Life in Full Spectrum: Adventures in Creative Living

There’s a kind of grief in missing a world that no longer exists… and knowing it never will again. Some mornings, I wake up and still feel like I’m in my twenties. My mind is sharp. Curious. Hopeful. I still dream. I still have ideas that make my heart race a little. I still want to build something meaningful. But then my body reminds me—quietly and cruelly—that I’m not twenty anymore. My knees ache. My spine protests. My energy takes longer to gather. I stretch before I even stand. And I find myself whispering,  “When did this happen?” Forty-four came fast. Faster than I ever thought it would. I blinked, and decades disappeared. The memories play on loop—first jobs, first apartments, young love, heartbreak, hope, loss, laughter that made my stomach hurt. Half a life, just… gone. And now I sit with the uneasy awareness that there may not be another forty-four ahead of me. Or maybe there will be—but what will they look like? What will I look like in them? What parts of me will still...

  People love to talk about how men are the problem. How they’re the predators, the aggressors, the ones to fear. And sometimes, yes—they are. But I’ve learned something else in the past two years that no one really talks about. Women can be just as cruel. Not in the same overtly violent, physically intimidating ways—but in words. In manipulation. In shame. In whispers, screenshots, comment threads, and anonymous DMs that slice deeper than any blade could. Since being on the show, I’ve been sent messages so vile they could rot your soul. People—mostly women—have told me in graphic detail how I should unalive myself, and why. Why? Because I’m  disgusting. Because I’m fat. Because I have the audacity to exist in a body that they think shouldn’t be seen, let alone celebrated. There are entire communities— groups of people who gather and bond over the belief that fat people don’t deserve to live. And if we dare to exist anyway? They demand that we do so while hating ourselves. The...