My life had already started to expand in small, meaningful ways before the j-pouch surgery, beginning in February 2021 after my total colectomy. My first memory waking up with an ostomy was sobbing to my PACU nurse, “thank you” over and over, because even the acute post-surgical pain couldn’t hide the fact that my normal/everyday pain that I had grown to accept over the last 8 years was gone.

I did not feel limited by an ostomy:

Hiking in Alaska. I was just as proud to be on a 5+ hour non-stop flight without worrying about bathroom access.

Whale watching from a boat- Humpacks, Sealions, Otters, and Dall’s Porpoise! In all their sea-critter splendor, still only slightly more magical than not caring where the bathroom was located.

Swimming in a hot springs- a non-issue, even with an ostomy.

—

Soon, August rolled around, and it was time for j-pouch connection/ostomy takedown. Because as a society we still didn’t quite know how to function from a pandemic and there was limited capacity at most Houston hospitals, I learned that I received this procedure where they filmed “My 600 Pound Life,” a fact that I didn’t at all find to be fun when my nurse practitioner announced this to me.

And, in true American Healthcare fashion, after COVID testing, prepping for surgery, getting cleared by anesthesia, and drinking my carb-loading beverages, I arrived at 6am to the hospital to learn that my surgery had been denied by insurance.
We waited in the waiting room all day, and I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink. Finally, around 5pm I made a hangry, exasperated phone call to my surgical team to announce that I was going to break my NPO, eat dinner, and hope to see them in the morning.

So that’s what I did, and after insurance decided to graciously let me have my medically-necessary surgical procedure to leave me with an ileal-pouch anal anastomosis (IPAA), I left the hospital a few days later to begin the road to recovery.

This was a tough recovery.

In hindsight, I was likely dealing with residual disease or perhaps even some sort of surgical complication, given the level of pain that I endured and my symptoms, but I powered through, and 8 weeks later, we went on our first post-op adventure to New Mexico, about a 5 hour roadtrip from where we lived in West Texas.

This was the first time I remember thinking hopeful thoughts about how maybe, just maybe, this surgery could indeed improve a person’s quality of life.

And soon after that, the world began to open up for me.

Since this procedure, I can sincerely say I’ve lived my biggest, on-purpose life. To be clear, I’m proud to be someone who has always fought to do the mundane things even before surgery: taking my body on walks, choosing to participate on the days I was privileged enough to have “choice” as an option, knowing that with chronic illness, choose-your-own-adventure days are never guaranteed, and waiting for the next shoe to drop is the only sure thing most days, at least that’s the story my mind tells me.

If you had told me 5 years ago that I’d soon be living in Colorado going on hikes each weekend that I’m not skiing, working for an IBD center, and rarely spiraling about the limitations of my body, I would’ve spat-laughed my drink all over you.

It hasn’t been all rainbows and sunshine: I still need iron infusions nearly annually.

And while living in Los Angeles (an immense career privilege made possible through this surgery), I regularly went to talk to the whales about how devastated I was to learn that I needed to return to high-octane medication in order to mitigate symptoms eloquently described by a Houston gynecological nurse practitioner as ruining my “hot years.” This occurred right after she belittled lectured me about gynecological hygiene when I tried to describe my symptoms, before I had the medical privilege of a confirmed diagnosis to validate what I already knew: that I had a fistula.

The whales believed me, and before you roll your eyes, yes- I do need you to understand that Free Willy was indeed THE cinematic stronghold in my childhood. The news of medical dependency and fistula fuckery far exceeded my sense of ordinary comprehension, but whales, in all their enormous, gentle, fierce, mysteriously-inhabited worldliness, felt capable of tenderly handling and even a little welcoming of my burdens. Evolutionarily speaking, they’ve seen some shit, and I felt safe sharing some of mine with them. Feeling small allowed the problems of my Hot Years^TM not seem so big. Beachside, tear-streaked sourdough pizza from Ghisallo’s didn’t hurt either.

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As I befriended the gentle giants, I didn’t realize that I was living an active paradigm shift: historically after this procedure, a silver lining that I clung to was the need for medication no longer. And now, especially after some people come into this procedure hot with prolonged inflammatory disease (in their Hot Years^TM ?!), needing meds after surgery might be the way to preserve healthy, surgically-altered anatomy, at least for me, and I know that I am not alone. (There are ongoing studies and exploration about prophylaxis of inflammation in the j-pouch).

So I guess this brings me to a few takeaways learned in 5 years with a j-pouch:

1. Don’t live in Texas during your Hot Years^TM if your reproductive organs need some TLC. I can’t speak to the male experience about this, but I would expect that if you’re a male with sub-par penis functioning abilities during your Hot Years^TM, you’d have a lot of sympathy in the State of Texas.

2. If you’re in need of some advice, you probably just need a good cry or three at the beach with the whales. Be sure to say “thank you" because they don’t hear that enough from our human parasitic species, and “thank you” goes a long way, maybe even longer when sound travels slower under the water.

3. Meds after j-pouch? Feel your feels, but it’s not a failure.

What’s my day-to-day like with a j-pouch, 5 years later?

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Humor me for a moment:

• The Horror: Fun and mysterious GI betrayal 30 minutes after you said, “Surely I can tolerate this food.”

  • Cash-in: Complimentary membership upgrade to the VIP lounge with priority lifelong bathroom access

• The Horror: Realizing you’ve prepped for a colonoscopy all night long to arrive at procedure check-in, hangry and dehydrated, only to discover that insurance denied the procedure for no reason in particular.

  • Cash-in: Pick-a-meal Punch Card! 5 free symptom-free meals that would cause normal/healthy humans debilitating GI distress but in these 5 instances will be fully gastrointestinally and psychologically pain-free. Post-bar Taco Bell? No problem. Thai food with max spice limit? Have 2, and follow it up with some ice cream. Punch card is valid until next colonoscopy.

• The Horror: Insurance denied your medication that you’re prescribed to stay alive. Now you’re stuck in prior-authorization purgatory, shatting your brains out and replying, “I’m fine- thanks!” while at least 2 organ systems are indeed, subpar at best.

  • Cash-in: Unlimited Marriot Bonvoy points with guaranteed upgrades each time you check-in to one of their properties, which are collectively still more affordable than any single U.S. hospital stay (perhaps another horror in itself?!)

    

I often look back at my 20s and shudder- the days were bleak and yet, we survived (“we” = Zack, me, and equally as miraculously, our marriage and our deaf dog). Life felt like we were hurled from a skyscraper and at any moment we might hit the pavement, but we never were sure which hurdle indicated that we had landed in a bloody smattering. With every 10 feet spent in free-fall, we were weighted with more medical bills, rising interest rates with credit cards, student loan debt, an unaffordable grocery bill or 3, unemployment, and a completely absent sex life in my “hot years” (eloquently described by a Houston gynecologist once) in exchange for depression, fatigue, anemia, and sleep interrupted by night-sweats and debilitating pain and bloody, painful diarrhea, all while in grad school, falling faster and faster into the dark abyss.
People say “waiting for the next shoe to drop,” but I was certain that I was mid-free-fall scrambling to remember if I even owned shoes (but if I did, I hoped they were fabulous).

Since 2021ish, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing a brain in a body that has gingerly, non-linearly, tiptoed further away from The Horrors and into a place of psychological safety, a destination somehow even lovelier and cozier than the aforementioned hypothetical cash-in rewards points (although…I’d happily take those, too).

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If you’d like life’s secret recipe to finding psychological safety, that essay will have to wait for another day. But here’s a teaser: the premise is absent of enlightenment and has deep undertones of the sweet relief of consistently affording groceries, making rent, and finding a treatment regimen for living with a chronic illness (and maintaining employment that provided the extremely necessary burden of health insurance) far more manageable.

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Have you ever wondered if healing is less about becoming someone new and more about remembering who you were before you had to survive?

As best as I can describe, thanks to time as the ultimate healer, this is what it feels like to be inside my brain these days: like noticing possibility instead of constantly scanning for danger. Here, hunger, rest, joy, and curiosity become easier to hear because they’re no longer drowned out by alarm.

This is the brain that has allowed me to wake up and think wonderfully ordinary thoughts like, “Did I remember to turn on the dryer last night?”
or
“Which hike will my cousin and I explore this weekend?”
or
"How would I want to feel if I walked into this room? How do I want my friends to feel? Which shade of this paint color allows that?”

I am delighted by these thoughts. I can’t believe they get to live in my brain. Despite the horrors of living in West Texas, it’s no secret that I loved getting to create our happy oasis, and for me, this is what the best part of having a place to call “home” is: the quiet privilege of dreaming up a space that reflects who you are and the life you love to live instead of what you’ve survived; to make choices based on joy instead of necessity.

So, if you’re up for a little adventure, I’d love for you to come home shopping with me

(since LOL we are being evicted from our rental house…it’s finnnne).

The timing? Not great! Zack is currently unemployed!
The budget? Not ideal! Again- Zack is currently unemployed! We will never see mortgage interest rates like we did in 2019/2020, but you know what?
We live in Colorado. There are trees here.
We are in good health. We are here together.
And today, we’re looking at 3 different local properties- the one that is my favorite via online photos (much to Zack’s dismay)?

The red shop vaccuum in this photo is perhaps a red flag, but (hear me out) the house is adorable, colorful, and I am intrigueddddd. Just looking at the photos from this house make me want to invite friends into the back yard for snacks on the patio.

If my biggest crisis this week is green carpet in a hypothetical house that a couple of millennials are privileged to imagine buying…with the minor caveat that the basement might stunt-double as a water feature…these are the horrors the cash-ins I’ll happily choose.

What a beautiful thing to overthink home décor.

I could not sleep (courtesy of endometriosis pain), so I watched the sunrise a bit. Occasionally I wake up with searing abdominal pain that lasts through the night- it’s different than Crohn’s pain, which is one I know well since it has been with me since childhood. This one has too, but it was absent for so many years spent on birth control, or Crohn’s pain took front and center stage for too many years that I forgot it was there until my total colectomy. But on nights when the pain returns, I talk to it, walk around, tell my body how safe we are…it’s a whole thing.
After wearing myself TF out from this ritual, I’ve also taken to watching “What’s in my bag?” videos on youtube until I drift back off to sleep. However, I had no such luck on June 21st, so when the sun came up, I woke Zack up, and we went for a 6 mile hike in the mountains.

On this hike, I said,“I used to think I needed to find my worth and purpose in work,

but now I know I’m meant to sit on a rock and look at the water.”

This, for me, is the truest thing I know in life.

Well…one of the truest things I know.

The other truest thing I know?

Friends make life worth living.

Recently, Zack and I moved into the cutest little rent house, where we’ve been receiving mail of previous tenants. I think these friendships just might be the entire purpose of finding this house, because we are (less than 3 months into a lease and 2 months since selling our house in Texas!) being evicted, which has great potential to be pure comedy that I will save for another day when it’s less disorienting and a little more hilarious.

Anyway- when we realized that the previous tenants and I had been neighbors, only a few blocks apart on the very same street in the same neighborhood in Los Angeles, I knew I had to reach out to them. In return for exchanging mail, we received a hand-painted card from the previous tenant, and I just knew we had to be friends.
So now we’re friends! Let’s call new friend “Bridget”.

Bridget invited me to her house for a Summer Solstice Ritual, a way to welcome the longest day of the year, a new season, with reverence, appreciation, and a few laughs, and good, seasonal snacks. I brought heirloom tomato and peaches from the farmer’s market; she prepared a table adorned with fresh sunflowers, crystals, and candles.
Magical whimsy.

I also brought along tarot cards which were a thoughtful gift from a friend this past Christmas. I’ve had fun playing with them for various fun life days, like Zack’s birthday, or my nephew’s birth this past February, and on this particular day?
The Summer Solstice.

So in case you’d like to participate, here’s my fun tarot card readings from 06/21/26:

Disclaimer: this is for fun. If it’s not totally obvious by now, I’m not a professional tarot card reader- I’m just a girl in my friend’s back yard.

• Justice: my interpretation of this card has already changed, thanks to this reddit thread (reddit tarot is wildly entertaining, by the way). Could this mean that justice is subjective and worth advocating for, especially on the behalf of others? And/or yourself?

  • Side note: Speaking of advocating on your behalf whYyy does capitalism absolve people from assholery? For example, when people say things like, “It’s not personal; it’s business.” or “We are running a business and we can’t…”
    Oh? We can’t be basic humans with some decency, because “it’s just business” is a moral eraser? I JUST DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

    • "It’s just business” is moral distancing. It’s cowardice. I detest it.

      • I own/owned a business. It was financially successful by most people's standards (and simultaneously wildly unsuccessful if you measure success by quality of life). So when people say, "We can't because we're a business," I don’t buy it!!! Businesses DO NOT make decisions, but people certainly do. Every decision, policy, refusal, cut corner, etc. is a reflection of human beings choosing to exercise their values via a business. Why do we act like adding a profit motive suddenly exempts us from kindness?
        Exhales. Alright. Moving on…

        • This card brought up some stuff for me. It’s fine.

• King of Swords: Firmness in authenticity, speaking your truth, removing those emotions and focusing on facts. This is hysterical coming from a card with a man whose fist is so tight that it looks like it may at any moment spontaneously combust. I see this as acknowledging the emotions (the fist) and moving into action (the sword)- a both/and moment, if you will. Firm reflection while standing your ground.

• The Star: This is a fuck-yes card for me, and if it makes you feel anything less than that, I don’t want to hear it- please don’t tell me. Tits out. Renewal. Reflection. Catch your breath. Trust that the stars are guiding you.

Ended the Solstice by decorating some fruits with cloves: sun and light meets warmth, cozy protection. This, I’m told, comes from Celtic paganism.
Full disclaimer: I killed the basil pictured here, which I hope isn’t symbolic.

Things that ended up better than imagined on this day (food things!):

• THE PALISADES PEACHES- Purchased fresh from the local farmer’s market. I can’t emphasize enough how special these peaches are. Didn’t know how they’d taste given that they looked on the outside like they could’ve been just a littttle more ripe when I found them, but alas, they’re perfect.

• Hungry Goat in Morrison, Colorado- a scratch kitchen that we found after our hike. Glanced at the menu and hoped the chef was from New Orleans. Spoiler: he is.
  Go there. Enjoy.

Hope you’re enjoying these sunny days with good people.
Maybe get into some trouble- Do something a little silly and celebratory, just because.

Have you ever woken up from a season of survival realizing that you’re not actually living a life you consciously chose? As the dust settles, maybe you’re feeling glimmers of relief, knowing that you don’t have to keep surviving; you’ve made it through. The big, hard crisis has passed.
But to make a conscious effort to live with intention would require a drastic change. Maybe beneath the relief glimmers panic is there, along with a bit of foreboding loneliness, a little fear of the unknown, and the unsettling realization that the person you’ve become, the life you’ve lived through the survival are misaligned with the life you want now that you have the privilege to choose a change.

So what do you do?

Do you stay, accepting the low-grade restlessness you’ve grown accustomed to, chastising yourself for feeling dissatisfied with a life that’s perfectly fine on paper? Or do you acknowledge the incongruence for what it is and choose something different, a life you’ve quietly known was possible, even if it felt inaccessible to dream about in years past?

Dearest reader, I opted for change.

There’s Texas…

Every place I’ve lived in or wandered throughout Texas is wildly different:

• Dallas = dress codes, botox, spray tans, private schools

• Houston = a grind, traffic, a rodeo, healthcare tourism, food, parking lots

• Austin = fun, musical, whimsical, hippie, oasis, lake runs

• San Antonio = more food, culture, color, hills, rivers, Catholics

• Waco = Baptist schools, Baptist Churches, strip malls, a margarita festival

• East Texas = mosquitos, pine trees, swamp, sweat, Louisiana-light
  

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Then…there’s West Texas.

Wild. Desert. Desolate. Dry. Dusty. Industrial. In the place of bluebonnets, there’s yucca, ocotillo and aloe growing wild- the colors somehow more subtle, deeper and more pastel simultaneously. There, you’re lucky to find a mesquite tree in the place of oak trees. Despite sunrises that reminded me of a beach-centric childhood because of the topographical flatness, there was no water for miles; mesas and plateaus instead of rolling hills or coastline, unlike any other place and 5 hour’s driving distance in any direction from any major metropolitan area, unless you count Marfa, a place so rich in color and the art of slow-living that the entire town closes down for post-lunch siestas.

When you meet fellow Texans and introduce yourself as a West Texas inhabitant, they usually say something like, “Oh no- what happened? Are you okay?!”
And the reply is supposed to sound something like, “You know- moving out here was a hard adjustment, but we found our church family, and we haven’t found better people than those in West Texas, and now we can’t picture ourselves anywhere else.”

Or, if you happen to meet a fellow West-Texas sufferer after you’ve been exiled, you politely console them by saying, “Our years in Midland were some of the most precious years. We look back on them fondly, and we still haven’t met friends anywhere as good as those in Midland.” Then you talk about all the friends you collected, most of which also opted to leave Midland at some point in their one wild and precious lifetime.

I took a different, slightly unhinged approach, usually opting for transparency, “We’re here for my spouse’s job. It’s true- like most places, you can find good people. But I personally can’t wait to leave and never look back.”
Some people found this refreshing, most found it off-putting. I’d like to think that I was simply weeding out the BS, keeping friends who appreciated my dazzling, authentic personality in lieu of risking fake friendships under false pretenses.
After all, life is short, and we can’t be wasting time.

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One time at a college alumni event, a man who didn’t know how to metabolize my honesty coached me through “How To Be Happy Anywhere” an ethos that served him well throughout many moves from Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and finally to Midland, Texas. I did not ask for this lesson, so I’ll share the cliff-notes version with you if you’re dying to hear how a single white man simply chooses happiness anywhere in the world: money, employment, church (or from my vantage point, living in places and participating in systems that uphold the patriarchy, and in turn, offer him a sense of safety, or at the very least, confirmation that he’s living in alignment with God’s will. Also- it’s okay to be single, even if you’re 42, because the world doesn’t see choosing career over partnership as a weird thing when you’re a guy; it’s ambitious and career-focused).
I asked him if he had ever heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs- he had.
”Well- it’s almost like happiness isn’t the goal until safety is, and sir, I do not feel medically safe out here in the least bit, and I can’t access happiness here until I feel medically safe.”
His response was so utterly disappointing that I can’t remember his retort.

Having the privilege of boarding a plane to see my GI doctor in Houston while recovering from 3 major surgeries during a pandemic, and doing so from a physical place that largely denied the pandemic’s reality while I was working in a COVID ICU, left a lasting imprint on my psyche. I left many social gatherings in West Texas feeling disoriented and disillusioned, exhausted by conversations about private school enrollment while privately wrestling with whether I even wanted children in a post-Roe era, in a body whose medical complexity had already taught me that nothing is guaranteed. Despite the social gravity of Midland, the subtle but constant pressure to perform, to keep up, to belong, only rarely could I manufacture a desire for small talk. Upon reflection, I usually decided the small talk was not worth the energy, and if I’m being brutally honest, I really did not like that same, giant Louis Vuitton tote slung over every woman’s shoulder.

Looking back, my failed attempts at friendship weren’t really attempts at all. They were projections of my own resentment toward a culture that seemed to prize appearances over authenticity at a time when I felt anything but okay. I wasn’t interested in pretending I was thriving. As a small act of resistance, a refusal to perform wellness for the comfort of others, I allowed myself to be a little angry, a little miserable, and comedically unpalatable, even if a consequence of such behavior meant alienation.

And yet, I am willing to concede that the secret to endurance is, and always has been, people. From Midland, I carried away one friend, the kind who makes a desolate place feel less lonely. She is an artist, a free-spirit, a natural matriarch, and the co-owner/plant-keeper of our favorite local coffee shop and the only place besides our house that we miss dearly. She listened to me lament my time in West Texas with understanding, tenderness, and offered me silver linings in the form of shady walks and coffee dates. She was my friend, even when I couldn’t feel like my best self, even when I felt like an energy-suck; she accepted me.

Perhaps my persistent, low-grade sense of vigilance, the feeling that another medical crisis could arrive at any moment, helps explain why I threw myself so completely into my work and rejected most obligation to pursue a social network in West Texas. Instead, I nurtured my virtual private practice as if it were a living, breathing companion and opted to nurture friendships far and away from Midland.

While living in a place that prized work above nearly everything else, I threw myself into mine. In doing so, I built a small corner of the world that felt safe and lovely for me and for patients navigating experiences I understood all too well. Watching people start to feel better, to gain a little bravery digesting food and reclaim their nutrition even with GI disease was profoundly life-giving. The people I worked with trusted me during some of their hardest moments, and I’m so grateful.

So, no- while I did not leave West Texas with a ton of friends and a church family, I still made lemonade from sour lemons, with a business that I felt proud to steward and a friendship that just might last for the long-haul. While I personally did not feel a sense of belonging on most days, there are places in West Texas that are spiritually important, enchanted and sacred, and I’d like to share them with you:

If you’re also the type of person who needs to look at a rock to feel spiritually okay and you find yourself in West Texas, I can’t emphasize enough how important visiting McDonald Observatory, Big Bend (National or State Park), and Fort Davis are for your soul, or at the very least, your stamina for surviving West Texas. I also recommend Balmorhea (pronounced Bal-Moore-Ray), which remains on my bucket list due to construction and poor timing with weather every time I drove by. It’s an actual desert oasis with (allegedly) the world’s largest spring-fed pool.

I thought I’d mourn Texas a little more, but the truth is since I moved here 10 months ago I felt an instant, unfamiliar, much-needed sense of belonging in Colorado, miraculously even stronger than the energetic pull that brought me here. I question all the years spent being hard on myself for not fitting into so many social settings in Texas (and Oklahoma). I thought I was a weirdo. Turns out, I am, but it seems like the people here are a similar kind of different, and those who aren’t don’t mind at all. I’m also pleased to report I’ve not seen that dreadful Louis Vuitton giant tote since relocating here.

While no place is perfect, I have entered a love-affair with Colorado: Highway sunflowers welcomed me to a place of mountain medical safety (I live 4 miles from my doctor’s office).People here appear to share values that resonate with me: investing in relationships, spending time outdoors, and celebrating life rather than simply enduring it, being a constant laborer.

There is an enthusiasm for being outside and a thoughtfulness toward neighbors that I appreciate deeply. For the first time in a long time, I feel able to be part of a community without constantly wrestling with rhetoric and beliefs that feel fundamentally at odds with how I think people deserve to be treated.

Oh, and friends from out of town genuinely WANT to come visit us here!

I wrestled constantly with Texas.

Why would women vote against protections I viewed as fundamental to our autonomy? Why dismantle programs that feed children? Why continue electing leaders whose vision of Texas seemed so much smaller than the diverse, vibrant reality I saw around me every day?

These questions followed me everywhere. They surfaced while I perused the aisles at HEB, at dinner parties, and during long drives across stretches of highway that seemed to go on forever. I wanted simple answers, but there weren’t any. The longer I lived there, the more I realized that my frustration wasn’t about politics, it was about fundamentally belonging.

I wanted to understand how a place so rich in culture, resilience, and generosity could also embrace policies that felt, to me, at odds with those values. I wanted to reconcile the kindness I encountered in individual people with systems and decisions that often left me feeling alienated. Most of all, I wanted Texas to be a place I could wholeheartedly love.

And while I do love Texas, and I thank it for making me; for teaching me survival.
I wish it well.
If you need me, I’ll be out here thriving in Colorado.

It’s where I belong.

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A look at a few of my favorite past World IBD Days:

1. Last year, I saw patients in my virtual private practice:

   

   oops- wrong order of photos; Zack also took me to see Leon Bridges at Red Rocks- Mariella, mariella, mariella, mAriElLaaAaaa

   

2. The World IBD Day before that, I got a super nerdy poster of distinction at a medical conference, where I got to make friends and talk about science all at the same time, but the cherry on top was dinner with friends (pictured here- go follow Abigail! She’s a smart, gorgeous, talented chef):

   

   

3. Another favorite: My sister and brother-in-law rented a yurt just outside of Denali National Park and WE COULD SEE THE SUMMIT! I REPEAT…

   

   

   The peak in the background with the wispy cloud is the summit, rarely visible- a Christmas World IBD Day miracle:

   

   And here’s a look at the last May 19th before it was World IBD Day to me:

   

Taken on 6th Street in Austin, TX during my 3rd year of college; my 21st birthday was just 4 months before I entered the IBD community with a diagnosis, a prednisone taper, and a script for Remicade infusions.

—

Recently I spoke with a newly diagnosed patient who was deep down a dark reddit rabbit hole, “the people there don’t want to live.” And you know what? I couldn’t even corroborate or deny that statement, because I just won’t let myself go to reddit (except for interior design advice, which is entertaining, in case you were wondering. So many strong opinions on paint color shades- who knew?!). I know the darkness that comes with the hardest IBD days well, and if anything, I need to be reminded that the good will be good, and if I can invest on as many positive memories with lovely humans, my godddd-sign me TF UP! These mundane, magical moments with good people are rainy-day insurances! Positive memories are lifeblood, reminders that even in the darkest moments, it is okay to wake up the next day. If that sounds bleak, I’d apologize, except this is what shatting blood for nearly a decade does to the psyche.

So in no particular order, I’d like to share the things and the people that have kept me here:

1. Okay, I lied, because the VERY top of the list with highest importance of all includes my lifers: Zack and Lindsay

   

   My sister and my spouse, two things which I thank the gods for every single day.
   

2. The Ladies of Bowel Moments Podcast: Robin and Alicia

   

   Please write your best guesses in the comments for why you believe they’re walking around a forest in white robes below in the comments (wrong answers only).
   Before I move on, for a beat, I need to wax poetic about Robin and Alicia: Robin is a fellow j-poucher and patient; Alicia is a daughter to a chronically ill parent, and the two of them together = alchemy. Please listen to their podcast if you are curious about IBD and all of the parts of life that it touches. If you’re not sure where to begin, I highly recommend this research round-up episode, which feels a lot like IBD Sesame Street in the very best way. Their podcast is actionable, important, and it amblifies both patient and clinician experiences with IBD. 10/10.
   

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3. Jaxon: when I was in college, he’d lay on my head when I needed to go to the hospital- I highly endorse pets as therapists (Jax is also tied for first place= highest importance)

   

   4.Brene Brown, PhD. Her books about shame are liberating. Are they geared toward chronic illness? No. But she explores readers to do “the next right thing” and I found this to be a vital skill that helps me reclaim some power and autonomy via the smallest micromoments in disease flares, rather than sitting in the suck and waiting for the clouds to completely part to live my life.

   
   5. With that in mind ^ Dr. Kristin Neff’s mindfulness and self-compassion resources helped me accept the shitty days, notice and name the suck, and move into action (or rest!) from a place of compassion.
   
   6. NOT reading “The Body Keeps the Score” and when someone recommends this book, you have a few options:
   - Punting them across the room
   - throat-punching this person
   - inviting them to your house for a ceremonial burning ceremony of the book
   - using the pages from “The Body Keeps the Score” as eco-friendly alternatives for wrapping paper for all of your least favorite family members for the holidays. I cannot emphasize enough how unhelpful this book is for someone living with a chronic disease.
   
   Okay, fine.
   I don’t endorse violence (unless you’re going to store violence and rage in your body as Crohn’s, in which case you should absolutely get out there and kick some ass), but as an alternative, I do recommend “The Wisdom of Your Body” by Hilary McBride, PhD.
   
   7.Movement is medicine. Motion is lotion (a patient said this to me recently, and I loved hearing it, but writing this out feels…off?). Yoga. Sprinting to + from the bathroom. Walks to and from the mailbox. Running so far you exorcise the demons. Lifting weights. Swimming. Dancing- it doesn’t matter what kind of movement you do, as long as you enjoy it, it is enough. This, (tied with being able to sit through an entire nourishing meal with a friend), is the best way to give a middle finger to a disease that can suck the life from you.

   

   
   8. My god. Sunshine makes life worth living. Just a moment in the sun changes so much for me.

   

   9.SLEEP and doing whatever you can to try to get an extra few minutes is imperative

   
   10. J-pouchers, I recommend this guy’s pouchiversary posts. Rasheed Clarke is a delight.
   
   11.Care team members who changed my life: an IBD specialist (much more helpful than a general GI doc); a pelvic floor physical therapist (PFPT); a j-pouch specialist consult (at Mt. Sinai); an IBD registered dietitian, who taught me how to love food on the days when I’m fortunate to do so, and how to nourish myself from a science-based place of compassion and curiosity on the days when I can’t. Lastly (but never really last), a mental health professional, specifically EMDR therapy to help process all the horrors to see that I really coul persist.
   
   

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—

P.S. A happy, happy Season to my fellow Taurus Suns. I have no idea what astrology actually means, but this I know: You deserve all the main character energy that awaits for you this season, and it’s yours for the taking. Cheers!

—

P.P.S. If you’d like to, in honor of World IBD Day, donate to my fundraiser, click here!

As a person who has spent most of their 20s in the bathroom (thank you, Inflammatory Bowel Disease), it’s high time that I put this hard-earned knowledge into practice to share with the world!
You’re welcome!
Is this my life’s purpose? Unsure, but it’s certainly alchemy.

Allow me to introduce you to the {insert sparkles} Ideal Public Bathroom {sparkle}

In order of least to most importance…

10 criteria for a public bathroom that won’t ruin your day:

1. An Ideal Bathroom has good artwork.

This is the artwork that adorned our previous home bathroom- I took it via my iphone from our favorite bar/restaurant, The Other Room in Oklahoma City.

But since we are on the topic of public bathrooms…

2. Criterion No. 2: Good lighting at the mirror. The B concourse bathrooms at Denver International Airport were 10/10 designed by a woman. Recently on a hike, my cousin and I spent a chunk of time analyzing and fan-girling over the natural lighting, attention to detail, cleanliness, and accessibility that the designers intentionally poured into this concourse bathroom. I don’t have a picture, but even in the darkest of bathrooms (which I do not necessarily endorse), you can still have good lighting! See?

What’s “Good” lighting?

Enough to see your makeup lines without having to mouth-breathe into the mirror while applying mascara; the right ratio of practicality and dignity-preservation. The bare minimum? If you know you are not at risk for looking like you’ve unintentionally applied drag-level makeup once you emerge from the bathroom and reintegrate into society.
Drag deserves to be intentional.

3. The illusion of privacy: personal closet stalls. When all the doors to the bathroom are VERY tall (these people get it). A downside? You need to have awareness of your surroundings to ensure there’s adequate toilet paper before committing to your stall, because you won’t be able to ask a neighbor to send some underneath in an SOS scenario.

Why? Great question.

• they’re acoustically a little more forgiving

• you don’t have to worry about anyone looking at your feet, and consequently, feeling rushed

• you don’t make weird eye contact with strangers through door cracks

• usually there seems to be an appropriate ratio of arm length: trashcan placement, which also matters

• the lighting is usually a little dimmer than in the rest of the bathroom. If you’re an introvert, the change in lighting, coupled with access to your own personal dimly-lit closet can serve as a nice little reprieve to come up for air; a little lighting-recharge station while you decide if you’re going to re-commit to socializing or plot your escape
  

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4. Adequate inventory. This is probably redundant, but we love a well-stocked bathroom.

   

5. Sinks + soaps: I need each and every one of you to work, and I need the soap to ideally be fragrance-free. For whatever reason, the soaps often smell like grandma’s house or Sunday school, and that’s an adventure we weren’t signing up for, either way.

6. Touch-free. Regardless of facts, I am fully convinced our recent worldwide pandemic started in a public bathroom, because as a person who has spent far too much time in public bathrooms, THE PEOPLE ARE NOT WASHING THEIR HANDS!
   But if the people bring their child crotch goblin into the bathroom, you better believe that little petri-dish of a human is coughing and sneezing all over the faucet that they accidentally left running. Unlike their parents, at least they’re learning to hand wash, which is reason enough to have hope in future generations.
   I don’t want to touch the things. May I grab the giant door with my foot? May I air dry my hands so we don’t waste more paper? Will the soap understand that I’m waving for it to dispense at me? These are necessary luxuries.

   

7. Seat stability. Have you ever tried to regain composure while fearing for your life, pants around ankles, in your most vulnerable state? I probably don’t need to say more about this. It’s important.

8. Toilet paper quality. WHY AM I PAYING AN ARM AND A LEG FOR A HOTEL ONLY TO BE MET WITH SINGLE-PLY TOILET PAPER? WHYGODWHY. IF I AM PAYING TO STAY AT THE BELLAGIO, BY GOD THERE BETTER BE CHARMIN EXTRA STRENGTH IN EVERY SINGLE BATHROOM.
   side note: never have I ever paid to stay at the Bellagio, but I know firsthand that they’re cutting corners and using single-ply TP, and the people deserve better.

9. CLEANLINESS. At the end of the day, functionality and cleanliness take the cake. As a semi-professional road-tripper, I’ve seen it all (will never recover from rural New Mexico and rural West Texas gas stations which shall remain nameless). Buc-ees deserves a shoutout, because those bathrooms are SPOTLESS (but I will never fully forgive you for price gouging during early 2000s hurricane evacuations, Buc-ees).

   

10. ACCESSIBILITY. People, especially those disabilities, deserve access to bathrooms- I highly recommend reading more about Ally’s Law and getting involved in advocacy if you have the capacity (local advocacy matters, too, and possibly even more than national advocacy!). As a person who has had to leave their dignity at the door on more than one occasion to beg for access to the staff bathroom as if my life depended on it, I vehemently believe all people deserve access to safe, public spaces for their health, and bathrooms, as silly as it sounds, are often those places.

    • A few resources improving bathroom access (feel free to share your favorites):

      • Got2goNYC

      • Flush Toilet Finder

      • Refuge (for safe, gender-inclusive bathrooms)

      • GoHere (Canada)

      • Denver public restrooms (check on your city’s webpage to see what’s happening in your community!)

Lastly, if you’d like a way to advocate, you’re welcome to donate to a cause that aims to make bathrooms optional, not mandatory :)

You’re welcome to make your suggestions airport specific or not: Best bathroom you’ve ever visited?
annnnnd, go!

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1. ZACK MOVED IN WITH ME. I REPEAT:

   

   AND he has been cooking for me, assembling meals, and letting me say, “I CAN’T BELIEVE I FINALLY CONVINCED YOU TO MOVE IN WITH ME.” Repeatedly.
   For context, we’ve lived in different states since last August. The company that employed him sold, and now that he’s in his severance era, we get to share a same zip code and street address! Like a real married couple.
   

2. WE FOUND A [TEMPORARY] PLACE TO CALL HOME[ISH]

   

   Jax continues in pet PT (he’s doing well), and we moved from a studio apartment into a cute little rental that Zack and I found for Jax.
   

3. I have had some version of an upper respiratory infection ever since I went to Idaho (for the first time!) in late March (and that is hell!), but that’s not stopping me from developing new hobbies:

   

   Inline skating? Twerking? I say both!
   

4. For the first time in my life, I smelled fresh jasmine (?) and realized it was covered in snow- a Colorado spring is a thing of magic.

   

   5. And probably the most fun update of all, I HAVE A NEPHEWWWWWWWW! I’ll never stop being grateful to my sister and my brother-in-law for giving me a friend, and I can’t wait to meet him. He went on his first big trip to Big Sur!

   

6. Survived my first Colorado Winter, but it was a sad one, and I hate climate change so much. Today I part with our season-long ski rentals, which I think is when Spring officially begins here? But I’ll report back.

   

   7.My cousin and I have been exploring like mad women in hopes of summiting a very tall mountain this Summer, and these weekends have been a true highlight of my life.

   

   8. Our Texas house is under contract (again)- fingers crossed!

   

   9. Friends are visiting this weekend (!!!) and we plan to explore Vail. Spoiler: Friends are Robin and Alicia (!!!!!!!!!!!!)

   

   

   Hopeful that we get better pics this weekend.

10. Something I’ve realized through EMDR therapy is that I’d like to try small acts of service (including rest!) that make it easier for me to love myself. Does this sound silly? For example:

    • cleaning because I love living in a clean space

    • reevaluating my alcohol consumption, because it hurts my feelings to feel self-induced pain from drinking carcinogens. Water never hurts my feelings though, and neither does coffee, and in fact, they allow me to feel like my best self.

    • moving my body because my back loves movement

    • cooking a meal because I love meditation and creating stuff

    • opening the blinds every morning, because I love to greet the day this way

    • realizing I’m living the dream, simply because I get to sleep with my windows open, so I’ll do more of that.

Podcasts that have been fun: Monica Lewinsky’s Reclaiming(wasn’t on my bingo card!); Good Hang with Amy Poehler

What I’m reading: “How to Kill a Witch” by Zoe Venditozzi (LOL so lighthearted) and a clinical sports nutrition text book (for when I need to fall asleep). A little upper and a little downer.

What I’m wearing: old sweats and cut-offs, socks with Birkenstocks unfortunately, or Rent the Runway fun pants if I need to look halfway presentable. Fun pants bring me joy.

People say your twenties are terrible, full of growth, learning-on-the-fly, barely making ends meet financially, building a career from crushed post-college-graduation expectations, hangovers, and multiple apartment relocations.

People were right.

The best advice I received in my twenties? “Don’t take life so seriously.”

My twenties were hard for all of the aforementioned reasons, plus navigating the hellscape of the American healthcare system, constantly advocating for myself against health insurance companies, and spending too much on groceries so I could prioritize homemade meals in light of a GI disease diagnosis. Most days in my twenties were spent with keen awareness that I was doing my best, and miraculously it continued to feel inadequate. The horrors persisted, and so did I.

After 2021 when my entire large intestine was surgically amputated from my body, life got better because I felt better physically. I also exited my twenties, which greatly improved my quality of life, along with consistent paychecks after no more grad school and having stable housing (we decided 2020 was a great year to become homeowners…why not?!). Being able to afford life with far less financial stress and feeling like daily survivorship in my body was less of a physical feat? These were unexpected, healing gifts for me.

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Another unexpected healing gift? I felt like my mind had been let out for recess. I consumed books like I had never read, pictures of interiors, exteriors, foreign lands, food, travel; I inhaled interior design and garden tour videos from youtube, and I watched my brain take on a new life that wasn’t preoccupied by pain, hunger, and grief. I fully anticipated (and hoped for) the possibility of healing to find my physical body, but a welcomed, gleeful surprise was that my brain seemed to be basking in creative energy in response to newfound permission to daydream and create without being handcuffed by bodily symptoms and fatigue.

As I inhaled more inspiration from color and creativity, I started asking Zack questions like, “What do you think about…?”

And he kept enthusiastically agreeing with my crazy ideas, like,
“We must get rid of the bandaid brown paint on the outside of this house.”

Grateful that Zack hated the bandaid brown as much as I did, and he kindly agreed to let me paint the outside.

“What do you think about replacing our baroque/gothic front door…?”

“Okay!”

“What do you think about immediately removing the hideous maroon from our sidewalk?”

Better.

I wrote here about how we wanted our first house to feel fun and lighthearted, not at all too seriously, and decidedly the opposite about how I truly felt about living in West Texas. I maintain that West Texas is where dreams go to die. It’s a horrid, dusty place. The people are great if you enjoy church, but if you’re a childless heathen like me, you’re going to have a bad time there.

After months of not putting the house on the market, we finally did last week, and now that we’re under contract (and actually moving in together again?! in the same State?!), I thought I’d share some house photos of our finished little creative project:

I’m a little guilty of anthropomorphizing this house, and I felt like it was our responsibility to bring her into the house she always wanted to be, more of an oasis in the desert, less of the Ranch-style farmhouse that she was when we met her.

A PSA to Texans everywhere: You don’t need the farmhouse!
Life is too short for windmills and shiplap, unless your house really needs to be a farmhouse. But you can always ask the house what it wants to be and then decide to help it out a little!
—
Painting our little house bright colors, fixing the sidewalk, painting, getting messy in the “we might as well” of it all…none of it was particularly serious, and I think that’s the point. The best advice from my twenties was not to take life so seriously, but it took a little living and leaving my twenties behind to actually understand what that meant. As it turns out, sometimes healing looks like a house in the dusty desert becoming something a little brighter than it was before.

We’ll meet our next house in Colorado soon enough and ask her what she’d like to be. For today, I’m grateful to be a few years older, an organ (or two) lighter, and a couple of state lines Westward. I’m grateful to have had the chance to have a house to help me heal, and I’m grateful to have the energy and the imagination to find out what kind of creative fun awaits us here.

Recently I asked a friend, “What important lessons did your parents teach you without explicitly teaching you?”
or something like that ^
(we were on a ski lift, and my exact words escape my memory).

“My mom taught me the importance of language-learning; my dad taught me to be a beginner throughout life; it’s good for you to be bad at things.”
She went on to explain how her dad recently joined a French club, a book club; how she grew up watching him shred on mountain bikes and snowboards alike (skills which he learned alongside his kids in their childhood), and how fascinated she is that he continues to make friends and find new hobbies. Each time she goes home to visit, he’s introducing her to newer facets of his life. Not dissimilarly, her mom recently went sailing with an all-female crew, just because she wanted to learn.

Why is it that once we become adults taller children, our center of gravity feels a little too unmanageable? Our brains take over, and we get too fearful of falling; too stuck-in-the-head about what other people might think (or if you’re a fellow hypochondriac like myself, a little too worried that your underwear aren’t matching trauma-bay ready)?
Clumsy, slow, feeling each painstakingly slow, dynamic shift as your body frantically searches for muscle memory that can’t be found…god.
it’s painful and humbling to be a beginner.

Mastery and ah-ha! moments have become small joys of life lately.
Disclaimer: On most current days, I feel like I’m riding a tricycle down a steep grade while my pedals spin out of control, but occasionally (and much to my pleasant surprise) I catch a glimpse of feeling my foot find a rotation without falling ass-over-teakettle, and it’s insatiable magic to inch toward…proficiency (“mastery,” on second thought, would be too optimistic of a word).

All at once, I’m reminded of growing up learning physical and mental flavors of mastery:
- the feeling of not stepping back during a swing, feeling the bright, yellow softball making contact with the end of my metal bat- the sweet spot, the knowing that this base hit would slide right over short stop’s glove, landing me at least a double. Muscle memory takes hold, and I’m in a full sprint rounding second base, shit-talking my way into fast friendship with my new acquaintance, The 2nd Baseman.
- finally feeling brave enough to dive off from the blocks, resurfacing for air, a sweet relief that I wasn’t going to drown after all
- catching a toss-illusion for the first time- dizzy, out-of-breath, hands blistered from twirling a baton in 100-degree Summer Southern heat. Slap-happy for getting the rhythm just right after the 132nd attempt.
- learning that sometimes the brain just needs the 114th pass through the Krebs Cycle before it finally understands that oxaloacetate is reduced, not oxidized, righttt
- standing up on a surf board, shaky knees, shoulders weak from doing burpees for hours against the waves, a laugh of elation echoing through my bones: the ocean and I finally agree on something after hours of fighting each other

Brief, magical moments that keep me coming back for more after hours of getting the literal crap beat out of me…What is it about that magical exhale, the a-ha! that’s so addictive?
The mastery glimmer: it’s the exact opposite of the chaos that came before it.
What felt impossible a hundred attempts ago suddenly feels obvious, like it was always meant to work this way, of course. The resistance disappears and you slip into a rhythm where each step leads naturally to the next.

Your shoulders drop, your hips loosen just a bit. Your breathing steadies. The frantic effort dissolves into something closer to exhausted surrender. Muscle memory takes over, the concept seeps into place nearly imperceptibly, until you suddenly notice you’re no longer fighting. Even if by pure accident, somehow you’re fluid, losing inhibitions and rigidity, moving with the process, no longer swimming upstream.

An electric second, undeniable proof that the failed attempts were somehow foundational and important, part of the becoming.

—

Recently I took a solo ski lesson, which was fun (and humbling)! Many of the lessons that came from this day reminded me so much of those, “of course” moments from childhood mastery glimmers: the importance of being loose, ready-stanced for adventure without having the whole course figured out from beginning to end, and letting “fun” = free-flowing, having some trust that your body will catch you.

It was a damn hard 4-hours, but I’d like to return for more.

^ More learnings = ice skating. I did take a tumble, which was far less scarier once I warmed up and allowed myself to feel physically looser.

^ more learning via Silversmithing. I am hoping to get into this a bit more.

And very lastly, most of my learning happens here ^ 9-5 things.
Transitioning from private practice into academic medicine has been the steepest learning curve of all. I spend most of my time exhausted by my own mayhem, setting reminders to circle back and to check in on patients, half the time unsure if I’m wildly under vs. over-communicating with my team, chuckling for freaking out about a person’s anatomy, only to then be reminded that “the inflamed portion was removed in surgery, Stacey.”
Oh. Right. Yes. Whew.
Thanks.

I guess if an aspiring silversmith on skiis (or skates?!) can find a silver lining through all of this newness… it’s that the record has shown that I do love a challenge, and I live for those small moments of mastery, even if they feel fleeting these days. Maybe the magic lives somewhere inside the mundane, clearing a path for those brief flashes when things finally click; the moments when the pedals catch.
And in the meantime, there’s a lot of room for learning.

If you need me, I’m doing my best trying not to wipe out on the downhill.

When I think about some of my greatest teachers in life, most of them weren’t where I expected to find them:

• an interior designer taught me so much about making people feel welcome into a virtual nutrition private practice

• a ski instructor taught me about acceptance, reframing resistance, and leaning into discomfort

• a patient taught me about resilience

• a dog taught me about patience

Then why do our human brains love a category?

After years of cultivating friendships, content, and mayhem on social media, I am quite curious about how living online inside of boxes shaped me:
[ ]nutrition account,
[ ]GI dietitian,
[ ]Crohn’s patient
My frontal lobe surely closed one day while I was scrolling Instagram.

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Something else I learned while sharing my [insert aforementioned boxed category] life on social media? The human stuff = connection.

Some of the deepest relationships I have today started on social media:
People who lost spouses in their twenties.
People rebuilding after illness, divorce, or losing a job.
People stitching a life back together.

We found each other through the words about the shared lived life experiences in between the photos of the highlights, because people were kind and had attention spans to read my verbose captions about grieving the loss of health in a body before I knew it was mine to celebrate. Or perhaps they related to my sub-par running times, negative splits and positive vibes, in pursuit of mental health in the outdoors. Human stuff. Friends found me because of GI nutrition or running, only to discover I refused to post What I Eat in a Day videos or fear-monger about inflammatory foods. People stuck around for the messy parts instead.

As goofy as social media can be, I tried to stay human on a platform built for unapologetic approval-seeking. Admittedly, there’s also a part of me that lOvEs approval from the masses… I’m a recovering people-pleaser raised in the South, after all. By not getting weighed down by the casino-esque, followership-chasing, algorithmic fuckery of it all, I had a good time, and more often than not, I’d argue that social media enriched my life.

Until it didn’t.

You open an app to check one thing: a restaurant menu, a last name, and suddenly 25 minutes have passed and you haven’t looked up. Somewhere between the memes, the plethora of advertisements, the feeling bad about yourself feeling bad about outrage, something uncomfortable sets in:
time is quietly being siphoned from your life.

Do we really need to know how our second-grade neighbor voted?
Do we need to watch another skinny white girl explain how she organizes her refrigerator and chooses morally superior, gut-health-vibing, detoxifying foods?

My god.

And then you hear things like, how you can control your algorithm, or how you need social media for…relevance?
Waitttt….
When did a big life get shrunk into tiles, 9-second-or-less videos? Did I consent to this?
When did I decide that I needed relevance? What even is relevance?
And who decides what’s relevant?

The more I heard myself saying, “I saw this meme” or “I saw this reel the other day”, the more I started to question if this is really how I wanted to be interacting with the tangible, living, breathing, big, messy, complicated people of the world.
The more places I go and people I meet, the more I realize we’re all just a bunch of muppets trying to figure out how to be human. Most people are doing their best. And usually that creates more connection, not less.

The problem with categorical boxes is that they flatten everything: people, places, history, and they erase similarity, which brings me to another tile on the grid: Texas.

When I talk to people who are not from Texas, they hear how wild as hell it is there, and they say things like, “Texas is whack” and “the people are crazy there”. And why yes, it’s all true, I have a bone to pick, and I’ll hold your hand as I tell you this,
“You’re crazy, too.”
The only difference is that in Texas, the crazy is (for better or for worse) on full display. We humans are all similar and dissimilar, though. No matter how people try to remove themselves from the Texan crazy of it all, I promise it’s in you, too.
yee- yee.

But unless we start learning to take some ownership, confront the parts we do and don’t like about ourselves, sit in the suck, hold our collective humanness accountable, rather than interacting with each other as if we’re truly defined and safely distanced by borders, tiles, check-boxes in an abbreviated bio on a screen… what will change?
Will circumstances get better?
For whom?

There’s plenty about Texas that I love and hate- it birthed me, raised me, and my family comes from sharecroppers who were too poor to own their own land there. As far back as I can trace my heritage (5 generations?), we’re Texans.

Some of my earliest childhood memories were beneath oak trees: My dad, a shotgun in hand, threw a 3-year-old me into the bed of his Ford pick-up truck so that I would escape a venomous water moccasin who slithered from the bayou into our backyard. (p.s., a water moccasin will aggressively chase you, falling from oak trees into your fishing boat. Ask me how I know.)

This memory, a quintessential Gulf-coast childhood chaos, was birthed on the same land as a historic cotton mill plantation.
Instead of confronting this history, the colonization, the dehumanization of other human beings, a nice family subdivision for mostly white people was built over it, where I lived until 1st grade. When I was 4 years old, I busted my chin open on a see-saw planted directly next to brick structures that housed history from when the plantation was last operational, less than 100 years prior.

There was no historical marker. No explanation. Just bricks.
And when I asked about the bricks, I was free to believe that white people, long ago and far away from me, had been awful. At 4 years old I was granted the comfort of believing racism was buried decades ago, deep beneath oak trees that knew the truth about the land that raised me, as I blissfully scurried about on the fire-ant-infested st. augustine grass and moss.

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Time marched on.

14 years later, I let a boy get to 2nd base in his Pontiac Firebird Trans Am under those same oak trees. A year later, I took my senior photos in a field of bluebonnets nearby.

4 years after that, I made a Facebook post about racist business practices just down the street from those same trees. The business owner called me and promised to make my dad’s life at work “a living hell” unless I took it down. Turns out, the KKK is still alive and well in Texas and beyond (and so is racism).

Those bricks under the oak trees weren’t part of the history lesson taught by our white football coach who doubled as the history teacher. No accountability for the history that the oak trees witnessed.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s a historical marker next to that see-saw now.
I wonder what it says.
I wonder who wrote it.
I wonder if the people who live there know the story of the land beneath their houses as their own children play on the see-saws beneath the oak trees.

And sometimes I wonder if the bricks are still there at all.

Maybe that’s the problem with grids and tiles and neat little boxes. From a distance, everything becomes two-dimensional:
A person becomes a category.
A place, like Texas, becomes a punchline.
History becomes a few bricks no one explains to a 4-year-old on a see-saw.
People find comfort in being siloed, different.

But the closer you get to real people and real places, the messier it becomes. Our contradictions show up, and so do our similarities. And it turns out the world isn’t made of tiles at all; it’s made of humans trying to figure out what the hell to do with our humanness with the ground beneath our feet as time marches on.

For a minute I wondered whether ReLeVAnCe meant staying inside a grid, tiles on a screen, categorizing, reducing life to something that fits neatly inside a check-box, even if I could justify it as “educational” or even “helpful”.
But the longer I live, the more I suspect relevance isn’t something an algorithm can decide. Real places and real people are far more complicated than that.

In an online (ir)relevant world lived in categorical similarities and seemingly blatant differences, consider our human sameness. What’s left for us to confront?
I suspect a great deal of reckoning and reflection exist an open-invitations for togetherness.
I suspect the alchemy and magic of relevance happen in community with and bearing witness to others.
I suspect the oak trees would have a lot to teach us about that.

A wise person who uses “Summer” as a verb once recommended that I draw a diagram: “How do you want to spend your time versus how are you currently spending your time- it may be helpful if you make a time audit. What are the differences? Be honest.
Now. Be strategic- bring yourself a little closer to the version of how you want to spend your time. What needs to happen?”

This was enlightening.

Staring back at me was a lesson: growing my own business meant that I had to be my own admin, social media manager, scheduler, care coordinator, and finance expert (chuckling that I logged, “did math.”).

In this time-audit exercised I learned that I wanted:

• Access to my people who feel like light to me

• To write (I have always wanted to write)

• To travel

• To spend time outdoors as often as possible (West Texas has unsafe air quality warnings, dust storms, and it’s anything but walkable)

• To host friends and spend long nights on a back patio with them (I did this as often as I could in West Texas, usually via extending invites to Zack’s colleagues)

• To create (lots here), some of which I was doing in service to the people in the IBD community (which I will continue to do here and here)

• To teach/speak at events (which I am fortunate to continue to do), especially if it means the chance to gas up other RDs

• More personal things

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Solo-preneurship often gets glamorized, and if you’re also a Millennial, you’re probably a product of early 2010s rah-rah girlboss era. You’re told that you can own your time, grow and scale your business, build “passive” income, spend hours building a life today so that you can live tomorrow, or “work from anywhere!”. You put your head down, work hard, clinging to a shiny version of success that awaits in the not-too-far-off future.

Don’t get me wrong- I’m proud of the ways in which owning my own private practice have enabled me to help people, mostly in alignment with my values, aside from the fact that capitalism and healthcare should never co-exist, but there’s not much I can do about that, except for under-paying myself, which I did/do. This isn’t noble.

My private practice was the sweetest lemonade, made from sour lemons, and it became my friend when I lived in a physical location that was the antithesis of who I am, where I am fortunate to say that I made a single, lovely friend in the 5.5 years that I lived in West Texas. In so many ways, my private practice has allowed me to become the clinician that I can be today, and I’m grateful to the people who have entrusted me with their nutrition care.

Despite my best efforts, I learned that West Texas wasn’t the place where I could live a life on purpose, and neither was solo-preneurship, though I did my best.

What I wasn’t told about having my own business

1.How desperately lonely I would feel. To remedy this, I budgeted attendance to conferences, just so I could spend time with people, even if it meant playing hooky and skipping an educational session or three. I visited friends in various places, where I would work on planes, trains, automobiles, and spare rooms. This helped close one of the gaps between how I wanted to spend my time versus how I was actually spending my time.

2. How much money and time are required to make a hire, steward a hire, and to then get to reap the rewards of having your freed-up time - I never quite made it to this level of financial success, likely because I was prioritizing escapes from West Texas to see people and places to sustain my sanity. Not making a hire is probably the result of my own stubbornness, but I didn’t want to hire someone unless I felt like I could pour into them.

3.When you stop, so does the business. To have models to sustain a steady income regardless, you’re going to have to REALLY work for it, which I would’ve continued to do, if I’m being transparent.

4. You are the bouncer: A person wants to mop the floor with you? There’s no one to protect you but you. As painful as it may be, you have to learn your limits; you have to put them into writing; you have to put them into practice; you have to learn all the ways in which you are an asshole when you tell a person that they can take their disrespect elsewhere and far away from your space; you have to give yourself the pep-talk-reminder that most people are gracious and good.

After college, despite always wanting to live elsewhere, in a different country, in New York City, in Colorado, life and chronic disease had a way of quietly pulling me into complacency:
You settle for the nearest big city in the same state, where you run into familiar faces from high school. You try on the job, the traffic, the sky-high rent. You join the running club. You accept that you’re living a life on purpose, after-all, you picked the uhaul, the apartment, the job.
You try on new, smaller, farther places, and you feel quiet pangs of remembering that possibility in different places still quietly beckons.
You lose your family, your health, your grounding. You allow survival to takeover, because it must. You acquiesce to be planted in the middle of the desert.
You build an oasis, and you return to yourself.
You make lemonade from lemons. You build a life, surround yourself with beautiful friendship.
You realize that you did the survival thing, and now you have an invitation to thrive.
You take inventory.
You see this life 20 years from now.
You refuse to accept anything less than a life on purpose, because my god, you lived to tell the tale.

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All signs pointed to a move, and after Zack asked me repeatedly, “Where do you want to live?” and hearing myself say, “I could be happy in Dallas by the lake.” He yelled, “Where do you want to live?”
”Colorado.”
Always. No hesitation. Gravitational pull that overrides logic, every time.

I started telling people that we were moving here years ago (deliriously optimistic that I had any say over the power of timelines), and finally, I felt that I had enough money in my business account to justify the move myself in 2025, sure that Zack would join me when he found the right job. JUST as I was planning to make the move, I received a job offer for a position at a local university hospital that I serendipitously had highly specialized training for, and after consulting with friends, mentors, and the gods, I enthusiastically accepted.

In the months that have followed, I feel as if I have existed inside a fault line: rapid growth of my private practice, followed by rampant turning-down-the-volume- expansion and retraction all at once, amidst a move to a new state, while Zack is still in Texas. Another analogy that feels correct: I’m floating through a tsunami on a comedically colorful inner tube, just trying not to drown.

No one tells you how to make a business smaller so you can have more room for the expansion of your own life.

And this is where I currently exist.

Have you ever felt deeply aligned with a dream, so certain it was yours, only to watch it transform almost overnight, leaving you both disoriented and strangely relieved that you no longer quite fit?

Have you ever felt tipped toward optimization, accumulation, future-tense legitimacy, proof that your work mattered, the promise of eventual arrival, only to eventually feel more tight, more tense, a little heavier than you bargained for, a little too stuck in your own head about your own work?

I’ve been reckoning with the truth, which is that I moved to cleaner outdoor mountain air so that I could breathe it in, to not live in front of a screen. I moved here for friendship, for relationships, to be part of a team.
And to embrace it all, I have to release the dream of my private practice, and let it take on a new form, watch it shape shift. My life depends on letting myself off the hook.

From a person actively figuring it out, with no roadmap for success, with no real idea of how to quantify “success” other than more presence, more pleasure, more friendship, more mountain air- here’s how I’m turning down the volume of entrepreneurship right now:

1.Not feeling obligated to reply to emails. There are no nutrition emergencies. Unless these people are actively paying for my time, I can let an email sit in a box for the sake of my sanity.

2.Saying “yes” to only hell-yesses. If it’s not an immediate hell-yes, it’s time better spent on a mountain, probably on a hike with my cousin, or with Zack. This also allows time for new skills, like silversmithing, or skiing just a little bit faster. This also ensures that I have time to spend with my senior/aging dog. His happiness is paramount.

3.Prozac and therapy, in reverse order. Fairly certain I should’ve walked out of the womb and been promptly handed an SSRI, but here we are, finding our way at the ripe age of 34.

4.Inventory of subscriptions and email clean-out. Amidst the clean-out, not beating myself up when an email got buried. We are humans.

6.NOT SUBSCRIBING TO THE FEAR OF OBSOLESCENCE.
”Adapt fast, or fade fast!”
”Evolve or get eliminated.”
”Comfort is the enemy of progress.”
When I’ve talked briefly to people about how I’ve said all I need to on instagram, I’m often met with either some version of the aforementioned, “because you need it to stay relevant.” OR I’m met with sweet solidarity, “that place is poison.”

I have holy trust that I know what I need for myself, and when I doubt that through my actions is when I don’t like being with myself. I do not need to fear obsolescence; I need to live a life in alignment with community, comfort, safety. I think I can find ways to continue to give back to communities that matter to me in ways that don’t siphon my energy, and I’m in the middle of figuring that out.

So…what is a life on purpose?

For now it looks like a lot of the aforementioned. I go to bed early. I move my body regularly. I spend time outdoors. I write. I doodle in a planner. I scheme and wait for Zack to join me here, because he’s still in Texas as I write this today. I take my aging dog to PT, and I spend time with family who helps me feel at home here. I try new restaurants, and I make my world around me beautiful with keen awareness that the world is ugly right now. I delight in the illusion of safety being 4 miles away from my healthcare team instead of a plane ride away, and I craft on the weekends. I work hard during the week for patients alongside a team that I’m lucky to know, not at all by myself, and I delight in getting to be a dietitian without also administrating the mess outta my day. I do not know what’s next for the business that I’m proud to have built, and I’m okay with being in the messy-middle today.

Today I do not feel that I am closer to using “Summer” as a verb, but I am at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and that’s alright with me.

If you’re the journaling type- your turn:

How do you want to spend your time versus how are you currently spending your time- it may be helpful if you make a time audit. What are the differences? Be honest.
Now. Be strategic- bring yourself a little closer to the version of how you want to spend your time. What needs to happen?

Ready- set- go.

- Stacey ☼

p.s. if you have tips for letting a dream take on a new life, let me know.

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Since I can remember, my brain has been stuck in the in-between. When I was too poor to afford therapy in my early 20s and began reading Brene Brown, I gained so much insight in learning how she describes “paradox”,
”because they’re honest”.

She writes,
“The gift of paradox is that if we hang in there and tolerate the tension- grounding down and holding both ideas- a new and deeper level of understanding is born.
Paradox is stubborn and never lets go.
We are the ones who tap out.”
from her newest book, Strong Ground

My first degree is from the College of Liberal Arts, Sociology, which taught me to ask questions like, “Who benefits”?” and “Where is the power?” and “How is power distributed?”
I chose Sociology after getting kicked out of undergrad for bad grades (lol she was a pre-med major, bless her heart), readmitted after holding a 4.0 at a local community college, and conducting a degree audit with the help of my trusted college roommate to determine “Which degree plan allows me to graduate the fastest?”

What I didn’t anticipate was that Sociology would give me permission to be fully myself…to let my mind roam, to follow curiosity wherever it led. It taught me how to think: critically, expansively, and in dualities.

Learning felt electric. I became fascinated by the tension between the individual and the collective; how media both reinforces and interrogates power; how inequality produces and perpetuates poverty. I wrestled with reform versus revolution, with incremental change versus systemic overhaul, with the anatomy of social movements and the conditions that allow them to ignite. Studying sociology required identifying that multiple truths could exist at once, holding the tension of competing dualities. I felt like my mind had stumbled upon a long-needed permission to exhale, out into open space to run free, where uncertainty could exist without fear, without obligation to present perfectly.

Paradox is what beckoned me to explore the science of nutrition in grad school, after learning that I couldn’t anti-inflammatory my way out of an inflammatory disease, no matter how hard I tried, and it’s still what I love most about working with people who have GI diseases- finding safety with food in a body that feels unsafe in digestion is paradoxical magic.

Today I find myself at my laptop, wearing workout clothes without a workout, reflecting on a long week in clinic spent holding space for peoples’ pain. The theme of the week seemed to be: slow recovery after abdominal surgeries. I listened as patients described their exhaustion, nausea, sleep deprivation. So many of my patients are, by every definition, in bodies that are in tender, painful phases of healing.

As I listen, I watch so many people reach for a silver lining, almost reflexively.

They applaud their lack of appetite. They frame unintended weight loss as a small victory. As if even in the middle of surgical recovery, they must produce something culturally admirable, as if thinness can redeem suffering. Even when the body is clearly screaming for rest and nourishment, we override it with performance. We trade embodiment for approval.
Why do we do this?

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There is an invitation here that often gets missed- paradox. Hold the tension:
“Healing really sucks.”
And also,
“I am going to nourish my body through this.”

Sit with the discomfort without polishing it.
Feed a body that doesn’t feel hungry.
Honor the holy fatigue instead of reframing it as a cry for discipline.
Let healing and recovery be ugly, nonlinear, messy, and metabolically demanding.

Healing is not glamorous. It doesn’t earn applause. There is no roadmap, but there is an invitation that requires acknowledgement: healing is metabolically expensive, a process journey. Cells divide. Collagen forms. Immune systems mobilize. Tissue knits itself back together. None of this happens without nutrition.

Healing looks like eating anyway.
Resting anyway.
Trusting that repair requires resources, like:

• Warm broth that goes down easier than solid food.

• Protein smoothies sipped slowly between waves of nausea.

• Comforting grains, olive oil

• Toast with butter. My god. What a super-food.

• A grandma’s stew

• An auntie’s recipe

• Warm ginger tea

• Anti-nausea medication when needed

• A heating pad

• A follow-up appointment

• Permission to text a friend

• Unanswered emails

• Trashy TV

• A mirror you don’t negotiate with this week

• A partner to get you through, if you’re so lucky

• Calories

Healing can be a devotional in self- compassion, if we can acknowledge the hard messiness, refusing to turn pain into a productivity story, simply witnessing the suffering without bargaining with it.
Naming the nausea, the fatigue, the open-ended suck of the process. Letting “this is hard” be a complete sentence, allowing the body to be a body: inflamed, sutured, swollen, recalibrating, instead of demanding that it also be tamed, thin, admirable, disciplined, optimized, productive.

Why don’t we feel rage at societal norms for depriving us of the permission that we desperately need to be embodied accomplices in our healing?

Why don’t we feel angry for being prescribed a thin, ideal, asPiraTioNal body type that, even in our pain, we reach for as a shitty silver lining, “at least my body is smaller” while muscles waste away?

Why aren’t we rioting in the streets at this toxic, patriarchal undercurrent of guilt that allows us to so easily feel guilty for rest?

Why do we settle for hard work as an acceptable exchange for access to health? If we want life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a golden-ticket to ensuring our own wellbeing should never be tied to employment? How can we rest when we know there’s a race against a clock to return to society?

And lastly- why do we buy into the belief that health is something that is earned or deserved?

I feel a sincere, simmering rage at our society for giving us humans the cultural reflex to package pain as a silver lining, to reframe suffering into something productive or praiseworthy, to congratulate us for shrinking instead of supporting us in our humanness, in our divine rebuilding, reclaiming. Healing is a profound human exercise in lived-paradox. Healing asks us to patiently navigate uncharted territory through the dark, to trust repair awaits us before we bare witness to the evidence, to be present. There is no hack, no shortcut, and the only way out is through.

Reinforcing societal bodily norms siphons power from people in our sacred healing, promotes disembodiment when no purer invitation for embodiment exists along the spectrum of human experience. The paradox of healing, and all the accompanied grief, ebbs and flows, nourishment, starvation, pain, restoration, frustration, bodily transformations, comedic horror, shared isolation…it all belongs to the human experience. The power is in the body, the magic is in bearing witness to the body’s dynamic healing journey in its entirety, seeing it for what it is, instead of reaching for societal approval; finding comfort in discomfort, an honest testament to our human paradox.

In my work when I am privileged to bare witness to the human experience of healing, I feel the tension rising in my chest, my training to applaud people in their thinness, to affirm their silver lining, my own reflex for approval. I see it, and I wish it well, and instead, I invite people to find another way back home to themselves, usually through comforting calories.
Anything else would be dishonest.

—

If you’re healing, or if you’re simply bored, I invite you to explore some paradox with me. If you’re the journaling type, feel free to jot down some answers…

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A quick heads up: This essay explores body, food, and control in ways that might be triggering for anyone with, or suspecting they have, an eating disorder. Read mindfully, or sit this one out, and take care. Plenty of fun awaits- you’re not missing a thing.

In my job, people tell me about how their symptoms made them worried; how they didn’t know the questions to ask the people in the white coats, because they weren’t handed a nice-and-neat medical vocabulary text book at the dawn of their discomfort, and they’re used to pushing through pain anyway…
It’s anxiety.
They didn’t know how to describe their symptoms in detail, because they were raised without access to knowledge about their very own body parts- only pet names, never anatomy.
Still pushing through pain, never asked where it ached.
Is it dull? burning? sharp? stabbing? For how long?
So anxious about pain.
So capable of normalizing pain, until they can’t anymore.
So anxious about pain.

They tell me about how they felt crazy until they were handed a diagnosis- who knew the chronicity of bad news could bring such relief?
Language. Certainty.
Finally.

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Then they tell me about how their symptoms crescendoed and their mind followed suit, working overdrive to keep them safe.
Less sleep now.
In their quest for safety and predictability, they began to reach for control: food.

They tell me about how they miss foods.
How they don’t miss foods.
How they used to enjoy foods.
How they use food.
How their mom talked about food.
How they hate food.
How they love food.
How they love to hate food.
How food feels.
How they think food feels.
How they know food feels.
How food tastes.
How they wouldn’t eat if they could survive without food.

They tell me about how, in their quest for control, they looked up one day, and they saw themselves: small, frail.
Hot.
[Gasping for air while climbing stairs.]
Sexy.
[Out of breath. Hair falling out.]
I haven’t been this size since high school!
[Too tired to stand over a stove.]
I haven’t worn this jean size in a decade!

They tell me about how people assign praise:
You look great!
[Sprinting to the bathroom to be sick]
Did you cut your hair?
[Emerging from the bathroom like nothing happened]
When did you get so thin?
[Opting out of entire food groups in an effort to maintain a social life.]
Tell me what’s your secret.
[Cancelling plans with friends to stay home near a bathroom]
I’d give anything to look as skinny as you are.
[Going to bed in lieu of screening ingredient labels]

Holding a sad plate of cold canned tuna.
They would never have enjoyed cold canned tuna.
How did they arrive at the place of choosing cold canned tuna?

They look up and see:
their cold canned tuna safe food.
A small body.
A small room.
No social commitments.
No friends.
…No control.

I ask people to collect signs of life:
- climbing stairs without feeling winded
- a full night of sleep
- a whisper of an appetite
- a return of a menstrual cycle
- a memory of a meal
- less clumps of hair around the drain
- sitting at a table with friends
- asking, “Would you please pass the bread?”
- participation
- lingering awhile longer after the meal is over
- a moment lived outside the straightjacket of GI sensations
- a body a little more lived in, more safely inhabited

And on the best kind of days, I hold up a mirror and watch a person emerge: the small life they endured through control was never big enough for their hunger, their joy, their energy, or their body.

- Stacey ☼

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Thoughts I thought I think often:

1. “How long would I have survived on the Oregon trail?”

2. “How long would I survive in primitive times?”

If the Oregon Trail is in question, I would’ve been abandoned by family members, stranded on the side of the trail with debilitating cholera and/or dysentery, long before “Crohn’s disease” had a proper name. If my very same family members are headed West for a better life, my ass is in the dust. I’ve met those people- they’ve got places to be, and this GI tract has no respect for a human agenda.

And primitively, if the Paleolithic rumors are indeed true: that one had to survive off of beans, nuts, and the occasional raw mammal from a hunt, consider me long perished. Actually, just take me out back and put me out of my misery, because a Crohn’s riddled GI tract could never.

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…Side note: Is it dark to consider possible past versions of myself in another life to have a debilitating GI disease?
If I time travel to the future, I wholeheartedly believe I will have freed myself from this gastrointestinal nonsense through the power of culturally-considerate chakra adjustments and kind deeds. On the off-chance that a gastrointestinally-trauma-free-future is indeed a possibility, I do strive to be good to other people in this life, though I haven’t figured out the chakra adjustment thing- there’s too many white ladies charging high-dollar for that shit.
Surely some deity will take notice and put in a good word for Future Stacey though.

As far as this life is concerned, I have a question:
”How does one body hold this much trapped energy?

I feel it
all.the.time
- opening emails, heart racing.
- forgot a meeting? Consider me mid-panic attack by the time I hit that join button
- before substack? Every time a person sends me Wellness Influencer’s harmful nutrition advice via IG. Hoops are coming off; I’m ready to fight in the parking lot.
- waking up in the morning? I’ve been thinking all night long.
- cut-off in traffic? I’m approximately 14 4-lettered words deep by the time I make it to the next exit, talking a biggggg game from the comfort of my Rav4
- finding an email sitting in drafts that I was certain I sent weeks ago? queueing up an apology letter as we speak.

If I could run a marathon daily, I’d do it gladly, because wearing myself out physically is the only way I get a good, deep sleep at night; the only way to fully exorcise the demons and to rid myself of all the buzzing, low-hum energy that at any moment might crescendo into full-blown techno music in my brain that I can’t turn down.

I’m convinced that these action potentials, these low-hum energies in my body are the reasons why I contracted a lifelong GI disease, never mind the fact that I grew up swimming in a chemical-plant-lined Gulf shore, or survived entire childhood softball seasons off of sweet Red Dye 40 sno-cones in 100 degree heat.
mmm. alchemy.
I’m equally as persuaded that these action potentials are, if I’m not careful, prone to sparking and igniting into kinetic energy that allows me to have a purposeful, productive, adventurous life.

Both are true.

As far as more acute, future versions of myself in this present life are concerned, I hope to harness the IDGAF energy and wisdom of the older, wiser women of Wiser Than Me. I envision my future self adorned with tattoos, long hair, Birkenstocks, refusing to open an email on my peaceful back porch. Maybe I don’t even think about an email because I’m too busy playing in the dirt.
But if/when I do open an email as my future self, maybe it’s a shared recipe, or perhaps I’m looking to start a little drama, “If you don’t send this email along to 3 friends, you’ll have bad luck for 7 years!”
I see myself chuckling with a blunt in my hand as I hit send!,
[…but I don’t smoke, and I hate feeling high, so we’ll have to workshop effortless cool girl version Stacey of 2066.]

Maybe a calmer version of myself is simply barefoot with a dog outside somewhere.

But for now, for today…

How do I close the gap between between the compulsion to over-extend?
How do I turn down the, “OH SHIT THERE’S A BEAR” volume in my brain?
How do I tune the soundtrack of my mind to transition into its own chromatic modulation of live music/twinkly lights/ocean waves?
How do I calm down while opening my email?!

Some tech-related try-ons in an effort to calm TF down:

- not responding to emails when full-blown strangers ask me to expend my own precious energy for free…

- not beating myself up when I physically/mentally can’t respond to emails (LOL my website designer increased google traffic to my website by >1600% in the last year. I am drinking from a fire hydrant)
- turning off the AI summaries when I can figure it out. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. I CAN READ MY EMAILS. STOP READING MY EMAILS TO ME. STOP CHARGING ME EXTRA FOR THIS FEATURE FOR WHICH I DO NOT WANT.
- not even opening my instagram. It’s normal and very humane to feel weighed down by cruelty. It’s normal to cry from genocide, child starvation, and murder. I don’t want the human part of myself to change, and I noticed that instagram made me feel like I was being programmed to feel helpless and numb. I am not helpless; I am a force when I am not numb.

Non-tech strives toward a calmer, more regulated nervous system:

- going to parks every week
- learning new skills (skiing, silversmithing)! Being bad at something and troubleshooting through it makes me want to cry of frustration and simultaneously makes me love life so hard, all at once.
- cooking
- crafting with friends, with no vision of an outcome in mind aside from “fun”
- moving my body consistently
- resting without guilt, which I’m trying on today, under a heating pad (shoutout to Crohn’s, you ole Oregon Trail havoc-wreaker, you). Cue “The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel, which will serve as a brief intermission although not at all the main soundtrack to my life that I’m looking for. Right after “The Sound of Silence” You may also play “Soundtrack 2 My Life” by Kid Cudi.
Then play “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” by U2.

Anyway. I guess what I’m saying is that once I learn the trick to understanding that an email isn’t real life and I learn the art of calming TF down in my Birkenstocks and my long hair, I’ll let you know.

If you have nervous system hacks, please let me know.

- Stacey ☼

—

p.s. I really don’t want the email hacks though, if I’m being transparent.
p.p.s. Yes. I am in therapy.

When I was in my exciting, extremely glamorous, unpaid internship at a local news station in Oklahoma City to become a registered dietitian, a production assistant recruited my help for a date night recipe to make for a potential special someone that he was trying to impress. It was a cold January day, freezing rain outside, so we settled on ramen, with a jammy marinated egg in star anise and soy sauce, (Ajitsuke Tamago, yes I had to look this up), edamame, with some sort of matcha cookie concoction. What the man didn’t know was that I personally detest matcha in all its forms, and I vomited outside of my Mazda3 in the parking lot only 20 minutes prior to our culinary conversation. I was 2 days fresh off of IV steroids from a hospital discharge and going through withdrawals after a pharmaceutical administrative error hindered my access to step down to the oral steroid.
What a time.

But he said to me, “Damn girl. You know how to eat.”
And I swear to you that I have never been so proud to received external feedback from a stranger, before or since.

Some of my favorite memories from life so far include a few of my close, favorite people, all of us sharing a meal: picnics, oak trees glittered with twinkly lights on a patio, and hosting friends for fajitas- so many good memories for me live around food.

And yet.
I live in a body that’s experienced so many horrors around meals- the experience of digesting food with a digestive disease exists somewhere along the spectrum of satirical comedy to extreme cinematic horror.
#blessed.

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Luckily, I’ve lived to tell many tales, and thanks to 3 life-saving surgeries, many medications, and the help of a dietitian, a therapist or 2, and a lovely life partner…I found my way back to enjoying food. I’d also like to give a sincere shoutout to Samin Nosrat, Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Jon Favreu’s Chef, Stanley Tucci’s Taste: My Life Through Food, the New York Times Cooking app, and Mariah-Rose Marie’s Cook Like Your Ancestors: An Illustrative Guide to Intuitive Cooking (which I endorse wholeheartedly).
Life continues to reveal itself and greet me in unexpected ways: The most impactful question a dietitian ever asked me was, “How did it taste?” and I learned how to enjoy and explore food from watching other people enjoy and explore food, not from hyper-focusing on how to repair a relationship with food that was rightfully steamrolled by a life-altering GI disease that made me shit my brains out for years on end. After years of working with people who are entirely too hard on themselves for having a strenuous relationship with their bodies and/or food and concurrent GI diseases to boot, I can confirm that vulnerably striving for nourishment with (and at times even despite) the bullshit is a very individualized journey, and no two paths are the same.

Share The Gutless Instinct by Stacey Collins

I love cooking, especially for people I love, and I delight in having enough energy to stand over a stove, uninterrupted by symptoms- it’s pure magic to me. I have zero knife skills, and I can barely chop garlic. But I love cooking, and the more I get to play in the kitchen, the more fun I have, even if the outcome isn’t always desirable or replicable (because I tend to let the spirit lead me as opposed to adhering to strict measurements). Some of my favorite concoctions that I’ve made for friends are fajitas, this lasagna in particular, one of my go-to smoothies after a sleepover, tabbouleh, and a good summer Horiatiki salad.

This year as I sit in my very temporary housing, I can’t help but dream about weekend mountain picnics, hiking snacks, and back porch tapas nights in a little yard that isn’t even ours yet- I’m not even sure if it exists, but it’s fun to imagine. If you’re in Colorado this Summer, consider this an open invitation to join us, and in case you can’t, I thought I’d share some foods that I can’t wait to make this year:

1. Baghali polo (fava bean rice)- fortunate to help quite a few Iranian patients and one of my dearest friends is Iranian- I need to be able to speak their food language, and this sounds fantastic

2. 2 different chickpea recipes- both shared from friends on the same day, which feels serendipitous:

   • Ras el Hanout Chickpea and Spinach Stew (by Nargisse Benkabbou)- this sounds perfect for a post-ski cozy Saturday (how does Ras el Hanout appear in my list twice?! Is she having a moment?)

   • Taverna Salad (by Lidey Heuck)- for sunnier days

3. Fattoush Salad and Arayes- for a longtime Palestinian friend who is also a restauranteur. I hope to graduate to more advanced Palestinian cuisine, too.

4. This olive oil cake, although baking makes me nervous. Surely I can handle it if I stick to recipe without deviating. Surely…

5. Stone fruit, farro salad, burrata- can’t wait for Palisades peach season. This recipe also makes me crave a beat-up, old, wooden table for my back yard that I haven’t met yet.

6. Boef Bourguignon- Truthfully, I have zero desire to make this, but this dish has weirdly become a Superbowl Sunday tradition in our household (maybe the only day of the year I watch the NFL on purpose). Zack makes it for hours. I look forward to it.

7. Paella: 35 minutes (pfft…we’ll see about that), cast iron and “easy”?! Say less!

8. Fruit leather- I have a nephew on the way; I’d like for him to have beachside snacks when I visit him once he’s old enough for solids :)

9. Barley carrot warm salad- recently I’ve been experimenting with barley as a breakfast grain bowl base, and I’m loving it. Carrots are not my favorite, but I’ve been experimenting with them in different recipes, and I don’t hate them.

10. Pazole verde with green chile broth- green chile is one of my favorite flavors, and healing after my last surgery took years before I could tolerate green chile without pain (worth the effort of trying and trying again, though). I can finally tolerate green chile, and I want to make this in the worst way.

I never saw the production assistant again, but I hope his date was a success. I hope his suitor loved that he considered the weather, and that he wanted them to feel cozy.

May we all be so lucky.

- Stacey ☼

…

p.s.

What’s on your menu this year?

Did I learn to accept and explore this loneliness by copious journaling? Yes.
Did I learn to dissociate from this loneliness by pouring myself into work aggressively? Also yes.

And that brings me to where I’ve realized I am today: One foot (my life partner) is still in West Texas, and another is physically here in Colorado, where I’ve accepted a new job, inhabited a lovely studio apartment, explored, skied, and eased into friendship I’ve been longing to have for so long. Despite being extraordinarily fortunate to have a few close, life-long friends, we were often separated by time and space, and West Texas is certainly not a destination for reunions and gatherings.
But Colorado is.

And it’s spectacular how the body learns, the mind adapts. I am experiencing a prolonged period of health, where I do not feel mentally and physically handcuffed by my body, forced into introspection. The ease of health is taking time to learn, and time is indeed the ultimate healer. I no longer feel afraid of the next shoe that could drop at any moment, or what’s around the corner, because I’ve already been there, and I took the time to notice, name, take a warm seat in the cold, relentless darkness in anticipation for a ray of light that inevitably would find its way, and it did. And I’m still here. If dark corners reemerge, as they inevitably will in life, I know them well, and for me, fear lives in the unknown, not the familiar.

Physically, I am in the place where I’ve wanted to be, at the foothills of the mountains, since I got scolded by a teacher in 3rd grade for talking too loudly to a fellow classmate. Vividly I recall chatting about the “Welcome to Colorful Colorado” sign on Interstate 25. Along life’s mayhem, I almost let myself forget that I wanted to be here. The “forgetting” felt much more like the path of least resistance, and I’m grateful that I didn’t take it.

My mind remembers the compulsion, the ferocity with which I threw myself into work over these last few years, desperate for a chance to prove to myself that I was okay after grad schooling from the pale blue tiled bathroom floor, or working in a COVID ICU while immunosuppressed as my own surgical dates loomed overhead. My mind remembers over-extending, saying “YES!” with genuine enthusiasm to every little opportunity hurled into my direction, at a pace so fast that I recently reassured an intern was “pathological and certainly not inspiring.”

I’ve been dancing to the techno-hype beat of “I’M OKAY! I’M OKAY! I’M OKAY!” for years, and now that I am in a physical location of “okay” …
…I want to learn the art of exhale in the in-between, without the certainty of arrival, and it feels imperative that I do. I’d like to explore the art of being okay, rather than escaping to okay. I’d like to re-wire the muscle memory.

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Lately I’ve been learning that my body wants the compulsory hype music volume to be turned wayyy down. My nervous system is begging for a decrescendo, and maybe a different musical soundtrack altogether. I do not have to keep the pace of work, of self-induced obligation, that I have been keeping as a form of happy escape, and I can instead watch time pass in nature, which for me is vitally important. In moving to Colorado, I can confirm that I am indeed the type of person who needs to look at a damn leaf from time to time to feel okay. This is quiet resistance.

In learning the art of an exhale, my business (a virtual private practice) that I’ve spent years building and stewarding in isolation is changing before my eyes, before I’m ready, which feels unfamiliar, hopefully evolving into something that can also be good. With so much uncertainty and open-minded curiosity, I’m watching a dream evolve and take on new life. A lot of in-between lives here.

Often I reflect on a conversation I had with a dear friend who shares my (not all that common) surgical history. We were on a walk together on a Summer evening in Laguna Beach, California, ice cream cones in hand, live music and twinkly lights keeping the score to a Pacific ocean-wave soundtrack when she said, “we went through all that we did so we could have moments like this!”

“Moments like this”.
Like spending time uninterrupted by symptoms making crafts with friends, hand-addressing holiday cards (some of which still sit on my counter), drinking coffee on a walk, entering slow conversation, weekend trips deeper and deeper into the mountains that absorb the chaos from my mind.

So how can I change the soundtrack of my mind to less obligatory/productive-techno-hype-beat chaos? How can I let my mind find more live music/twinkly light/ocean waves (or in my present reality, wind-through trees) soundtrack?
Can that be the definition of finitude, or of “arriving”? Do I need it to be?
How many exhales can I possibly collect on my way to getting there?
And should I make a celebratory life milestone announcement when I’ve reached a mostly mentally stable headspace?
TBD.

- Stacey ☼

p.s.
What non-work-related forms of arrival are you celebrating or learning to embrace right now?
Where are places that give you the physical space to exhale?

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Dear Person Who Has/Loves/Knows Someone With Crohn’s Disease or UC:

When I started this letter 3 weeks ago, the USDA guidelines had just dropped their hottest new album, the food pyramid. As I currently sit here, listening to my deaf dog bark at pedestrians, coffee in hand, I now feel like, given the USDA’s blatant use of chat gpt for graphics and absent consultation from credentialed nutrition experts, I do not owe the USDA nutrition pyramid my critiques.

However…selfishly, cathartically, I would, like to address my fellow IBDers. If we were to have a conversation about what the USDA guidelines mean for you specifically, here’s what I’d say to you:

1. Do not mistake the government’s validation of food fears as a solution.

You, with a digestive disease, are a well-read individual! Historically, when have you ever looked to the government for nutrition advice on how to eat? Perhaps I am speaking out of turn here, but I do not recall running to the world wide web for USDA food advice in 2012 upon receiving my diagnosis, and despite the focus on real food (which I am all for, by the way), I do not feel the same in 2026.

Despite the government’s willingness to acknowledge valid food fears (citing the importance of disease prevention using food), we need solutions, not lip-service, and here are 2:

1. Americans (especially people who are genetically predisposed to GI conditions like Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis) indeed need FEWER hyper-processed supplements, tighter regulation around quality assurance programs for corporations that pump out and advertise to desperate, sick people, disclaimers on marketing campaigns, and accountability when harm is done. In my clinical practice many of the people I work with are working hard to reduce exposure to processed foods in their diet, with far too little hesitation before purchasing more supplements. Why is this?
It’s a societal red flag when I mention “fiber” and subsequently (often) need to clarify that I’m speaking specifically about fiber in real food, because many people assume that I’m referencing psyllium husk, metamucil, benfiber, sunfiber, prebiotic fiber…you get the point.
Thank you, marketing. Thank you, capitalism.

Did you know that there is no legal accountability for supplement companies to stop production once harm is documented? After harm has been documented, only then are supplement companies (maybe) summoned to appear before a court of law, likely to be fined (possibly not even resulting in shut-down of the company). Meanwhile they’re free to continue marketing and turning profits as usual.
Exercise HEAVY caution around popular hair/skin/nail supplements (a case report; a review) but body building and weight loss supplements are risky, too. Liver toxicity, injury and liver failure have been well documented. Before supplementing, be sure that you need the supplement (consult with your physician, request labs!), and look for supplements that are 3rd party tested for safety. (p.s. If you’re curious about how to screen supplements for safety, especially if you have Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, here’s a resource to help)

2. It’s pure comedy that a government built by corporations, financially responsible for subsidizing fruits and vegetables, would instead opt not to incentivize farmers to plant crops (aside from corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice), blame the individuals on their health choices, without regard to what’s available and accessible. If farmers were more financially incentivized and supported to plant and protect the harvest of a wide array of fruits and vegetables, this would ultimately lead to more widespread consumption of them, especially if the farm-fresh produce was as affordable as many of the demonized corn and soybean-based products.
Instead, the government is empowering individuals to assume “personal responsibility”, conveniently absolving themselves from systemic accountability to its citizens. Corporations, not individual people, are who the government ultimately answers to right now.

(speaking of people… consider referring a friend!)

Refer a friend

So, yes. Let’s “eat real food” and hold corporations in the trillion dollar wellness industry accountable for their hyper-processing, harm-perpetuating agenda in the name of profits over the safety and wellbeing of citizens.
Let’s make real food accessible, and let’s give farmers the incentives to grow and harvest real foods. Let’s give people the finances to access real foods; the time-freedom to cook real foods by paying people a living wage so they aren’t working multiple jobs; the health literacy to harness the skills to piece-meal real foods together.
Real food is systemic and political; not personal. For more on this, I highly recommend reading Shana Spence’s take and subscribing to her substack.

2.If you have IBD, your dietitian has probably been preaching the importance of protein to you already.

Prioritize protein at every meal. This is not a novel recommendation (since the 1940s!). However, the 1.2–1.6 grams (or ~0.54–0.73 grams per pound of body weight) of protein per kilogram of body weight is indeed a new, higher recommendation. Complete proteins, with all 9 essential amino acids are needed to build muscle (alongside physical activity), and animal-based sources of protein are indeed the path of least resistance to accomplish this, especially with the lack of health literacy in this nation. Increased widespread health literacy is a need (and this hot damn mess of a food pyramid is proof, but I digress).

People who are seeing dietitians for their IBD are surely already being educated around their protein needs that are elevated in active inflammation. Surely they’re being encouraged to decrease exposure to red (pork, lamb, beef) and processed meats, especially if they have disease in their colon, especially with ulcerative colitis.

More protein is needed, yes, especially in active disease flares to support the body in healing, which can be challenging (think smoothies, Greek yogurt, blenderized soups, and textures mashable against the roof of your mouth during these moments).
A focus on plant proteins, especially when replacing animal proteins, is not a bad idea for microbiome health. I hear you; IBD makes this feel impossible. But for the sake of your health, it’s not worth subscribing to this fear forever, and if you feel stuck I hope you have a solid IBD-experienced RD in your corner to help you though.
[disclaimer: do not increase fiber (especially from fruits and vegetables) with active fistulas or strictures without the support and guidance from an IBD-experienced dietitian]

3.The shoutout to gut-health was pure comedy

Sandwiched between the complete lack of delineating plant from animal protein, holding both as equally supreme (they are not, especially with IBD), and the removal of the clear alcohol recommendation serving size limit, (a known carcinogen in every form), I can’t help but wonder if the gut-health shout-out was a nod and a wink to colorectal surgeons everywhere, because they’re going to be in business. Please, I beg, limit alcohol; avoid it in IBD flares, and do not prioritize a protein increase without also prioritizing plants (even if they’re blenderized, or cooked down to be fork-tender! Still better than no plants at all!). A protein increase without including adequate hydration and fiber will increase constipation. If you’re spending some time in prayer in the bathroom straining and sweating, perhaps it’s time to put that protein-enhanced chip/coffee/drink/popcorn on pause- it is highly processed anyway.

For the sake of my patients with GI diseases, I want to scream from the rooftops about how we do not face a protein deficit in this country. Fiber is an essential macronutrient of concern, and you can have it both ways: building muscle with plant sources of proteins and fueling your microbiome, as long as you’re savvy enough to combine plant sources that have complementary amino acid profiles to make them complete (this is not rocket science). You may also prioritize complete plant sources of protein as your GI tract allows: tofu, amaranth, buckwheat, hemp chia, tempeh, edamame, soy, and quinoa, a pseudograin- all capable of supporting muscle and microbiome health alike.

Why?

4.Because fiber is THE macronutrient to help prevent chronic disease.

1. Fiber intake has been associated with sustained IBD remission time, decreased relapses in IBD; reducing the risk for other chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancers, and type 2 diabetes.

2. The European Food Safety Authority and the World Health Organization recommended 25 g as the sufficient fiber consumption in adult. Numerous health guidelines from many nations call for people to increase their fiber intake, yet the prevalence of widespread dietary fiber deficiency persists, highlighting the need for the intensification of educational efforts that address the health advantages and sources of dietary fiber, as well as methods for its inclusion in daily meals (Eat fiber at every meal!). If we truly wanted problem-solve to chronic disease in this nation from a nutritional lens, strategies to enhance the accessibility and literacy of including fiber FOODs (for the love, not more hyper-processed supplements) need to be prioritized.
   

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   5.Lastly, if you can’t tolerate dairy, it’s okay.

   The 3 servings of full-fat dairy recommendation is…excessive. Many health-promoting diet patterns have 1 or fewer servings of dairy, but when dairy has been added to this plant-forward eating pattern, the addition has shown to have some heart-health benefits. If you have IBD and you feel certain that you can’t tolerate dairy at all, you just might find that you can tolerate low-lactose dairy (examples include Greek yogurt, when the lactose has been fermented out for >24 hours, parmesan or cheddar cheeses as garnish), which may be worth exploring considering yogurt’s protective role (with fruit!) in pouchitis health (for people with a j-pouch) as well as for yogurt’s associations with decreased colorectal cancer risk.

   Key takeaways:

   1. validation of fears doesn’t equal a solution, but it does equal marketing. Solutions could look like:

      • improving access to help people eat real food (government needs to be held accountable for stopping their own financial benefit from corporate kick-backs)

      • increased quality assurance/control and consumer safety accountability for companies making supplements

      • increased oversight in marketing: companies with active lawsuits for causing harm in human health should not be allowed to run ads across all media platforms (an American girl can dream)

   2. Shoutout to Gut-Health!

      1. LOL

         • I have a conspiracy theory for this oddly-placed shout-out, which I’m sharing here.

   3. If we want to decrease risk of IBD progression with food, or decrease the risk of other diseases for general Americans:

      • we need better health literacy. For the sake of today’s newsletter, I’ll offer some solutions here

      • we need to fix the fiber deficit, especially in tandem with a recommendation for protein increase (or else, you’ll be writing a google review for a colorectal surgeon)

   Stay curious. Stay well-read, and don’t ever change that about yourselves, fellow IBD friends. But I beg, check those credentials and don’t you dare let those people using fear to sell dogmas or to further agendas access any of your precious energy.

   I’m opening up the comments for discussion for this one- fellow IBDers/RDs/Friends- would love to hear your thoughts…share away!

   Thank you for reading.