney disease.

This disease takes from us—our energy, time, sometimes our ability to work. It takes from our loved ones too.

It leaves little bandwidth to advocate when we’re doing it individually for our medical care. Then add politics, nonprofits that pick sides, funding cuts to kidney research, articles in newspapers focusing only on the corrupt side of transplant... it’s overwhelming.

Then there’s the list. The fucking list. Over 100,000 people in the U.S. are waiting for a kidney transplant. Many wait five years or more because demand far outpaces supply. Every year, more people are added than receive transplants. And about a dozen people die each day waiting.

It fucking sucks.

When my friends and family were medically eliminated from being living donors, I felt disempowered and heartbroken. I did not want to wait. I decided to run a social media campaign in August 2024.

Here’s what I realized:

It’s Not a Zero-Sum Game

A zero-sum game means one person’s gain is another’s loss—like a fixed pie where taking a slice leaves less for everyone else. With over 100,000 people on the deceased donor waitlist, it feels like receiving a kidney means someone else has to wait longer.

But living kidney donation fundamentally challenges this.

When someone donates a living kidney, they aren’t “taking” from the system—they’re adding to it. They’re baking more pies. When someone registers as an organ donor, they’re adding to it and baking more pies.

Here’s what it looks like:

When someone donates a living kidney directly, one person gets a kidney and comes off the deceased donor list. Everyone behind them moves up.

Through kidney chains—programs like the National Kidney Registry—incompatible donors can be matched to help multiple recipients. One donation can trigger a chain that helps five, 10, even 30+ people.

There are also voucher programs, where someone donates now and their loved one gets priority access for the future. The kidney saves someone else's life today while creating security for tomorrow.

And here's something I didn't even know was possible: directed deceased donation. Someone can add you to their advance directive or living will as their intended recipient if they die.

When I ran my campaign, someone actually reached out about their family designating me as their brother's kidney recipient—he had been left braindead from a motorcycle accident. It didn't work out, but I had no idea this option even existed.

And then there’s something harder to measure:

The Inspirational Ripple

My campaign educated, not pressured, over a thousand people about becoming a living kidney donor, and inspired 95 people to get tested. Three people donated to strangers. Those three donations helped three people—none of whom were me—and created their own ripple effects.

When someone shares their story, the donor pool expands. Awareness expands.

But I believe one of the biggest reasons people don't ask is fear.

The Fear No One Talks About

Deep down, my biggest fear was: What if no one steps up? What does that say about me?

The fear of rejection is deeply human. That part of me couldn’t lead my campaign.

It had to be the mom who had such a big desire to live and to give back—that was my major motivation, and it had to overcome my biggest fear.

I also had to wrestle with something uncomfortable: asking someone to do something I wouldn’t do myself.

I don’t like pain. I avoid it. How could I ask someone to donate a kidney when I probably wouldn’t?

Through conversations with my mentor, I came to see something differently. I give in other ways—through listening, through writing, through showing up for people. Giving and receiving don’t have to look identical.

My mentor said something that shifted everything: for someone else, donating a kidney might be one of the most meaningful acts of love they ever give.

By not asking, I might have been preventing someone from experiencing something deeply meaningful.

I received a kidney from a living donor through my campaign. Several months later, my body rejected it. But later, a friend donated a kidney to the National Kidney Registry as a voucher for my future—her kidney saved someone else immediately while giving me priority access when I need another transplant.

Both of my donors told me it was one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives—even though my first transplant failed.

What I Want You to Know

If you fear rejection like I did, that is valid. I think you’re worth saving, but I realized I had to believe that about myself and connect with my deepest motivation to overcome my biggest fears.

If you ever worry you’re asking for too much, know that for many donors, this becomes one of the most meaningful acts of their lives. You might be preventing yourself—and them—from experiencing something profoundly beautiful by not asking.

It’s okay if you wouldn’t donate a kidney yourself. You give in other ways, so keep giving.

I’m not famous. My story did not go hugely viral. I’m just a mom with a story. But 95 people responded. Three donated to strangers. The ripples are still going. Who knows what telling your story could do.

Maybe you’re thinking, “I can’t ask. I’m not ready. It’s too scary.” I get it, and that’s okay too. Maybe you share your story with who you’re comfortable with at first. You can always expand.

You don’t have to start a big campaign. You don’t have to go viral.

Maybe it’s a conversation with a friend. Maybe it’s a post just for your friends on Facebook or Instagram. Maybe it’s asking your church to put an article about you in their newsletter. Maybe it’s asking your friends to share your story.

But We Don’t Have to Do It Alone

I don’t know what my future holds. But I know this: people can be amazing. I’ve seen the best of humanity when it comes to transplant. People who liked and shared my posts, organizations and volunteers who helped me create a successful campaign, people who made meals for my family when I was in the hospital, people who sent cards of support, people who stepped up to get tested, and people who were healthy enough to donate a kidney.

We can be empowered too. If we tell our stories, if we educate people, if we donate just a little money each to institutions doing kidney research and nonprofits that support living donation, if we ask our congress people to vote where we think it matters—it might not be immediate, but I believe we can move the needle.

In many ways, we can save our own lives, but it feels so encouraging that we don’t have to do it alone.

Resources

DOVE Transplant - Helps find living donors, especially for veterans. They helped me find my donor.

National Kidney Registry - They support matching kidney recipients with living donors through kidney chains, voucher programs, and providing resources.

Kidneys for Communities - Community-Directed Donation™ program allows living donors to direct their kidney to specific groups (religious affiliations, alumni groups), potentially starting paired chains

Kidneys for Kids - Supports children with kidney disease by connecting them with living donors

Renewal - Facilitates kidney transplants within the Jewish community with guidance, support, and donor-matching

National Kidney Foundation - Provides education and support to both recipients and donors. They have an online course you can take about looking for a living donor.

American Association of Kidney Patients - Dedicated to improving the lives of kidney patients through education, advocacy, patient engagement, and the fostering of patient communities.

I see you, kidney warrior. You’re not alone.

With love and hope,
Danielle

If you’re walking this road too, I’d love to hear your story in the comments.

Leave a comment

Note: This post is part of my Memoir Writing Series, available exclusively for paid subscribers. Thank you for your support.

Good morning,

When I first started writing while on dialysis, I thought I was writing a self-help book. The idea was to take what I was learning and put it into simple words with simple prompts for people who were also facing chronic illness or kidney disease. It was a genre I was familiar with — I had written my first book in that space.

When I read those early entries now, they feel muffled and incomplete. I remember writing in between dialysis sessions—sitting at my computer, completely exhausted after hours of migraine, nausea, and vomiting. My body heavy. My mind thick. There was a sadness in me that wanted to pour out, and my computer became a tool to absorb it.

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Hi Everyone,

I’m disappointed to share that our guest speaker, Emma Hertzel, is sick today, so we need to reschedule our Substack Live. We’re tentatively looking at Monday, February 23rd at 12 PM EST, though with chronic illness, even rescheduled dates can be unpredictable.

It made me reflect on something I still struggle with: how hard it is to put predictability onto anything when you’re managing a chronic illness. The last time I got a simple cold, it lasted more than four weeks and turned into a sinus infection that took several rounds of medication to treat. It’s part of why consistent Substack posting is so hard for me.

When I read about “how to be successful” on Substack, the advice is always: write at the same time, on the same days, with a consistent rhythm. And I get it. But my body doesn’t always cooperate. Even now, when I’m technically more stable, there’s still a layer of instability underneath — two ER trips in the last two months, and multiple follow-up appointments because kidney disease makes everything more urgent.

When I asked Emma if she wanted to try for next week, she said, “I’d like to commit, but the last time I had a cold, I was sick for five weeks.” And it hit me — my pre-chronic-illness mind still thinks in “I’ll be better in one week” when the reality now with kidney disease and immunosuppressants is often much longer. It’s a new shift I’m still coming to terms with.

So the way I’m thinking about Substack now is this: I have aims, not absolutes. My aim is to write two reflective posts a month for all readers, two posts for subscribers about memoir-writing, and one Substack Live that opens up a topic we all think about but don’t always talk about openly. But an aim is different from a promise, and that distinction feels healthier for me.

Signing off for now.

Love, Danielle

Thank you to all my paid subscribers for supporting this work. Your support makes it possible for me to keep sharing these reflections with you.

PS. I’ve started a subscriber chat on Substack with simple prompts you can choose to respond to. The prompt for this post is: “When did you plan something, and things outside your control got in the way? How did you cope?”

You’re welcome to share in the comments, keep it private, or print it out and add it to your own book of reflections. My hope is that these prompts give you a quiet place to pause, notice, and capture little moments of your life—for yourself, or for the people who love you.

I love hearing from readers. While I can’t always reply, I do my best to read and respond to every comment and email.

Leave a comment

Join us live:
📅 Monday, February 9th
🕛 12 PM EST
📍 Click here to join us

On Monday, February 9th at 12 PM EST, I’m hosting my first Substack Live conversation — one I’ve wanted to have for a long time.

I’ll be joined by my dear friend from college, Emma Hertzel, LCSW, CST— a certified sex therapist.

Emma and I met at Arizona State University, and I was drawn to her immediately. She was deeply thoughtful, nonjudgmental, and unafraid to gently question what others accepted as truth — a rare quality in your early twenties.

We stayed in touch over the years, and when my health changed, Emma reached out with so much compassion. Because she has lived with lifelong physical disability and chronic fatigue, our conversations grew deeper, exploring what it truly means to live in a body impacted by chronic illness.

Eventually, our talks turned toward something so many people experience — but few talk about openly:

Sex. Intimacy. Libido. Identity. Desire. Loss. Adaptation. Aging.

We know that sexuality changes across the lifespan — through youth, parenthood, stress, illness, aging, medication, fatigue, pain, and everything life brings.

Yet so many people quietly hold questions like:

• My libido has changed. Is it something I need to “fix”?

• How do couples navigate mismatched desire?

• What does intimacy look like when traditional sexuality isn’t accessible, appealing, or even possible for a season?

This conversation is for anyone navigating change — whether through chronic illness, disability, postpartum shifts, menopause, aging, or simply the realities of being human in a body.

A quick note: This discussion will include sexual health and intimacy. Nothing graphic, but we will use appropriate clinical terminology.

Emma brings not only professional expertise, but lived experience — adding important depth to this conversation. I’m grateful for her willingness to talk openly about something so many people feel alone in.

Join us live:
📅 Monday, February 9th
🕛 12 PM EST
📍 Click here to join us

Come listen, ask questions, or simply sit with us in a conversation we all deserve to have more openly.

Have a question you’d like me to ask? Leave it in the comments or reply to this email.

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Tomorrow is my son Barney’s second birthday, and I’m so excited to celebrate with him. While I always thought he had a lot of personality, it’s been especially fun watching it take shape—his curiosity (always asking “What’s that, Mommy?”), his humor (farts, burps, and silly sounds are endlessly funny to him), his initial shyness around people, and the way he becomes flirty once he’s comfortable. He’s also chill and likes hanging out—just being part of whatever’s happening.

Several people ask me, “Do you have a hard time on his birthday?” or “Is there any part of you that’s angry at him about what happened?” For those reading this Substack for the first time: I lost both my kidneys during his delivery.

The short answer is no.

Some people are surprised I’m even asked these questions. I’m not. Just look at how TV, movies, and books portray birth trauma and postpartum mental health (think The Babadook and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle). Even this week, I watched a series on Paramount Plus called Little Disasters, where one of the main characters experiences a mental breakdown from a traumatic birth that triggers perinatal OCD and severe anxiety.

In my mind, I’ve been able to compartmentalize—Barney’s birth from the trauma, the grief, and the ongoing reality of living with kidney disease. In many ways, that separation has served me well, though I recognize not everyone dealing with trauma can or should do it.

I’ve also been intentional about addressing the mental health side of everything that happened. While I did struggle with some anxiety and depression as I adjusted to life with kidney disease, writing, talking with close friends, and therapy helped me process it.

Here’s the thing: I do carry anger—sometimes even rage—but not at Barney. My anger is toward my doctors for some of what happened during delivery and after my hospital stay. That’s why I have therapy. It’s my space to get it out and process it. I’ve also done a lot of that work through my writing.

It also makes me think of friends who’ve struggled with postpartum depression and anxiety. It’s real. It’s brutal. And I have deep compassion for it—especially when advanced maternal age, hormones, perimenopause, or medical trauma are layered in, along with the confusion of not knowing what’s causing what.

For me, my mental health focus has been less about postpartum identity and more about surviving kidney disease and medical trauma. Maybe that redirected some typical postpartum struggles.

I also wonder if my history played a role. I dealt with anxiety and depression in middle school and high school, and those early experiences gave me a lot familiarity with dark mental spaces. Between my clinical training as a social worker and years of being a spiritual seeker, I developed tools along the way because I never wanted to go back to the way I felt during that time in my life. But I also know this: mental resilience can collapse instantly. Having tools doesn’t mean they’ll work when trauma hits.

So when all this happened, it was probably a mix of having some tools to draw upon, fatigue from kidney disease, my disposition shaped by age and experience, and years of therapy, that prevented extreme depression or anxiety.

Still, I know compartmentalization is a coping mechanism—not a solution, and not something everyone can access. Many people can’t separate the trauma from the child, the grief from the joy, the body from the memory. And the books and films I mentioned exist because that reality is common, not rare, and give space to explore human themes in exaggerated extremes.

Interestingly, I want to write fiction someday with a protagonist that experiences postpartum depression—not because it’s my story, but because writing is where I explore the lives I didn’t live, the darker parts of my psyche, the different versions of myself I didn’t become.

While overwhelming postpartum depression hasn’t been my story, there’s a part of me that wishes I could have had that instead of losing vital organs. My deepest, maybe darkest thought is this: Did losing my organs overshadow everything else? Could I not even access postpartum struggles because survival consumed everything? They’re probably not connected—or maybe I could have experienced both—but I wanted to confess my thought anyway.

But here’s what I know for certain: I love my son. A love unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

Tomorrow he turns two, and I wanted to mark this moment—not with grief or anger, but with gratitude for making it to this milestone. So I’m ending this with a poem I wrote for him.

The idea came from my writing coach, Brian Morgan, who gave me the prompt to begin every sentence with the words, “I remember.”

For Barney, on Your Second Birthday

I remember seeing you for the first time,
delighted by your little hands and toes.
I remember when you looked at me,
I noticed your squishy nose.

I remember when you visited me in the hospital,
looking like you’d known me for years,
and when I stared back at you,
it brought me to tears.

I remember when I came home
after a thirty-five-day hospital stay.
I came to your crib crying,
and you smiled right away.

I remember the first time you rolled from your belly to your back,
determined to do it over and over.
I was so proud of you,
I cheered, “Move over, Rover!”

I remember when you said your first word, “Dada.”
I cried out in joy,
then quickly quipped “Momma”—
hoping you’d try.

I remember when you sat up
with our nanny Marcy assisting you,
and then one day you did it by yourself—
how it happened, I hadn’t a clue.

I remember when you first stood up,
holding your diaper box tight.
I cried out in amazement
and in delight.

I remember when you took your first step—
after practicing all day long,
you finally let go and walked,
all brave and strong.

I remember when you said your first sentence,
“All through the town.”
It wasn’t just saying it—
it was singing while jumping up and down.

I remember the first time you said “no”
and shook your head vigorously.
It was the first time you started asserting yourself—
the beginning of separating you and me.

I remember the first time we took a bath together
with my bathing suit on.
You were so excited Mommy was in the tub with you—
it was so much fun.

I remember when you were born,
when you turned one,
and now as you’re turning two.

Barney, you have no idea how much I love you.

Thank you to all my paid subscribers for supporting this work. Your support makes it possible for me to keep sharing these reflections with you.

PS. I’ve started a subscriber chat on Substack with simple prompts you can choose to respond to. The prompt for this post is:
“Write an essay or poem, and start each sentence with ‘I remember.’”

You’re welcome to share in the comments, keep it private, or print it out and add it to your own book of reflections. My hope is that these prompts give you a quiet place to pause, notice, and capture little moments of your life—for yourself, or for the people who love you.

I love hearing from readers. While I can’t always reply, I do my best to read and respond to every comment and email.

Leave a comment

Note: This post is part of my Memoir Writing Series, available exclusively for paid subscribers. Thank you for your support.

Good morning,

I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between writing as work and writing as a calling, and I wanted to share what that has been like for me.

Back in 2021, during the pandemic, I wrote a career-change workbook. At the time, I was working as a career coach and completely burned out. The goal was to get my method on paper, turn it into an online course, and eventually hire others to facilitate it.

Some days, writing felt… laborious. I would sit down every morning to write, but between burnout and the isolation of the pandemic, the work felt heavy.

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