Women are social creatures, primed for connection and close intimate ties from one stage of life to another.
All humans are social creatures, of course, and being alone in the ways modern humans can now be alone would have been almost impossible throughout most of our history and prehistory, when survival depended much more directly on other people. But women have also spent much of that history surrounded by other women, children, family, and community, often in close physical proximity and involved in the nurturing and care of both young and old.
Our reproductive physiology also makes oxytocin particularly relevant to distinctly female experiences, including childbirth and breastfeeding, alongside sex, orgasm, touch, eye contact, bonding, and other forms of relational connection.
For this reason, I believe women in the modern developed world may be uniquely vulnerable to what happens when intimacy, community, physical affection, pleasure, and meaningful human connection become scarce. This doesn’t mean that loneliness isn’t an enormous problem for men, nor am I suggesting that every lonely woman is walking around with clinically measurable “low oxytocin” that explains her symptoms. My work is primarily with women, and what interests me is the intersection between female physiology and a way of living that can leave us increasingly disconnected from many of the experiences that historically made connection a normal part of everyday life rather than something we had to intentionally schedule.
Many women are now highly independent, educated, career-oriented, geographically separated from family, living alone, marrying later or not at all, having children later or not having them at all, and spending an extraordinary amount of time working, consuming information, and interacting through screens.
There are freedoms within this that previous generations of women did not have, and I don’t romanticize a past in which women’s survival could depend heavily on men, marriage, or family structures they had little power to choose or to leave. But greater independence has also made something else possible: we can construct lives in which we technically function quite well while receiving surprisingly little intimacy, touch, co-regulation, sexual connection, communal care, or deep relational support.
And because modern life gives us so many substitutes for stimulation, we may not even immediately recognize what’s missing for us.
We can work more. We can scroll. We can research our symptoms, perfect our diets, order another supplement, listen to another podcast, take another course, smoke cannabis, use stimulants, binge on non-stop entertainment, stay constantly busy, or pursue our next goal. We can even remain surrounded by people through partying, through casual relationships, social media exchanges, and shallow social connections while still being profoundly lonely.
My theory is that many women are increasingly using easily accessible sources of dopamine and stimulation to compensate, at least in part, for lives that contain too little of the connection, pleasure, safety, intimacy, and bonding that we actually need to be well and to feel deeply connected in society.
When this goes on for long enough, loneliness can become difficult to identify because it becomes the water we swim in. And through my training in working with C-PTSD, I’ve come to view connection as the main underlying core need upon which every other need sits. Based on the Neuro Affective Relational Model (NARM) of development, humans have 5 core needs that we come into this world with, connection being the immediate one that underlies the other 4, attunement, trust, autonomy, and a loving sexual development and expression.
When one or all of these core needs aren’t met during development, we can live our adult lives with developmental disruptions that inhibit us from meeting these needs as adults; we can develop adaptations around these unmet needs that become maladaptive over time.
Now, I’m not implying that everyone who has some unmet needs is walking around with trauma, and there is still a lot of research that we need in the fields of developmental trauma. What I am saying, however, is that human connection is a baseline need for sustaining a healthy life, and that if we don’t experience this early in life, this can be one main reason why we go through life struggling to experience this as an adult. But even if we did have our needs met during developmental years, we can still develop real maladaptive patterns and health issues if our needs for connection go unmet year after year.
Loneliness is a threat to our overall health and quality of life.
You may not walk around all the time thinking, I’m lonely. You may simply feel overwhelmed by everything you have to carry because you’re carrying it alone. Your health problems may occupy an enormous amount of mental space, and you may show up as more “type A” or obsessive as a result of this. You may feel flat, low in vitality, disconnected from pleasure, overly serious, chronically stressed, or strangely unable to imagine your life becoming much bigger than it currently is if you’re the only one actively contributing to it.
And if you’ve spent years living this way, particularly after trauma, chronic illness, heartbreak, family estrangement, relocation, or relationships that taught you not to rely too heavily on other people, you may have developed an identity around being the person who handles everything herself.
I know this experience personally because I’ve lived it. There have been periods of my life when I felt physically and emotionally terrible as a result of some combination of inflammation, health issues, unresolved trauma, and social isolation, with each feeding into the others. Then I would spend time with someone I loved and notice how dramatically my internal experience could shift afterward and my perspective on my life and my health seemed to expand! The symptoms I had been consumed by hadn’t necessarily disappeared, but they became noticeably smaller.
This is what co-regulation does in relationships, and it happens whether we’re consciously trying to co-regulate or not, simply through human connection.
The identity I had unconsciously built around my symptoms, how I felt, and what they meant about me became smaller too. I’d been seen, touched, listened to, validated, distracted, made to laugh, inspired intellectually, and given the opportunity to co-create reality with another human being instead of being the full-time bearer of my own reality. This is an essential component of being a human, not a luxury some of us get and others aren’t so lucky — we all need this.
These experiences in my relationships impacting my health and outlook have shaped the way I think about women’s health.
Nutrition matters, of course. Metabolic health matters. Hormones matter. And addressing inflammation, nutrient deficiencies, digestion, sleep, blood sugar, and other physiological stressors, indeed, matters. But human connection also matters, and I think we can make a serious mistake when we treat a woman as though her body exists independently from the relational environment in which that body has to live, in which that body has to survive.
And surviving is what life can start to feel like if we don’t have others close to us who share in our values to co-create this life with.
So if you’ve been working relentlessly on your health while becoming progressively more isolated, if you don’t have the friendships, family relationships, partnership, family, sexual connection, or community you actually want, or if you’ve become so accustomed to not having these things that you’ve stopped allowing yourself to even consider that you want them, I want to offer another way of looking at the problem.
I want to share the strategies that I use with my clients and in my personal life with myself to address the more complex and oftentimes difficult-to-address issue of loneliness and the downstream psycho-emotional and physiological consequences of this, especially when it goes on for too long. These strategies are as follows.
1. Take an honest inventory of your relational life
The first step isn’t immediately forcing yourself onto a dating app, signing up for five social events, or deciding you need to become more extroverted, thus surrounding yourself with people who might just leave you feeling more alone. It’s getting honest about the life you’re actually living and what it feels like to live in it.
Who do you talk to when something difficult happens or you have an emergency? Who can you call without worrying that you’re bothering them? How often are you touched affectionately? How frequently do you laugh with another person, share a meal, have sex, hug someone you love, sit beside somebody, verbally process what you’re going through, or experience the relief of having another person understand what has been living inside your head?
How much fun and pleasure is actually present in your day-to-day and your week?
And perhaps more importantly: are you satisfied with the answers that you got from to these questions, or have you simply learned not to expect very much from life in this department? For women with trauma histories in particular, this inventory can be confronting because extreme independence can look remarkably functional from the outside. If you’ve developed a hyper-developed sense of autonomy because relying on people once felt unsafe, disappointing, or unpredictable, being the captain of your own ship can become a deeply entrenched part of your identity.
You may have excellent intellectual reasons for why you don’t need much from other people or why people aren’t available, why dating isn’t worth it, why friendships are exhausting, or why nobody around you shares your values.
You may also have developed the habit of explaining away why you’ll build a social life once your health improves, your business grows, you move, you lose weight, you have more energy, or you finally feel like yourself again. In this story, you’re not perfect enough yet to have the social support that you may be needing to get yourself to that next level in your life in the first place! Some of those reasons may be completely legitimate.
But intellectual explanations can also protect us from having to admit something much more vulnerable: I need people, I don’t currently have the relationships I want, and I don’t know how to change that.
There can be real grief in admitting this and vulnerability in looking at ourselves through the lens of these unmet needs.
Women are often verbal processors, and relationships give us opportunities not only to receive advice but to distribute the psychological weight of our struggles and triumphs in life. Something that feels enormous when it’s circulated through your own nervous system for three days can feel substantially more manageable after talking about it with someone who knows you well and cares. Another person can offer perspective, humor, reassurance, practical help, affection, or simply the experience of being witnessed and heard. Without enough of these interactions, we can become the sole container for our problems, ambitions, health struggles, fears, responsibilities, and trauma, and everything can begin to feel heavier than it might within a well-supported life.
This is also one reason health issues can become disproportionately large in an isolated woman’s identity; she’s experiencing the symptoms, researching them, managing them, thinking about them, structuring her day around them, and frequently doing all of this alone.
The more frightening or disruptive the symptoms are, the easier it becomes to invest even more attention in fixing the body because the body feels like a problem she can potentially control, whereas her social life or love life does not. I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly in health-oriented women, and I’ve lived versions of it myself: focusing more and more intensely on health while intimacy, pleasure, friendship, community, and relational needs remain in the background, a void.
This doesn’t mean the health problems aren’t real. They often very much are! It means we need to ask whether fixing our health has quietly become the project through which we avoid looking at everything else. And the only way we can know any of this is if we take stock of our current life, admit honestly to ourselves what needs we have that aren’t being met, and feel what comes up when we do this.
2. Create a social life worth healing for
Once we have an honest understanding of our relational reality, the next step isn’t to become perfectly healed, completely confident, or endlessly self-loving before we’re allowed to build solid relationships.
I don’t believe in the idea that we have to love ourselves first before anyone else can love us or want to be close to us. Intimacy is messy.
We’re relational beings, and we learn about ourselves through knowing other people and being known by them. We heal in relationships. We discover parts of ourselves through friendship, partnership, sexuality, building and participating in family dynamics, resolving conflict, collaborating, caregiving, and the intimacy that we could never discover through introspection or individual growth alone.
At the same time, there’s an important difference between believing we must become perfect before we deserve connection and developing enough of a relationship with ourselves that we can choose connection wisely.
I’ve worked with very isolated women who don’t seem to know what another person would find interesting, enjoyable, or lovable about them! This is heartbreaking, but it also makes sense within the context of chronic illness, trauma, mental health struggles, and years spent in low-agency states, dissociating and feeling helpless over our circumstances and our bodies. When your life has gradually contracted around the demands of managing symptoms, surviving, working, scrolling social media, intellectualizing all of your feelings, or fixing yourself in one way or another, you may eventually stop participating in the parts of life that give you evidence of your own vitality.
This is where I come back to something I’ve written about before: creating a life worth healing for. And in this context — creating relationships worth healing for.
Rather than waiting for every symptom to resolve before you begin living, start identifying the parts of your life over which you do have agency and move them incrementally toward what you value. What are your actual principles that you’d like your life to be based upon? What kind of woman do you want to be? What kind of people do you respect and pay attention to, and why? What qualities and experiences do you want your friendships to contain? What qualities matter to you in a romantic partner or husband? What kind of family life do you want? What makes you feel creative, sensual, sexy, useful, playful, curious, lovable, or alive?
What do you want to contribute to other people’s lives rather than only receive from them?
This matters because relationships built primarily to escape loneliness are very different from relationships chosen from a clear understanding of who we are. Some people cannot tolerate being alone, so they continually surround themselves with others, enter relationships quickly, stay in partnerships that aren’t good for them, or maintain friendships with little depth because almost any connection feels preferable to solitude and being with themselves for very long. But simply being surrounded by people is not the same thing as being relationally healthy or having your intimacy needs met.
On the other end is the woman who has learned to enjoy her own company, trust herself, think independently, and recognize that solitude can be restorative—but who is also mature enough to recognize that independence does not eliminate her need for other human beings.
She can hold both: I enjoy being alone, and I need people, I can take care of myself, and I want to be cared for. I don’t want relationships simply to fill space, and I deeply value partnership. I won’t abandon my standards because I’m lonely, and I’m also not going to use my standards to protect myself from ever having to risk rejection or mess up my perfectly controlled life.
That middle ground between the inability to enjoy solitude and one’s own company and self-isolation is where discernment develops.
Building a life around your values also increases the likelihood that you’ll encounter people who share them in the first place because we tend to meet people through the lives we actually participate in. Healthy people often find one another through health-oriented environments, similarly to how intellectual people meet through intellectual interests. Family-oriented people build relationships around family life, and people devoted to particular causes meet while participating in those causes. We can have relationships in all of these domains that serve different needs, but we have to be confident in ourselves as someone worth knowing in order to build these relationships in the first place!
This is why relational health can’t always be solved by simply “trying to make friends.” Sometimes the more useful question is: What kind of life would naturally put me in contact with the kinds of people I want to know, and do I believe that I’m someone worth knowing?
Then you begin building that life before those people arrive. This is what I’ve done in my relationships over the years, and although I still have periods of loneliness — sometimes circumstantial, sometimes environmental, and sometimes my own doing — it’s brought me some of the greatest connections a person could possibly ask for!
3. Make connection, intimacy, community, and pleasure actual priorities
Awareness of our needs & patterns without actual implementation eventually becomes another form of intellectualization, another form of avoidance.
Once you understand what’s missing and have begun creating a stronger relationship with yourself and the life you want to inhabit, there comes a point when building relationships has to become something you actually do, something you prioritize in the same way that you prioritize exercise and good hygiene. This might sound obvious, but many of us give relationships whatever scraps of time remain after everything we’ve decided is more urgent gets done. This is even more true once we have children, a full career, and health issues we have to manage — we can literally scheduling in some of our favorite people months in advance to then going several months before we see them again. And this is if we even have these friends in the first place!
We work. We exercise. We meal prep. We answer emails. We research our health. We complete our routines. We consume digital information. We work on ourselves. And then we may look at our lives and wonder why connection hasn’t somehow appeared, or why we feel so stressed or unable to relax.
If relationships are foundational to health and quality of life, they have to receive some of the same intentionality we willingly give to nutrition, work, exercise, and self-improvement.
Depending on what you need, this might mean getting on dating apps and approaching them with more intention than just collecting a bunch of profile matches or swiping through anyone who doesn’t seem perfect. It could mean attending events even when staying home feels easier, or joining organizations centered around causes or interests you genuinely feel passionate about. It could mean becoming part of communities that share your values, inviting someone for coffee instead of waiting to be invited, or reconnecting with family members with regular phone calls.
If your environment came up as an obstacle to healthier relationships, this my mean traveling to spend time with people you love, or building relationships online with the intention of eventually bridging some of them into real-world friendships, trips, meetups, professional collaborations, or community.
Prioritizing this also means integrating smaller experiences of connection and pleasure into your daily life rather than imagining that relational health begins only when you finally have a best friend group, husband, or family. A conversation matters, daily touch matters, laughing with a friend matters, regular eye contact matters, and sitting across from another person and sharing a meal together matters. Sexuality and sensuality matter, even if they, again, start with you figuring out what you like and want first on your own.
Doing something creative with another person matters, being able to ask for help matters, and allowing somebody to do something for you matters. These are skills and neural pathways being built each time you prioritize them.
For a nervous system that’s become accustomed to isolation, even small experiences can begin providing evidence that another experience of life is possible.
This step also requires holding two truths simultaneously: I am lonely and want deeper relationships, AND I am not willing to fill my life with empty connections simply so I don’t have to experience loneliness.
Loneliness is not inherently unhealthy — it’s a signal to an unmet need. And this distinction is especially important for women who cope with loneliness through partying, casual relationships, substances, or continually surrounding themselves with people who don’t actually know them. A crowded social life can still be a profoundly lonely life. If the relationships around us continually reinforce the behaviors, beliefs, consumption patterns, and trauma responses we’re trying to move away from, being “social” isn’t necessarily moving us toward greater relational health.
Sometimes becoming healthier actually creates loneliness before it creates connection.
You may stop drinking as much, discover that much of your social life revolved around alcohol, and lose your tolerance for drinking culture. This is a very common experience, actually, and it often comes with real loneliness. You may change how you eat, spend your weekends differently, become more serious about your fertility or family, leave a dysfunctional relationship, stop participating in friendships built around behaviors you’ve outgrown, and find that you have far less people to fill your schedule with. It’s also common to develop values that no longer match the people you’ve known for years, and this can be a lonely experience.
There can be a real void between the relationships we’ve outgrown and the relationships we haven’t built yet, and this is an important time for getting clear on what we want to come next.
That void is uncomfortable, but filling it indiscriminately doesn’t solve the problem because the void itself is an important social pause for us. The crucial work for us is in learning how to tolerate the temporary uncertainty of building something better without retreating into total isolation or returning to relationships that no longer fit simply because they’re familiar. And this will become more important the more disruptive or unhealthy the behaviors or norms were associated with the relationship(s) we’re letting go of.
“But there aren’t people like me where I live.”
This is one of the most common objections I hear from women who are lonely or relationally isolated, and I can actually relate to this experience a lot myself.
Sometimes our environment genuinely is part of the problem. Perhaps you live somewhere with few people your age, or maybe the local culture is poorly aligned with the values you’ve grown into. Perhaps you’re single and the dating pool is extremely limited, your family lives across the country, or you’ve changed substantially while the community around you hasn’t. I’ve experienced versions of this myself, and I’ve moved multiple times in an attempt to change my circumstances and create greater agency over my life.
Moving isn’t always the answer, though, and sometimes changing locations becomes another way to avoid patterns that will follow us wherever we go.
Sometimes there were more opportunities where we already lived than we realized because fear, exhaustion, illness, or avoidance kept us from actually participating in or seeing them clearly. And sometimes we have to leave somewhere to discover that the trade-offs we had there were actually worth accepting and better for us than we gave them credit for. Sometimes moving and changing environments can itself be a trauma patterns and being in flight is the familiar way that we access our agency when we’re feeling helpless.
But sometimes our environment really does matter, and changing it is what’s required to bring us into closer contact with the relationships we most need.
If you’ve made genuine efforts to create the relationships you need and the place you’re living continually prevents you from doing so, then moving cities, states, or even countries doesn’t have to be considered an impossible option simply because it’s inconvenient, or even stressful. You may not be able to move tomorrow; you might need a year or several years to prepare financially and practically. You may ultimately decide that staying near family, keeping a particular career, or remaining somewhere you love matters more than having a larger dating pool, but the bottom line is that you need to understand your options and know that you’re the one choosing them!
All of these different factors influencing our relationships involve real trade-offs in life.
Agency doesn’t mean we get everything we want without sacrifice or loss — it means we’re willing to examine those trade-offs consciously rather than treating our current circumstances as permanent simply because changing them would be difficult. It means acknowledging where our power in changing things lies and making a choice from this clear-eyed place. The internet can also help us bridge some of these gaps in a way that wasn’t possible twenty years ago. If you’re isolated because your interests, beliefs, intellectual life, or values are unusual within your immediate environment, online communities can help you find people who understand those parts of you.
I don’t believe internet relationships should permanently replace embodied, real-world community, but I certainly believe they can become bridges to it.
Online friendships can turn into visits, trips, collaborations, relocations, collaborations, and real-life communities. Even dating at a distance can make sense for someone whose local options genuinely don’t align with what she wants, provided there’s eventually a realistic path toward building a life in the same place. For instance, my business and my personal life has overlapped at various points, having made rich connections online during business partnerships or podcast conversations that provided the foundations for friendships with women all over the globe who share my values. And as a deeply intellectual and heterodox thinker, I’ve found some of the greatest connections through seminars and events where people came together to talk about the ideas and topics I found myself geeking out alone over behind closed doors.
At some point, we have to decide how important relationships actually are to us, and we have to take an active role in creating these relationships and treating ourselves as if we’re badass enough to deserve these relationships in the first place.
When we’re older and looking back at our lives, I suspect that who we loved, who loved us, who we built with, who we cared for, who cared for us, and who was there to witness our lives unfold will occupy considerably more of our story than many of the inconveniences we once considered too large to overcome.
Relational health is health
As women, we’re meant to experience our lives in connection with other people—in friendship, family, intimacy, community, care, sexuality, collaboration, and, of course, in love.
These relationships contribute to our sense of safety and identity, they give us opportunities to regulate alongside other nervous systems, they help us process the inevitable stressors of being alive, and they provide many of the experiences associated with bonding, pleasure, expansion, and oxytocin. Yet, many modern health-conscious women can gradually find themselves living with less and less of these states and these experiences. This can be such a gradual and ubiquitous process that we don’t even realize that loneliness has become the water we swim in daily — the very water we also work so hard to be healthy within!
Sometimes chronic illness creates the isolation, sometimes trauma does. Sometimes career ambition, relocation, heartbreak, divorce, changing values, or sheer exhaustion slowly crowd intimate relationships out.
Sometimes we never developed the relational skills or secure attachments that would’ve made maintaining close relationships easier in the first place. And sometimes we’ve simply discovered that modern life makes it remarkably easy to survive alone while filling the resulting emptiness with screens, work, productivity, stimulants, entertainment, substances, casual connection, and the endless project of improving ourselves for the sake of improving ourselves.
The solution here isn’t abandoning independence or deciding that every woman needs the same kind of social life — I would be exhausted if I adopted some of my more extraverted friends’ social lives!
And of course, the solution also isn’t ignoring legitimate health problems and pretending friendship will fix our hormones or our circadian rhythms! Once again, I bring our attention to the middle-ground and the nuance of each individual path and make the case that the solution to our growing epidemic of loneliness and isolation is found in widening our understanding of what creates a healthy woman.
We can take honest stock of the relationships and connection we currently have rather than automatically normalizing their absence and assuming it can’t change.
We can build lives we genuinely want to participate in and develop enough self-trust to choose relationships from discernment rather than out of desperation or convenience. And then we can treat friendship, family, partnership, intimacy, community, sexuality, fun, and pleasure as real priorities rather than luxuries we’ll finally have time for after everything else has been fixed or managed perfectly. I’ve seen women come to me with complicated health patterns that are difficult to diagnose and address, including autoimmunity, MCAS, mental health struggles, and other symptoms deeply intertwined with stress physiology.
With these women, we may spend time looking at labs, food, minerals, digestion, hormones, and lifestyle, only for me to discover that a woman has virtually no support network, spends most of her time alone, or doesn’t feel emotionally safe within her primary relationships.
This relational context doesn’t make her physical symptoms imaginary, and it doesn’t eliminate the need to care for her physiology, but it changes the context in which I understand it.
A woman’s nutrition matters, but sometimes even more important is the life her well-nourished body is being asked to live, and those she’s sharing this life with.
If you’re realizing this is part of your health story
I’m not a relationship coach. My primary area of expertise is still health and nutrition.
But I’m also trained and certified in embodiment, nervous-system regulation, attachment coaching, and trauma-informed care, and these areas inevitably bring us into the relational patterns that shape a woman’s experience of her body and her whole life. For women, having safe relationships and regular access to pleasure, connection, support, and intimacy can be just as important to the larger healing process as many of the nutrition and lifestyle practices we tend to focus on first. Yet relational health can feel considerably more daunting to address because it isn’t something we can completely control ourselves.
Relationships involve other people, vulnerability, discernment, boundaries, rejection, grief, trust, and sometimes making difficult changes to the life we’ve already built.
These are also areas that can easily remain untouched when you hire someone who is looking exclusively at physiology, nutrition, or hormones. My practice is intentionally integrative because I want to understand and care for the whole woman. That can happen even within something as focused as an HTMA consultation, although an hour-long consultation inevitably means we’re only going to skim the surface of deeper issues like chronic loneliness, isolation, relational stress, or trauma patterns.
In my more comprehensive private coaching containers, however, we have considerably more room to understand how these pieces interact and to work with them alongside nutrition, metabolic health, nervous-system support, and the physiological concerns that brought you to me in the first place.
This is particularly important if you’re preparing your body for conception now or know that motherhood is something you want to build toward in the future. Choosing a partner, creating a safe relationship, developing relational skills, and building the support structures that motherhood asks of us are not separate from preparing for motherhood. They’re part of it. This is why Nourishing The Mother includes an entire component devoted to relationship building and psycho-emotional support alongside the physiological work.
Everything I write about in this area is also something I’ve had to confront in my own life. Loneliness and isolation have been significant parts of my own story.
For those of us who have lived with complex trauma or followed unconventional life paths, we may reach the age when we want to build a family and realize that we haven’t found the right partner yet, in part because earlier years had to be dedicated to surviving, understanding ourselves, and healing childhood wounds. We may realize that previous partners or friendships weren’t conducive to the growth we needed and that leaving those relationships created an uncomfortable void. We may naturally lose connections as our lifestyles, health practices, consumption patterns, or values change and then have no idea how to build relationships that reflect the person we’ve become.
We may already have loving people around us but rarely reach for them because isolation, exhaustion, low energy, or old protective patterns have become habitual.
I see all of these experiences in the women I work with, which is why relational health can become an integral part of my private coaching rather than something I automatically separate from a woman’s physical health. If this article spoke to you and you recognize that loneliness, isolation, difficulty building safe relationships, or disconnection from pleasure and intimacy have become part of your health story, you can schedule a free chat with me to learn more about the ways we could work together.
And if motherhood is something you’re intentionally moving toward—whether conception is on the immediate horizon or you’re building the foundations for it further down the line—and choosing the right partner, creating healthier relationships, or developing the psycho-emotional foundation for family life is part of what you know you need to address, Nourishing The Mother was created with this larger picture in mind.
Your relational health begins with your relationship to yourself, but it doesn’t have to end there.
You’re allowed to build a life in which being healthy isn’t the central project around which everything else revolves, but the foundation that gives you greater capacity to love, connect, create, experience pleasure, build family and community, and participate more fully in the life you were trying to become healthy enough to live in the first place.
