That is, “the false belief that the situation a person is facing is unlike anything anyone has ever faced before. Is so unique that therapy and treatment or recovery programs that work for others will not work for them because they are a special case” (Out of the Fog).

I’ve been reading an excellent addiction recovery memoir (The Recovering by Leslie Jamison) that has reminded me of the way this mindset has often infected my thinking, to the detriment of my own selfhood and that of the people around me. It’s perhaps one of my least favorite parts of the pathology of some of my mental illnesses (in particular anorexia, which clinicians categorize as egosyntonic — meaning a huge part of my brain is always looking for any scrap of reassurance that my behaviors are justified and good for me). Some part of me is wired to think, I am uniquely broken and therefore uniquely unreachable, uniquely unable to shift my behavior, uniquely, immutably a lost cause. Anything I do as a result is OK.

You’ve likely seen this creep into the way I narrate my struggles, even now. There is a fine line between saying “because I am mentally unwell, I cannot change in all the ways I’d like to” and “because I am mentally unwell, I cannot change at all.” Terminal uniqueness pushes me towards the latter.

I understand now that this is why my first encounters with suicide prevention messaging didn’t help me.

“You’re not alone,” early heartfelt MySpace posts would declare 20 years ago, when World Suicide Prevention Day was new, and I was in my early advocacy days.

Yes, I am, I’d internally scoff. And even if I wasn’t, how is it supposed to comfort me that other people are suffering the way I’m suffering? I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.

I felt a certain kind of righteousness in this internal declaration, as if I wanted everyone in the world to be spared my own tragic fate. I had never felt special before. If it took immense suffering to grant me that, so be it.

And if no one had suffered quite like me, then I got to have a certain specialness, my pain taking on a mythic quality. I didn’t have to try to get better like others did because they were separate from me, our situations impossible to connect.

Hoping is fine for you, my adolescent brain would whisper. But we are quintessentially different. I do not have to do that kind of heavy-lifting of the soul. I’m excused.

A great humbling has taken place in my life over the past few decades as I have interacted with people from so many walks of life, been in hospitals and treatment centers, and lost friends to suicide, addiction, and eating disorders.

For every single person I meet, there is something painful they have survived that I have not. For every single person I meet, there is something painful they have survived that I have.

As it turns out, I’m not alone. And that reminder both continually dethrones my pain as the most important thing about me and also completely changes how I approach suicide prevention.

Suicide prevention (which can include preventing your own suicide through a radical commitment to kicking towards the surface of the awful, necessary present) only really works when it’s a communal practice of solidarity.

Trauma and mental health struggles are real and valid. They need to be affirmed in the completeness of what it’s like to live inside them. This is one of the core tenets of being trauma-informed. But these struggles also need to be understood as part of the bigger picture of human experience, including the fact that my suffering is legible to others. Openness about my struggles and receiving the openness of others in return dethrones my suffering in a way that can mercifully extinguish its burning.

Yes, I believe individual experience exists. But it’s only codified as fully true when it’s in the context of what we share.

Yes, my pain is real.

No, it is not all-encompassing.

It is one piece of a whole.

I want to be clear: mental illness itself sometimes makes this perspective-taking impossible. I cannot always see beyond myself. I can sometimes see just far enough to recognize my own myopia, to be driven mad by how far from my values it feels to be so self-centered.

I have suffered. I have not suffered uniquely. I have wanted to die. So have endless others.

As a child, a kind of main character syndrome defines play. I think this is likely a natural way of defining and delineating the self.

But at some point, we have to move beyond that.

One of my favorite things about my work with HeartSupport, a metal music and mental health nonprofit, is that it puts me in spaces where mental health is fully and openly discussed, but I am never the main character. In May, immediately after a near-death health crisis that included an incredibly low mental health episode, I spent a few days volunteering with HeartSupport at the country’s largest rock and metal festival, interviewing artists and manning the booth where our team had thousands of conversations with music fans about mental health.

I hugged strangers who sobbed on my shoulder. I heard about completed suicides of loved ones. I met people with scars that matched mine. I saw ferocious hope that outshines my own.

It’s the second time I’ve done this, and it was one of the most heart-shifting experiences imaginable to bear witness in this way. I never felt like I was betraying my own story or depleting myself. Instead, what I have experienced became the container to hold what others have experienced. I never had to say out loud, “I understand.” I simply had to embody understanding through presence, through invitational silence.

As it turns out, it’s totally possible to show up for others without leaving yourself and your own significance and truth.

As we head into National Suicide Prevention Month, I am in a challenging mental health episode. I am also planning to go to concerts, to see people I love in two countries, to sing shared songs that affirm and then transcend the skin that has so often crawled with the isolation of being terminally unique.

I’m not alone.

How terrible, that others have plumbed the same wells of oblivion that I have.

How beautiful, that I am not holding this bitter cup by myself.

P.S. — If you want to donate to HeartSupport as a tangible way of showing up for people this Suicide Prevention Month, you can do that here. You can also join me in supporting To Write Love On Her Arms in making free treatment available to those who are struggling with their mental health.

We truly change the world when we choose to show up inside each other’s worlds.

“What if I DON’T actually have anorexia?” I routinely posit to my ever-patient husband, ruefully joking as I name my constant, daily intrusive thought.

He fondly laughs, surrounded by our endless paperwork, my DNR form on our humming, half-empty fridge, our medical debt, our aching, restricted life.

I have had anorexia since I was about 9 — so for 26 years, if you want to do the math. I was 10 in this picture, already writing down every single thing I ate every day, my weight, my final height as it settled.

I also have always borne multiple other chronic illnesses and health challenges. It can be difficult to draw the lines: where does the impact of one diagnosis end and another begin? So I talk about my health like it’s one impenetrable spiderweb of scars.

Last time I counted, I lost track at 14 different chronic diagnoses. Which ones originated with lifelong malnutrition? Which ones (such as Celiac Disease) helped further drive my eating disorder?

These are unknowables, which rankles as a person who thrives on intellectualizing.

It’s worsened by the fact that doctors really don’t know how to deal with my comorbidities either. Most medical professionals get one day in 9 years of med school where they talk about eating disorders. Some doctors have confessed to me that they had even less. Any doctor who wants to understand eating disorders better has to pursue that knowledge independently.

That’s why inpatient wards for people with eating disorders are separate. That’s why eating disorder doctors blame everything on the eating disorder, and other doctors attribute nothing to it and have no clue how to manage its impact. Care is staggeringly siloed, and thus incomplete. I have yet to have a single medical professional who could hold the whole picture of my body for me. I am stained glass, to them and to myself, this fragmented thing that hides different shades of self from other panes of brittle color.

And so I cling to my anosognosia like a life raft: it’s easier if I don’t have anorexia. It’s easier if I’m just dangerously ill and no one really knows why.

But we DO know why.

My commitment to reality at all costs makes me grudgingly show up to life’s confessional: I have been very sick with anorexia for almost my whole life. At different times, it has saved me. It has also made everything in my already fragile body worse. It will almost certainly be the biggest factor in why I die.

I offer this in my continuing efforts to help others understand: curative measures are so complex when part of the pathology of your illness is that you don’t believe you need to be cured. That pathology is echoed in a world that is all-or-nothing in its acknowledgment of your lived experience of the world’s deadliest mental illness.

I’m here also to tell anyone else who is suffering: the whole of your experience is valid. You are more than one diagnosis, or all of them. Your soul is a galaxy of dark space and piercing light. You deserve to be seen. You deserve to be beheld with awe. ✨

I felt bewildered by my own tears. I’d wanted to run away from the suffocating Texas town where I grew up for as long as I could remember. I did not regret that I finally had. But something in me felt an absence nonetheless.

When I graduated from college, I had an odd year out between finishing my degree and marrying my years-long soul mate, Jordan. That’s when my friend Dianna, who I will forever know by her affectionate mid-2000s screen name “Mangy,” offered me her futon in her tiny Colorado townhome. She told me she worried some part of me would not survive if I tried to stay in Texas. She told me I could come as soon as I was ready.

Her concern was valid. My body and my mind had been falling apart under the pressure of tethering myself to that red clay earth, thick with memory and pain.

So I sold most of what I owned, packed two plastic bins full of band t-shirts and Converse, bought a car for $25 from my friend Mars’s parents, and threw my electric blue Fender acoustic guitar in the back. Another of my beloved friends, Brianna, agreed to ride with me through the long Kansas miles for moral support.

I had finally arrived in Colorado with my scant essentials and a dizzying selection of latent trauma responses I didn’t yet have the language to name.

I would later understand that I spent so much of that first summer crying in the ash tree because setting even a broken home on fire leaves your spirit singed. The place I lived had never been safe, but leaving it still felt like a death. Plus, I knew the house I’d landed in was only temporary, that I’d go to some unknown place when my fiancé got into one of the many grad schools he was applying to.

“Where is home?” my exhausted body was crying.

It was a familiar question. When I was just barely older than a toddler and my family moved from Zambia back to Texas, as we wrestled through days sleeping on strangers’ floors and trying to find a place to land, I asked the same question with my child’s eyes full of tears.

What Mangy offered me felt so foreign that it left me turned inside out. She had two small children, 9 and 5 at the time, who had known me their whole lives as an occasional interloper. Now, they had me to themselves constantly — especially since I spent the first two months in Colorado not working. The futon I slept on was in the townhome’s living room. When the kids would wake up in the morning in their upstairs bedroom, they’d scout down the stairs, searching for a sign of life.

The moment I’d betray a sign of wakefulness, it was over.

They’d be on top of me in an instant, chattering away about their day’s plans, their night’s dreams, their requests for games or a trip to the park. No matter how tired I was, my infinite fondness roused my energy. Helping look after young children was not new to me; I’d been doing it my whole life. But here, they had a caregiver who was not me, one I could fully trust to attune to their needs.

That meant that I just got to be their friend, the young adult who loaned the 9-year-old my black nail polish, who painted endless pictures with the 5-year-old, who picked them up at the bus stop and herded them home alongside a passel of other neighborhood kids who somehow fell into my orbit.

This was one of many ways that my understanding of what “home” could be began to realign.

I arrived in Colorado with the deep intention to reach some kind of fragile peace with the eating disorder that had ravaged my teenage years. I set an intention: I would eat three meals a day, and I would take a walk every day on the scraggly Colorado trails.

But I would not walk if I hadn’t eaten the requisite meals.

Mangy cooked for me, setting a plate down at breakfast, lunch, and dinner without a word, without monitoring how much I finished or didn’t. I had been doing a significant amount of the cooking for my family since I was a child. To be served in this way was humbling, perplexing, and galvanizing. My body got stronger. I could walk farther and farther on the trails that were steadily claiming my heart.

At night, after the kids went to bed, Mangy and I would curl up in the corner of her room to watch the tiny TV by the window. She showed me 80s movies, and I showed her the David Tennant seasons of Doctor Who. Sometimes, credits long rolled past, we’d talk until it was the blackest part of the night. There was never pressure for every conversation to have weight and heft, but those things were also always welcome.

I moved to Colorado in June. By August, I needed at least a little income, so I started working odd jobs: cleaning, house sitting, or when I was the luckiest, graphic design or photography. My car pretty quickly fully broke down. It didn’t matter; I’d grown strong enough to walk all over town.

I’d walk to work. I’d take myself to see the new movie renditions of Les Miserables and The Hobbit. I’d go sit at Starbucks and write. I got to know Colorado Springs intimately on those bystreets, marveling at gardens growing in their alien, arid shapes and colors.

Mangy and I were part of a community of mutual friends stemming from the writer’s group she’d founded when I was in my mid-teens, so if I wanted company, I always had people to hang out with. I had been immensely lonely in college, my four jobs, home life, and academic endeavors precluding any chance of socializing. Suddenly, I was learning the art of un-isolating.

This began to feel somewhat ominous when my departure neared. As I walked my favorite trail at golden hour, 10 months after moving in with Mangy, I realized I had stopped crying in the ash tree. I had stopped grieving the place I had left behind because I’d built a brand new template for what home meant. I knew I was storing up light inside me, the light that leaked over the mountains, keeping it close to my heart in case I’d need it in the days ahead.

And I did. When I left Colorado, I was nomadic for a few months until Jordan and I got married and settled in Nashville, Tennessee, while he worked on a PhD at Vanderbilt. I quickly discovered a depth of loneliness I’d never known before. When I lived in Texas, at least I had my siblings, a crew of seven of us constantly piled on each other like enmeshed, quarelling, mischievous kittens. In Tennessee, I had Jordan, and I had a great and terrible void. We were 22, impoverished, and building a life from scratch.

“Bloom where you’re planted!” well-intentioned distant advisors would say.

I wanted to retort, “can’t you see that I’m trying to plant a tree in thin top soil that is perpetually blowing away?”

Nashville was transient, shallow, and slick with a social sheen of transactionary relationships. It got a little better when my Nashville chosen sisters, Sarah and then Caitlin, moved to town. But it never got easy, and it never felt right.

I always secretly harbored this ache for Colorado, like a recently extracted tooth whose gap you can’t stop noticing. Jordan and I went back every summer, staying with Mangy in her new, bigger house, hiking over the radiant mountains. My big brother moved there shortly after I moved away, meaning every visit was now also an excuse to see him.

“You wouldn’t be happy if you moved there,” a former friend snapped at me over and over again, wanting me to stay closer to where they could get to me. “You’d still be exactly who you are: you’d still be depressed and anxious.”

Doubt seeded in my spirit. Was I wrong about how I remembered living in Colorado? Was my inability to thrive in Tennessee something inherently wrong with me?

After five years of scraping together a life in Nashville, Jordan and I were forced to let that life go and move to Memphis for his work. I quickly learned that I had not yet plumbed the depths of what loneliness can be. In Memphis, I found its bitter bottom. I entered a shadowed place where I was unmade. I was the least myself I have ever been.

After a year living there, Jordan and I made our annual trip to Colorado. My brother had gotten married the year before, and we’d just learned that he and his wife were expecting their first child. On a drive up Pike’s Peak, Colorado Springs’ central mountain, I snapped a photo of my brother and sister-in-law — and they giddily remarked that it was their first photo as a family of three, my oldest niece being ferried towards her arrival in the world.

I felt a new, wonderful, terrible twist in my heart. I had not yet met my niece. I already knew I loved her more than my own breath and blood.

When Jordan and I drove back into Memphis that time, after the 18-hour drive was behind us, we were quiet as we passed by each stoplight on the narrow thoroughfare that led to our apartment.

“It’s hard to come back,” Jordan finally said, quietly.

I looked at him, a little startled. He had always been better than I was at choking back the loneliness. He had a job he genuinely loved. He had joined the local symphony choir. He had lived in various parts of Tennessee since elementary school.

Tennessee had never been my home. In that moment, I understood that it wasn’t Jordan’s, either.

A lump rose in my throat. Maybe it was finally time to go home.

Jordan interviewed for a job in Colorado Springs in the weeks leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. He got the job mere days before my first extended hospitalization for anorexia — a hospitalization that happened to be, as fate would have it, at a facility in Colorado. During that time, we bought our first house, sight unseen, with the help of unbelievably kind realtors and video calls.

Mangy picked me up from partial hospitalization housing on my final day of treatment and drove me to see our new home before dropping me off at the airport to fly back to Tennessee for the move. It was a townhome, very similar in layout to the one I’d lived in with Mangy so long ago. I walked gingerly across the empty laminate floor, picturing the life it might stage.

Seven years and four months after I’d moved away from Colorado, we moved back. I have now lived in Colorado longer than anywhere else in my adult life. And it turns out that the template for home that I built at 21 was ready to let me sink back into it, even after the years in Tennessee had chewed me up and spit me out as a heartbroken, emptied, nomadic creature.

Now once a week, Mangy comes and sits on my couch the way I used to sit in her room, and we watch TV shows and unload the weight of life. Also once a week, Jordan and I go to my big brother’s house, spending hours being deliriously exhausted by two vivacious little girls who cannot even remember a time before Aunt Mary and Uncle Jordan lived just down the street. We are surrounded by friends who we see often. I walk the same trails I walked at 21, but dozens of others too: after all, I can reliably drive myself to trailheads now, since I paid a little more than $25 for this most recent car.

It turns out I didn’t need to bloom where I was planted. I needed to seek the right soil. It took a while, but I finally came back to it, and I’ve taken root.

In some ways, the haunting warning spoken over me wasn’t entirely wrong: I am still sick, traumatized, and wrestling with an entire lifetime of ache that came before we got here. But given the choice, I would rather be sick surrounded by friends, by family, by mountains, than to be sick while living in the trackless wastes of loneliness.

But it was right in this way too: I am myself here. I am home.

It was a weekend of staggering heartbreak. The music journalism job that had defined my 20s had crumbled under me with little warning. I wanted to finish well, so I committed to still work the awards weekend I was on the list for right after my final week on payroll. I showed up for free during those days.

Caitlin and Sarah were beside me — Caitlin my coworker, Sarah our past coworker and forever partner in crime. We pulled hijinks all over the Opry area. We took dramatic photos. We rode the carousel. We bought discount Hot Topic t-shirts. We were disruptively, fiercely present together in the face of crippling loss.

I was in the middle of other losses: being forced to move away from Nashville against my choice and my hopes. The financial ruin of sudden unemployment in the midst of a move. The early stages of my crippling neurological disorder. Ongoing extreme secret abuse in a relationship. Mourning my cousin’s death by suicide. Deep personal pains that are stories I still can’t tell.

But there we freaking were, riding a carousel, laughing.

The next night, I stood on that red carpet with Caitlin. We seamlessly rolled through artist interviews.

We worked the press room backstage at the Opry, manning an interview booth where I had throat coat tea for all of the artists who were hoarse from interviews and performing.

At the end of the night, I walked out into the heavy dark beside Caitlin, and I walked into the knowing: a whole chapter of my life was over. I had finished it well. I had sewn shut the grave clothes. I was walking, back straight, eyes forward, shoulders set, into death.

This week, July of 2026, was the replacement Nashville trip that I was supposed to take in February before the surgery that sidelined my entire life.

I’d already had the trip to Nashville to see Sarah and Caitlin and work with some of my current rock and roll clients planned when Caitlin pointed out that the Opry debut for my favorite band — Switchfoot — was happening in the exact time frame I’d already be in town. Of course, I jumped on tickets.

Then there was an after-show announced, because of course, Switchfoot is too prolific to play just three songs in a night.

Switchfoot played their Opry set, beginning with “Dark You to Move,” the song tattooed around my forearm.

After, the staff directed those of us with the after-show add-on towards a back room.

It was the exact same room where we’d done press 8 years ago during the end of my world.

Caitlin and I walked death in reverse. Instead of walking away from something that had disintegrated under us, we walked the solid road towards a band we love, an experience we’d share, a presence in the lives we’ve built for ourselves.

Being who I am (overthinking, meaning-making, always), I was staggered by the symbolism.

Two nights later, Sarah, Caitlin, and I were together in Franklin, just south of Nashville, spilling tea and laughing til my tired body ached. I don’t know if they felt it, but after the year that has been, I felt it in my bones: I didn’t know if we’d ever all be together again. I hadn’t known if my body would allow it.

These sinews and this skin and this broken heart had pulled themselves together to reach for my sisters, against all odds.

We were on our way to dinner, laughing about something innocuous, when we saw it: a carousel.

Of course, we had to ride.

It happened to be National Carousel Day (surprise! That’s a thing), so we got two rides for the price of one. We rode the gorgeous animals up and down, laughing, eyes shining, snapping photos like unruly teenagers.

8 years ago, riding a carousel together was an act of uncertain reaching for a hope I couldn’t even feel because I was so grief-dismantled and numb.

I have a lot of reasons to feel that way now. I have lost infinitely more than I could have dreamed in those 8 years. I have been telling my steady, sweet husband often that this year is the only year of my adult life that has held so much pain that it compares to 2018.

But here’s the theme I found myself sharing with Caitlin and Sarah over and over again: I kept everything that mattered.

After everything. After every desolation. After every death.

Here I was, with my sisters, a carousel, and laughter.

Nothing else matters. Nothing I have lost or gained: just these people I love who somehow love me, the laughter, the wonder, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the ache.

I was trying to believe the world wasn’t ending when we climbed on that carousel 8 years ago.

I don’t try to pretend that anymore. My world has ended, over and over. And don’t get me wrong: that matters.

But it doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as what has survived every apocalypse.

The people who love you will walk death in reverse with you. They’ll chase wonder in the face of loss. I know it now, in my bones, in my blood, about my dearest friends and my siblings and my partner and Divine Love itself.

I kept everything that mattered.

I kept them.

The Vegas airport slot machines gleamed garishly in the early morning light. I watched them flash and ping shrilly, my eyes half closed, from my position in an airport wheelchair. If I’d had a choice, I would have chosen another place to sit and wait for the next assistant to come grasp the wheelchair handles and take me to my next gate.

But of course, if I’d had choices, I wouldn’t have been there at all.

It was April 18, 2023. In the preceding months, I’d gotten used to being pushed in a wheelchair sometimes — a jarring adjustment, a swallowing of pride prompted by collapsing in LAX on the way home from a business trip. I’ve needed wheelchairs and walkers on and off many times over the years since then. But back then, it was brand new, and the way my own legs worked like a stranger’s felt like being trapped.

No one prepares you for the bone-rattling humiliation of the rapid change from running sub-8-minute miles to being on bed rest, unable to consistently walk more than one room’s length at a time.

I was on my way to medically stabilize at the one treatment center that had consented to take me (irresponsibly, if I’m honest— they were not equipped). It was after I’d been turned down by about a dozen others. After my primary care physician had defied recommendations to put in orders for a hospitalization at home, “because you’ll just discharge, keep doing the same things, and die anyway in a couple of months.”

Nights earlier, I’d been sent home from a bed in the ER purely because they knew I had a bed in another facility, ordered to come back during the liminal in-between if my heart began to show signs of stopping again.

I didn’t know if I wanted to live. But I knew I wanted the option of living. And that meant giving up a lot of other options, for the moment — including the option of walking.

I don’t always gravitate back towards stories from my youth, but in that moment, I remembered a prophecy attributed to the first-century rabbi Jesus, who was speaking to his notoriously unruly follower Peter.

Peter is depicted as strong-willed, smoldering with misguided loyalty and tumultuous opinions. He seems like someone fiercely dedicated to his own agency, even while genuinely desiring to understand the needs of a new interdependent spiritual community he was part of.

There was a deep betrayal in the relationship between Jesus and Peter, but on the other side of death and resurrection, grace closed the wound with three swift stitches: “do you love me?”

“Yes, of course.”

As the story goes, Jesus then said something both cryptic and staggering. He told Peter, “When you were younger, you used to put on your belt and walk wherever you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands and someone else will put your belt on you, and bring you where you do not want to go.”

The author of John’s gospel adds that this foreshadows how Peter will die (in an act of state violence).

As I sat waiting for a stranger to wheel me away from the glistening maws of the slot machines to my final flight, the words rattled around in my head.

You’ll reach out your hands, pleading, but someone will bring you where you do not want to go. One day, this is how you will die.

To be disabled is to lose autonomy, one small, devastating death at a time.

When I first read the list of example disabilities listed by the ADA years ago, I was shocked by how many of them I had seemingly totally independently of the myriad complications of lifelong malnutrition. More than likely, my first-presenting disabilities (my neurological disorder, celiac, spine problems, PTSD, and Major Depressive Disorder) were purely the result of trauma and genetics.

Nevertheless, I was able to function quite well until my 30s, in part due to some self-led harm reduction in my 20s.

Now, my capacity varies massively. Some months are good. Others, I’m in the hospital. Sometimes, I need a wheelchair. Other times, I can work myself up to running a slow mile (which I can, miraculously, do right now).

Even at my best, the things that I do in the world (going to work, going to concerts, traveling, hiking) only happen if I spend every spare other minute in bed or on the couch — the invisible cost I am constantly counting. I assess and dole out my energy like a miser because I have to. I make ROI decisions. I have traveled a fair amount this summer, for example, but as a result, I haven’t had the “extra” energy to fold laundry since May, and I’ve missed dozens of appointments. Every ounce of me goes to keeping me moving during the times I’m visible, some terrible, ever-changing magic trick.

This, too, has been a learning curve: disability is not a static state. It is a fluid matrix of symptoms and functions, constantly changing in status and relationships with one another.

Unfortunately, part of that matrix is public perception.

I wonder now if I was too honest too early about my declining health (even though I waited well over a year before I told anyone about my first inpatient stays). The truth is, I really thought I’d either get better or die instead of whatever it is I’m doing now. I had no idea how to play the long game.

And so I have had to constantly run up against the limitations of people’s assumptions about what is right for my body, even when I try to offer them as much clarity as I can.

I have often told Jordan that dying in slow motion has been nowhere near as hard as handling other people’s reactions to doing so.

Public perception of disability is a double-edged sword, especially when most of my disabilities are varying levels of visible (until I’m literally in a wheelchair). If I present as unwell, more often than not, I’m treated like I’m too fragile to know my own body, mind, and ability. But if I present as functional, I’m told it can’t be that bad, and I don’t need the kind of help I’m asking for — not even if I display a full medical chart for backup.

I am so fortunate to have a clinical team (both outpatient and inpatient at my specialized out-of-state hospital of choice) who talks honestly with me, and who trusts me to do the same. We have reached a deep understanding of how to balance my capacity and quality of life.

I am so lucky, too, for the friends who have allowed me to simply be present at whatever capacity I can be (even if it’s only part of an event instead of the full evening), the siblings who think of things like extra cushions for my damaged spine when I visit, the coworker who cheerfully carried my work bag out to my car day after day while I was using a walker. These gentle angels are profound expressions of mercy incarnate. They are also the exception, not the rule.

“Nothing about us without us,” goes the disability rights slogan. But there are a million insidious ways that this principle isn’t practiced, where I feel like my personhood disappears beneath the stamp of liability.

One of the hardest lessons I have learned is that in an everything-maxxing society, there is very little room for the sick. To be in a disabled body, to be limited, can be seen almost as a social contagion, a mirror for everyone else’s own fears that they could drop below the threshold of what is seen as socially acceptable levels of functional and health-performing. Part of this is the deep desire to believe that health is always a personal choice, that if you just check the right boxes, you’ll be in control and pain will not befall you.

That is very psychologically normal.

It’s also dead wrong.

And it comes with a real cost. There is a massive amount of data and commentary out there about the moralizing of wellness culture, the way it is one of the most acceptable forms of bias; Christy Harrison’s work at making scholarly research accessible is excellent in this regard, as is Maintenance Phase, Kate Manne, Kate Bowler, and many others I could name (and am indebted to).

It’s almost like to be unwell and shatter our illusions of complete autonomy as humans is to then be marked as undeserving of full autonomy, the same way so many other kinds of bodies have been deemed unworthy of full autonomy in past systems of oppression because of their gender identity, race, or class. For someone with PTSD who already has to work deeply hard to regulate when my autonomy is inevitably threatened, this is pretty hellish, and can feel like violence (even when the limits on autonomy are considered by the other party as well-intentioned or necessary).

To put it simply: the only version of me that society will ever really want is the wholly well version.

But I do not have that to offer. I can dissemble, but I cannot actualize that person ever again.

I have become obsessed with Halsey’s haunting illness exploration “Life of the Spider,” expressing their own feelings of becoming unwanted when lupus and leukemia put their career (and their life) in jeopardy. So much of the album The Great Impersonator is about life and death, about losing a sense of self when it’s clear that society wanted them for what they could do, not who they were.

“Cause I’m the spider in your kitchen weaving webs through every year
And I worked real hard on the last one but the last one got me here
I’m minding my own business but my presence makes your curse
I should be getting better but I’m only getting worse
And, God, how dare I even think of choosing here to die?
‘Cause then I’m just a problem that you have to take outside.”

It is a point of great delight and rightness to me that I witnessed the only live performance of this song that has ever happened — at Red Rocks, mere days after I was discharged from the hospital, the medical wristband still flashing on my wrist in the blacklights.

“You want to take a shower?”

The nurse sounded beyond skeptical.

“Yes,” I repeated calmly. “I will feel much better if I shower. It won’t take me very long. I know we’ll have to unhook most of the lines, but I can keep the incision sheltered.”

It was February of 2026. I was lying in a hospital bed, in a gown and sweatpants, hooked up to a pole decked out with swollen bags of fluids and attached to monitors gauging the slow slog of my heart.

“Well, OK,” the nurse said dubiously. “But I’ll need to sit and watch you, and you know you have to use the chair the whole time.”

Of course I knew. I couldn’t stand unassisted; I used a walker just to get to and from the bathroom.

But as the hot water poured over my tattooed skin, rinsing away surgical markers and EKG pad gel, I felt like it washed a modicum of selfhood back into me.

These are the moments when autonomy is still mine, regardless of living in a society structured to borrow and steal the steering of my body and soul.

I can’t fix societal systems. But I can take a shower. I can put on eyeshadow in a hospital bathroom. I can tuck a new tattoo behind my ear before a 4-hour infusion. I can begin to reframe wheelchairs as providing access instead of removing autonomy. I can find the people who don’t ask me to impersonate functionality, who simply let me be sick without shaming that state — let me be me.

If you are chronically ill or disabled, I wish that same defiance for you. I hope you find your own small practices of selfhood. Even if sometimes it’s necessary, I hope you never find yourself stuck sitting in a wheelchair on an April morning, numbed by the inescapable clamor of a slot machine while you wait for someone to take you where you do not want to go.

We are not spiders to be crushed. We are bodies broken — and we are worth unbreakable.

We were in a small crowd, all of us clustered around Switchfoot’s bus, waiting to see if we’d get one of the legendary aftershows from their lead singer, Jon Foreman. It was October of 2010, and in those days, aftershows were not as formalized as they have become now (announced on social media, in a carefully pre-selected location). We simply had to wait and hope in the musty dark outside of Click’s Bar, glutted on song and story from a full concert already, still wanting more.

It felt extravagant, waiting into the darkest hours for more light. I was not accustomed to allowing myself to hope for such a gift. That night, recklessly, I was letting myself want.

By that point, Switchfoot had been my favorite band for years — a bond I shared with J, one of my lifelong best friends. Because of the limitations on my teenage years and the fact that I wasn’t allowed to get a driver’s license until I was almost 20, getting to concerts was hard, even once I started patching together rides between family members and friends willing to take me.

So this was the first time I’d managed to make it to see Switchfoot (although I’d seen Jon solo in a last-minute gig in a church attic 6 months earlier). They were in the midst of their Hello Hurricane era, touring with The Almost, one of my other favorite bands, as direct support.

We were members of their then-small fan club Friends of the Foot, so J and I got to enter the venue early to spend time with the guys and watch them soundcheck. For a 19-year-old fangirl, this was basically transcendence.

Foam seagulls hung from the grungy bar ceiling, mimicking motion, flight. After the soundcheck (during which they played the entirety of “Bullet Soul” just for us), we simply hung out.

Immensely shy and reserved at that age, I still found myself drawn out by the kindness of the guys in the band, quickly laughing as J and I flitted between conversations.

Switchfoot never structured their “meet and greets” as the usual long line of people waiting for 10 seconds to grab a group photo as an amorphous cluster. We were just all in a room together, talking to the musicians and each other, taking photos on digital cameras for each other before the smartphone was ubiquitous.

I was so nervous before I got a photo with Jon Foreman that I was stiff and shaky. He could clearly tell. Compassionately and with zero self-preservation, he immediately started cycling through ridiculous, grandiose poses to create hype, loudly proclaiming the importance of getting a photo with me. Suddenly, I was laughing as J caught our photo.

I would later write about the experience on my first blog.

“For a long time, the only way I knew how to handle relationships was through the lens of what I had to do and how I had to act and what I had to give and the constant, endless battle to meet everyone’s expectations of the person I should be,” I wrote at 19. “But these guys had no expectations. They were totally willing to give me their time and their songs and their smiles. And I had nothing. And it was absolutely and completely terrifying. I was so certain that they were just going to talk to others and ignore me entirely, and I was OK with that. But they didn’t. I never had to ask to get a picture with any of the guys – they all asked me. I think I only said one complete sentence while we were talking to any of them. Even when I was with Jon, who I had met before, I couldn’t speak. I could only smile and say thank you.”

What I couldn’t write at the time was the uniquely painful place I found myself in, my own personal hurricane I was facing down. The choice to try and live that I’d made at 16, the commitment to pursue love and compassion as the most meaningful way of being, was one I pursued without guidance or guardrails.

I began to confuse self-abandonment with love. I began to believe that to be repeatedly crucified for others was the only way I could give back the second chance I’d been given.

I know now that my life will always be a greater gift to others than my eventual, inevitable death. If I’d known more about the actual faith tradition I’d stumbled into instead of going off terrible half-truths inculcated in Western religion, I would have known that the great death-dance Evangelicalism demanded of me was inherently hypocritical. The end of the story they told was life, not death. The Person they were supposedly modeling their teachings from submitted to solidarity with death — and then, somehow, went beyond it.

I didn’t feel like I was allowed to do the same. I didn’t know what it meant for me to resurrect.

As a result, I was both deep in family enmeshment and in the early years of a relationship marked by extreme coercive control, a way of being that I’d been groomed into by how I grew up. I would experience the most immense suffering of my life in that situation. When I carefully wrote “the only way I knew how to handle relationships was through the lens of what I had to do and how I had to act and what I had to give,” the reality I was picking my way around was “I am not allowed to have wants or experience personal joy right now because I am always quickly, decisively, brutally punished for it.”

After soundcheck, J, another friend, and I went to grab cups of coffee before the concert began, vaulting our preshow jitters higher with the caffeine.

As I recounted at the time, “I was angry at myself for being quiet. I kept telling myself that I must have looked ridiculous, that I had been the only person in that room too afraid to talk, that all of my friends would never act like that.”

But then: the music.

Self-loathing can’t dam the river of beauty that is a song that once found you alone in the bitter black, now sung in unison under the viscous reds and blues and greens of a stage’s lighting.

J and I were on the front row, right against the stage, under those foam seagulls. Song after song broke over me like a wave. Early on in the set, as he often does, Jon Foreman was roaming across the landscape of the crowd, tethering himself to us by taking a few hands at a time. He almost immediately grabbed mine, making eye contact with me as he sang, as I blinked rapidly in my struggle not to look away.

“There in the song and in the contrasting light and dark and in the sweaty, singing, pulsing crowd, Jon simply reached out and took my hand. And it was a moment of connection, a moment that was more than any words that could have been spoken. And as the setlist continued, complete with almost all of the Switchfoot songs that have meant the most to me, I sang and I cried and I wondered who I was and why in the world I was invited into something so beautiful.”

For a moment, something was simply good. For a moment, I was moved beyond the language of deserving and into the melody of grace.

The night closed on “Dare You to Move,” my favorite song of all time. My desperate heart heard a curious invitation, beyond conscious thought, beyond the songs, beyond my own terror. Blessedly, I had the foresight to write down what I thought I heard Love saying to me:

“Do you really think this is all, Mary? Do you really think that I’m going to leave you here and give up on you? This is just the beginning. Move. I dare you.”

My frozen soul, so frightened and small, expanded enough to crack the ice as I wept.

Jon Foreman did eventually come out to join us in that dark Texas parking lot after the show. Someone had constructed an actual working banjo from tin cans, and they’d brought it to see if the instrument could stump Jon. It couldn’t. He picked up the “canjo” and casually tuned it before busting out the then-unreleased “Just Rob Me,” a song which would later appear on a Fiction Family album. We laughed and clapped along, our voices reverberating off the patchy concrete at 1:00 a.m.

In the days that followed, as I went back to a full-time college load, multiple jobs, caregiving for my younger siblings, and trying to constantly placate the mercurial relational force that was taking over my whole life, I grappled with grace.

Who was I to have had that experience? Me: painfully quiet, shy, scarred, starving, afraid.

It took a few days before I allowed myself to simply make peace with it. While I was working a cleaning contract for my father late one night after a full day of classes, I finally reached acceptance.

“I am beginning to wonder if there are a lot of things I’ve had wrong,” I mused. “Am I more than what the world tells me I should be? Am I more than barely scraping by? Am I more than a 19-year-old kid who is too quiet all the time? Because if I am, then that means that I don’t need to live in constant fear of motion because I’m afraid that I won’t be moving the way everyone tells me to. It means that I am more than college and grades tell me I am. It means that scars are not the final moment, but the starting point. It means that where I am now is only the beginning, rather than the total of who I am. It means I have a reason to keep going, even when it’s dark. It means that I can burn bright, that I have another chance.

It means that the constant song I’ve heard since my freshman year is getting louder, not quieter, that there is a song of redemption and broken things made new calling out simple, beautiful, earth-shattering words: I dare you to move.

And so I will.”

15 years later, in December of 2025, I drove through a snowstorm to see Switchfoot for the 25th time.

At 34 years old, I had worked in the music industry for almost 15 years (I’d started just months after my first Switchfoot show). Now, I routinely provided PR and marketing services to many of the same bands I’d been hooked on at 19. Through the ebbs and flows of my work with music, I’d build a second career in nonprofit marketing, and my humanitarian career was now half a decade old.

It turns out that I really was more than I’d been told I should be. The quiet kid’s words had traveled around the world — quite literally, with music and advocacy work leading me to countries like Thailand, the Philippines, and Germany. Through it all, I carried the bridge of “Dare You to Move” tattooed around my arm: “maybe redemption has stories to tell.”

As I drove through the snowstorm in December of 2025, I was reflecting on the reality that I would likely have to decide about some health intervention soon; my always dodgy hold on stability was increasingly tenuous. I felt a deep, inexplicable unease as night fell on the snowy backroads I was confidently navigating my little Kia over, the main highway closed due to ice. I felt assured in my driving, but less so in where I was going after the end of the road. I didn’t know, but somehow I knew: the months ahead of me would be some of the darkest of my life. The shadows were already falling.

But I had learned 15 years ago that even in the dark seasons, the hurricanes, the blizzards, I’m still allowed to chase the light.

That night in a Colorado ski town was the smallest Switchfoot show I’d seen since the first one 15 years earlier. A group of us clustered against the stage of a performing arts center, laughing and chatting, all millennials aged into our religious trauma and our slow unbecoming and re-becoming.

I have worked beside Switchfoot several times over the years, but we don’t really know each other. Nonetheless, that frigid night, just like he had 15 years ago, Jon Foreman crossed the stage to take my hand and sing right at me as I stood on the brink of the crowd.

I’m not afraid of moments like these anymore. I can make eye contact with joy without flinching. I can sing the words back to someone I respect, my eyes enlivened by our shared delight.

Epilogue:

Five months later, after surgery, the closest call yet with death, two months in and out of the hospital, relearning how to walk, and multiple immense crises and losses, I’d see Switchfoot again.

In May of this year, they were on the cusp of releasing Forever Now when they played Florida’s Welcome to Rockville, the country’s largest rock and metal festival. I was there working with HeartSupport, a music and mental health nonprofit for which I do marketing. Graciously, everyone I was there with knew and held space for this fact: Mary’s Switchfoot time was non-negotiable.

As I ran from our booth to the stage where Switchfoot would be playing, I felt my abdomen pulling around the still-healing scar from a surgery a few months earlier, the contraction of displaced muscles. I felt my heart clamoring in my chest, a heart that beats defiantly against 4 different diagnoses now, a heart that refuses to stop.

When Switchfoot took the stage, blending songs I’d heard them play 15 years ago with songs that are brand-new to this present era, I almost immediately doubled over — unexpectedly, urgently sobbing. Months of grief and determination and white-knuckled endurance poured out of me in rivulets of saltwater surrender.

This band is still startling me with goodness that feels unearned, undeserved.

I never thought I’d see Switchfoot play again. I never thought I’d hear them release another album.

I had been OK with that. As I write this, steeping in the latest songs from my favorite band, I want to continue being honest about my mixed feelings about my own survival.

But I know this: if I have to stay in this place a little longer, with this broken body and this scarred but increasingly clear-eyed soul, I am grateful that I get to do it accompanied by Switchfoot’s music. I am grateful that J is still in my life, a beloved constant. I am grateful for everything I was wrong about at 19. I am grateful for everything I was right about, too. I am grateful that goodness, beauty, and love continue to find me, no matter what else I have to face at the same time.

I am grateful I’m still moving, still living on a dare for as long as I’m able — and that I’m not alone while I’m doing it.

If I could be surprised so many times before, I choose to believe I could be again.

My sister Lina, my brother Flynn, and I were working a cleaning contract at a church our family attended for a while. This was our primary job among several contracts we worked so that our parents could collect the income.

I snuck into the industrial-equipped church kitchen with my older siblings, seeing the gold mine uncovered: a big plastic bag stuffed full of popcorn from a church event we hadn’t attended (due to the increasing social ostracization and intense bullying my siblings and I were targeted by).

Furtively, we three shot one hand out at a time, grabbing fistfuls of stale kernels and then stuffing them in our quiet mouths. The popcorn was sweet and salty at the same time: a flavor palette we’d never encountered before. I was 10 years old, and I’d never heard the words “kettle corn.”

At some point, our father-acting-as-boss figured out what we were doing and, disgusted, demanded that we stop. After all, it was raccoonish behavior, rifling at night through the leavings of the middle-class Texan Evangelicals who occupied the building during the day.

But we were undeterred. The popcorn was too sweet. We watched each other’s backs, sneaking back and forth from the massive grey trashcan, lifting the lid just enough to shove our skinny wrists underneath and grab another mouthful.

The kettle corn incident makes more sense based on one simple fact: we were hungry.

We were almost always hungry. Dinners were sometimes simply a pot full of canned beans, mixed with salt and pepper. We were allowed two snacks between meals, around 10:00 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Snacks were usually two saltine crackers; if we were lucky, it was three, and if we were extra lucky, we got to skim a thin layer of butter on the salty tops.

Even though I started exploring social issues and structural inequities as a young adult, I never really applied the word “food insecurity” to my own experience until much later. We always had food, more or less; I truly believe that my parents were doing the best they could within the limits of their belief system and the life it allotted for us.

I didn’t understand that the amount of food, and what it consisted of, also spoke of structural precarity.

By the time I was 10, I was already dieting intentionally, was already monitoring my food intake to try and carve myself into non-existence. I kept detailed lists of what I’d eaten each day in my journals.

Reading them now, with the experience of many years under the care of dieticians and doctors, I can see all the glaring red flags: I was malnourished for as far back as I can remember.

Really, I was hungry until I learned not to be. Deny your body long enough, and you lose all hunger cues.

“Don’t you get hungry?” some people have asked upon learning of my lifelong eating disorder, decades of my adult body lagging behind the normal caloric intake for a healthy toddler.

I can honestly tell them: no. My body doesn’t miss what I trained it not to hope for.

Believe it or not, I can blame the questionable social norm of the icebreaker question for a lot of revelations.

Over the five years I’ve worked in nonprofit marketing, the most normal of all my jobs following years in the tumultuous music industry, I have increasingly realized that I have a mismatched set of stories.

When a casual pre-meeting prompt about a memory we have or an experience we recall is tossed out, I have to do quick mental math about what the right degree of trauma-dumping is in that moment. I am committed enough to authenticity that “zero” is not the amount I choose. But how much do I up the ante? When others are talking about Friday nights spent on sports or with friends, when is the appropriate time to admit that I worked until midnight every Friday night of my childhood?

I have also started to notice the thousand unspoken elements of stories from people I know, such as my partner, who grew up securely middle-class: their anecdotes are full of safety nets. If they got hurt, they went to the doctor. If they were in trouble, they asked for help. If they needed new clothes, they were bought. If they were hungry, they ate.

I can’t fathom it.

It doesn’t make me insecure, really — not anymore. I don’t miss what I never had. My hunger cues are gone.

But it does sometimes make me grimly aware that I will never really catch up. If I started from an entirely different set of social mores, building the plane as it’s flying, how can I possibly expect to touch anything but the fumes of those who started adulthood with fully-formed aircraft chugging steadily along?

I am a kid hard at work on a dark night, swallowing the leavings of someone else’s party, just a little too late.

My body keeps the score.

It infuses a lot of my current work life, the thing that afforded me this mysterious entrance into the middle class, with a similar sense of displacement. I have been working since I was about 8 years old, paying rent since I was 16. I never had a financial fallback. I know what instability looks like, the devastation that used to ripple like a shockwave through my family when one of the contracts we kids worked with our father would be severed. I was crawling out of a terrible chasm while my peers were already standing up on the edge, unknowingly on solid ground.

I will never fully outgrow the fear of falling instead of reaching them.

So I work hard, 50-60-hour workweeks between two careers, even in months when I’m bed-bound due to my health. I keep trying to earn my way into the givens and for-granteds of the social class I accidentally performed my way into through brutal college years and often sacrificing my selfhood on the altar of careers.

But I am still working without safety nets. I have endless dental appointments to make up for the ones I didn’t have as a child, every cavity and crown another gap in experience. I am at the doctor’s more often than I am at social gatherings, patching together a body that spun out on life’s freeway because I was redlining it from such a young age: celiac, bones that broke and healed wrong, a neurological disorder, the myriad impacts of a lifetime of malnutrition.

I know I dodged the bullet of cyclical poverty, and that isn’t lost on me.

After all, I got here. After all, I am now solidly middle class — even though it comes with the constant compensation for the lifetime I was not. Even though we crack our high-deductible health insurance plan’s out-of-pocket max every year, without fail, and pay for extra specialists on top of that that insurance won’t cover. Even though if I were to stop working, or to work less, I would lose this tenuous foothold in the world.

I can never unknow how fragile my status is. Sometimes that makes me more empathetic towards those who are marginalized. Sometimes it makes me a better humanitarian. Sometimes it gives me a level of gratitude.

Those things are all true — sometimes.

Most of the time, I also feel a doomed sense that I’m just on the edge of falling, of being the kid with her hand in the trash can again.

But all of the time, I know this: when I remember, I don’t see the desire of that moment as a disgusting thing to be judged. I see three hungry kids chasing whatever sweetness they could find, refusing to settle for the scraps they’d been given.

If I have to live as a precarious kid forever, I want to also be that girl: the one who dug through garbage to find something sweet in the trash.

Quickly, I scanned the labels in the cold case, having learned by this point that my U.S. gas station standbys are usually available in Asia as well: yogurt and fruit. My eyes skipped over a language I didn’t know on the yogurt label to find the gluten-free emblem, the thing that mattered most.

This will be a story I tell someday, I thought to myself as I plunked down my plunder on the counter and awkwardly picked out the right bills in a foreign currency. No one ever told me that when I signed up to be a writer, I also signed up for this. Who else has to get an undercover police escort to find Celiac-safe food in a red-light district?

I felt my face and my mouth go through the motions of friendly smiles and a carefree thanks to the cashier, settled into my part as a Western tourist running high on novelty. I slipped out through the heavy doors into a thick night lying heavy on the street, on the same pavement where nightclub owners shouted out their wares — younger women, girls — a few hundred yards away.

Already that evening, my anti-trafficking coworkers and I had walked the street, me slinging back a sugar-free Red Bull (my drink of choice when I need to blend in, given that I’m medically barred from alcohol). It was the second redlight district in the second country I’d been to on that trip, a time I had entered into with the mindset that my primary job was just to be a student.

I had braced myself for the emotions that might rise at the sight of the girls: young women existing somewhere on the spectrum between coercion and consent, bodies bared to the weighty stare of the neon-punctured dark. By this point, I had already written so many stories about so many girls like them, seen their photos in case files, read things that taught me to believe that some of the worst hells are the ones human beings think up for each other.

But I was unprepared for what I felt when I saw the men.

White tourists prowled the streets, many of them in small packs, bound to each other by raucous laughter and the desire for a deal. See their humanity too, I begged my soul. It’s in there. It has to be in there.

This was one of the greatest emotional asks I have ever made of myself. If I believe (and I do) in restorative justice, it means that consequences for men like these are a natural part of directing them deeper into their own humanity, into alignment with how we can and cannot treat each other. It means that no soul is too mangled to be assembled into something dignified and dignifying.

It is indescribably hard to believe that when you’re rubbing shoulders with a man who is devouring girls a third of his age, consuming with his terrible eyes under a stupidly mundane baseball cap.

I sensed I’d be grappling with the existential tension of it all for a long time to come. That night, I gave myself permission to just focus on the immediacy of the experience.

We were having van trouble, so our group alighted at a fast-food restaurant at the end of the strip to get food. Of course, as someone with Celiac Disease, I couldn’t eat anything there — everything fried in a shared frier, coated in crumbs that could make me ill for 4-6 weeks. Ironically, the food was a more pressing threat at that moment than the actual human traffickers a couple of doors down.

Hence why I had an officer assigned to me for my undercover op to the convenience store for food.

As I walked from the convenience store back to the restaurant to rejoin my colleagues, I was careful not to look over my shoulder to see if my police escort was following me. I swallowed back my need for visual reassurance that I wasn’t alone on streets swimming with sharks.

Close to a decade earlier, I nervously straightened the shoulders of a black blouse, standing in the Tennessee swelter beside a red carpet. Sarah was standing beside me — my coworker, housemate, chosen sister, and frequent partner in shenanigans.

Sarah and I had been sent to a major awards event with no instructions. I knew I had media credentials, but I had zero clue what that actually meant. My bosses at the time had never worked a red carpet either. I was the company’s emissary in Nashville, and I’d just started working for them as my primary gig after years of volunteer work.

Publicists hurried up and down the carpet on the other side of a thick velvet rope, passing me half-sheets with bullet points about the artists they would be walking down with.

Oh, I realized suddenly. I’m supposed to be interviewing them, not just taking photos.

Sarah and I quickly conferred, piecing together what was expected of us before any artists could get too far down the carpet. I had come prepared to take photos, but had no clue that interviewing was a normal part of being a media outlet on a red carpet. I had only done a handful of artist interviews at that time.

We devised a game plan: I had my old iPod touch in my camera bag. We’d use voice memos to record, trading back and forth on artist interviews, coming up with on-the-fly talking points that would be useful to our employer.

We were both in our early 20s. This was before I had even learned how to do my makeup, so I felt painfully bare and vulnerable amid the glamor of the red carpet setting, where stylists trailed a few of the artists to fix errant flyaways and blot away beads of sweat.

As if we’d planned it, Sarah and I rolled through interviews with artists rapid-fire, both of us drawing on our expansive knowledge of the Christian music genre at the time. I snapped photos between interviews.

Scott Stapp, lead singer of one of my teenage icon bands Creed (shut up, I know), stepped into view. I think I may have briefly stopped breathing.

But then I quickly pulled on my secret knowledge of their discography and his recent solo ventures to mentally assemble interview questions. Years of clandestine adolescent internet searches for rock and roll were serving me well.

Calmly, I whipped out that old iPod touch with its shattered screen and interviewed a rock icon — hoping no one could see that beneath it all, I was just a kid a few years out from being homeschooled.

Years later, I would work that same red carpet as my last event of that job. That was after I already knew it was over. After the money, and my first professional dream, had vanished from under me. After I’d learned that those carpets are full of people who aren’t what they seem. After I’d held on too long, too tightly, to a thing as it became poisonous to my clenched fist of a heart. After I’d committed to, nevertheless, finishing well.

I could now name a list of people on that first red carpet who had either physically or sexually assaulted women or were complicit in covering up those assaults. Some of that is now public. But there are also stories that aren’t mine to tell without consent, disclosures I have no business making.

By the end of my time in that work, I knew too much — a grim knowing that had witnessed every kind of casual dishonesty and cruelty imaginable in Nashville parties and penthouses. I also knew what kind of danger I faced if I gave away who I really was, that I wasn’t part of the game, that I was constantly looking for the metaphorical fire escapes to get out with my own sense of moral integrity intact.

A friend would later say to me ruefully, “Nothing could have better prepared you for working to fight predators than working in the Christian music industry.”

He was right. Part of the hot fist of revulsion that clamped down on my throat on a late night in Asia was a memory of nights that may have looked so different, but that were actually the same: sharks in the water. Me, a writer, in way over my head.

What are my flimsy words in the face of evil?

The first stories I remember creating came to me when I was a 4-year-old. I drew picture books about mermaids, storytelling before I was literate enough to do so with words. On that particular gray spring day during a trip to a missionary training station in the Appalachians, I sat beside a massive woodpile, a notebook sprawling in my child’s lap, a pencil clutched in my short fingers. I crawled inside the pages like a safe haven.

Seemingly, no time at all passed before my love of storytelling placed me so far from safety. No one told me how dangerous dreams can be. No one warned me how much they could slow my own healing down. No one warned me that telling the truth has such a steep cost.

I’m still reckoning with that. Both of my major career chapters have sometimes felt like I am digging my personal peace’s grave. It can feel like I’m rattling around my own hollow heart, this cavity scooped out by the exacting toll of going into fathomless dark.

But I have learned what words are in the face of evil: they’re all I have to give. And so I have to trust that, in the divine mathematics of grace, they’re enough.

They are the tether that has bound me to people who are safe, those mythic beings who have come my way through shared stories about music, about pain, about survival. Whether it’s a beloved lifelong friend on a red carpet or an undercover police officer I will never see again, my words have been connective tissue for an avoidant, gunshy heart.

There are absolutely sharks in the water.

But I stubbornly believe there are still mermaids, too.

I sat rocked forward on my sit bones, the fissures in the lower discs of my spine making it perpetually hard to occupy normal chairs. I was listening to my newly-established palliative care doctor explain the Do Not Resuscitate paperwork in front of me, paperwork that was a chipper shade of neon green, too eye-searing for the topic at hand.

“The likelihood that they could revive you, with your cardiac history, is very low,” she continued, kind but factual — exactly the way I prefer clinicians. No pandering or softening what I already know to be true of living in my body. “If we did, you would likely be looking at living only in a vegetative state on a ventilator, after your brain would have experienced loss of blood flow.”

“OK,” I said calmly. “That makes sense to me.”

We went over the fact that signing a DNR automatically comes with refusing several other medical interventions — interventions I already knew I had no interest in accepting, if it came to it. I signed the paperwork, hung it on the fridge when I got home as instructed, right alongside the Lord of the Rings magnets I’ve had since I was 11.

Later, I lay in a hospital bed, going over my DNR with an anesthesiologist before surgery so they knew what to do if my heart stopped before I woke up. The middle-aged man could not believe that I, a 34-year-old woman, would already have a DNR on file with the state.

“But you just don’t want to eat,” he said flatly. “That’s all that’s wrong with you.”

I felt my stomach sink, that old classic stigma like a rock I’d suddenly been forced to swallow.

“Well,” I said softly. “That’s not all that’s wrong with me.”

The first few years after I became incredibly unwell after a few fragile years of health in my 20s, I told almost no one. Not even when I would disappear for weeks to months on end to treatment centers.

It was easy enough, in those days; when we lived in Memphis, we knew no one, so there was no one to notice my absence. I would tell my siblings and my core group of friends. I would continue with everything else as usual, my whole life already held remote.

I have always been known for writing transparently on my public platforms about my experiences. But I needed a protective bubble back then, some safety until I knew how to orient myself around the judgment I knew would be directed towards my illness (and it has).

I could have kept that silence forever: let my writing stay about rock and roll. Let my focus remain on the places I’ve gotten better, not where I’ve gotten worse.

I never wanted to be performative. I think some part of me also hoped I would magically get better and never have to admit to being so unwell. That illusion died about three years ago now, when I was first told my case was likely terminal. Back then, I was told I would be lucky to reach my 32nd birthday. I reached it (in a treatment center) and am now staring down 35, stubbornly buying year after year back with close calls dodged and bitter pills swallowed.

And even still, I could have stayed largely silent about this. It would have been my right. I have certainly returned to protection around my health process at different times in my life, including quite recently.

But at some point, I decided that wasn’t how I wanted to live. If I was to suffer, I wanted to choose what it meant. And I wanted it to mean transformative grace.

My greatest mandate in this life is to ask, “If Love were in the form of a person, what would Love do?”

This is what has survived at the heart of my spirituality, this unbreakable light that lives like an ember in my fragile ribcage. This weekend, Good Friday, Silent Saturday, and Easter Sunday, represents the most distilled answer to that question: if Love was a person, Love would sometimes give itself in consenting surrender to necessary suffering, and offer that suffering as identification with everyone else who has been in pain.

When I write about my sickness, my sadness, my trauma, in my own stumbling way, I am trying to reflect that story that is the truest thing I know. I am gathering together all my diagnoses, all my fractured physicality, letting go of my impulse towards egoic self-protection and saying: “this is my body, broken for you.”

For anyone who needs a reminder that it’s OK to be sick and to still be a person, to still be lovable, exactly as you are. For anyone who needs assurance that you can be living and dying at the same time. For anyone who is ready to cross the line beyond productivity and into the vulnerable ache of needing grace. For anyone who simply needs to know: I am not the only one who has suffered this way.

And when I think about my illness as collateral damage to the people who have harmed me, those who made me want to disappear, those who embedded hurt like my native tongue in my body: I soften into the meaning-making that the Christ-story gives me here, too. I think about those who have hurt me, those who were in their own pain, those who I have separated myself from, even while desiring their healing above all else. And I cradle my broken body tight, praying in the chirping semi-dark of a hospital room: “Forgive them. They didn’t know what they were doing.”

I recognize that suffering, dying, are not by default ennobling. I have had to focus on that truth at different times in my life to over-correct after believing for so long that suffering was all there was. Martydom is overrated.

During my recent near-death experience in February, while on bed rest between hospital stays, I read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I felt my breath stolen over and over again by the way meaning could be made in the most horrific example of suffering in modern history, by the documented truth that we have the ability to choose some unbreakable sense of self and purpose — even if only to hold it near us as we walk into death.

Similarly, I thought once that working with survivors of human trafficking would teach me that some pain is impossible to transform into meaning. I have found the exact opposite. The people I know who have suffered the absolute worst of humanity are the ones most likely to choose to meaning-make on the other side of it.

They don’t have to; no one would judge them for cynical despair (and certainly, some of them do land there, and my empathy for them is boundless). But by and large, what I have seen in survivors is the most profoundly determined, Love-incarnate way of transmuting their pain rather than transmitting it (as Richard Rohr would say).

One of my long-time favorite writers, Nadia Bolz-Weber, recently wrote about her father’s body being donated to scientific research following his death. This, too, she named as that baffling declaration: “this is my body, broken for you.”

It lent substance and shape to what I’m doing when I offer up my brain in research studies when I’m hospitalized, letting my cognitions be picked apart, wearing a salt-water-soaked net of electrodes over my head as my brain function is measured. If my body can inform future research about better treatment for Severe and Enduring Anorexia Nervosa, I want to offer it wholesale: take all of it. All its quirks and co-occurring health issues. Let it be one data point that ultimately lessens someone else’s suffering.

But that is the long game, the game with outcomes I may never live to see. What I have in the short term is a story. What I have in the short term is the carefully chosen balance between self-disclosure and self-protection.

I don’t want to abandon myself by giving away things that were meant to be processed in private; I have gotten much better at knowing where that line is. But I do want to offer the world what I can, with love, the same way Love Incarnate offered himself to me in my very favorite story. Even many years after I left the structures of organized religion, the story’s power stays.

The choice to identify with the dying, the sheer naked suffering of living in a breakable body, is as

poignant as grace and grief held in equal fullness in my soul. Love chose that. I want the courage to keep choosing that too.

I felt my throat close up as the question hit me, spoken gently but piercingly by my inpatient therapist, one of the lead researchers in the country (one of the only researchers, in fact) on Severe and Enduring Eating Disorders.

I’d just repeated what I’ve learned to explain over the last few years: that my lifelong anorexia is an existential scream. I was silenced for the first 30 years of my life about horrific suffering, leaving me often isolated and alone, feeling unbelieved and doubting even my own sense of reality. So when I learned ways of telling the truth, it’s like I haven’t ever been able to stop screaming: “I’m in pain.”

Sometimes even allowing myself to accept help, or grace, or a modicum of gentleness, feels like betraying the truth. I panic: I don’t want to be silent again.

So I shroud myself in suffering. I let this broken, dying body scream.

“You’ve done the work of accepting that the people who originally needed to believe you never will,” the therapist continued. “You’ve removed them from your life. So who is left to hear you now?”

“The people who love me,” I near-whispered. I was sitting propped in a chair, too weak at the time to sit upright for long. “The people who already believe me.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Mary, the people still in your life know you’re in pain. They believe you.”

And they do. My sweet husband who has watched me struggle to survive since I was 15. My star-strewn siblings, my north stars. My precious anchor friends who heard when I reached out 7 years ago and said: “I don’t know how, but my whole life has fallen apart.” Chosen family in Tennessee and Seattle. My rock and roll clients-turned-lifelong soul friends.

I’ll be honest: I don’t know how to stop screaming.

I have been through things I still don’t know how to talk about, write about, say out loud.

But I do know I want to own reality as it is, to take responsibility for how I have showed up in this world.

So to every person who has let me scream and believed me: thank you.

To every person who has gently weathered the storm of my suffering, hurting to watch me hurt myself: thank you, and I’m sorry.

To every person who is continuing to let me do the work imperfectly, not judging the way my attempts to survive have led me through the valley of the shadow of death, who has accompanied me there with silent solidarity instead of expecting anything from me: thank you.

I am still incredibly low-capacity, on every level. I continue to beg your patience. Dr. Nikkel and I have endured experiences in the past few months that are indescribable, still, even for this writer. But I had to say this much. I had to let you know that if you’ve heard me: it matters. 🤍

The thing I remember most vividly about the first time I self-harmed was the wash of quiet, like white-out for my overwhelm.

I’d been mired in despair over a nightmare masquerading as prophecy, leaving me in bone-deep conviction that the friends I trusted most would betray and abandon me. I was 15 years old, and given that it was a Sunday, I’d spent the morning with a lace veil over my head and a skirt brushing my ankles in the airless dim of the chapel my family attended weekly. As I sat in the mold-colored yellow chairs, I’d formulated a plan.

I grabbed pink-handled scissors from my desk and slid them under my clothes as I casually walked up the 8 creaking wooden stairs to the room and half-bathroom I shared with my sisters to change after the Sunday service. I picked out all-black clothes. I waited until my sisters were all downstairs. Then I locked myself in the tiny half-bathroom with its peeling floral wallpaper, rolled up a sleeve, and held the scissors crooked open in my hand.

When I first felt the sting, all the screaming in my head stilled to utter silence. I no longer felt fear of an abandonment I fervently believed I deserved. I no longer felt unlovable. I was bad — I had been punished — all was right with the world.

I calmly cleaned up and went on with my day.

The date was February 11, 2007. There would be no going back.

Over a decade later, on one of a scattering of trips to the emergency room to be stitched back together after fracturing myself, an earnest nurse younger than many of my husband’s college students looked at me from under flipping dark bangs and asked, “so why do you do this?”

Completely calm, composed as a symphony, I gave him a clinical answer about high stressors in my life and my tendency towards maladaptive but effective coping mechanisms. I listed for him the professionals I was seeing, the medications I was taking, the myriad ways I was tending to my mental health.

What I didn’t tell him was the complex truth: that I am addicted to the quiet. That in a head and heart so loud, infected with others’ narratives about me and my own residual self-loathing and a lifetime of habit, sometimes I just need the noise turned down.

Once I’ve done penance, I can rest.

Here’s the brutal authentic: I have not fully conquered self-harm in adulthood because it’s been too comforting to have as an escape hatch from my own heart, even when that escape hatch exacts a terrible price.

Here’s the embarassing real: I have been most effective at not starving myself when I am actively self-harming instead.

Some people call this “behavior swapping,” where coping mechanisms just rotate places in a terrible dance instead of the root issue ever been fully addressed. I am a pro at behavior swapping. If it’s not starving, it’s self-harm. If it’s not self-harm, it’s brutalizing overwork. If it’s not overwork, it’s starving.

Let me tell you, to be heartbreakingly clear: it does not work. It’s a short term escape hatch that actually drops me right back into the same distress almost immediately. Hence the need for the next way to suffer, clutching desperately at my own pain like a pill to deliver me. Some of this is because with C-PTSD, my brain actually can’t always process time in the same way other brains can. For my brain, the present and the past conflate, time collapsing, until I’m once again that 15-year-old certain of abandonment and disaster.

One of the worst parts is the way that, like any addiction (and self-harm is a process addiction with a legitimate brain chemical component), the ante has to constantly be re-upped.

A few months into self-harming, after my worst incident to date, I journaled, “This time there’s a major problem. That was almost an hour ago. I still feel very, very little regret. The sick feeling was only very minor, and it just blended with the pleasure. I walked downstairs like a normal person, even though I had about 21 cuts on my upper arm, hidden beneath my black sleeve. And everything just feels… normal.”

I knew this was a terrible tunnel that would narrow and narrow until it dead-ended in disaster: the lack of remorse about treating my body in a way I wouldn’t treat my worst enemy. The normalization of increasing risk. The way more and more acute self-flagellation was demanded of me in order to hit the calm internal sea I longed for.

If I could change one of my coping mechanisms, it would unequivocally be this one.

I had years at a time of sobriety from harm in my 20s, those years when I held myself to a white-knuckled standard of perfection, the days of the Nashville cool girl, the era when I was being so damaged by others that I had less need to torture myself.

When my life fell to pieces in 2018, self-harm was the first thing to come back and embrace me with its roaring silence, drowning out the anguish. It has been woven in and out of my life ever since, always as a messenger, a waving red flag that something in my life is terribly off-kilter. I’ve self-harmed while in treatment centers and hospitals for my eating disorder, the staff’s probing grace pointing out the clear function of that action when I’m in a position where coping through punishing caloric restriction is taken from me.

One of the most crucial things I have learned over the years is that behavior swapping doesn’t have to refer to harmful behaviors only.

The times I have been most effective at choosing a road other than self-harm is not when I have tried to willpower my way out of a negative behavior. It’s been when I have tried to substitute a behavior that aligns with what I value instead.

If I’m going to behavior swap, I don’t want to trade one form of punishment for another; that keeps me in the cycle of constantly raising the stakes of suffering.

Instead, I want to trade self-harm for playing piano, venting my emotions through the black and white in a thunder of melody until I reach the same stillness inside.

I want to write, to tell the truth with my words instead of narrating through my broken body.

I want to walk in the Colorado sunshine, blinking in the brightness of the mountains that have cradled me from the moment I first landed in their arms-like-harbor.

I want to reach out to the people who have loved me so well, even just to trade unhinged memes, to sneakily swap self-hatred for an exchange of care.

None of these methods deliver on the same well-worn neural pathway of hurting myself quite as quickly or effectively. But they keep me safe, and they make me more myself instead of less. They add instead of subtract. They lend substance and steadiness to my shaky soul, coloring in the black-inked demands of atonement.

Recently, I got my first ever cover-up tattoo: covering up a tattoo with traumatic associations, and simultaneously covering up the self-harm scars I’d used to try and strike it out.

Historically, I’ve been hesitant to cover up scars with tattoos. At first, it was a legitimate sense that I didn’t ever want to be ashamed of my scars, challenging myself to accept grace instead. Now, I wonder sometimes if it’s morphed more into just another form of moralizing punishment: you did this to yourself. You should have to wear the consequences.

So swapping scars for vibrants birds representing my beloved nieces was something new and special.

The tattoo artist warned me that the ink might not take in exactly the same way in the scar tissue. It’s not always simple or immediate, trading marks of self-hatred for marks of self-expression and deep love.

But touch-ups, he said, are free. We can try to pack in the new ink as many times as we need to.

That’s the grace I am seeking, eagerly, needily. It might take a while to swap scars for color, harm for art. But I’m working on it.

And if you wear scars too, I hope you feel freedom to do the same — no matter how long it takes.

In early 2014, at 22 years old, I was dreaming.

I lay in the first tiny, shoebox Nashville apartment I shared with my new husband. I recounted the dream in detail the next morning, a dream about being lost in Arkansas by the lake where my family used to visit my grandparents’ timeshare in thick, sluggish Augusts and Septembers in the 90s and early 2000s. I wrote:

She was wearing a worn Lion King shirt I knew so well, along with awkwardly loose black-and-white striped culottes. She wore velcro strap sandals, like her little sister. Her lanky arms and legs hung out of her clothes, and her pale skin and white-blonde hair looked smooth and unspoiled in the sunlight. Her hair had been pulled up into two pigtails — a style she favored — but the fine, straight strands were so slippery that many had fallen loose and gave her a slightly rag-tag look.

All my words and thoughts caught in one burning ball in the back of my throat. I had an overwhelming sense of the weight of all that would happen to this little girl — terrible, terrible things. I knew she would be torn apart. I knew she would be so broken. I had no feeling that I should tell her these things, but I grieved to see the contrast between who she was and who she would become. It was like seeing a pure white light shining through a window before the window becomes splattered with dirt and blood.

Mercy came down to me, their wide hazel eyes bright and inquiring beneath the riot of their hair.

“I’m trying to find my cabin,” I explained, my voice a little thick and hoarse.

They shrugged their little shoulders. “I’ll go with you.”

So we walked together. I was too afraid to hold their hand, but sometimes they’d reach out and grab my wrist to steady themself, and soon I began helping them over the rough places. We saw many cabins, but I couldn’t find where I was supposed to be staying. I began to wonder what was happening, if I’d ended up some place where a past version of my life still lived.

I followed the sweet child up a few paths, around a lake bend, over a bridge, and onto a new path. The paths we’d found before were paved with bark mulch, but this new one was fine white dust.

Mercy’s sister came flying down to meet us, her white pigtails streaming, her shoes getting steadily caked with the dust of the path. Mercy smiled and stepped aside. Mary stopped and looked at me solemnly, curious. I looked her in the face. She had those same teeth still struggling to straighten out, those overly wide and pale blue eyes, a face that managed to look soft and round with youth despite how skinny she was.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I stepped forward and swept the girl up into my arms, tall 6-year-old though she was. As if instinctively knowing this was important, she didn’t struggle or tense as I wrapped my arms around her.

“You’re never, ever going to be alone.” I was sobbing as I spoke this next to her ear, her silky pigtail against my face. “I promise. Remember that, OK? You won’t be alone. Not ever.”

Her arms held tight around my neck, her legs wrapped loosely around my waist. She didn’t seem confused or upset —simply serious, as I well knew she often was.

Still crying, I put her down. She looked up at me with those wide blue eyes.

This was before therapy, for me. This was before talk about befriending your inner child saturated pop psychology. This was before I understood my own immense attachment wounding or had any formal diagnoses. This was before I would sit in endless group therapy sessions, being encouraged to “recover for your younger self.”

Somehow, I had an innate knowing that my adult self had to soften towards my child self — a child who grew into a self-punishment cycle that nearly swallowed her whole.

I have always had a profoundly hard time knowing how to make sense of the difficulty and abuse I experienced throughout my developing eras of becoming. Contrary to what some people have, I think, misconstrued, I have no interest in assigning blame or harming anyone’s reputation, which is why I don’t actually name or directly assign actions to anyone when I write about what I’ve been through.

For me, for the majority of my life, it was unthinkable that anyone other than myself could be to blame. Punishing myself became a way of sparing everyone around me, or from doing the immensely complex work of sifting through the nuance of the simple tragedy of being human beings in relationship with other human beings who are not all bad or good — just alive, wounded, and wonderful.

I had no tools for that work until quite recently. So self-harm made sense, as did starving myself, suicidal thoughts, an addiction to overwork, and a stringent asceticism that used to lead me to do things like deny myself coffee for a month or two at a time just because I felt like if there was any kind of suffering and deprivation I could think of, I should be able to endure it.

Abusive relationships shored up this story I told myself about the safety of suffering, the simplicity of its strictures. It’s easy to seek out the same dynamics that mirror your own internal landscape and sense of truth — which is exactly what I spent my 20s doing.

In September of 2025, well over a decade after I’d had the dream about making a promise to a towheaded 6-year-old self, I sat in my doctor’s office, twisting my rings around my fingers anxiously. Some wrenching circumstances where I had been harmed by people I felt unable to blame had brought trauma to the surface like a winch hoisting a shipwreck from the murk of a sunless lagoon.

On the surface, I was functional, confident, advocating for myself, and navigating my myriad appointments to keep my illnesses in check.

Underneath, I was sliding badly.

I took suicide off the table as a potential ending for myself at 16. But the thoughts linger on haunting repeat, especially as the effort of staying alive becomes beyond Herculean in this deeply unwell body.

That day in my doctor’s office, edgy as a cup of pure caffeine, I had ranked as high as you can on the PHQ-9 (the clinical ranking scale used to assess depression and suicidal ideation). Still, I assured them I had no intention of acting on my impulses. I had a flight to Germany booked for the following day, after which I’d spend a few days at a music festival with friends before traveling alone and visiting some cousins.

But the decision my doctor had to make was a hard one. Not only were my depression and suicidal ideation charting at maximum; my food intake had slipped, as it always does when I am seeking the safety of suffering. I had displayed several other major red flag behaviors.

My doctor’s office had to decide whether to send me to a psych ward — or to send me to Europe by myself, where I would have endless opportunities to dismantle myself.

I lobbied hard for the fact that rock and roll in Germany would do more to interrupt the self-punishing cycle than a psych ward ever could. Fortunately, they agreed with me. They cleared me to go.

After a whirlwind few days of plane travel, friends, jetlag, broken German, soundchecks, photography, and being deeply rooted back in the reminder of how beautiful the community 34-year-old Mary lives in truly is, I was standing beside the stage as my friends in the band Disciple played their song “After the World” acoustic to a packed-out tent.

That song is one of my two life songs, the reason why I have roses tattooed on my right forearm. As I stood there listening, I thought about being 16 and terribly alone in the world. I thought about the safety suffering provided for me in those days, days of isolation and shame, days that stole the shine of the 6-year-old from the dream. I thought about laying out knives on a bathroom counter in front of me, holding my wrists behind my head, sobbing as I sang in a small voice:

You break the glass, try to hide your face
Recorded lines that just will not erase
And buried in your loss of innocence
You wonder if you’ll find it again

Was I there for the worst of all your pain?
And was I there when your blue sky ran away?
Was I there when the rains were flooding you?
Off of your feet
Those were My tears falling down for you, falling down for you

I’m the One that you’ve been looking for
I’m the One that you’ve been waiting for
I’ve had My eyes on you ever since you were born.

The song is written from the eyes of Love. Love that saw the innocent little girl, the broken 16-year-old, and suddenly — I remembered — the professional, private, traumatized, sick, but impossibly loved 34-year-old too.

The truth is that any version of me in my growing-up years could never fathom the life I live now, despite its difficulties and pain. That I bear witness to so many gorgeous souls. That I adventure so widely. That I know grace with such breathtaking nearness.

Tears stung my eyes. What are you doing, dear heart, seeking out your own sorrow? I heard a tender voice asking me. You are so loved. You are not alone. You will never, ever be alone. You are surrounded by people who love you, even here, on the other side of the world. You don’t need to hide behind your protective suffering. You know this. You have learned the better story so many times. Rest in it.

It was a holy, cathartic moment surrounded by people who reminded me of all the best things my years in music have built. I was seeing friends I hadn’t seen in years. I had been offered astonishing kindness by every single person I interacted with.

I fully believe it’s only because I was so buoyed by communal light that I was able to go on and have an experience of profound independence. I cared for myself on that trip better than I had in a long while, steadily sinking back into selfhood, into the version of myself that settles near the unbroken part of me.

“I tried, and near October, I thought that I could do it,
but November threw us in to a whirlwind again, and come January, I knew it:
all the things I told my fans about the hope that I had found
are lying in a hotel bathroom, in a puddle of blood on the ground."

And someone will love it because it’s honest,
and someone will hate it because it’s crude,

but as for me: for every time I give my testimony to a crowd,
I'll lie awake at night and wonder
about whether or not I've told the truth.

God, forgive me. I believe a lot of lies that come from the mouths of a lot of good liars,
(namely: me.)”

— “Resentment” by Levi the Poet

Some life storms, there are no tornado warnings for. There is no rusted bleat on the radio. There is only the breath sucked out of the sky, the sick green air, then the five minutes that brutalize your landscape forever.

That has been my life since December.

I did not choose any of it; I would not have. But yet again, it’s been easier to blame myself. It’s been easier to pick through the pieces and find as many as possible to assign to myself as personal moral failings than it has been to even begin to process what I have lived through with some loved ones.

In January, I had yet again hit a low where my brain suggested on loop that I should take that old fire escape out of the conflagration of my retraumatized brain, conclude my own story. Tiredly, repeatedly, I said no. Instead, I packed a duffel bag and headed into the mountains for a weekend with my writer’s group, a community of women who have allowed me to bask in their creativity and their soul-full living for the past two years.

For a few days, everyone allowed me to tell the truth about what I was experiencing. I was offered absolute solidarity rather than pity. I was still treated as wholly myself, wholly welcome. In a frigid cabin that some Texan owners really probably needed to winterize, we kept each other warm with stories, with laughter, with cups of tea, with a roaring fireplace, with conversations that startled me by how effortless they felt. It was like being cocooned, for just a little while, in the same kind of radical love that I now recognize in a few special pockets in my life.

I was (and am) so immensely grateful. Those were the only days of 2026 so far that did not feel like falling down the stairs in the dark.

The truth is that whether it’s my music community, my writing community (present and past), my siblings, my nieces, my countless other friends and chosen family near and far, I have so many sources of stories about myself now. Stories that don’t have to be blunted by suffering so intensely that I can salvage a painful relationship from use and abuse. Stories that reinforce the idea that some people can be safe, even in their imperfection.

Stories that give me examples of person after person walking up to that 6-year-old girl with pigtails, the girl who would suffer abuse, assault, illness, and near-death over and over again, and wrapping their arms around her to say you will never be alone.

The way Love does.

The way I still hope I can hold myself someday, too.

(For the people who have loved me this way, without demanding information, without requiring I deliver the emotional validation of a perfectly crafted response, without scaring the skittish child who still fears so often every heavy-handed approach: thank you. Thank you for being a piece of Love to me.)

As if it’s a moral failing when a once-broken hip aches before the rain, trembling with aftershocks of pain despite faithfully followed physical therapy.

As if it’s criminal when the cancer recurs following round after round of chemotherapy.

I’ve been around long enough now to watch so many friends give every single ounce of their courage and strength and cleverness and kindness to recover from substance use disorders, from depression, from anxiety, from PTSD, from eating disorders. I’ve been around long enough now to watch them die in the process.

I refuse to believe they were bad.

I am still trying to learn to believe I’m not bad, too.

I had surgery at the beginning of this month to try to correct some emergency medical issues arising from complications from my Severe and Enduring Anorexia Nervosa. I had my reservations, but professionals advised me that it was the only way forward. Intentionally or not, it tapped into the undercurrent of a narrative I have encountered more times than I could count in clinical settings: you got yourself into this mess in the first place. This is all your fault for not being better yet; you should be willing to undergo any amount of suffering to fix it. What’s wrong with you? Just fix it.

So I made the latest in a series of astronomical personal sacrifices to say yes to being rushed into surgery, swallowing my misgivings and dread, trying to do what I believed was right to stave off the constant shadow of this disease, to keep buying myself time back from death.

This surgery has been profoundly helpful for many others in my same position, life-saving and essential, so it was a valid suggestion from professionals. Unfortunately, my body began to reject it almost immediately. A short hospital stay became a long one as my body’s fragile ecosystem collapsed in on itself, a natural disaster leaving an unlivable wasteland behind.

As I’ve returned home and tried to resume my life, I have continued to decline instead of improve, despite so much kindness from my support community. My body continues to reject the surgery, and my shattered, sick system is too depleted to heal.

I have made more terribly costly decisions about next steps, supported by a kind core team that adamantly tells me over and over, “We still need you here, Mary.”

But my conditioning towards self-blame is a deep, well-worn rut.

I quickly found myself in a cycle of finding fault with every single way I’ve navigated the process, feeling like all of this could have been prevented if I’d just advocated for myself better, communicated my own felt sense of frailty better, pushed back on some of what I was told about the mandates of insurance and the medical system’s preferences. I blamed my body most of all, this failing frame that continually betrays my Herculean efforts to preserve it, that seems to develop a new chronic illness annually like it’s got a calendar release schedule.

It’s easier to name myself as bad than it is to accept a world that is chaotic, where safety is never guaranteed, where not every situation is survivable — psychologically or physically.

This is one anecdote I could tell out of hundreds where an uncontrollable, unchosen setback became equated with personal failure.

The far worse examples of this dynamic are those I have witnessed in my friends who have died.

Recently, I spoke to the mother of someone dear to me who died by suicide.

“He wasn’t a failure,” she declared. “How could I blame him for leaving a place where he was in such unbearable pain?”

I wept to hear her speak that profound mercy. I wept because I have watched some of my friends who have died by suicide, died from their eating disorders, died from overdose, demonized as “just not wanting recovery,” as if that amounts to them deserving scorn amid their own death sentences.

Some of the people I have watched die wanted life more than just about anyone else I’ve ever known. So many healthy people are alive more or less by accident. Those who are not sick get the privilege of staying alive as a roll of the dice, as a side effect of having a brain and body that adapt in a particular way.

To live healthy is not moral superiority. It’s often sheer, blind luck.

I don’t know why some of us land in survival mechanisms that ultimately lead to our death. I do know that we almost never consciously choose it. I don’t know why some of us can rigorously engage in every treatment and therapy under the sun and have it still not take. I do know that I have watched people who have never had to sacrifice a single damn thing to stay alive judge, shame, and blame people who have suffered astronomically just to eke out another year or two of life through the hell in their body and brain.

I do not want to glamorize eating disorders or make light of the death toll (as a reminder: eating disorders are the second-deadliest mental illness, and about a third of individuals with Anorexia will die of their illness or the suicide that alleviates the suffering of that illness).

Believe me, there is nothing glamorous about the way my body is cannibalizing itself, about the narrowing rigidity of a starved brain, about my brittle bird-boned spine, about 11 traumatic hospitalizations and treatment episodes plus countless ER visits in 6 years, about trying to live fully while making peace with death. I would not endorse this for anyone.

But increasingly, I am trying to refute the belief that it makes me bad. Even if it kills me.

My friends who have died after fighting unbelievably hard were not bad for being sick. Even on the days when they didn’t want recovery, or at least wanted recovery but simultaneously wanted relief because they were so impossibly tired, they were not evil; they were human, and they were mortally wounded.

I will never stop wishing they could have stayed. I will never blame them for leaving.

There is a beautiful post going around on social media about honoring efforts towards sobriety — however those efforts might end. I have been so moved by it.

It reminds me of the quotes about Lord of the Rings character Frodo that have given me so much comfort over the years, why it’s so essential both that he tried to keep the Ring and that he ultimately was utterly unable to return to ordinary life in the Shire. It offers grace to any of us who get used up by the act of impossible survival.

“I do not think that Frodo’s was a moral failure. At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum - impossible, I should have said, for any one to resist, certainly after long possession, months of increasing torment, and when starved and exhausted. Frodo had done what he could and spent himself completely (as an instrument of Providence) and had produced a situation in which the object of his quest could be achieved. His humility (with which he began) and his sufferings were justly rewarded by the highest honour; and his exercise of patience and mercy towards Gollum gained him Mercy: his failure was redressed.

We are finite creatures with absolute limitations upon the powers of our soul-body structure in either action or endurance. Moral failure can only be asserted, I think, when a man’s effort or endurance falls short of his limits, and the blame decreases as that limit is closer approached.”

Letter to Eileen Elgar, J.R.R. Tolkien, September 1963

I have spent myself in ways most people will never know trying to recover, and I simply have not managed it. Even if I were to magic the Anorexia from my neural pathways at this very second, after 26 years, I would be managing terminal health impacts until my death, especially because I have so many co-occurring health issues.

I understand that this is deeply painful for those who love me, which is the primary thing that keeps me up at night. I never meant to hurt anyone. I never wanted things to go this way. I still want to minimize my own damage. If I could promise everyone who loves me that I’ll stay forever, I would — but I can’t offer that assurance.

But I can unequivocally say this: traditionally “recovered” or not, I have become more myself along the way. Wherever this journey ends, it will end with me more Mary than I ever was before I got so sick.

I have written before about how my illness was a canary in the coal mine that, in many ways, birthed me into myself. I can wish those abusive circumstances never happened to begin with (and I do). But I would also rather have had a few precious years lived fully aligned with my values than an endless lifetime of cowering in fear.

Make of that what you will. At the end of all of it, as I sit in my latest Valley of the Shadow of Death, sifting through endlessly chipper Eating Disorder Awareness Week posts about how recovery is unequivocally possible, I just want you to hear this:

If you haven’t recovered, you’re not bad. If you have been unable to terraform this earth into something livable for you, you are not a failure. If you have spent incalculable pieces of your selfhood trying to eke out a fragile safety and it hasn’t worked, there is grace, even now, for you.

And I like to believe that in the end, for all of us failures, all of us sick and wounded and scarred, all that will be left waiting is Love.

As I see it, the call of Lord of the Rings is not just that we recognize and challenge dangerous, authoritarian systems of power. It’s the reminder that to do so may cost us everything — and may never be successful in our lifetime.

Can we challenge the dark, even to the point of death, without benefiting personally from the outcome?

Over and over again in the story, characters in Lord of the Rings acknowledge impossible odds.

“Just a fool’s hope,” Gandalf wistfully, wearily, says of the plan he himself endorsed for saving the world.

They are right about the inevitability of suffering. Battles, relationships, and lives are lost in the arc of the story. Irreparable damage is done to the psyches of those who least deserve harm.

The stakes are real, and often excruciating.

And of course they are: we’re talking about a story written by a man who fought in World War I, who was then whisked away from the frontlines, critically ill, while his friends died in the trenches. A man who wrote Lord of the Rings under the shadow of World War II and the fear of his own sons’ death.

“I wish the Ring had never come to me,” Frodo famously says, agonizing over impossible demands and decisions to be made by his small Hobbit heart in a cavernous dark. “I wish none of this had ever happened.”

In his wisdom, Gandalf says, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

It’s important — and so hard — that Gandalf stops there. I want him to say, “if we decide well, these horrors can be undone.” I want him to say, “if we use the time right, there will be a clear pay off for all the suffering.”

But Gandalf doesn’t say that because it’s actually not guaranteed. And Frodo certainly never gets that sort of ending. He uses every ounce of his time, his body, his skill, and his heart — and he is ultimately fully used up in the process.

The Shire is, impossibly, saved. But not for him.

The call is not to do the right thing until it pays off.

The call is to do the right thing even if it never does.

The call is to do the right thing even if it costs us absolutely everything in the end.

In this way, Tolkien ruined me on other stories for life. All the “surprise! No one is ever really dead, everyone comes back, every tragedy is reversible!” wish-fulfillment tropes have never felt true to me. That kind of cheap, sweet nothing feels more deluded than ever in an era of endless grasping cruelties, the betrayal of systems purporting to protect, the gnawing hunger of despair that causes us to turn on our own.

Because that’s the thing: although so many of the characters in Tolkien’s stories recognize the reality of the risk, they also recognize the profound pitfall of despair. Over and over again, despair is portrayed as the paralysis that chokes the momentum of Goodness.

To name the reality of the stakes is not to despair. It is to take sober-minded inventory of the cost — and to choose to pay that cost, quietly, with courage and with shaking hands.

Lord of the Rings speaks to a grim moment in which there are no quick fixes for the ever-deepening darkness around us. It asks if we will take a costly stand in hope for a world we may never see. And it shows us that this is the most durable hope: hope that is wholly self-aware and self-possessed, but also self-transcendent, willing to offer our one limited, imperfect soul for the sake of a far-off dawn we may never see.

I admit, it’s an idea that is deeply personal as someone who is both terminally ill and working in human rights in 2026.

But I have a sense I’m not alone in the sense of resonance. I have a feeling so many of us need a kind of road-tested hope. That may be why we braved the ice and snow to see the stories that matter this past weekend.

I hope it sends me into this week with clear-eyed recognition of the danger inherent in systems of unquestioned power. I hope it gives me courage to count the cost of telling the truth, always, resisting the allure of safety and social capital, choosing humility and service and care. And I hope it gives me love deep enough to pay the price for a more equitable world — even if it’s one I never see. ✨

James Earl Jones’s voice boomed over the air-conditioned plush of the movie theater’s seats. I sat rooted in place between my big brother Flynn and big sister Lina, watching the artistic rendering of the African savanna swirl in colors of night while Mufasa’s character reminded his son Simba that he bore the lineage of kings.

I had never been in a movie theater before. The lights, the sound, the sheer number of seats — it was all a bit of a shock for me, given that the setting on screen looked a lot like the home I’d known for most of the life I could remember. But I knew Story when I saw it. That was all that mattered.

We were at the East Texas theater that summer of 1994 with a man who my parents said worked with my father. In a kind gesture to try and help out, he’d taken us three wide-eyed, quiet, tow-headed missionary transplants for the afternoon, thinking maybe the newest Disney blockbuster would be timely for a bunch of kids homesick for the Zambian bush. It also gave my parents — who were technically unhoused at the time, finding us places to stay on acquaintances’ floors — a few hours to keep sorting out the logistics of what would come next.

When we landed in a rental house owned by another missionary, The Lion King on VHS landed there shortly thereafter. We had a tiny TV someone left with us, the grainy box a fellow castaway. Flynn and I watched the movie on repeat. These were the 90s days of foreshadowing, that briefly flickering threshold before digital media permeated every part of life. We middle Millennials would watch the movie and then act it out, him the Simba to my Nala, the Scar to my Mufasa.

Long after lights out at night, the hours where total silence was expected of us, we’d hide beneath the blankets to keep telling the story: quoting it front to back to each other, word for word, like casting a spell against the dark.

When my first birthday back in the States came around, the money was still tight. There were whispers about church discipline, about what it would cost to be accepted back into the African story my parents still believed would save us.

I couldn’t parse our own exile, didn’t draw any parallel between the shame our family lived in and the shame that sent lion cub Simba deep into the desert. All I knew was how lucky I was that when celebratig my birthday at my youngest uncle’s house, I got a plastic Lion King plate that I would treasure for decades.

Watching and referencing The Lion King became an intrinsic act of remembrance — and not just remembering our life in Africa, a life we had to slowly accept would never be ours again. It became synonymous with an internal sibling code between Flynn and me. It became a ritual of sheer escapism and imagining. Like oral traditions in any culture throughout history, it asked us to go through the somatic practice of recollection, sound and rhythm and vibration of our ears and tongues. It rooted us in the context we shared.

Decades later, on my second visit to New York City, I bought tickets for my chosen sister, Sarah, and me to see The Lion King on Broadway. In what has now become a foundational anecdote of our friendship, as two fully grown women in our late 20s, we sat in that theater and sobbed through the entire show.

It’s not just that it was beautifully produced, though it was. It’s not just that stories were the only safety our childhood had afforded us, though that was true, too. For me, it was that I was remembering who I am. I didn’t even need Mufasa to tell me to do it: it was a reflex of the heart, responding to a simple story told with great spirit.

Sometimes, a new acquaintance asks why my siblings and I hold to seemingly the most random stories with such fierce allegiances so long into adulthood.

“All we had was each other and weird fixations!” Flynn tends to answer cheerfully.

The Lion King was not our first weird fixation, but to this day, it’s one of my favorites.

To be both storyteller and storyhearer is to be a rememberer. There is no age limit on these roles, no geographical parameters, no shame that can faultline the joy.

This will hurt.

It will require you to be terribly brave.

You will have to watch the searing rises and falls of every panic attack, each flashback, the bitter edges of razor blades and my own ribcage. You won’t be able to spare me from a single one.

You’ll see the hospital gown shrouds, the breath mint blues and greens (breathe, just keep breathing). You won’t be able to clothe me any better.

You’ll catch the double meaning when a new trauma mirrors my old ones with all the knowing pain of a plot-twisted scar. Maybe you’ll even weep on my behalf when you hope I am not watching.

You’ll see me make choices that double down on my pain when I’m backed into a corner, wretched missteps you can’t divert me from.

You’ll watch when I slip under water, sift through the whole sea trying to find me, even as you start to have the terrible realization that you’ll never be able to force my limbs to swim.

I know, I know, I know: you don’t even have to say it (though it’s such a tender grace when you do). You wish you could help. You wish you could do more. You wish it wasn’t happening this way.

I see you, seeing me suffer.

I know you’d save me if you could.

I know because of all the siblings in sickness I would have saved if I could, every new friend in every hospital ward and every biological broken heart in the Texas dark and every beloved over every text message who I just wanted to spare a second of suffering.

But in the end, we can’t save each other. We can only show up with the courage to weather the awful feeling that maybe we’re not really helping.

Arms stretched wide. Incarnation: “Here is my love. Take it all into the swallowing night with you. Pack it in your go bag. It’s yours to carry, light enough to keep close, even tucked in a wheelchair under fluorescence.”

Oh my many who love me so well.

You won’t be able to save me.

This will hurt us both.

I am so sorry.

Let’s be terribly, bravely, present together.

Another is the similar sinking feeling when I see yet another woman in the public eye blamed for this “return of heroine chic.”

Dreading the reign of smaller bodies as not only normative but mandated is not a hot take. But resisting that mandate as fundamentally dangerous while refusing to vilify specific people for it seems to be. And that’s why I’m adding my voice to a noisy conversation as we close out an incredibly fraught year.

I set the stage by standing on the shoulders of women who have done tremendous labor on the subject of body liberation: notably, Aubrey Gordon, Kate Manne, Virginia Sole-Smith, and Sonya Renee Taylor, among others. I do not want to recreate their outstanding scholarship, but I do want to recap it. I’m providing a ton of references if you want to follow some of their (and my own) research.

Notably, an increasing wave of research has proven that “obesity” is at best correlated with health challenges, not the cause of them. In fact, weight stigma, which prevents individuals from accessing care for treatable, preventable illnesses, may be more deadly than fatness itself.

Most actually proven health risks associated with weight are concentrated at the far extremes: both higher- and lower-weight individuals.

The fact that the system of tying weight to health is broken should not surprise us when we learn that BMI, the Body Mass Index, was not developed by a doctor: it’s an artifact of a 19th-century statistician. He was aggregating information about white men, collecting what was true about them, not what should be true. This approach is both non-scientific and frighteningly racist. Even the American Medical Association has cautioned against using the BMI as the primary indicator of health.

So what do we use instead? There are so many options. Heart rate, blood pressure, metabolic function, sleep, mood, and brain function, for starters. I would add quality of life, which includes the ability to accomplish the goals that bring you meaning and joy without undue discomfort (accounting for the limitations of disability status).

This massive body of research is now at direct odds with another cultural narrative: “obesity” is always bad, in a way that is actually morally coded with much shaking of heads. Thinner is always healthier. Being fat may not be your fault, per se; it’s a disease. And it’s one we must eradicate at all costs.

Hence, the irresponsible prescription of GLP-1s and other dramatic weight loss interventions.

When we try to get rid of whole categories of bodies for their skin tone, their hair, or other physical attributes, we call it eugenics. When we do it to fat bodies, we call it health.

That is truly wicked, a kind of evil that often slides by even in otherwise humane spaces.

Never mind the well-documented side effects of any of these interventions, which can include intense GI distress, depression, suicidal ideation, and — worst of all — a loss of joy and connection. We have officially found a cure infinitely worse than the supposed “disease.”

Here’s where we get to my literal skin in the game — and to Wicked.

I have Severe and Enduring Anorexia Nervosa, and have since I was put on a diet for the first time as a 9-year-old child and my genetic proclivities and desperate need to cope with trauma roared to life. My anorexia, which is currently actively endangering my life, is not about weight; it’s about achieving psychological safety. I have to bite my tongue every time someone in a social setting lauds my pitifully low-calorie concoctions at shared meals as “healthy.” I am almost undoubtedly the least healthy person in most rooms; I fall at the far end of the weight bell curve, which means I am infinitely less healthy than people in my life with more skin to spare.

In eating disorder recovery circles, as we see many body-positive influencers backtrack and high-profile actresses like those in Wicked (who I intentionally will not name here) shrink, there has been an understandable emotional reaction of rage and grief. The behavior that has killed our friends and destroyed our lives is seemingly being lauded and platformed.

I myself have often had big feelings about this. I have not seen Wicked because of some really traumatic associations with the music, but some of my favorite people have truly loved the story and been buoyed in lovely ways by the movies. Those movies are, by all accounts, gorgeously made.

What a jarring juxtaposition between that and the often horrified comments on social media posts, stitches on TikTok, and side-by-side Instagram comparisons expressing fear and rage about the women’s bodies.

The podcast Diabolical Lies recently did an exceptional deep dive proving both that celebrities probably have stayed consistently thinner than we realize as a whole, and also pointing out the irony of the fact that these “before and after” pictures picking apart celebrity weight loss might be more triggering than anything celebrities could do themselves. They also point out how uniquely gendered this behavior usually is.

For me, it begs the question: who is really at fault? And what does body justice actually look like in this hellscape?

It surprises people when I say that I actually have no interest in blaming any actress — or any individual choosing intentional weight loss. I do not believe any person who is silently showing up thinner is glorifying anorexia, as the charge is often leveled.

We are all surviving a system that, as I mentioned earlier, is actively designed to actually kill fat people, or at least erase their bodies. I lived in a fat body, on the borderline of “morbidly obese” (I use those words in quotations because I think they’re unhelpful constructs) for years. I lived in that body with the same severe eating disorder I have now; my body just responded differently to restriction for that window of time due to metabolic injury. I know well that to be in a larger body is to experience systemic oppression, including but not limited to trouble fitting into public seats, limited healthcare, limited insurance, wage inequity, and massive public stigma.

If you’re experiencing all of that, then everyone in your life, plus perhaps a doctor, tells you to shrink? Especially given my own state of being, I can’t blame you for making the best decision you can based on the information you have.

But I can absolutely blame the systems of power that perpetuate your oppression.

I don’t know if any particular celebrity has an eating disorder. Firstly, it’s impossible to tell by looking at someone; less than 6% of people with eating disorders are underweight. My current body is a statistical minority. All the claims that so-and-so has an eating disorder because they’re thin could unintentionally be perpetuating the stereotype that you must be emaciated to be ill. That belief has notoriously kept people out of treatment and made this class of diseases deadlier.

Beyond that, no public comment concern trolling someone who may have a life-threatening mental illness is likely to prompt them to desire recovery. As someone with just a modest online following, I have been called Skeletor (actually kind of metal to be honest), Gollum (less metal), told to eat a burger, to eat potatoes, told no man will ever want me, etc., etc., ad nauseam. Many of my friends have endured far worse. I’ve also had theoretically kinder comments where people unfollow me because I am “too triggering to look at.”

At all of these times, I was running myself ragged (as I still am) working with an outpatient team to try and keep myself alive. I was in and out of the hospital. I was devoted to brutal honesty with myself and some of the best professionals in the world.

Still, I was told, my body was not allowed to exist as it was in public.

So I get a little sensitive when I see the same claims being made of public figures, who may or may not be actually sick (with an eating disorder or something else), and who may or may not be already under the care of physicians, and who may be responding to trauma or severe pressure the only way they know how to.

It begins to be a question of disability rights, at this point (and eating disorders are a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act). Would we ask someone with cancer who has lost weight due to chemo not to appear in photos? I hope not.

And sometimes, what we might blithely assess as an eating disorder may be something else entirely anyway. I remember when one of my favorite artists was being accused up and down of an eating disorder relapse, especially as they had disclosed a past history of disordered eating. Turns out, it was leukemia. In those moments, it’s startlingly clear how little we know about each other, how important it is to ask questions first and comment on someone’s body later or never.

But I do understand that the question remains: how do we navigate the wave of emotions that might come up in a world where the only bodies that seem OK are, for whatever reason, small ones?

I think we stop talking about bodies and start talking to bodies.

You and I likely don’t personally know the celebrities who are embroiled in the debates. They will likely never see any comments we might leave.

But we each know many people, especially young people, who will see and hear comments we make and have their worldview shaped because of it.

I think restorative body justice looks like relationships. I think it looks like asking “how did you feel about your body after watching Wicked?” instead of “how did you feel about the actresses’ bodies?” I think it looks like being each others’ hype people and greatest defense in times of experiencing the vicissitudes of stigma. I think it looks like celebrating both the fact that we are able to be physically embodied with each other and the fact that that presence is about so much more than any one attribute of the bodies that make it possible.

I have not always done this perfectly. I have felt so sad and activated by seeing creatives I love shrink, to my limited knowledge, unnecessarily. But I have tried to keep conversations about public figures to private setting, to the feelings that come up for me and my people as individuals.

Remember how I said earlier that my own eating disorder is about safety? I feel safest when I am with people who have unequivocally loved and celebrated and accepted me, regardless of my frail, fluctuating physicality.

So we respond to the wickedness of this era’s body politics by showing up in real relationships. We tend to our own emotional landscapes with tenderness. We withhold judgment on personal decisions about body size made by individuals, recognizing that ultimately, everyone has sovereignty over their own body anyway.

Then we fight the system like hell.

We support policy change through organizations like NAAFA. We contribute to the sorely-lacking research about the complex bio-psychosocial web that actually causes eating disorders and body image distress (I love giving my broken brain to science). We educate ourselves continually (Maintenance Phase is my personal favorite). We contribute to mutual aid to support food and healthcare access when things happen like the suspension of SNAP benefits. We share ideas with each other whenever we have them — so please, comment with yours!

I expect we’ll see some correction of the pendulum swing, that this era will equalize the same way the disastrous Fen-phen debacle did, and heroine chic, and the low rise jeans contagion of my adolescence. Until then, I hope we take care of each other. I hope we’re kind. I hope we’re well.

And I hope we take no shit from the people who want to keep us small.

(Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional, and you should ultimately consult a doctor— ideally a weight-neutral one— about your needs. I am simply a journalist and a human rights writer who also has had the benefit of picking the brains of many clinicians on the topics of weight and health through my own journey with SE-AN, in addition to absorbing the research of others I am beholden to. I highly support everyone doing similar exploration with curiosity leading and a focus on peer-reviewed, credible sources in addition to truly hearing the narratives of people you know in all types of bodies.)

I was incredibly excited before our “jump,” given that I love just about anything that helps me synthesize adrenaline. But as someone who is also perpetually and painfully body-conscious, I worried about doing it wrong. I have never been athletic, and I was about a month and a half out of a hospitalization, and I still had significant muscle atrophy from the months that had necessitated it. How would I do, holding my body level against the force of the wind?

I stepped into the wind chamber to meet our gracious instructor. I felt what it is to be weightless.

I immediately knew I’d be fine.

What followed was utter exhilaration. I motioned that I wanted the addition of high flying up and down the cylinder that holds the powerful blast of air, and like space suit-clad butterflies, the instructor and I pinwheeled up and down. I felt my face blossoming wide open in fierce delight.

This was something new. This was something utterly unexpected. This was freedom.

Someone with a background like mine — with the trauma, the abuse, the poverty, the illness — had no business doing anything like this. It defied all credulity. Yet here I was anyway.

I couldn’t stop laughing at the miracle of it, the joy.

This week, I took on a new title at my human rights day job — the fourth title I have held in about as many years. I’ve been reflecting a lot on this, my second career, which still feels more like a sapling than the rooted, weathered, gnarled thing of endurance that is my time as a writer in the music industry.

I have decided, out of personal protection, to create more public separation between myself and the details of the (often dangerous) work I do. But by now, it’s well enough known that I work for a global nonprofit that serves survivors of exploitation. My role in this work has grown with each year.

This year, that growth has included the most personally costly season of work yet. So much so that my medical team, including members who have been providing me care for years at this point, have said that they feel like it’s the first time they’ve often been straight-up treating symptoms of just my job, not my myriad other conditions. The work is a beautiful, sacred thing. It is also exacting, in some ways I never really could have anticipated.

Add that to the fact that I find myself trying to explain why I choose to stay in the workforce at all, given my health. The answer is some complex tangle of necessity (my medical bills are wince-worthy), childhood trauma that tells me the people I love are only safe if I’m working to the point of suffering, and a cowardly fear of the unoccupied days I see stretching like the silent stillness of black ice around many of my fellow patients with chronic illnesses.

But if I’m speaking from my chest, from my truest self: I have clawed my way here with some wild combination of hope, privilege, and my own stubborn fingernails. I don’t want to let go now, no matter how sick or sad I get. I don’t think I’m done yet.

There is a story I could tell about all of the jobs I’ve had since I was first sent to work around age 8. It would be a scrappy story of rugged individualism, of bootstrapping, of raw achievement, of my suffering being granted meaning through baptism into semi-stability.

But that’s not the story I want to tell.

I don’t want to tell a story where every impoverished little girl who is taught not to want, taught that she is not allowed to speak in front of those with authority, taught to go without, has to break their heart and their body to climb into the middle class.

That story is an American classic. It’s also boring as hell.

I did utterly spend myself to build what I have now, multiple times. And it worked. But I increasingly feel that it shouldn’t have had to.

Spirits shouldn’t have to break so that bank accounts break even, that terrible calculated equation of human pain.

To me, this is antithetical to my core belief in grace: this idea that to be human is to jettison the economics of deserving. That to be human is actually to be needy of love, to need to give love, to be in a constant give/receive harmony that is the only way we can be whole.

If I rely on my own deservingness of building anything that societal consensus would deem success, I find myself in a kind of frantic panic. I’ve fallen prey to the mindset too many times, to my shame. It was almost easier when that was entirely out of reach, when I was a girl with a veil over her head every Sunday in a tiny Texan chapel, rarely owning shoes that fit, only existing to eventually marry and bear children and keep a house somewhat clean.

I was never supposed to have a career. I accidentally have two, as a side effect of just caring about things (music, stories, human rights) so incurably that I keep finding new ways to care more efficiently. Along the way I have been given a few boosts of blind luck, and the aid of some privilege as a cis white woman. I owe special thanks to startling grace from other women whose leadership I have worked under: Ginger, Deborah, Amber, Laura.

I can mostly forget where I come from, until some subtle reminder slips out from between the pages of a book, or manifests in a body that keeps the score. But I still worry that people can smell it on me: the poverty. My “I’m not from here” immigrant/missionary daughter mannerisms. My utter obliviousness to wanting to climb a career ladder (a ladder I had never even seen until I was in my 20s — rungs, options, are a privilege of the not-poor).

So often, I find myself feeling terribly small. I spent years catching up on all the pop culture I missed while being homeschooled deep in religious fundamentalism, raised by parents who did not grow up in the States.

But it turns out that absolutely nothing could have caught me up on how to be middle class. It is a learning curve that still leaves me winded.

I struggle to make sense of my story: how I can be more professionally successful, by just about every metric I know of, than I ever anticipated, while incredibly unsuccessful at getting physically and mentally well. How I could both have put forth enormous effort to be where I am and also understand it as nothing but sheer grace.

I have to keep returning instead to something someone recently told me when I was in a moment of great angst about where I’m supposed to be in this season of work/life balance: “your vocation is not what you do for work. Your vocation is who you are.”

My shoulders loosen a little every time I think of it, when I throw out the linear progression of profession entirely.

I have been a custodian, a secretary, a librarian, a food service cashier, a ride-share driver, a freelance graphic designer, a photographer, a journalist, a university marketing specialist, a rock and roll publicist, a nonprofit marketing professional, and many other things. And I have always been myself, at every single one of those jobs.

I have always sought, to the best of my ability given my age and the resources I had at the time, to do some very simple things: to move from the overflow of grace. To be of service. To be truthful. To be empathetic. To be creative. To be a student of people and life. And, when the time comes, to leave each chapter well.

Whether scrubbing toilets or compiling a trauma-informed handout for Homeland Security to share with law enforcement. Whether throwing toilet paper at a crowd of 100,000 on stage with A Day to Remember or dressing up as Galadriel deep in the mountains. Whether laughing through waterfall spray in a fjord in New Zealand or quietly driving a very hungover young gentleman home from a Nashville apartment he didn’t remember going to. Whether letting my 3-year-old niece sit on my lap and steal all my rings (shrieking “PRETTY!”) or riding an ATV around a millionaire’s estate in Hawaii.

Some of that made me money. Some of it didn’t. All of it was authentic to me. All of it mattered.

My career is a story that will only ever make about as much sense as a writer indoor skydiving.

My vocation is simply to be Mary: awkwardly earnest in all things, somewhere between life and death, soul-led until I gently close the door on my days.

I hope to make the burden lighter for others along the way — to alleviate some of the cycles of poverty that I had to shatter parts of myself to get free from, like a prisoner breaking her hand to slip free of a shackle. To set a table wide enough that differences in class and creed are recognized as reason for celebration and collaboration to create equity, not exclusion. To soar from abundance where I once felt held down by the clammy granite of scarcity.

I recently happened to stumble on an interview I gave the year I started my current job (which was my first W2 position after a few years of full-time freelancing and soul-searching, AKA existential crises). I was pierced to the core by the words of a younger self.

I hope to keep doing the same. And that hope is battle-tested. That hope is a scrappy thing, after the year I’ve had, the life I’ve lived. That hope reads a little like these words from Mary Oliver, which have been giving me hope lately in a hard season:

Here’s to the fighters and the screamers. Here’s to hope.

I am walking through my university’s familiar performing arts center, but it has been transformed.

The usually sober-faced stage is a mouth wide open, spewing wires and cables, each humming with electricity. Men scuttle between these ropey black veins, testing and tweaking. There is an overwhelming auditory buzz in the air. I lightly rest my hand on a wooden rail, feeling the thrum of sonic vibrations through the grain.

I just turned 17, and my favorite band is playing at my university. My school also happens to be my father’s workplace, so using him like a backstage pass, I’ve managed to get in hours before the concert to watch the crew set up. They are transforming the room as I’ve known it, the place where we hold staid evangelical chapels, where even the raising of a hand is seen as reckless abandon.

I wonder what will happen when the riffs hit tonight. I’ve never been to a concert, and it’s been hard to picture this familiar room — with its multi-million dollar housing and impossibly heavy red stage curtains — holding something so foreign.

But watching the unfamiliar gear being pushed and pulled into place, inputs and outputs dialed in, my anticipation is beginning to take substance and form. For months now, all I’ve had is a fragile ticket that I snuck out of my parents’ house to buy and then kept like a secret on the bookcase I use as a nightstand. Now the electricity kindles my nerve endings, sparking a louder excitement in me.

I have to go to class in the afternoon, but the upcoming concert is all I can think about. One of my classmates asks me if I’ll headbang or mosh. I cock my head, confused; I’ve never heard those words before. But I know instinctively that I have to wear all black to fit a cultural norm, and I choose the closest thing I own to a band tee: a simple shirt boasting a logo for the writer’s group I’m a part of. I believe I’d never be allowed to own a real band t-shirt, but I wistfully dream of having one someday.

I return to the venue that evening with my sister and a few dear friends, walking there directly from my parents’ house. We sit in line for hours, eager to claim spots near the front since the show is general admission. I listen to everyone around me chatting about other bands — some of them I’ve heard, but others sound new. I take mental notes.

When we spill into the foyer and then the auditorium, my group and I run to the front. A few of my friends select chairs in the first row, and I sling my bag onto one. Then I notice that many people are not sitting, but instead stand in the narrow gap between the chairs and the stage.

Is this a thing that happens at concerts? I think. Is it really a possibility to be that close?

I quickly tell my friends I want to stand, jumping forward to grip the wooden molding on the edge of the stage. I won’t be letting go for the rest of the night.

The lights go down. I have strangers packed around me, but when I glance over my shoulder, I can see the encouraging, shadowed faces of my sister and friends. I lock eyes with the electric indicator lights blinking on the gear.

Then, the music.

It’s just the opening band, but I am already lost in a space that feels at once utterly new and impossibly familiar. Riffs, drum fills, and bass lines stack on top of one another, shimmering through the ether to build impossible palaces. Lights like liquid saturate the air, so thick I can nearly taste their reds, their blues, their greens.

The room is not the room. I’ve found a portal to an alternate reality, something True, as if it had been hiding beneath this college performance center all along.

How do I inhabit this new space? I eagerly look around, learning. I see jumping. I see the coil of shoulders, the back-and-forth sling of heads, that I understand must be headbanging. I see hands raised with just the index and the pinky aloft, seemingly a sign of appreciation. I try all of it. Usually stoic and still, my movements stilted, I also seem to have found another version of my body: one shaken loose.

By the time my favorite band is on the stage, I am as electrified as the wires I’d seen that morning. My sister and I pass my 4-megapixel digital camera back and forth through the tightly packed crowd, taking turns capturing moments. Later, I’ll find documentation of myself in this strange catalytic moment: off my feet, waist-length white blonde hair flying, one hand gripping the stage, the other in the air.

When my group walks out that night, we talk about what we’ve seen. All sheltered and a little scared, we challenge each other to commit to whether we’d do it again: attend a real rock concert. I am afraid to seem too eager, to have loved this alternate reality as much as I have.

“I think I’d go again,” I say softly. “Not, like, for just any band. But I think for the right bands, I would want to go to another concert.”

15 years later, I will pull my snow-grimed black car up to the loading dock of an arena. The semi trucks will be different from those they’d been a decade and a half earlier, but they’ll carry some of the same gear. The band setting up will be the same, but instead of playing Christian colleges, they will now be playing an arena alongside other rock giants.

I will send a quick text to a friend — one of the band’s members — and sit in the warmth of my car to wait for her. When I see her, I’ll jump out to give her a hug and then drive her to get coffee downtown.

We’ll talk about a lot of things that day, making the most of the chance to hang out away from a venue or hurried text exchanges. But one of the things I’ll tell her, almost shyly, is about that first room so long ago. It will catch me off guard when I see earnest tears in her eyes.

“I think about hanging it up all the time,” she’ll tell me with characteristic frankness and clarity. “I don’t need to do this. I really don’t. But as long as there are stories like this, how can I walk away?”

And I’ll understand exactly what she means.

Because it turns out that the alternate reality I stumbled into can be accessed through rooms around the world. In time, I’ll slip into it from access points in more than half of the U.S. states and one European country. Over 500 bands will provide me with the key. I’ll learn the frequency of load-ins and load-outs and soundchecks until it’s more familiar than my own pulse.

I’ll have my own heartbreaks, my own dry seasons, my moments where I wonder if caution might have been better before signing up to be a citizen of this electric plane of being. But every time I walk into another venue, watch the lights go down, feel the skin of reality turn itself inside out, I’ll know: I’ve found the rooms I’ll call home for the rest of my life.