Kat’s Musings

Tag: Anorexia

My deepest passion is nutrition — but ultimately, it’s all for him

What are you passionate about?

He is the prize at the end of the journey. To fully receive that gift and build the life I dream of with him, I have made my health non-negotiable. Nutrition is not just a hobby for me; it is something I can wax poetic about for hours with genuine excitement. I have explored it all — from the MAHA movement (seed oils, fluoride, ultra-processed additives, and all the hidden toxins) to Ray Peat’s principles and everything in between. I have lived the experiments myself: vegan, gluten-free, paleo, keto. I have been underweight and overweight. Through trial and error, I have learned what truly makes the body and mind thrive.

A glowing, multicolored heart-shaped swirl glimmers vividly in space.

A brain injury years ago left me with some lasting effects I can be self-conscious about. It does not stop me from loving deeply or building a lasting relationship— as seen in my current form attracting him (thankfully, the “disability” does not seem to bother him at all), but I still carry that quiet desire to show up as my strongest, healthiest self. I want to move through life with ease — for me, and especially for him.

Currently. Wifely duties from afar.

Because more than anything, I long to be his perfect little housewife. I can already manage it beautifully with one hand, but two steady hands would let me pour even more love into our home. And yes — almost every girl dreams of the aisle. So I am committed to walking strong, not just so I can hold his hand while we stroll down the street or along the beach, but so I can walk down that damn aisle toward him, radiant and ready for forever.

Love from a Distance.

June 13, 2026
Navigating Youthful Chaos: My High School Journey

My boyfriend and I have been mainlining our childhood like it is a caffeine drip—Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Place, and now it is my turn to open his eyes to my own high school drama—the glossy, sun-soaked fever dream that was The OC. God, I used to worship that world. I wanted the luxury car, the beach house, the effortless drama. Mostly I wanted the body. Marissa Cooper’s surfboard silhouette—long, lean, zero percent body fat, the kind of thin that makes clothes hang on your protruding bones. Paris Hilton-esque. vacant-eyed and untouchable. I wanted to be built like a surfboard. Instead, I got my own high school experience, which played out less like a Fox teen soap and more like a psychological horror.

I changed school districts right before freshman year so that I could attend private school. Fresh start! New hallways, new faces, new chance to reinvent myself as someone people actually wanted to sit with at lunch. I showed up with the kind of desperate optimism only a fourteen-year-old can muster. I smiled too wide. I laughed at jokes that were not actually funny. I even joined the school soccer team, even though I was only a little speedster without any soccer ball skills. I was ready to collect friends like limited-edition.

Middle school had already done its damage, though (read here). That was where I learned the rules of the game: be thin, get straight A’s, and the world will throw compliments at you like confetti. Teachers beamed. Boys stared. My mother bragged. It was the easiest dopamine I had ever scored. So when high school hit, I doubled down like a junkie with a new dealer. Social life? Optional. Body? A full-time job. Grades? Non-negotiable. Everything else could rot.

I did try, in my own half-assed way. I met boys. Kissed one. The “bad boy” ala Ryan from The OC. Let him finger me through my Juicy Couture jeans (try explaining that hole in your jeans). I even went back to my old district just to play tennis for their team—commuting like a masochist because apparently I still needed some thread connecting me to “normal” teenage life. Those bus rides were surreal: me in my little skirt, racquet between my knees, pretending I was just like everyone else while my brain screamed calorie counts and tomorrow’s biology test.

But the obsession was already metastasizing. One solid year of high school—that is all I really got before the sickness took the wheel. Freshman year had moments of light. I remember walking the halls in low-rise jeans that showed the sharp edges of my hip bones like trophies. I remember the rush when a senior looked twice. I remember thinking, This is working. Keep going.

Then the mirror became my enemy, my priest, and my dealer all at once. I stopped eating lunch. I did sit-ups until 2 am. I measured my worth in the gap between my thighs and the numbers on the scale. Straight A’s were never enough anymore—they were just part of the game. The real prize was disappearing. Becoming so small that people worried. That kind of worry felt like love.

The new school never really knew me. How could they? I was a ghost in Abercrombie. I showed up, aced everything, then vanished into my room to count ribs and cry over missed carbs. Friends tried. I pushed them away with the polite brutality of a girl who is already in love with her own destruction. Boys were easier—they wanted the fantasy, not the full dossier of my neuroses. So I became that girl… the boys’ friend. I gave them pieces. Never the whole haunted house.

Looking back, it is grotesque how romantic I made it all seem. The OC soundtrack in my head while I did crunches at midnight. The way I would stare at Marissa’s collarbones like they were scripture. I wanted that coastal California emptiness so badly I carved it into myself in the middle of nowhere suburbia. Meanwhile, the real kids around me were making memories—bonfires, breakups, bad decisions with cheap beer. I was making spreadsheets of my intake and hating myself in HD.

There is something darkly funny about it now. I traded four years of messy, stupid, glorious teenage chaos for a body that still was not thin enough and a transcript that could not hug me back. I was the girl who had it “together.” Teachers loved me. My report cards were porn for my Russian parents. And I was rotting from the inside out, polite smile stapled to my face.

If I could go back, I would tell that wide-eyed freshman something brutal: the praise feels good until it does not. The boys will not save you. The scale lies. And no amount of straight A’s will make you feel safe in your own skin. Sometimes the rebellion is not starving—it is eating the pizza and going to the dumb party anyway.

But I cannot go back. So instead I am here, rewatching The OC with my boyfriend, laughing at how fake it all looks now. Marissa’s tragic glamour hits different when you have lived a version of it and survived. I am softer now. Older. Still fucked up in new and exciting ways. But at least I am not measuring my worth in negative space anymore.

High school me would call that weak. Adult me calls it winning.

What a twisted little victory lap.

May 21, 2026
A Mothers Unbreakable Love: The Trials, the Shame, and the Grace That Saved Me

I never planned to write this. For years, the story of my mother and me felt too raw, too private, too tangled in guilt and gratitude to share with anyone outside our small circle. But lately, as I watch her move through the house we have shared for forever, I realize that silence does not honor her. It erases her. So here it is—the unfiltered truth of how one woman gave up her entire life so that her broken daughter could keep breathing, keep growing, and finally start learning how to live.

Happy Mother’s Day to my beautiful mother!

My mother and I been through fire together. Not the dramatic, movie-style fire with heroic rescues and swelling music. Ours was quieter, messier, the kind that burns slowly for decades and leaves scars you only notice when you talk about your life with your boyfriend and a therapist (or even write about it in a blog!)

It started in high school. I was the liar with the hollow eyes and the secret bathroom rituals. Anorexia had me in its grip, and I lied about everything—how much I had eaten, how much I weighed, where I had been after school. I lied to her face while she begged me to eat just one more bite of a bagel and cheese. She yelled. She showed frustration. And I detested it. She sat on the edge of my bed at 2 a.m., stroking my hair while I cried and swore I was fine. I was her only child, and I was disappearing right in front of her.

Then came college. The pendulum swung hard the other way. I ballooned to over two hundred pounds in what felt like the blink of an eye. The shame I brought on my family was visceral. Family friends whispered behind their hands. Holiday photos where I tried to hide behind my parents. My mother’s face when she saw the stretch marks and the way my clothes no longer fit. I had gone from starving myself to bingeing in secret, using food the way I once used starvation—as armor, as punishment, as the only thing I could control. She never shamed me publicly. Instead, she was forced to drive me to doctors and therapies. Always reprimanding. Still not good enough.

And then life changed in the way no one prepares you for. Fifteen years ago—more than fifteen now—I moved back home from Syracuse University. Not just to my parent’s house. But to my mother’s house. She just turned 40 then, a woman who had built a career she loved, who had friends who adored her, who had dreams that extended beyond the four walls of caregiving. She gave it all up. Just a quiet choice to stay home, to be the one who was always there.

Because I needed her in ways that still make my chest tighten when I think about it.

At twenty years old, I had to be changed like a baby. My mother acted as if changing the diaper of her grown daughter was the most normal thing in the world. Afterward she would help me into clean clothes and bedsheets. She did this day after day, week after week, for longer than any mother should ever have to.

And she is still teaching me. Even now, in my thirties, she teaches me etiquette on how to live. Not the surface stuff—fork on the left, napkin in your lap. The real etiquette: how to show up for yourself when no one is watching. How to speak kindly to the body that has betrayed you. How to answer the phone. How to make a bed properly, how to load a dishwasher so it actually gets clean, how to look someone in the eye and ask for help without the shame that used to choke me. She teaches me by example, every single day.

She gave up her career— the colleagues who became more like family—she walked away from all of it so I would not have to navigate this alone. She gave up friendships that required travel and late nights and spontaneity. She gave up the version of herself that existed before my struggles swallowed the oxygen in our home. I saw the resentment. I know there were nights she cried. I know there were mornings she stared at old photos of herself smiling and wondered what might have been. And , yes, after years of my being sick, she weaponized that grief against me.

How do I live with this guilt?The honest answer is: I do not . Not anymore. Guilt used to paralyze me. It kept me stuck in the same cycles, convinced that I was not enough: too broken, too expensive in every possible way. What changed was not some magical self-love epiphany. It was watching my mother choose me every day and realizing that her love wasn’t a debt I had to repay by being perfect. It was a gift I could only honor by getting better—slowly, imperfectly, one small step at a time.

I’m not “fixed.” I still struggle. My body is a battlefield of old wars and new compromises. There are days I need help with things most adults take for granted. But I am here. I am learning. She sees the woman I am becoming because she refused to let the girl I was disappear.

May 10, 2026