There are things I expected from getting older. Grey hair. Wrinkles. A certain amount of creaking when I stand up. Bladder leakage. The gradual realization that getting down onto the floor has become a decision requiring both strategic planning and an exit strategy.

I did not expect to lose my ability to type.

This is particularly insulting because I used to be a medical transcriptionist and for the past decade and a half, an author. Typing was not merely something I knew how to do. Typing was something my fingers knew how to do without consulting me. I could listen to an exhausted, slurring doctor with a strong accent who is talking ninety miles an hour while eating dictate a complicated History & Physical report and watch a documentary on Tudor hygiene at the same time.

There was a time when I could listen to an exhausted, slurring, strongly accented doctor who is talking ninety miles an hour and eating while dictating a laparoscopic cholecystectomy at the same time I watch a documentary on Tudor hygiene and mentally plan dinner. My fingers would simply take care of business.

Those fingers have apparently retired.

Now I transpose letters. I hit the letter beside the letter I intended. Sometimes I type an entirely different word from the one currently occupying my brain. I routinely make at least one mistake in every sentence, and when I text from my phone, things become sufficiently dire that anyone receiving the message might reasonably wonder whether they should reply or call emergency services.

This is especially aggravating because I KNOW HOW TO TYPE.

Or at least I have documentation suggesting that I once did.

Perhaps my brain’s hard drive is simply full.

After 65 years, I have stored an unreasonable amount of crap in there.

Six children. Nearly 30 years of marriage. Decades of work. A 17-year marriage before the current-30 year marriage. Books I’ve written. Books I’ve read. Books I thought about writing. Books I thought about reading. Rituals. Recipes. Clients. Deadlines. Phone numbers that haven’t been valid since 1987 (502-275-4004). Commercial jingles from childhood. The complete lyrics to songs I don’t even like. The combination to my high school locker. The location of things my husband can’t find. Several metric tons of family history.

Somewhere in there is probably the name of the woman who sat beside me in seventh-grade English (The late Sandra Faye Cardwell nee: Martin).

Meanwhile, I cannot remember why I opened the refrigerator.

This seems like poor allocation of resources. To be fair, I have external (literal) hard drives that are completely full but have seventeen copies of each of the same 17,462 photos and an unreasonable amount of computer code on .txt files – code that any operating system after Windows XP struggles to interpret.

Wow. That hard drive metaphor is getting downright eerie in its relevance.

The Six-Word Hostage Situation

I particularly resent cognitive tests.

You know the kind.

Someone gives you several words to remember.

Apple. Chair. Penny. Horse. Blue. Church.

Fine.

Apple chair penny horse blue church.

Visualize a horse named Penny eating an apple while sitting on a chair outside a blue church.

Got it.

Then they start talking to you.

Perhaps they ask what year it is. Then there’s a little arithmetic. Then somebody wants you to draw something. At some point I will inevitably begin thinking about something completely unrelated.

Now we’ve arrived at whether monkeys are sentient.

Of course monkeys are sentient.

Wait. Are monkeys sentient? Surely monkeys know they’re monkeys. Does a monkey contemplate monkeyhood? Does a monkey ever sit in a tree thinking, I have really made some questionable life choices?

Now I’m thinking about Planet of the Apes.

Charlton Heston is on the beach. Sentient monkeys did not go well for him.

There is the Statue of Liberty.

YOU MANIACS!

And suddenly somebody from far away says:

“Can you tell me those six words I asked you to remember?”

Apple.

Horse.

...

Charlton Heston?

Apparently, he was not on the list.

I Just Told Myself That

The stranger part isn’t forgetting something from 1974.

That seems reasonable. There was a lot happening in 1974.

What unsettles me occasionally is forgetting something from five minutes ago when very little was going on.

I can be sitting at my desk and think, When I finish this paragraph, I need to go put the laundry in the dryer.

Finish the paragraph.

Save the document.

Stand up.

Why am I standing?

I apparently sent myself an instruction and then immediately deleted the email.

This has resulted in essential adaptations.

Timers are no longer merely for cooking. They are external memory.

My phone is external memory.

My calendar is external memory.

Notes and lists are external memory.

I delegate the bandwidth to pixels and battery power and dried tree pulp.

If something absolutely must happen later, I no longer trust Future Katrina to remember it simply because Present Katrina explained the situation in detail to her.

Present Katrina means well.

Future Katrina has no idea what that woman was talking about.

And Yet, There Is a Peculiar Contradiction

Because while I sometimes cannot remember what I walked into the kitchen to retrieve, I know things now that I couldn’t possibly have known at 25 or 45.

I recognize patterns faster.

I understand people better.

I have a deeper capacity for compassion while simultaneously having better discernment for who gets that compassion.

I know which problems deserve my attention and which ones can go frolic in traffic without me.

I have decades of accumulated knowledge about my work, my family, magic, relationships, survival, grief, love, and the thousand strange little systems that make up a life.

Perhaps memory and wisdom aren’t the same thing.

That feels important.

There is a cultural assumption that a good brain is a brain that retrieves information quickly. Name the six objects. Remember the appointment. Recall the actor. Find the noun. Finish the sentence without stopping halfway through because the word colander has temporarily ceased to exist.

Those abilities matter.

But they aren’t the whole mind.

My retrieval system may occasionally be wandering around the warehouse yelling, “I KNOW IT’S IN HERE SOMEWHERE,” but the warehouse itself is enormous.

Sixty-five years enormous. I could easily get lost in the labyrinthine maze of mental storage bins and often do.

Still, I Am Making Some Adjustments

I am increasingly unwilling to depend upon memory for anything involving fire.

That’s not wisdom. That’s basic risk management.

If the oven is on, there needs to be a timer, an alarm, a note, or some other system that does not depend upon me spontaneously remembering the existence of the oven while I’m writing an article about sentient monkeys.

I write things down.

I put appointments immediately into the calendar.

I set reminders.

I leave myself notes.

And when I notice something changing significantly, I mention it to the person providing my medical care rather than asking Facebook whether Carol from Des Moines thinks I have dementia.

There is a middle ground between pretending nothing changes as we age and assuming every misplaced noun is the opening scene of Still Alice.

I intend to live there.

The Goddess Has Expanded Her Storage Requirements

Maybe my hard drive isn’t actually full.

Maybe after almost 65 years, the directory is simply gi-normous.

The files are still there. Search just takes longer.

Occasionally something has been saved under an inexplicable filename.

Sometimes the spinning wheel appears and stays there for longer than I would like.

Sometimes I go looking for the name of that actress who was in that thing with the guy and she drove her car over Talbot Huddleston on One Life to Live and my brain informs me that the requested information will be available sometime between Thursday afternoon and three o’clock tomorrow morning.

And sure enough, at 3:07 AM, the delivery arrives as promised: JUDITH LIGHT.

Thank you, brain. Thank you. Very helpful. The conversation where that information would have made me look brilliant is now many hours in the rearview mirror and this information is now about as useful as my childhood phone number.

So, I get up to go pee, because of course, and when I snuggle back into my bed to sleep, I am wide awake trying to remember the name of the actor who played Marco Dane.

That information is arriving by FedEx. You know. When you absolutely need it the day after they said it would be there.

It reminds me of a poem I read several years ago:

“Backward, oh backward, time turn in your flight!
I just thought of the comeback I needed last night.”

I don’t want to romanticize cognitive decline. There are changes in memory that deserve attention, and I intend to pay attention to mine.

But I also don’t want to spend the next decades treating every ordinary glitch as evidence that I am disappearing.

I’m still very much here.

I’m just running an older operating system with an absolutely preposterous number of mostly unnecessary files.

The typing isn’t what it used to be.

The short-term memory occasionally wanders off on random tangents without leaving a forwarding address.

Oh look. A delivery just arrived and it is addressed to me: Gerald Anthony played Marco Dane.

I have to write down more things than I once did. As a Virgo, I have always been a list person. Now, it is essential.

But somewhere inside this overcrowded Goddess hard drive are six children, a husband, several lifetimes of work, an entire spiritual tradition, thousands of stories, more than a few disasters, an astonishing amount of survival, and enough useless trivia to cripple a server farm.

Gerald Anthony was married in real life to Bryne Thayer who played Jenny Wolek, who was sister to Judith Light’s character, Karen Wolek, but back when Jenny was a nun, she was played by Katherine Glass. Jenny died in an avalanche in Switzerland in 1997 and One Life to Live has been off the air since 2012, but that info still lives rent free in my head.

So if you give me six words to remember, understand that you’re asking quite a lot.

I’ll give you two.

And possibly Charlton Heston and all the words to “I Love Trash” by Oscar the Grouch.

That’s my final offer.

As an aside, I offer a sincere and heartfelt thanks to those stalwart souls out there who attempt to wade through the stream-of-consciousness shit I write here. I see you. I appreciate you. I just might not remember your name until several hours later when the world is asleep.

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There is a particular photograph that appears in nearly every weight-loss story. You know the one: the Before Picture.

The person stands there looking vaguely miserable, usually wearing something unflattering, possibly holding up a newspaper so we know nobody has tampered with the evidence. The lighting is terrible. The posture is worse. Apparently, nobody who weighs more than the recommended amount is permitted to smile.

Then comes the After Picture. Better clothes, better lighting, better hair, better posture, possibly a spray tan, and definitely a smile. Ta-da! A worthwhile human being has emerged!

I have a problem with this whole arrangement.

I have lost weight, –not all the weight by a long shot, but a good chunk of weight– and I truly liked the woman in the Before picture. She was smart, funny, loving, stalwart, occasionally fierce, and although she screwed up a lot, she always tried to do the right thing.

This has made the whole process considerably more complicated.

I Already Did the Other Thing

I’ve been overweight for roughly 35 years. During those decades, I did what women of my generation were trained to do when our bodies exceeded their assigned boundaries: I tried to fix it.

I’ve dieted, counted things, eliminated things, and eaten things that bore only a theoretical relationship to food. I’ve been hungry in the name of becoming smaller. I’ve succeeded temporarily and then watched my body claw its way back toward whatever weight it apparently believed would protect us from an approaching famine.

Eventually, I stopped. Not because I suddenly decided there were no health considerations associated with weight, and not because I decided mobility didn’t matter or that every size creates exactly the same physical experience. I stopped because I could no longer justify postponing my life until my body became acceptable.

This was the body I had, so I began living in it. Really living in it.

I bought clothes for the body I actually possessed instead of the hypothetical smaller one who was apparently always arriving next spring. I stopped treating photographs of myself as evidence from a crime scene and stopped believing every room contained a silent jury evaluating the width of my ass. Somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of myself as a woman who had failed to become thin.

I became a fat woman. A Goddess, even. Venus of Willendorf and I had reached an understanding.

Then I started losing weight.

Well, shit.

Enter Ozempic, Stage Left

I started taking Ozempic, and for a while, it did something rather astonishing: it quieted things.

Food didn’t disappear from my life. I still love food, and I still enjoy going out to dinner. I have absolutely no intention of spending the remainder of my existence pretending that steamed broccoli produces the same emotional response as something involving butter and a competent chef.

But the volume came down. The cravings became less insistent. Hunger stopped behaving like someone pounding on the front door because the house was on fire.

Over about seven months, I lost 22 pounds… and so far, I’ve kept it off.

Then my body apparently convened a meeting and announced, “That’s quite enough of THAT.”

The weight loss slowed considerably. Now, I’m at 24 pounds lost. This is where the traditional narrative says I should become more disciplined, try harder, exercise more, tighten up my diet, and break through the plateau.

I am 65 years old with a knee that has been healing since December. I’m not storming Normandy.

My body and I are negotiating.

The Awkward Part

Here’s where things become complicated in a way I don’t hear discussed very often: some things are better when I weigh less.

There. I said it.

The Fat Positivity Police may arrive shortly. I’ll put on coffee.

It is easier on my injured knee to carry less weight. Some movements are easier. Clothing fits differently. I breathe better at night. My arms no longer go numb if I am positioned poorly. There are practical realities associated with inhabiting a smaller body in a world overwhelmingly designed for smaller bodies.

I don’t think acknowledging those things requires me to declare war on fat people, nor does it require me to retroactively hate myself. That’s the part our cultural conversation about weight seems incapable of holding.

We’re offered two teams. Team One says fat is terrible, weight loss is always wonderful, and every lost pound deserves a parade. Team Two sometimes seems to require us to pretend body size can never affect anything whatsoever because admitting otherwise might validate the cruelty directed at fat people.

I don’t particularly want to join either team. I’m 65. I’m tired. Do the teams have snacks?

I’d rather tell the truth. My body deserves respect at 281 pounds, at 245 pounds, at 199 pounds, or even if I gain every ounce back. Respect is not the prize waiting at the end of weight loss.

That’s the distinction that matters to me.

Please Do Not Rewrite My History

This is where the Before Picture bothers me, because the entire concept asks us to reinterpret the person who came before.

Look at her. Wasn’t she unfortunate? Wasn’t she unhappy? Didn’t she need rescuing?

Except I lived in that body.

I loved people, raised children, wrote books, practiced magic, led festivals, lectured in standing-room-only halls, and built businesses in that body. I laughed in it and grieved in it. I had sex in it and ate spectacular meals in it. I worked, traveled, taught, argued, created, worried, celebrated, screwed things up, fixed some of them, and generally participated in the messy business of being alive in it.

That woman wasn’t waiting to become me. She was me.

She doesn’t get demoted to photographic evidence just because my pants are getting looser.

There Is No After

Perhaps this is one of the advantages of getting older. I’ve lived in enough versions of my body to know none of them was permanent.

I’ve been younger, thinner, heavier, pregnant, injured, healing, healthy and decidedly less so. Parts have recovered while other parts have deteriorated. My eyesight changed enough that I graduated to progressive lenses. My hearing isn’t what it once was. My knee currently has a strongly worded opinion about stairs.

Every version felt permanent while I was living in it, and none was.

So what exactly would an After Picture show? After dieting? After menopause? After Ozempic? After the knee heals? After I lose another twenty pounds? After I gain ten back? After I turn 70?

After I die?

Actually, let’s skip that last photo. The lighting will be terrible.

There is no finished version of a living body. That’s what living means.

The Goddess Is Allowed to Change

I think this is the piece I was missing when I first started thinking about body acceptance. I thought acceptance meant arriving somewhere: This is my body. I accept it. Done.

But perhaps acceptance isn’t a destination. Maybe it’s a relationship, and relationships have to accommodate change.

I don’t have to cling to fatness to prove I wasn’t lying when I said I loved my fat body, and I don’t have to pursue thinness to prove I care about my health. I don’t have to apologize for losing weight or apologize if I stop losing it. I don’t have to pretend there aren’t advantages to becoming smaller, and I certainly don’t have to turn the woman I used to be into a cautionary tale so the woman I am now can feel victorious.

Maybe Ozempic will continue helping me lose weight. Maybe I’ll plateau here. Maybe I’ll gain some of it back. Maybe my body has other plans entirely. At this point, I’ve known her long enough to understand that she rarely consults me before implementing policy.

Based on the evidence, I am not the one in charge here. I did all the right things, made all the right food and exercise choices, and I got minimal results. I just got cranky as all hell. When I half-ass tried, I dropped the weight of a substantial toddler.

What I do know is that I am not standing at one end of a transformation waiting for the glamorous reveal. There is no reveal. There is Wednesday morning, articles to write, spells to cast, people to love, dinner to enjoy, a knee to accommodate, a life to inhabit, and a body that has carried me through every single thing that has happened so far.

Whatever size she becomes, she doesn’t need to earn her place in the photograph.

Because I am not a Before picture. I’m not an After picture, either.

I am the whole damned story.

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I want to go on record as saying, “This Seems Poorly Supervised.”

I am about to turn 65.

I know this because the United States government has been sending me mail.

Lots of mail. And AARP started blowing me up ten years ago.

Apparently, there is a point in every American life when the federal government, insurance companies, healthcare providers, and approximately four thousand organizations I have never heard of simultaneously become extremely concerned about whether I understand Medicare.

For most of my life, birthdays arrived with cake.

Sixty-five arrives with a three-ring binder.

And while I understand that 65 is really just another number, culturally it is one of those numbers that comes with baggage.

At 16, you can drive.

At 18, you can vote.

At 21, you can legally drink.

At 65, apparently, someone hands you the ceremonial staff of elderhood and trusts you not to poke anybody with it.

This seems poorly considered.

When Did I Become the Older Person?

I have six adult children. That should have been my first clue.

They range from their late twenties to their late forties, which means some of my children are now the age I still vaguely imagine myself to be.

This creates occasional glitches in the Matrix.

Someone will mention a 45-year-old woman and I will automatically picture someone roughly my age.

Then I remember. No. She is roughly the age of my children.

Rude.

My grandson is 22 and is expecting his first child later this year, which will make me a great-grandmother. A GREAT-grandmother. (as opposed to just a “good” grandmother)

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a great-grandmother. It’s a beautiful thing. I just feel there should have been some kind of proficiency exam first.

Shouldn’t great-grandmothers know how to can peaches?

Shouldn’t I own an apron that has been in the family since the Hoover administration? Mine only date back to Nixon.

Shouldn’t I have a secret pie crust recipe that I refuse to write down?

Instead, I have progressive lenses, a laptop, a small traumatized dog, several businesses, and an alarming number of opinions.

Apparently, this qualifies, based on the evidence.

I Thought Elders Knew Things

When I was young, older people seemed so incredibly established and that was back whne I thought people in their forties were “older people.”

They knew how insurance worked.

They understood mortgages.

They knew what to do when the toilet made that noise.

They had recipes they didn’t need to look up.

They could identify trees.

They owned things called “good scissors” that you were absolutely forbidden to touch.

Most importantly, they seemed to understand life.

I assumed this happened automatically.

You just kept having birthdays and eventually the Great Wisdom Download occurred.

Perhaps while you were sleeping.

One morning you’d wake up, stretch, and suddenly understand escrow, grief, plumbing, human nature, and exactly how much potato salad was required for seventeen people.

I’m still waiting.

I do know more than I did at 25. Considerably more.

I know which battles are worth fighting and which deserve a pleasant nod followed by doing whatever I intended to do in the first place.

I know that very few disasters are improved by an immediate response.

I know that sometimes people need advice and some just need a sandwich.

I know that love and compatibility aren’t the same thing.

I know that adult children remain your children while simultaneously becoming people whose lives belong entirely to them.

I know grief doesn’t really end. It changes address.

I know you can lose almost everything you own and still eventually build another ordinary Tuesday.

That’s something.

But I also just spent ten minutes recently looking for something that was, in fact, in my hand.

So let’s maintain perspective.

The Elders Are Just People Who Got Here First

Perhaps that is the revelation.

The elders I admired when I was young weren’t finished either.

I just couldn’t see it.

My parents died young. My mother was only 60. My father was 51.

I am already older than either of them ever got the privilege to be.

There is something profoundly strange about crossing that line.

As children, our parents establish the outer boundary of age. They are always ahead of us, standing farther down the road.

Until someday they aren’t.

You keep walking. And eventually you reach places they never did.

There isn’t a parent farther ahead who can tell you what 65 feels like.

There is just you.

That doesn’t make me sad every day.

But it does make 65 feel less like an ordinary birthday and more like entering unexplored territory.

I am becoming the person farther down the road.

Good Goddess.

Please Stop Calling Me “Young Lady”

There is, of course, another peculiar part of becoming an older woman.

Everyone suddenly becomes terrified of acknowledging that you’re an older woman.

“You’re not old!”

“You don’t look 65!”

“Sixty-five is the new 45!”

And the especially irritating:

“Hello there, young lady!”

If I roll my eyes any harder, I will need yet another eye exam.

I have been menstruating, raising children, paying taxes, working, grieving, loving, rebuilding, and accumulating lower-back opinions for longer than some nations have existed. I have cookie sheets older than the people who say this to me.

You do not have to pretend I’m 32 to compliment me.

And while we’re here, don’t tell me I’m “65 years young.”

I’m not.

I’m 65 years old. It took me 65 years to get this old, and I refuse to have my accomplishment linguistically repossessed because we’ve collectively decided that “old” is a dirty word.

Nobody tells a six-year-old she’s “six years young.”

Nobody congratulates a 30-year-old on being “30 years young.”

We only start performing these grammatical gymnastics when the actual number becomes something we’re apparently supposed to be embarrassed about.

I’m not embarrassed. I have no desire to be 32. Thirty-two-year-old me was doing the best she could, but she was exhausted.

She worried about things I wouldn’t give ten minutes to now.

She had more stamina, certainly.

She also had considerably less sense.

I’ll keep the trade.

Being old isn’t an insult unless we agree that it is.

I’m fat, too.

We’ve covered this.

I refuse to spend the remaining portion of my life turning perfectly accurate adjectives into personal attacks.

Fat.

Old.

Grey-haired.

Grandmother.

Soon-to-be great-grandmother.

None of those words erase woman.

None erase Katrina.

And none erase Goddess.

They are simply additional chapters.

Maybe Wisdom Isn’t Knowing Everything

I used to think wisdom meant answers.

Now I suspect wisdom has considerably more to do with questions.

At 25, I could be astonishingly certain about things I understood very poorly.

At nearly 65, I’m much more comfortable saying:

I don’t know.

Let’s see.

Maybe.

I was wrong.

Tell me more.

That isn’t the kind of wisdom they put on statues.

There should probably be a statue of an older woman shrugging and saying, “Hell if I know, but let’s figure it out.”

I’d visit her.

Maybe an elder isn’t the person with all the answers.

Maybe an elder is simply someone who has survived enough wrong answers to recognize that certainty is overrated.

Someone who knows that life changes.

Bodies change.

Marriages change.

Children change.

Plans change.

Fortunes change.

Homes disappear.

New homes rise.

People leave.

People arrive.

And somehow you keep making dinner.

There may be more wisdom in that than I once realized.

And evidently, all you need to do to get your hands on the elder stick is not die.

I Accept the Position

So yes.

Apparently, I am becoming an elder.

I would like the record to show that I did not apply for this position and remain suspicious of the hiring process.

Nevertheless, I accept.

I will try to use my powers responsibly.

I will tell younger women the things I wish someone had told me, regardless of whether or not they want to hear it.

I will remind them that almost nobody knows what they’re doing as much as it appears they do.

I will tell them that bodies are allowed to change.

That leaving can be brave and staying can be brave.

That starting over does not have an expiration date.

That there are worse things than being fat.

There are worse things than being old.

There are far worse things than being boring.

I will tell them that love sometimes looks like romance and sometimes looks like sleeping peacefully on opposite sides of the house.

I will tell them that surviving something terrible does not obligate you to become inspirational about it. Sometimes you just survive.

I will tell them to use the good towels.

Order dessert when they want dessert.

Take the picture even when they don’t like how they look.

And never, ever save the expensive candle for some sufficiently important occasion.

You are the occasion.

Maybe that’s what elders are actually for.

Not to stand at the end of the road shouting instructions back at everyone else.

Just to stand a little farther along it, holding up a lantern.

Not saying, “I know the way.”

But: “I’ve made it this far. There’s room up here. Come on.”

I’ll be 65 soon.

I don’t know everything.

I haven’t figured it all out.

I am still changing, still learning, still screwing things up, still laughing, still working, still loving, still becoming.

But I’ve been around long enough to know a few things worth passing along.

So perhaps I am ready after all.

Just please don’t ask me about Medicare.

I’m still reading the binder.

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Why Starting Over Isn’t Just for Young People

Today is the New Moon.

Technically, this means the Moon is still up there doing perfectly respectable Moon things, but we can’t see the illuminated part from where we’re standing.

I appreciate this. I’m right there for it.

There are days when I, too, am doing perfectly respectable things that are not immediately apparent to the casual observer. Likewise, there are days when I look like I’m kicking up a lot of dust, but I’m not doing shit.

I am so close to 65 that I can smell the Medicare Advantage from here. At nearly 65, I have developed considerable sympathy for celestial bodies that prefer not to explain themselves.

The New Moon traditionally carries all kinds of associations with beginnings, intentions, fresh starts, planting seeds, and deciding what we want to grow during the next cycle.

All quite lovely.

But lately I’ve been thinking about our cultural ownership of beginnings.

Apparently, they belong to young people. Grandma Moses took up painting in her last 70s and that is notable why? Because people don’t imagine old folks starting anything new. We are supposed to just sit around and be old.

Beginnings Have a Dress Code

When you’re young, everyone expects you to begin things.

You begin school. You begin careers. You begin relationships. You begin families. You buy your first car and your first house and your first truly terrible sofa.

You practically trip over beginnings.

People ask what you’re going to do next. They encourage you to dream big.

You are told that your whole life is ahead of you, which is both inspiring and, in retrospect, an absolutely horrifying amount of pressure to put on someone whose frontal lobe may not even be fully cooked yet.

Then, somewhere along the way, the language changes. People stop asking what you’re going to become. They start asking what you’ve done.

The future quietly becomes smaller in the grammar.

At nearly 65, I find this deeply suspicious. Because I am not finished. Not even remotely.

I Have Not Arrived

There seems to be an assumption that by this age, a person has become whatever she’s going to be.

Ta-da! Final form! Please collect your complimentary pill organizer on the way out.

Except I’m still changing constantly.

My body certainly didn’t get the memo about achieving final form.

I have progressive lenses now because apparently my eyes decided seeing at only one distance at a time was inefficient.

My knee has spent most of this year renegotiating the terms of our relationship.

My hearing isn’t what it once was.

My body isn’t what it once was.

My family isn’t what it once was.

My work isn’t what it once was.

I am not what I once was.

And contrary to everything we’ve been taught to believe about aging, that isn’t necessarily a tragedy.

Some of it is loss. Some of it is inconvenient as hell. Some of it requires copays.

But some of it is simply new.

The Audacity of a Future

I think one of the strangest things about getting older is realizing how much future you may still have while simultaneously becoming increasingly aware that the supply is not unlimited.

When I was 25, twenty years was practically geological time.

At 65, twenty years is...

Well.

Let’s not ruin a perfectly good New Moon.

The point is that time feels different now. And oddly enough, that makes beginnings feel more precious rather than less possible.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life exclusively maintaining what I’ve already built.

I want to make things I haven’t made yet.

I want to write things I haven’t written yet.

I want to learn things I don’t know.

I want to change my mind. I want to discover that something I’ve believed for thirty years was complete horseshit and gleefully throw it overboard.

I want to become someone my 50-year-old self couldn’t have predicted.

Maybe even someone my 64-year-old self can’t predict.

That sounds like living to me.

Starting Over Is Not Starting From Scratch

This may be the greatest advantage older women have when we begin something new.

We’re never actually starting from nothing. I don’t approach a blank page empty-handed. I arrive carrying decades.

Every stupid decision.

Every spectacular decision.

Every person I’ve loved.

Every person I’ve lost.

Every mistake I swore I would never make again and then made again with minor variations.

Every success.

Every humiliation.

Every scar.

Every recipe.

Every book.

Every child.

Every goodbye.

Every time life burned everything to the ground (once, literally) and I discovered that, inconveniently, I was still alive afterward.

That is not baggage. That’s inventory.

When a young woman begins again, she brings possibility.

When an older woman begins again, she brings possibility and receipts.

There is power in that.

The Moon Doesn’t Panic About It

Maybe that’s what I like about the New Moon.

She doesn’t make a production out of beginning again.

She disappears.

She goes dark.

She doesn’t issue a press release.

She doesn’t announce: NEW MOON, NEW ME!

(Thank Goddess.)

She simply begins another cycle.

Quietly.

Without apologizing for the previous one.

Without pretending the last cycle didn’t happen.

Without needing to become an entirely different Moon.

There’s something profoundly comforting about that.

Because maybe a new beginning doesn’t require becoming a new person.

Maybe I don’t need a New Katrina.

Frankly, I’ve invested a lot in this one.

Maybe I only need to allow this Katrina to keep becoming.

There Are Still Blank Pages

I don’t know exactly what comes next. That bothered me enormously when I was younger.

I thought adulthood meant eventually knowing.

Knowing who you were.

Knowing what you were doing.

Knowing how life worked.

Knowing where everything was headed.

This may be one of adulthood’s longest-running practical jokes.

I know more now than I used to but I am quite certain I forgot enough to even it out.

I also know enough now to understand how much I don’t know. And somehow, that’s become less frightening.

There are still blank pages.

There are still things I haven’t tried.

There are still places inside myself I haven’t visited.

There are still opinions I haven’t changed.

There are still people I haven’t met.

There are still sentences I haven’t written.

There are still mornings I haven’t awakened into.

And yes, there are fewer of them than there were when I was twenty.

That doesn’t make them less valuable. It makes them considerably more so.

Tonight the Moon is dark. Tomorrow she’ll still look almost dark.

Then, slowly, there will be a sliver.

Nothing dramatic.

Nothing announcing itself with trumpets.

Just a little more light than yesterday.

I think I can work with that.

I don’t need to reinvent myself.

I don’t need to become younger.

I don’t need to become thinner, prettier, more productive, more enlightened, or otherwise sufficiently improved to qualify for another beginning.

I just need to still be here.

Curious.

Unfinished.

And willing to turn the page.

That’s enough.

The Goddess isn’t done yet.

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Somewhere along the way, we all learned the phrase, “survival of the fittest.”

It conjures images of lions chasing gazelles, the strongest prevailing while the weak quietly disappear.

The funny thing is, that’s not really what Darwin was talking about.

Evolution doesn’t hand out trophies to the strongest.

It rewards the most adaptable.

And if that’s true, then those of us entering the second half of life should be receiving honorary doctorates.

Because by the time you’ve reached your sixties, you’ve become an Olympic-level adapter.

Need proof?

I no longer read restaurant menus with reading glasses perched on the end of my nose.

I finally surrendered and bought progressive lenses.

Not the cheap ones, either. The kind that require a small mortgage and a brief orientation before use.

For the first day, I walked around like a newborn giraffe trying to figure out where the floor had gone.

Now I can drive, read a menu, work on my computer, and admire the view out my living room window without changing glasses three times before lunch.

That’s adaptation.

My husband and I haven’t shared a bedroom in about ten years.

Not because we don’t love each other.

Because he flops around like he’s reenacting a medieval battle and I snore like a diesel engine climbing Donner Pass.

We finally realized that romance, connection, and intimacy doesn’t require mutual sleep deprivation and nocturnal resentment.

That’s adaptation.

My knee reminds me hourly that it has opinions.

So I plan my day differently than I did twenty years ago.

That’s adaptation.

I no longer apologize for asking someone to repeat themselves because my hearing isn’t what it used to be.

That’s adaptation.

There comes a point where life stops being about proving you can do everything exactly the way you always have.

It becomes about discovering better ways.

You buy the grabber instead of climbing on the chair.

You keep medications in a weekly organizer because pretending you’ll remember is adorable but unrealistic.

You stop apologizing for asking someone to repeat themselves.

You wear shoes designed by people who have apparently met actual human feet.

You schedule your errands so you only have to make one trip into town.

You choose the booth you know you can actually get out of.

You stop apologizing for asking someone to repeat themselves.

These aren’t defeats.

They’re innovations.

I’ve noticed something interesting about younger people.

Many still believe accommodations are admissions of weakness.

Those of us who’ve been around a while know better.

Every adaptation is really a declaration that says, “I’m not done yet.”

I’m simply becoming more efficient.

There is a certain freedom in giving up the performance of invincibility.

I don’t need to pretend I can read six-point font.

I need better lighting...

...and really expensive glasses.

I don’t need to pretend my body works exactly as it did in 1987.

It doesn’t.

Neither does my cassette player.

That isn’t tragedy.

That’s chronology.

The older I get, the less interested I become in appearing capable and the more interested I become in actually enjoying my life.

If a life hack lets me do that... let me tell you, I’m all in.

Because maybe the measure of aging well isn’t how successfully we resist change.

Maybe it’s how gracefully—and sometimes hilariously—we adapt to it.

And perhaps the greatest adaptation I’ve ever made has nothing to do with glasses or knees or medication.

It’s sleeping in a bedroom on the opposite side of the house from the man I adore.

For years, we believed that married people were supposed to sleep together.

Then one day we admitted something that should have been obvious long before.

He wasn’t sleeping.

I wasn’t sleeping.

We were waking up tired, cranky, and just a little resentful of each other.

So we did something radical.

We chose rest over convention.

Now he sleeps peacefully.

I sleep peacefully.

Every morning we reuinte with hugs and conversation, happy to see each other because we both got a good night’s sleep.

That’s not the failure of a marriage.

That’s the success of an adjustment.

I’ve come to believe that the second half of life isn’t about becoming tougher.

It’s about becoming wiser.

It’s about letting go of the exhausting idea that doing something differently means you’re somehow doing it wrong.

After all, evolution has been trying to teach us this lesson for a very long time.

The strongest don’t always survive.

The adaptable do.

And if my progressively engineered glasses, sensible shoes, weekly pill organizer, separate bedroom, and strategically modified life are any indication...

I think I’m evolving just fine.

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For most of my younger years, I assumed life was supposed to be exciting.

Big adventures.

Big dreams.

Big changes.

Big stories.

Big money.

Big relationships.

Then life obliged.

Children.

Financial uncertainty.

Health scares.

Business ownership.

Losing our home in the Caldor Fire.

Rebuilding from scratch.

Grieving what was gone while trying to appreciate what remained.

Friends and family dying.

Keeping a store thriving in the midst of a global pandemic.

It turns out I got all the excitement I could ever reasonably ask for.

These days, if someone asks how things are going and I answer, “Pretty boring,” I mean it as the highest compliment imaginable.

Boring means Bruce is sleeping in his favorite spot but didn’t keep me up all night wanting to play.

Boring means Eric disappears for the afternoon to climb a mountain and comes home with stories instead of injuries.

Boring means the bills are paid, the lights are on, and we can afford our weekly dinner out without performing complicated mathematics in the restaurant parking lot.

Boring means my biggest dilemma on Tuesday might be whether I should fold laundry before answering emails.

Twenty-year-old Katrina would have been horrified.

Sixty-five-year-old Katrina lights a candle in gratitude.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped chasing excitement and started collecting peace.

Peace is having a cup of hot tea at my desk while the mountain outside wakes up.

Peace is watching my son’s garden flourish.

Peace is seeinging my daughter’s smile.

Peace is knowing Eric is sleeping well...down the hall. (If you’ve never tried separate bedrooms after decades of waking each other up, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.)

Peace is having enough ordinary Tuesdays that they begin to blur together.

That’s not failure, that’s healing.

We’re taught to admire lives that look like highlight reels.

Vacations.

Promotions.

Transformations.

Reinventions.

Babies.

Flashy cars.

Meanwhile, the truly miraculous moments often look suspiciously ordinary.

A dog sleeping at your feet.

The refrigerator humming.

The smell of dinner.

A spouse asking if you’d like to go out for Mexican food.

The familiar creak in the hallway that tells you someone you love is home.

I still have difficult days.

My knee still reminds me that healing isn’t always on my preferred schedule.

My body and I continue our long-running negotiations.

There are worries about our adult children, who are working hard to find stable footing.

Life has not suddenly become perfect.

It has simply become...peaceful.

And I have discovered that peaceful is wildly underrated.

If younger me could see my life now, she might think it looked small and uninteresting.

I know better.

Because after everything life has thrown at me, I finally understand something I wish someone had told me decades ago.

A boring life isn’t the absence of living.

Sometimes... it’s the reward for surviving.

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There is a specific kind of internal silence that descends at a certain age. It is not the silence of abandonment; it is the quiet of a curator surveying a newly organized collection. You look in the mirror, past the reflection of the woman standing there today, and find yourself observing a crowd. They are all you, yet they are all ghosts.

This week’s Body of a Goddess message is dedicated to that profound realization: as we age, our bodies are no longer just temporary vessels for our current ambitions. They have become formidable, living repositories. Every mark, every new wear-and-tear ache, and every softening contour is a plaque in a physical museum. We are not just standing still; we are co-habitating with the collective weight of our own formidable history.

The Inner Gathering of Archetypes

For decades, the spiritual communities have spoken of the triple archetype: Maiden, Mother, and Crone.

The Maiden is that fierce, untamed, exploratory self. She is all curiosity, potential, and untarnished optimism. The Mother is the era of creation—be it of children, businesses, art, or entire movements. She is sacrifice, nurturing, and fierce protection. The Crone is the wise elder who has nothing left to prove. She is knowledge, sovereignty, and the transition into a deep, internal power.

We are taught to view these as a clean, sequential progression, as if we check one box and move seamlessly to the next.

But true physical sovereignty teaches us otherwise. We don’t just become one archetype. We collect them. We are always, all of those women, present in this single, changing chassis. The Maiden is the echo of potential in your smile; the Mother is the strength in your spine; the Crone is the formidable peace behind your eyes. They are a gathering, an inner council co-habitating within you.

Enter the Diva: The Empowered Post-Mother Gateway

In my own spiritual practice, we found that the standard progression was missing a crucial chapter. There is a glorious, empowered landscape that opens up after the intense, all-consuming demands of the “Mother” years have ended, but before the true infirmities of the “Crone” years arrive.

We call this archetype the Diva.

The Diva is a force of nature. Her children are grown, her career has peaked or stabilized, and she finally possesses the luxury of sovereign resources. The Diva is not a selfish identity; she is a reclaimed one. She is the wildness of the Maiden, but now fortified with the resources of the Mother.

The Diva doesn’t contract. She expands. She is the one who puts on the bold jewelry just to go to the grocery store. She is the one who claims her entire geography without a moment’s hesitation or apology. She is ferocious, funny, dangerous, and absolutely presence-driven.

Teetering on the Edge of the Crone

Right now, I find myself in a very specific, transitional sweet spot: I am teetering right on the delicate line between Diva and Crone.

I know this with absolute certainty because I just walked out of my Medicare planning meeting.

Nothing grounds you in the realities of your personal timeline quite like sitting across a desk discussing supplemental plans, drug tiers, and government-mandated milestones. It is a official, bureaucratic nudge from the universe letting me know that the transition is well underway. Despite my desperate clinging to my Diva glory, I fully expect to tip right over the edge into official Crone-hood come early September.

And you know what? I am ready for it. The Crone isn’t a downgrade; she’s the penultimate promotion, before that ultimate promotion.

Curating vs. Haunted Living

When I stop surveying the retired selves and actually meet my own gaze, I am no longer looking at a flaw or a historical memory. I am looking at a formidable, current Goddess who is the direct consequence of all those women’s survival.

Society loves to trap us. It wants us to constantly compare our current chassis to the Overachiever’s efficiency or the Wild Spirit’s velocity, mourning the change as failure. But true physical sovereignty is not about eviction; it’s about curation. It is understanding that you are the sole proprietor of a magnificent, decades-old monument. You have to walk among the exhibits without moving back in.

I no longer have to perform the armored stance of the Mother. I am too formidable to regress to the tentative Maiden. I am savoring these final, glittering moments of pure Diva sovereignty, and when September arrives to officially hand me my Crone credentials, I will step into that deep, quiet peace with my head held high and my crown firmly in place.

The ghosts are always present, and their contributions were immense. But when I look in the mirror, I’m not just seeing a museum. I’m seeing the most reliable, dangerous, and present person in the building: The Sovereign Goddess.

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There comes a point in every Goddess’s journey when she looks in the mirror and realizes she is no longer just sprout-testing a few stray chin hairs. Instead, she is hosting a full, robust, Sam Elliott-level mustache event right on her upper lip.

Society expects us to treat this sudden surge of testosterone-fueled facial embroidery as a shameful secret. We are supposed to quietly whisper about “peach fuzz” while secretly wielding tweezers like tactical weapons. But out here in the real world, we need to talk about the sheer logistics of managing a face that has decided to transition into a rugged, old-west sheriff.

The Waxing Room of Horrors (And the DIY Trap)

Naturally, our first instinct is to rip the invaders out by their roots.

I regularly visit the nail salon for maintenance. When the technician waxes my eyebrows, everything goes perfectly fine. But the second that hot spatula moves south to my upper lip and face? It hurts like absolute mad. I lie there clutching the vinyl table, questioning every life choice that brought me to this moment, while the aesthetician cheerfully tears away bands of my flesh.

And just when you think the torture has ended and you can finally breathe, they bring out the tweezers. They hover over you, picking and plucking at every microscopic root the wax missed, until you genuinely think you might die right there on the table. You are physically weeping, your lip is throbbing, and they are still hunting down stragglers like they’re searching for buried treasure.

But if you think the salon is brutal, the DIY home kit is a specialized circle of hell.

In a moment of supreme hubris, I decided to wax my own mustache at home. It went terribly. The wax stuck to my face like industrial adhesive, refusing to budge or release. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, crying actual tears of agony, trying to pry this hardened, painful plastic off my skin. My home attempt bore absolutely no resemblance to the slick, swift pain of the salon. It was a hostage situation where my lip was the captive.

I have never waxed anything south of my neck. Just… no.

The Shaving Taboo and the “Farmer’s Tan”

After the great wax trauma, many of us turn to the trusty razor. It is fast, painless, and highly effective—until the universe decides to play jokes on you.

Years ago, my husband Eric and I were driving to a family gathering. Earlier that day, I had showered and done my usual shave. As we drove, I noticed Eric continually glancing over at me from the driver’s seat.

Finally, I snapped. “WHAT?”

He hesitated and asked, “Did you shave your lady mustache or something?”

Defensive, I demanded to know why he was asking.

He shrugged and said, “Because you have a kind of farmer’s tan where your mustache used to be.”

Yes, the ultimate shaving betrayal: the ghost shadow. When you shave thick hair, you reveal the pristine, pale skin underneath that hasn’t seen the sun in months, leaving you with a stark, reverse-mustache tan line that screams your secrets to the passenger seat. Seriously, like a newly pubescented young man, you shave every day, so when all this upper lift shade has a chance to develop, I cannot imagine.

And don’t even get me started on the salon waxing lady who clutched her pearls and warned me, “Don’t shave your upper lip! It will grow back thicker!”

I looked her dead in the eye and told her, “I started shaving it BECAUSE it grows back thicker! I can’t stop it from growing back thicker! I didn’t start this! The mustache did!” At this point, the hair has its own agenda. Shaving didn’t create the forest; it’s just the only lawnmower I have left that doesn’t make me cry.

The Battle Plan: Comparing Your Facial Hair Options

If you are currently fighting the Sam Elliott sweepstakes on your own face, here is the honest, unfiltered breakdown of your tactical options:

• Shaving:

  • The Good: It is fast, entirely painless, and you can do it in the shower in ten seconds flat.

  • The Bad: It requires constant maintenance, and as Eric so lovingly pointed out, it can leave you with a temporary “mustache farmer’s tan” if your skin has been shielded from the sun. Also, you have to keep on top of it, shaving most days.

• Professional Waxing:

  • The Good: It keeps the hair gone for weeks and weakens the hair bulb over time.

  • The Bad: It hurts like mad on the lip and cheeks, they still pick at you with tweezers afterward until you think you will die, and you have to let the hair grow out to a visible length before they can wax it again.

• Threading:

  • The Good: It is incredibly precise and doesn’t use heat or chemicals, making it great for sensitive skin.

  • The Bad: It feels like a tiny, sadistic elf is lassoing each individual hair and pulling them out one by one. The slow-motion pluck is a very specific kind of torture. This is beyond even Epi-lady pain levels.

• Depilatory Creams:

  • The Good: Cheap and easy to apply at home.

  • The Bad: They smell like burning sulfur and can easily give you a chemical burn if you leave them on for even three seconds too long. The line between “this isn’t working” and “using napalm as a body lotion” is as thin as the hair itself.

Owning the Stubble

Whether you choose to wax, shave, thread, or let your inner cowboy run free, the ultimate goal of a Goddess is to strip away the shame. Our bodies change. Our hormones shift. Sometimes, we sprout hair in places we never expected, and sometimes we have to explain a reverse-tan line to our partners on the way to Thanksgiving.

If they are going to look, let them look. Just make sure your tweezers are sharp, your razor is clean, and your sense of humor is entirely intact.

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Dear Friends,

After a long journey and countless hours of deep creative work, the finish line is finally here. I finishsed the final edits for my new cozy paranormal romance, Ten Past Four, is finished, and the book officially launches on Monday, August 3.

Because you are the heartbeat of my community, I want to invite you to join my exclusive Advance Review Team. I am incredibly grateful for your ongoing support, and I want to share this story with you first.

How the Advance Review Team Works

In exchange for an early digital copy of the book, I ask for your support in building our launch momentum. Early reviews tell the retail algorithms that a book is being read, which helps new readers discover the secrets of Faith Cottage.

If you join the team, here is what the flow looks like:

• Claim Your Copy: Click the secure link below to head to my private BookFunnel page. You will enter your email address to download the file directly to your preferred reading device (they offer both Kindle-ready EPUB and PDF formats).

• Enjoy the Story: Dive into the book over the next two and a half weeks. Take your time and enjoy the journey!

• Drop Your Review on Launch Day: On Monday, August 3, I will send out a quick reminder with direct links. I ask that you take two minutes to copy and paste a brief, honest review onto Amazon and Goodreads.

A Quick Note on Security & Guidelines

To keep this launch safe and fair for everyone, please keep a couple of standard industry guardrails in mind:

1. Accountability Watermarking: The download system automatically applies an invisible watermark tied to your download email. Please do not share or distribute this file publicly.

2. The FTC Disclaimer: Per Amazon and FTC guidelines, please include a brief sentence at the very end of your review stating: “I received an advance review copy of this book from the author.”

3. Exclusivity: Please do not share this invitation with others without permission from me.

If you have the time to read and share your honest thoughts by August 3, I would love to have you on the team.

To download your advance digital copy, click here:👉 https://bookhip.com/HCQATBP

Thank you so much for walking this path with me and helping me bring Ten Past Four into the world!

With gratitude,

There is a specific kind of magic that happens in the absolute stillness of a bedroom or while sinking into a lounge chair. It is the moment when you realize, with a sudden and quiet shock, that nothing hurts. In those precious, fleeting minutes, a wave of emotion hits so close to the surface it can bring you to tears—not from sadness, but from the sheer, overwhelming relief that the background noise of your own body has finally gone quiet for a short time.

Because for those of us living a life of boots-on-the-ground reality, pain is no longer an occasional visitor. It has moved in, unpacked its bags, and become the baseline. Maybe it is life’s way of coaching us to look forward to death when, in theory, nothing ever hurts again.

For me, the roll call is daily and predictable: my lower back, my right rotator cuff, and my injured right knee. Then there is my left knee, which has spent the last eight months carrying the extra weight and compensating for the right one, and finally, the sharp, stubborn ache at the base of my left thumb. You learn to navigate your day around the physical geography of your own joints, mapping out movements like a general plotting a course through hostile territory.

The Gospel of the Forever-Young

If you turn on your phone or listen to the modern health industry, you will hear a completely different sermon. We are constantly barraged by wellness enthusiasts, biohackers, and influencers who preach that physical deterioration and chronic pain are not endemic to aging. They insist that with the right combination of collagen powder, mobility drills, anti-inflammatory diets, and sheer willpower, your joints should function like a well-oiled machine until you’re ninety.

But let’s look closely at the people delivering this gospel: it is almost always the young.

It is easy to lecture the world on how the body should naturally age when your cartilage hasn’t yet left the building and your joints haven’t accumulated decades of historical mileage. It is a philosophy born of theory, a luxury of those who are still operating on their factory-default settings. They treat pain as a personal failure of maintenance rather than the natural, standard tax of living a long, full life on a planet with gravity.

Normalization as Survival

Out here in reality, normalizing pain isn’t about giving up—it’s a sophisticated psychological survival strategy. If we stopped to mourn every single ache, creak, and structural protest our bodies made throughout the day, we would never leave the house.

Instead, we adapt. We learn the exact angle to lift an arm so the shoulder doesn’t catch. We know precisely how to swing our legs out of bed to protect the back. We accept that one joint is going to scream because it’s been heroically doing the job of two for the last eight months. We normalize the discomfort so we can get on with the business of being fabulous, sovereign, and productive. We absorb the ache into the background static of our lives.

Reclaiming the Pain-Free Moments

Recognizing this reality doesn’t make us defeated; it makes us present. When you stop fighting the natural trajectory of a changing body and accept the boots-on-the-ground truth of aging, those moments of pure physical quiet become holy.

Here is how we honor the reality of our temples this week:

• Dismiss the lecturers. Stop letting thirty-year-old fitness gurus make you feel guilty for having a body that remembers its history. Your joints have stories; their joints just have metadata.

• Honor the compensators. Give a little mental gratitude to the parts of you that are over-performing to keep you moving. That left knee taking the brunt of the weight deserves a medal, not resentment.

• Melt into the quiet. When you do find yourself lying down and the pain recedes, don’t immediately fill the space with thoughts or tasks. Stay there. Let yourself feel the luxury of zero resistance. If it brings tears to your eyes, let them come. It is the sweetest meditation on earth.

We are not broken machines that just need a new part; we are living, breathing monuments to survival. The background noise might be louder than it used to be, but when it fades into a whisper, the silence is absolutely beautiful.

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Popular culture loves to warn women about the impending doom of hitting a certain age: The Great Vanishing. We are told that once we cross a specific chronological threshold, the youth-obsessed spotlight clicks off, and we slide effortlessly into societal invisibility.

But nobody ever tells the fat girls that the standard rules of invisibility simply do not apply to us.

When you are a woman of significant size and vintage, you never truly have the luxury of disappearing into the background. You cannot fade neatly into the wallpaper when your physical form inherently demands coordinates in a room. We exist in a bizarre, exhausting paradox: we are hyper-visible to public judgment, yet entirely erased when it comes to human desire.

Hyper-Visible for Condemnation

Let’s be real about how the world looks at us. We are never invisible when we are navigating a narrow grocery store aisle, trying to find a seat on a crowded train, or merely existing in a public space. In those moments, the public eye is a laser beam.

And heaven forbid we dare to publicly enjoy an ice cream cone on a hot summer day. If we do, we instantly become the focal point of the entire street—the target of side-eyes, silent scolds, and the collective intake of breath from people who think our joy is a public offense.

We become a canvas for total strangers to project their cultural anxieties, their unprompted medical opinions, and their deep-seated biases. The world watches us with a critical, policing gaze—ready to condemn the space we take up, the food in our hands, or the audacity we have to exist without shame. We are hyper-visible as a cautionary tale, a talking point, or a target for societal disapproval. Our size makes us a monument that everyone feels entitled to comment on.

The Invisible “Good Fat Girl” (Until It’s Time to Ridicule)

Yet, the second we try to play by their rules, the magic trick happens in reverse.

When we do the “good fat girl” thing and walk into a gym to step on a treadmill, we suddenly become entirely transparent to the establishment. The fitness enthusiasts and gym bros look right through us as if we are part of the drywall. Our presence in a space dedicated to fitness is ignored because we don’t fit the aesthetic narrative of the environment. We are invisible when we are sweating, invisible when we are working, and invisible when we are doing exactly what society claims it wants us to do.

Unless, of course, the cell phones come out.

That is the vicious underbelly of the gym paradox. We are ignored by civilized society, but we become hyper-visible to those folks who pull out their phones, thinking they are being entirely inconspicuous. They snap a photo or record a quick video just to upload it to their social media for a laugh, ridiculing a woman who is literally doing the exact thing they mock her for not doing. In that moment, we aren’t seen as human beings putting in effort—we are stripped down to a meme, a cheap punchline for a toxic internet culture.

The same erasure occurs when the conversation shifts to romance, intimacy, or baseline human desire. The spotlight completely vanishes. Culturally, the aging, plus-size woman is neatly categorized as the safe best friend, the comforting maternal figure, or the asexual placeholder. We are stripped of our nuance, our fire, and our sensuality. Society decides that if a body does not conform to a rigid, youthful, narrow ideal, it must no longer possess a libido, a longing, or a magnetic charge. They look right through our passion as if it’s a structural impossibility.

The Architecture of Resistance

But a sovereign Goddess does not wait for a broken culture to grant her permission to be desired.

I know fat women who have looked this hypocrisy dead in the eye and chosen a path of radical defiance. They become intentionally, vibrantly, and unapologetically expressive with their sexuality because they resist being overlooked. They don’t do it to perform for the male gaze; they do it to shatter the matrix of erasure.

When you lean into your sensuality with intention—whether that’s through the clothes you choose, the way you carry yourself, or the unapologetic ownership of your pleasure—it is a fierce act of resistance. It is saying, “You do not get to look through me. You do not get to relegate my fire to the shadows just because you don’t know what to do with the heat.”

But man, it’s exhausting.

Reclaiming the Full Spectrum

Living fabulously in this skin means refusing to accept a half-life. You are allowed to take up physical space and sensual space.

Here is our directive for rewriting the rules:

• Reject the split screen. You are not a public problem to be managed by day and an invisible ghost by night. You are a whole, unified, radiant entity.

• Own the stage. If they are going to stare at you eating that ice cream, give them an absolute masterclass in self-sovereignty. Savor every single bite.

• Feed your own fire. Sensuality belongs to you, not to the audience. Dress for your own texture, move for your own joy, and express yourself because your vitality demands to be felt.

The world might try to balance its books by making us hyper-visible for critique and invisible for love, but a Goddess knows how to break the scale. We are here, we are large, we are fiercely passionate, and we are absolutely not fading away.

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We need to talk about the absolute lie that is the phrase, “You should only eat when you’re hungry.”

If humans only ate when our biological engines required fuel, the snack food aisle would not be a multi-billion-dollar psychological wonderland. The truth is, a large portion of our relationship with food has absolutely nothing to do with an empty stomach. Sometimes, your stomach is perfectly content, your macros are met, and your nutritional needs are entirely satisfied.

But your mouth is bored. And a bored mouth is a dangerous thing.

The Dopamine Grab

We like to pretend eating is a purely mechanical act—fuel in, energy out. In reality, eating is also one of the fastest, most reliable ways to get a hit of dopamine, the brain’s favorite feel-good chemical.

When your mouth is bored, it isn’t crying out for sustenance. It is staging a protest against monotony. It wants texture. It wants a contrast of salty and sweet. It wants that specific, satisfying crunch that lets your brain know you are doing something exciting.

You open the refrigerator door and stare into the illuminated cavern, not because you need a meal, but because you are looking for entertainment. You want a taste experience to break up the mundane reality of a Tuesday afternoon. Eating a handful of chips or a piece of chocolate in that moment isn’t a failure of willpower; it is a micro-vacation for your brain.

The Hidden Catalog of Non-Hunger Eating

Once you look past the myth of physical hunger, you realize your metabolic survivalist has an entire catalog of reasons for wanting you to chew:

• The Transitional Snack: This happens when you finish one task and are about to start another. You cannot just move from answering emails to cleaning the house without a transitional cracker to mark the boundary. It is the punctuation mark of the afternoon.

• Procrastination Chewing: You have a difficult phone call to make, a spreadsheet to organize, or a looming deadline. Suddenly, the absolute necessity of toast reveals itself. You aren’t hungry; you are just using the act of chewing to delay facing the monster.

• Emotional Insulation: Food is soft, warm, predictable, and entirely under your control. When the outside world feels spiky, chaotic, or ungrateful, eating acts like a soft blanket for your nervous system. It creates a temporary buffer between you and whatever fresh hell is trying to breach your peace.

• Soothing Fight or Flight: Our human wiring is weird and often, we remain in a heavy state of anxiety and fight or flight long after a threat has passed. If we are lucky, food is one of the very first acts of intimacy we share with another person. We have a need we do not understand and someone fulfills it for us. Our nutritional needs are met. We are held and comforted. We feel safe and provided for. Sadly, as adults, this often is not the case and because that first intimacy occurs at such a formative time, we are deeply imprinted to associate feelings of security with food.

Negotiating with the Senses

The diet industry loves to make you feel guilty for this. They tell you to drink a glass of water or chew on a piece of ice when your mouth gets bored. But your brain is a sophisticated machine; it knows the difference between tap water and a salt-and-vinegar potato chip. You cannot trick a dopamine-seeking brain with an ice cube.

Being a sovereign Goddess means understanding these non-hunger cues without judgment. If your mouth is bored, acknowledge it. Sometimes, you just need to give the survivalist a little entertainment so it stops banging on the bunker doors.

Here is the Goddess guide to navigating the bored mouth:

• Identify the mood before the food. Ask yourself if you are empty or simply uninspired. If you just need a dopamine hit, choose the item that actually delivers it instead of eating five things that do not satisfy the itch.

• Remove the morality. Eating for pleasure, for comfort, or because a flavor is spectacular is part of the human experience. It is not a character flaw.

• Savor the entertainment. If you are eating purely because it tastes really good, then actually pay attention to it. Turn off the screen, put down the work, and let your mouth have its little party.

The non-hunger reasons we eat are just as much a symptom as hunger is itself. When we are hungry and think “Why do I want to eat?” we usually have an answer: I haven’t eaten anything for six hours.

We should give the same attention evaluating our non-hunger responses. In normal circumstances (meaning for people who are not obese), there is no negative judgment for eating when you are hungry. No one questions it. For an overweight person, if you eat when you are hungry, you’d better be eating the “right” foods or suddenly everyone has an opinion. Goddess help us if we eat for reasons other than hunger.

For many of us (me included), when asked why we eat, the surface answer is, “Because I love food. Food is amazing.” On a deeper level, what that means is, “I have a dopamine deficiency. Every fiber of my being is screaming for a fix and let me tell you, a celery stick is not going to serve the purpose any more than a handful of sawdust.”

If I have a vitamin C deficiency, I can eat roasted chicken breast all day long and still have a vitamin C deficiency. If it is ignored, scurvy is not off the list of possibilities, even if I’m eating healthy proteins and salads. Until we address the deficiency, it will continue to compromise our healthy balance. The most common nutritional theories treat the need for food as the filling of an empty space rather than meeting one or more of the other needs food fulfills.

If we feel sad and unappreciated, what was there in times like birthdays, weddings, and retirements that celebrated us? Cake.

If we feel compromised, what happened when we were sick? Mom put us to bed with chicken soup and ginger ale to heal.

When we feel lonely, what do we associate with a first date or going out with friends? Going out to dinner and eating great foods; maybe having popcorn at a movie.

Your body is a complex system designed to seek joy, comfort, and survival. Sometimes, the most spiritual thing you can do is acknowledge that you don’t need a math equation to justify a piece of dark chocolate—you just need a little sweetness in a bitter world.

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Y’all, we need to talk about the strange, slow-motion magic trick our bodies perform somewhere after the youth-obsessed world stops checking us out.

If you have ever looked down at your hands or caught your reflection and thought, “Who authorized this upholstery?” you are not alone. There comes a point where your reflection stops matching your internal map, and your skin decides to start playing by its own set of rules.

The Paper-Thin Truth

The biggest shock isn’t just how the skin drapes; it is how incredibly frail it becomes. I distinctly remember being younger and looking at the elderly women in my life, noticing the permanent collection of purple bruises and half-healed scrapes on their forearms. I used to wonder what on earth they were doing to get so banged up.

Now, that is me.

I am they.

We are one.

Namaste.

Suddenly, your skin changes texture, losing that firm resilience and turning into something resembling crushed velvet or expensive, delicate tissue paper. Every little scratch—the kind you wouldn’t have even noticed thirty years ago—seems to slice deeper than it should. A clumsy run-in with a cardboard box or a momentary swipe from a pet leaves a mark that takes weeks to fade and makes you wonder if you need stitches. You become a walking canvas of your daily collisions, carrying a constellation of tiny, healing wounds that remind you exactly how thin the barrier between you and the world has become.

The Midnight Asset Migration

When you are a Goddess of a certain vintage and volume, gravity stops being a theory and becomes a highly aggressive project manager. For decades, you know exactly where everything is. Your body has a layout.

Then, the migration begins.

You catch a glimpse of your arm waving goodbye, and the skin keeps waving for a full three seconds after your hand stops moving. Your knees, which used to be perfectly serviceable joints, now look like two grumpy faces staring back at you from the mirror. It is a bizarre disconnect. Inside, you feel vibrant, wise, experienced, and completely sovereign. Outside, your skin is slowly draping itself over your frame like a slipcover that belongs to a completely different sofa.

The Elasticity Mirage

The beauty industry loves to target us with potions containing camel milk, pulverized diamonds, the placenta of a baptized baby, and the tears of a thousand youth-industry interns, promising to restore “elasticity.” What they don’t tell you is that fat skin behaves differently than thin skin when it ages.

On the plus side, our gorgeous curves act as a natural filler, smoothing out the wrinkles that our thinner peers spend fortunes trying to inject away. We are blessed with a natural, built-in plumpness that keeps us looking radiant.

But the trade-off is structural. When that skin finally decides to soften and thin out, it doesn’t just wrinkle; it drapes. It gathers. It pools in places we didn’t even know had zip codes. Getting dressed becomes less about fashion and more about architectural containment, trying to tuck, smooth, and negotiate with a surface area that seems to expand even as we try to shrink it.

Reclaiming the Temple Cover

So, how do we handle a shell that feels like it was delivered to the wrong address?

We stop treating our changing skin like a failure of maintenance. This skin has stretched to accommodate growth, cushioned the blows of a chaotic world, and protected a living temple through decades of survival. It might feel softer, it might tear easier, and it might texture differently in the light, but it is the physical record of your endurance. Every scar and stretch mark is a battle we won. Why? Because we are still here.

Goddess Directive for the Week

• Stop pinching and start polishing. Moisturize the drapes. Treat the thin spots with care. Oil the velvet. Treat the skin you are in like the sacred tapestry it is.

• Fire the mirror critics. If a mirror only tells you what has shifted or scratched, look away. Your presence in a room is measured by your energy and your sovereignty, not your elasticity. If I’m having a down day, I can dress in front of a mirror just fine and never actually see my body once.

• Own the drape. If your skin wants to soften, let it be soft. There is immense power in a woman who refuses to apologize for taking up space, marks and all.

You are not a museum piece meant to stay frozen in amber. You are a living, breathing, gorgeous Goddess, and every shift in that skin is just proof that you are still here, still reigning, and still completely fabulous. We get to decide and we get to set the terms.

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One of the greatest curses and greatest blessings of the catastrophic house fire of 2021 is that all of my clothes burned. This was a curse because I really needed some damned undies but a blessing because all of my clothes burned… including the bins and bins of skinny clothes in the sheds and closets!

But I do remember what it was like to have those bins and wow, is it ever “a thing.”

There is a unique kind of archaeological dig that only women of a certain vintage and size truly understand. It’s the seasonal closet switch-over. For a Goddess of substance, this isn’t just about moving sweaters to the top shelf. It is an emotional gauntlet where you are forced to confront the ghosts of your former bodies.

Closets and storages containers are not just for seasonal choices. They are a historical timeline of a woman who has lived, expanded, contracted, and fiercely survived.

The Wardrobe of Wishful Thinking

Every woman I know who has ridden the weight roller coaster has at least three distinct wardrobes hidden away.

First, you have the “Now” clothes—the trusted, comfortable garments that fit the body you actually woke up in this morning. These are the pieces that don’t cut off your circulation, don’t require tactical athletic tape, and let you breathe while you’re working.

Then, you have the “Just in Case” section. This is a collection of clothes that are exactly one size smaller. They are the optimistic garments whispering, “Maybe next month.”

Finally, deep in the back, shrouded in dust and old dry-cleaner plastic, lies the “Museum of Misery.” These are the single-digit jeans from 1998 or the tailored dresses from a decade ago. We keep them like holy relics, as if throwing them away means admitting defeat to the universe. We look at them and think, “If I just eat nothing but ice cubes and anxiety for six months, I’ll get back into that… maybe.. but probably not.”

The Architecture of the Over-The-Shoulder Boulder Holder

And while we are excavating the wardrobe, we absolutely must discuss the structural engineering disaster that is the modern plus-size bra.

When you possess a chest of a certain vintage, viscosity, and volume, the lingerie industry gives you an ultimatum: torture or erasure. First, there are the underwires. Why must I wear rigid pieces of metal that poke, prod, and attempt to impale my ribs every time I sit down? I chose long ago to say “No more” to that particular brand of everyday suffering. Life is too short for underwires that hurt.

So many people tell me, “You just need to get professionally measured and buy quality bras! Then they won’t hurt.” I did and they still did.

But when you abandon the wire, you enter a horrifying landscape where you are forced to choose between one titty or four.

On one hand, you have the wireless comfort bras that completely lack central scaffolding, compressing everything into a massive, singular “uniboob” that looks like a shelf of bread dough resting on your ribs.

On the other hand, you have the traditional cups that simply cannot contain a pair of rather liquid breasts. They slosh right out over the edges, creating a bizarre quad-boob effect that makes your shirt look like a topographical map of the Andes. There is no middle ground. It’s either a monolithic block of flesh or an over-spilled structural emergency.

And let us not forget the nighttime migration. If you dare to go to sleep in a loose nightgown or a comfortable tank top, your breasts will immediately execute a prison break. There is nothing quite like waking up at 3:00 AM to realize that while your body was resting, one of your boobs completely wandered off and is currently in the kitchen making a sandwich.

The Emotional Weight of Cotton

The fashion industry loves to tell us that clothes are about self-expression. What they don’t tell you is that for a fat woman, clothes are often used as a emotional report card. We let a zipper determine whether it’s going to be a good day or a “What Fresh Hell Cometh Today” kind of day.

We hold onto the tiny clothes because society has conditioned us to believe that our smallest self was our best self. But if I really look back at the eras when those tiny clothes fit, I wasn’t happier or smarter or kinder. I was usually starving, exhausted, obsessed with a number on a scale, and entirely disconnected from my own personal sovereignty.

Why are we keeping garments that actively make us feel like a failure before we’ve even had our morning coffee?

Cabbage Roses and Sovereign Style

When you do cross over into a certain size bracket, the retail world tries to punish you by offering only two stylistic choices: “Aged Matron” or “Circus Tent.” You are suddenly surrounded by a sea of loud cabbage rose prints, polyester tunics that could double as boat sails, and elastic waistbands that lose their dignity after two washes. It’s as if the designers believe that because we take up more space, we want to look like a walking sofa.

But being a gorgeous Goddess means refusing the tent. It means standing up and saying “No more” to clothes that don’t honor the temple they are covering.

The Great Cleansing

It is time to clear the stagnation out of the closet. If your body is currently a beautifully efficient survival machine, it deserves to be dressed for the present terrain—not a hypothetical future or a romanticized past.

For decades, I based every clothing purchase on one metric: “Could I sleep in this?”

Here are the new Goddess Laws for the wardrobe:

• If it requires you to hold your breath to button it, it goes. You need your oxygen.

• If it evokes guilt instead of joy, it goes. You are a healer and a practitioner, not a prisoner to a piece of denim.

• If it’s a cabbage rose tunic you bought out of desperation, burn it. (Metaphorically, of course. Or literally, if you need a good ritual cleansing).

We are the architects of our own survival, and that includes how we clothe ourselves. Dress the Goddess you are today. She is the one doing the heavy lifting, beating off the pounds when she can, and steering the ship through the storm. She deserves a fabulous outfit right now. And time, she is a’tickin’ away.

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A few days ago, a random thought crossed my mind, the kind that usually leads to a pleasant trip down memory lane. I realized I hadn’t heard from my friend Charlene in a while. We had been friends since the third grade, one of three girls who I could genuinely call my friends in high school. We kept in touch over the decades, exchanging messages a few times a year.

I pulled up her social media to see what she was up to, only to collide head-first with a digital wall of mourning. Charlene had died some time ago.

Stunned, sitting in the quiet of my office, a cold wave of panic washed over me. I immediately looked up Sandy, the second member of my friend short list. She had also died some time back. I searched for Paula, the final piece of my teenage puzzle. Also dead. In the span of twenty minutes, the entire landscape of my youth was wiped clean. None of them were left.

Seeking some kind of comfort, I looked up Susie. Susie was an older neighborhood girl who used to let me hang around her when I was just a kid looking for a role model. Her Facebook profile exists, but it is completely hollow—no photos, no posts, just an empty digital shell. I spent hours researching her family members, her late husband, her children. There is literally no mention of her existence anywhere online. It is as if the internet simply swallowed her whole.

The Haunted Arithmetic of Survival

The silence that followed that search was deafening. Neither my mother nor my father lived to be as old as I am right now, so I am already operating in uncharted territory. But realizing that the witnesses to my own beginning have exited the stage left me feeling entirely empty. Haunted.

If we weren’t living in the digital age, I would never have known. I would have gone on with my week, assuming my friends were out there somewhere in the world, living their lives, breathing the same air, and holding our shared memories in their hearts. The internet gave me the truth, but it also delivered a sudden, crushing isolation.

It is a strange kind of vertigo to realize you are the last woman standing in a room that used to be full of laughter, secrets, and terrible high school haircuts. When the people who knew you before you knew yourself disappear, you start to wonder if your own past is just a story you made up.

Reclaiming the Hearth

For twenty-four hours, I sat with that hollow feeling. But a goddess doesn’t sit in an empty temple and let the fires go out just because she is the only one left to tend them.

We have to shift the narrative from nearing extinction to ambassadorship. I am not just a survivor left behind in a ghost town; I am the chosen custodian of that entire era. If I don’t remember the exact cadence of Charlene’s laugh, the specific brand of mischief Sandy preferred, or the way the leather in Susie’s Nova smelled on a hot July evening, then those things truly cease to exist.

Outliving your peers doesn’t mean you are ancient. It means you have been promoted to matriarch. It means your work here is far from finished.

Living on Borrowed Credit

The weight of being the one who remains is heavy, but it is also a profound honor. We owe something to the ones who checked out early. We owe it to them to live with absolute, unapologetic relish.

We cannot afford to waste time hiding our larger-than-life bodies, shrinking into the background, or waiting for a “perfect time” to be happy. Our friends didn’t get the credit of these extra years. We are holding the wallet now, and it is an insult to their memory to spend it frugally.

Eat the food. Wear the ridiculously bright colors. Speak the terrifying truths. Occupy your space in this world with pride and sovereignty. You aren’t walking through this life alone; you are carrying a whole crowd of girls inside you now. Keep the lights on in the temple. You are the last witness, and you have a magnificent story to tell.

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I had a deeply unsettling experience in my bathroom this morning. I walked up to the sink, splashed some water on my face, looked up into the mirror, and honestly wondered who let the nice, silver-haired lady into my house. Given the level of supernatural woo woo that is active in this house, for a moment, I thought I was looking at the true form of one of our beloved ghosties. But no. I was the ghost this time.

Inside my head, I am perpetually thirty-five. I am vibrant, a little dangerous, and entirely convinced that I can still pull off a dramatic exit from a room. My internal ecosystem operates on the assumption that my skin possesses the bounce of a fresh marshmallow. Then I catch my reflection in a store window or under the aggressive, unforgiving fluorescent lights of a public restroom, and the cognitive dissonance hits like a splash of ice water. Or a fire hose of it.

The woman looking back at me has stories etched into the corners of her eyes. She has a jawline that has decided to explore a downward trajectory. She looks lovely, mature, and completely unfamiliar to me.

The Stranger in the Glass

This is the strange vanishing act of aging. It isn’t that we disappear from the world; it is that the person we have always known ourselves to be vanishes behind a curtain of time, replaced by a stranger who has inherited our wardrobe.

It creates a bizarre emotional vertigo. You reach to push back your hair and your hand—which is now oddly spotted with colonies of brown dots that are not cute freckles—looks like your mother’s hand. You catch a glimpse of your profile and realize that gravity is no longer just a theory; it is an active, aggressive landlord collecting rent on your flesh.

Finding the humor in it is sometimes the only thing that saves us from despair. There is an undeniable comedy in watching your body perform tricks it never used to do. The way a deep, dramatic sigh now leaves your mouth when you simply bend over to tie your shoe. The way your knees make a sound like a handful of gravel being thrown against a window when you stand up from a low couch. We are goddesses, yes, but currently, we are goddesses operating under a comedic curse.

Vulnerability is the True Sovereignty

Let us be completely direct here: it isn’t just disarming, it hurts to watch the youth fade from your face. It is a vulnerable thing to admit that you miss the elasticity of your thirties or the effortless energy of your twenties.

I watch people fly up and down staircases and marvel at the Witchcraft they wield as I peck, peck, peck my way to the stairs with my cane, wincing when I have to put pressure on my knee to do so.

Society tells us to fight it, to buy the creams, to freeze the muscles, and to pretend that the numbers on our birth certificates are just a clerical error. To be clear, in my entire life, I have never been a vain person. I was never super pretty. Just ordinary. My Goddess, how I miss ordinary! Caring about how I look is another change that keeps me from feeling like me.

I fully understand and agree that the true power of a goddess doesn’t come from pretending the mirror is lying. It lies in looking that silver-haired stranger directly in the eyes and claiming her anyway. That, my friends, is a work in progress for me. First, I have to get her to stop startling me. I know in twenty years, I will look back at the now me and think about how few wrinkles she had (comparatively).

Realistically, the cognitive dissonance only wins if we agree that the younger version of us was the only version worth knowing. The truth is that the woman in my mirror right now has survived things the thirty-five-year-old version of me couldn’t even fathom. She has buried things, birthed things, built things, and walked through fires (literally) that would have scorched the youthful skin right off her predecessor. She accomplished a lot. She endured a lot. She lived a lot… and she kind of looks like she got put through a wringer.

Reclaiming the Reflection

I know we are not vanishing. That will come when they put our bodies in the ground and we fade into the memories of others rather than the “real” person. I deeply hope they glamorize my memory and make me more than I am. The gilded me could be so much cooler than the real me.

I’m sure there are Hallmark cards that read, “Every wrinkle is a line of dialogue from a life lived out loud. Every soft curve and silver strand is proof of endurance. The external shell is changing, absolutely, but the fire inside the temple remains entirely untouched by the passing of the years.”

That is just so precious and I’m sure it’s true. I’m not turning sixty-five years old in September. I’m turning sixty-five years young and I will look back at people who lean down and speak loudly to me (and likely in a baby voice) and think, “I have cookie sheets older than you are.”

When I look in the glass and find myself wondering where any hint of youthful self wandered of to, I must stop searching for a ghost who is no longer there. She is the one who vanished. I’m still here. I am one of the final expressions of me.

I did not expect it to be this way. I imagined my older self as wise, strong, wizened, even. She’s clever and has witty old lady retorts that no one sees coming because they underestimated her. She’s one they talk about being “sharp as a tack” despite her advancing age. She is the bog witch who is over everybody’s shit and lives to please herself and her clever, nearly human cats.

Of course, a bog witch does not conjure up mental images of “eternal youth,” now, does she?

One of my goals for this year is to work harder to be fully present in each moment rather than thinking on or lamenting the past or focusing on or worrying about the future. I want to be here… now. Part of that involves me reconciling this huge abyss between who I think I am and who I am now. I hope that the old lady who lives in my house likes me.

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It’s Obesity Week here at Body of a Goddess, and I want to talk about how my “willpower” is currently losing a wrestling match against a biological system that thinks it’s living in the Ice Age.

I have decided that if eating one sensible salad causes your body to scream in terror while a single slice of pizza is treated like a precious heirloom to be stored in the hip vault forever, we aren’t failing—we’re just inhabited by a very dedicated survivalist.

The Dragon in the Bunker

We like to think of our metabolism as a simple calculator—calories in, calories out. But in reality, your body is more like a paranoid prepper living in a bunker. It doesn’t realize it’s 2026 and there’s a 24-hour grocery store three blocks away. It thinks it is 10,000 BCE, a blizzard is coming, and you haven’t seen a woolly mammoth in weeks.

The moment you start a “diet,” your internal alarms go off. Your body doesn’t see “health goals”; it sees a famine. It immediately deploys a coordinated strike of metabolic and hormonal changes to defend your fat stores like a dragon guarding gold.

The Survivalist’s Tactics

When you try to lose weight, your survivalist metabolism uses some pretty dirty tricks to make sure you stay prepared for the coming winter:

• The Hunger Drive: Your appetite ramps up to a fever pitch, making that leftover crust in the pizza box look like a religious relic.

• Energy Throttling: In a celebration of life-preserving efficiency, your body lowers your resting metabolic rate and reduces how much energy you spend on basic movement.

• The “Poor Responder” Effect: For some of us, these compensatory adaptations are so strong they can fully counteract a 500-calorie daily deficit. You’re doing the work, drinking so much water your back teeth are floating, counting proteins and carbs and calories and fat, but your body is doing the bookkeeping and necessarily adjusting to make certain nothing leaves the vault.

The Battle of the Zeros

I am feeling the looming presence of this metabolic pushback right now. Whether it is mental or physiological or both, my body resists the zeros. I can move freely up and down digits 1 through 9 in any given decade of weight. But as soon as the scale creeps toward a zero threshold, my body freezes up and absolutely refuses to cross it.

Right now, I am teetering on a zero, and my internal survivalist is trying to decide what comes next. I am on the zero and can hear the drumroll that heralds whether or not I can get past the zero… in the right direction.

It might not sound like a grand saga to the outside world, but since the beginning of February, I have managed to beat 20 pounds off my body. If I continue to lose at my current pace, this month—May 2026—I will drop down to the lowest weight I have been since October 2017. In fact, it will match the lowest weight I’ve managed to hit since 2009, despite decades of radical, exhausting yo-yoing up and down.

I feel different 20 pounds smaller. And yes, I feel better. Several physical issues have cleared up, which I deeply appreciate. My insides work better, and my clothes fit differently. When you are my size, 20 pounds doesn’t make a massive visual impact to a casual observer, but I feel like I will finally reach a visible difference this year.

I haven’t made a big deal about this journey until now because I have lost 15 to 20 pounds so many times before. Honestly, I could probably create 10 or 12 entirely separate versions of myself using just the lost weight I’ve recycled over the years. I will know I’ve truly crossed into new territory when I get below 200 pounds—and while I’m entirely open to the option, I don’t think that milestone will happen this year.

My metabolic survivalist goes absolutely ballistic when it sees a zero at the end of my weight numbers. Right now, it is battling that numerical change like Jacob fought the angel.

Redefining the “Win”

This is why the mainstream “willpower” narrative is such a fresh hell. Science shows that weight loss is a complex, chronic condition—not a simple choice or a character flaw. For the vast majority of people, the body’s biological response to shedding pounds is so persistent that weight regain isn’t a personal failure. It is an expected, predictable consequence of a biological system that is hardwired to survive.

So, what’s a Goddess to do? We shift the focus. If your body is a survivalist, stop fighting it with brute force and start negotiating. Success shouldn’t be measured solely by a arbitrary number on a scale that your body is actively defending.

Real success is found in:

• A better quality of life.

• Higher energy levels, even if your metabolism is still “prepping”.

• Improved self-esteem and overall daily health.

Your body isn’t trying to make your life miserable; it’s just a beautifully high-functioning survival machine that loves you very much and wants to make sure you’re the last one standing in the tundra. Eat the banana, forgive the “vault” when it panics over a zero, and remember that you are a sovereign, living being—not a static math equation.

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When a slender, athletic person hears the word “camping,” they get a misty look in their eyes. They start vibrating at a frequency only detectable by hiking boots and high-end granola. To them, camping is a spiritual return to the earth, a chance to “unplug” and “recharge” while sleeping on a yoga mat that provides all the structural support of a single flour tortilla. They’re going to HIKE, and FISH, and ROCK CLIMB, and SLEEP ROUGH.

When those same words reach the ears of a goddess of substance, the reaction isn’t a vibration; it’s a full-body trauma shutdown. We don’t hear “nature.” We hear “logistics.” We hear “gravity.” We hear the sound of a plastic chair screaming for mercy in the middle of a forest where no one can hear you scream except for the bears who check their watch to time how long it takes for you to die after you hit the ground because you will feed their entire family for a year while your campmates are just the toothpicks that will dislodge your vital organs from their teeth after the feast.

The Tactical Scouting Mission

The true horror of camping begins the moment you arrive at the picturesque site. While the gazelles are busy tossing a frisbee, we are performing a high-stakes structural integrity survey of the terrain.

You aren’t looking at the sunset; you are looking for the Load-Bearing Log. Every outdoor gathering involves the “Lawn Chair Russian Roulette.” You know the one—the collapsible bag chair with the thin aluminum legs that look like they were manufactured by a company that specializes in coat hangers.

Sitting in one of those as a fat person is an act of extreme faith. You don’t just sit; you descend with the slow, agonizing precision of a lunar lander. You spend the entire conversation monitoring the tension of the polyester fabric, waiting for the inevitable “pop” of a rivet that signals your sudden, undignified transition from “Goddess at a Fire” to “Human Taco trapped in a Canvas Coffin.”

The Physics of the Sleeping Bag

Then there is the sleeping arrangement. To an athletic person, a sleeping bag is a cozy cocoon. To us, it is a restrictive, nylon straitjacket designed by someone who has never seen a hip in their entire life. The pain of old bones sleeping on the ground is beyond belief.

There is a specific, quiet desperation in trying to zip up a mummy bag when you have more “mummy” than “bag.” You spend twenty minutes performing a series of horizontal yoga poses just to get the zipper past the mid-thigh mark. It harkens back to sweeter days of lying on the bed and “sucking in” to get that single digit pair of jeans to zip up.

Once you are finally encased, you realize the devastating truth: you are now in a sensory-deprivation tank with no exit strategy. If you need to pee at 3:00 AM, you aren’t just getting up; you are embarking on a multi-stage extraction mission that involves rolling like a beached seal until you gain enough momentum to hit a vertical plane.

You’re basically fuct.

The “Awe” vs. The “Ugh”

The thin crowd loves to talk about the “awe” of the great outdoors. They love the challenge of the vertical incline. They don’t understand that for a person of size, the challenge started at the car door.

Every step on uneven dirt is a negotiation with your knees and ankles. Every charming narrow trail is a potential “Winnie the Pooh stuck in Rabbit’s house” situation waiting to happen. While they are busy connecting with the spirits of the trees, we are busy connecting with the reality that we are the only creature in the woods that didn’t come equipped with four-wheel drive and a built-in fur coat.

The worst part is not that our slender campmates didn’t likely consider how hard this would be for us. The worst part is that several of them think we deserve this torture as a punishment for being fat and hope that the experience will motivate us to “just lose the weight” so we can have a fantastic time (like them!) next year.

The Verdict

The next time a slender friend suggests a weekend in the wilderness, remember: you are a goddess. Goddesses belong in temples—preferably temples with central air, reinforced mahogany seating, and a bathroom that doesn’t require a flashlight and a prayer.

If they want to sleep on the ground and eat dehydrated peas, let them. We’ll be right here, maintaining our sovereignty on a couch that was actually built to hold a queen.

Aftercare Note: After the emotional detox of even thinking about a camping trip, please treat yourself to a long soak in a tub with Epsom salts. Drink plenty of water to flush out the phantom stress of that collapsible chair. Your energies are moving healthily now—safely away from the woods… and the bears.

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Gentle Reader,

There is a distinct moment every morning, somewhere between the first screaming demand of my bladder - I swear, it is like a spoiled toddler - and the first creak of my ankles, where I lie perfectly still and perform a full-system diagnostic. I’m like a NASA engineer checking a 1970s satellite that’s been floating in deep space for way too long.

Oxygen levels? Stabilizing. Hydration? Critically low. Joints? Reporting back with a series of pops and clicks that sound suspiciously like a bowl of Rice Krispies.

As a Goddess of a certain vintage, I’ve realized that aging isn’t a slow, graceful decline. It’s more like a synchronized protest occurring faster than I ever imagined. It seems my body parts have formed a union, and they are currently on a collective strike. If one more important body part goes all Norma Rae on me, I’m just going to check myself into a facility that serves Jello way too often and smells like a hybrid of pee and antiseptic.

Somebody please tell Eric to marry again and this time, pick someone who is young and skinny. That man deserves a trophy wife and she can reap the benefits of me having spent three decades forming him into the perfect husband.

For now, I wake up, blink at the ceiling, and ask the universe: “What fresh hell cometh today?”

The Spotted Map of My Life

Before I even get out of bed, I notice the new additions to the “collection.” Lately, it seems as if the frontier of my skin is being colonized by age spots. Or are they liver spots? Whatever the medical term, they are suddenly everywhere.

I’m not just talking about the back of the hands—the classic “old lady” giveaway. I’m talking about the unexpected frontier. There are spots on my forearms. Spots on my shins. I found one on my shoulder yesterday that I’m fairly certain wasn’t there when I brushed my teeth. It’s as if my skin has decided to become a Seurat painting without my permission. I’m starting to look like a very large, very tired Dalmatian. I spend half my time wondering if it’s a freckle or a sign of the end times, and the other half wondering why “Goddess Gold” looks so much like “Rusty Brown Spatters.”

The Barnacles of the Soul

And then, we have to talk about the Seborrheic Keratoses. My nurse practitioner —who has been my medical person for around fifteen years —wryly informed me that these are commonly called “the barnacles of aging” and that I can just “scratch them off.”

Barnacles. Apparently, my body has decided that since I’ve been sailing the seas of life for well more than six decades, it’s time to start looking like the hull of an abandoned tugboat. These little “stuck-on” growths appear out of nowhere, looking like someone dropped a tiny bit of brown candle wax on your ribcage or your back. They aren’t dangerous, they’re just... there. Eric noticed one on the top of my ear. I mean seriously, WTF? It’s as if this Goddess is slowly being encrusted by her own history. I’m half-tempted to go down to the shipyard and ask them to just scrape me down with a putty knife and a stiff drink.

The Potassium Rebellion

Once I’ve finished cataloging the new topography of my skin, the physical rebellion truly begins. My body has decided it is no longer satisfied with the amount of potassium I provide and chooses to communicate this via eye-watering leg cramps.

At any time in the day or night, my calf muscle can suddenly and without warning turn itself into a (badly rendered) piece of origami. It’s a pain so sharp it makes you want to apologize for every banana you ever neglected to eat. I’m currently one leg cramp away from legally changing my name to Chiquita. Drink more water - my internal organs are already drowning and scrambling to find Wilson, their companion volleyball - and take those horse pill sized supplements!

Mentally in the Desert with Jim Morrison

Then there is the sleep—or the lack thereof. O Captain! My Captain! Brucifer is still waking up at random times in the night ready to join the Rockettes and build houses with Jimmy Carter. My sleep cycle has become more of a sleep “suggestion.” This eight-to-ten hour girl is having to wring a thriving life out of five to seven hours and it just isn’t working.

Neither CBD, liquid doggie melatonin, crating, exercise during the day with no naps, nor gloom of night keeps this little asshole from the completion of his appointed rounds. All you have to do is note the time stamp of this blog post (does Substack use time stamps?): 3:18 am.

By 10:00 AM, I am no longer a functioning member of the 21st century. I am mentally wandering through a hazy, psychedelic desert with Jim Morrison. I’m staring at my computer screen, listening to “The End,” and wondering if the Lizard King also had to remember his password for the pharmacy app. When you haven’t slept, the line between “deep spiritual wisdom” and “I forgot why I walked into the kitchen” becomes dangerously thin.

At this point, I don’t think I have had a good night’s sleep since the Nixon administration.

The Retirement Paradox

And wasn’t I supposed to be retired? I love what I do and times are hard and crazy right now, so a Witch’s work is never done, but this diamond art ain’t gonna do itself. I have a list of things I want to do—the books I want to read, the magic I want to make—but I am perpetually thwarted by the “Things I Must Do.” This conflict takes on a whole new perspective when you have way more road behind you than in front of you.

I’m crabby. I’m “Get Off My Lawn” adjacent. I’ve realized that retirement is actually just a full-time job where your boss is a demanding, potassium-deficient, barnacle-covered body that requires constant maintenance and a very specific type of ergonomic chair.

The Goddess Grace

But even in the “fresh hell,” there is grace, right? …right? Because even if I am mentally in the desert with Jim Morrison, at least I’m in good company. If I’m crabby because I have too much to do, it’s because I still have a life worth living and can still be valuable to others.

We are “Goddesses in the Trenches.” We may be held together by Spanx, Geritol, and the sheer force of ornery will, but we are still here. We are the architects of our own survival even if that survival looks more like the Brady Bunch house than Downton Abbey.

So tomorrow morning (later this morning?), when I do the “Morning Inventory” and find a new “barnacle” has docked itself onto my shoulder, I’ll just sigh, eat a banana, scratch Bruce on his entirely kissable little head and remind myself: I’ve survived every other fresh hell the universe has thrown at me. Today is no different. BRING IT!

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Katrina's Website - All Things Katrina

There is a recurring myth in the textile industry that the moment a woman’s dress size enters the double digits, her aesthetic preference immediately reverts to “Grandma’s Guest Bedroom.”

I have spent years scouring the racks for clothing that says “I am a powerful, sophisticated woman of a certain vintage,” only to be met with a sea of cabbage roses and puff sleeves that make me look less like a Goddess and more like a very large, upholstered ottoman. It is a mystery of the modern world: why does the fashion industry believe that the more surface area we have, the more cartoon characters we want to wear on our chests?

The Cabbage Rose Industrial Complex

If you are a woman of substance, you know the struggle. You walk into a Plus Size section (usually tucked away in the basement near the luggage or the industrial-sized vacuum cleaners) and you are immediately blinded by the prints.

Huge, loud, aggressive florals. It’s as if the designers think that if they cover us in enough botanical chaos, we will simply blend into the wallpaper and disappear. And don’t even get me started on the Puff Sleeve. On a sprite, a puff sleeve is whimsical. On a 3x Goddess, a puff sleeve is a structural hazard. It adds four inches of shoulder width I didn’t ask for, making me look like I’m ready to start for the Raiders.

The Workout Wear Paradox

Then there is the supreme irony of the Workout Gear. The industry loves to tell us that we need to “get moving.” But have you tried to find high-quality, moisture-wicking, non-see-through leggings in a 3x? Apparently, the designers believe that only people who are already fit deserve to wear spandex.

The people who actually need the support, the compression, and the reinforced inner thighs to prevent chub-rub friction fires are left with flimsy cotton sweatpants that sag in the seat and feature a poorly placed Tweety Bird. If I am going to attempt to move 300 pounds across a gym floor, I need a garment that has the structural integrity of a suspension bridge, not a oversized pajama pant that gives up the ghost after three lunges.

The Footwear Dilemma: Pumps vs. The Orthopedic Sled

Let’s talk about the Physics of the Pump. Balancing 300 pounds on a two-inch stiletto heel is a feat of engineering that should be studied by NASA. It is a high-stakes gamble with my ankles and my dignity. One wrong move on a sidewalk crack and I’m not just falling; I’m creating a seismic event from which I might never arise.

The alternative, of course, is the “Comfort Shoe.” We’ve all seen them—those velcro-strapped, beige, orthopedic sleds that look like they were carved out of a single block of Styrofoam. They are a fashion nightmare. There is no middle ground for the Goddess foot; it’s either a death-defying heel or a shoe that says, “I’ve given up and I’m here for the early bird special.”

The Spanx Standoff

To bridge the gap between the Cabbage Rose Tent and actual fashion, many of us turn to the Body Shaper. Now, I appreciate a smooth silhouette as much as the next woman, but at what cost? These garments are essentially a full-body hug from a boa constrictor. Just climb into a gigantic blood pressure cuff and let it squish your entire body. They smooth the lumps, yes, but they also prevent the minor biological necessity known as breathing.

You put it on, and suddenly your internal organs are forced into a game of musical chairs. Your liver is now where your lungs should be, and your dinner has nowhere to go. You look fantastic in that cocktail dress, but you can’t laugh, cough, or sit down for more than four minutes without seeing spots before your eyes. It’s a literal “breathtaking” look.

The Caftan: The Forbidden Comfort

Finally, we have the Mama Cass Caftan Collection. Don’t get me wrong. I love a caftan. It is airy. It is roomy. It allows for a full range of motion and a triple-cheese pizza without judgment. It is the ultimate expression of Goddess comfort.

But try wearing a floor-length, psychedelic-print silk tent to a professional board meeting or a high-end law firm. For some reason, the Professional Arena has a bias against garments that could double as a parachute. Apparently, if people can’t see the exact location of your waistline, they assume you aren’t capable of handling a spreadsheet. I also abhor that weird polyester smarmy material used to make most caftans. Use silk. Use t-shirt material. Use a soft feedsack material. Don’t use fabric that feels like plastic and cellophane had a child.

The Goddess Verdict

The fashion industry needs a wake-up call. We aren’t looking for tents, and we aren’t looking for kitschy prints. We want what everyone else wants: clean lines, quality fabrics, and the ability to work out without looking like a Saturday morning matinee.

Until the designers realize that a 3x body deserves more than a “forgiving” elastic waistband and a giant daisy, we will continue to perform our tactical recon at the department stores—armed with safety pins, body tape, and - for now - a healthy sense of humor.

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