A personal reflection on body image, restrictive eating, intuitive nourishment, and learning to love my body with greater compassion

For most of my life, I have been in an unhealthy relationship with my body, body image, and the skewed self-narrative I carried within. In my teens and twenties, I was always trying to be smaller than my natural size, wrapping my value, worth, and acceptance around my weight.

I know many women can relate to this, which is why I feel called to share how I have come into a truer relationship with my body, one rooted in acceptance, nourishment, and self-love.

A personal reflection on addiction, abandonment, grief, family systems, and the difficult healing of releasing someone’s outcome

I am very familiar with addiction. I know the hurt, the pain, the confusion, the abandonment, and the heartbreak addiction causes loved ones.

My sister and I grew up with addiction in our family system, and we experienced firsthand the ways addiction can fracture a family—especially the innocent hearts of children. If I were to name the deepest imprint addiction left on me, it would be abandonment. That is the truest wound I know in the depths of my core from loving someone affected by addiction.