There comes a point in every Goddess’s journey when she looks in the mirror and realizes she is no longer just sprout-testing a few stray chin hairs. Instead, she is hosting a full, robust, Sam Elliott-level mustache event right on her upper lip.

Society expects us to treat this sudden surge of testosterone-fueled facial embroidery as a shameful secret. We are supposed to quietly whisper about “peach fuzz” while secretly wielding tweezers like tactical weapons. But out here in the real world, we need to talk about the sheer logistics of managing a face that has decided to transition into a rugged, old-west sheriff.

The Waxing Room of Horrors (And the DIY Trap)

Naturally, our first instinct is to rip the invaders out by their roots.

I regularly visit the nail salon for maintenance. When the technician waxes my eyebrows, everything goes perfectly fine. But the second that hot spatula moves south to my upper lip and face? It hurts like absolute mad. I lie there clutching the vinyl table, questioning every life choice that brought me to this moment, while the aesthetician cheerfully tears away bands of my flesh.

And just when you think the torture has ended and you can finally breathe, they bring out the tweezers. They hover over you, picking and plucking at every microscopic root the wax missed, until you genuinely think you might die right there on the table. You are physically weeping, your lip is throbbing, and they are still hunting down stragglers like they’re searching for buried treasure.

But if you think the salon is brutal, the DIY home kit is a specialized circle of hell.

In a moment of supreme hubris, I decided to wax my own mustache at home. It went terribly. The wax stuck to my face like industrial adhesive, refusing to budge or release. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, crying actual tears of agony, trying to pry this hardened, painful plastic off my skin. My home attempt bore absolutely no resemblance to the slick, swift pain of the salon. It was a hostage situation where my lip was the captive.

I have never waxed anything south of my neck. Just… no.

The Shaving Taboo and the “Farmer’s Tan”

After the great wax trauma, many of us turn to the trusty razor. It is fast, painless, and highly effective—until the universe decides to play jokes on you.

Years ago, my husband Eric and I were driving to a family gathering. Earlier that day, I had showered and done my usual shave. As we drove, I noticed Eric continually glancing over at me from the driver’s seat.

Finally, I snapped. “WHAT?”

He hesitated and asked, “Did you shave your lady mustache or something?”

Defensive, I demanded to know why he was asking.

He shrugged and said, “Because you have a kind of farmer’s tan where your mustache used to be.”

Yes, the ultimate shaving betrayal: the ghost shadow. When you shave thick hair, you reveal the pristine, pale skin underneath that hasn’t seen the sun in months, leaving you with a stark, reverse-mustache tan line that screams your secrets to the passenger seat. Seriously, like a newly pubescented young man, you shave every day, so when all this upper lift shade has a chance to develop, I cannot imagine.

And don’t even get me started on the salon waxing lady who clutched her pearls and warned me, “Don’t shave your upper lip! It will grow back thicker!”

I looked her dead in the eye and told her, “I started shaving it BECAUSE it grows back thicker! I can’t stop it from growing back thicker! I didn’t start this! The mustache did!” At this point, the hair has its own agenda. Shaving didn’t create the forest; it’s just the only lawnmower I have left that doesn’t make me cry.

The Battle Plan: Comparing Your Facial Hair Options

If you are currently fighting the Sam Elliott sweepstakes on your own face, here is the honest, unfiltered breakdown of your tactical options:

• Shaving:

  • The Good: It is fast, entirely painless, and you can do it in the shower in ten seconds flat.

  • The Bad: It requires constant maintenance, and as Eric so lovingly pointed out, it can leave you with a temporary “mustache farmer’s tan” if your skin has been shielded from the sun. Also, you have to keep on top of it, shaving most days.

• Professional Waxing:

  • The Good: It keeps the hair gone for weeks and weakens the hair bulb over time.

  • The Bad: It hurts like mad on the lip and cheeks, they still pick at you with tweezers afterward until you think you will die, and you have to let the hair grow out to a visible length before they can wax it again.

• Threading:

  • The Good: It is incredibly precise and doesn’t use heat or chemicals, making it great for sensitive skin.

  • The Bad: It feels like a tiny, sadistic elf is lassoing each individual hair and pulling them out one by one. The slow-motion pluck is a very specific kind of torture. This is beyond even Epi-lady pain levels.

• Depilatory Creams:

  • The Good: Cheap and easy to apply at home.

  • The Bad: They smell like burning sulfur and can easily give you a chemical burn if you leave them on for even three seconds too long. The line between “this isn’t working” and “using napalm as a body lotion” is as thin as the hair itself.

Owning the Stubble

Whether you choose to wax, shave, thread, or let your inner cowboy run free, the ultimate goal of a Goddess is to strip away the shame. Our bodies change. Our hormones shift. Sometimes, we sprout hair in places we never expected, and sometimes we have to explain a reverse-tan line to our partners on the way to Thanksgiving.

If they are going to look, let them look. Just make sure your tweezers are sharp, your razor is clean, and your sense of humor is entirely intact.

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Dear Friends,

After a long journey and countless hours of deep creative work, the finish line is finally here. I finishsed the final edits for my new cozy paranormal romance, Ten Past Four, is finished, and the book officially launches on Monday, August 3.

Because you are the heartbeat of my community, I want to invite you to join my exclusive Advance Review Team. I am incredibly grateful for your ongoing support, and I want to share this story with you first.

How the Advance Review Team Works

In exchange for an early digital copy of the book, I ask for your support in building our launch momentum. Early reviews tell the retail algorithms that a book is being read, which helps new readers discover the secrets of Faith Cottage.

If you join the team, here is what the flow looks like:

• Claim Your Copy: Click the secure link below to head to my private BookFunnel page. You will enter your email address to download the file directly to your preferred reading device (they offer both Kindle-ready EPUB and PDF formats).

• Enjoy the Story: Dive into the book over the next two and a half weeks. Take your time and enjoy the journey!

• Drop Your Review on Launch Day: On Monday, August 3, I will send out a quick reminder with direct links. I ask that you take two minutes to copy and paste a brief, honest review onto Amazon and Goodreads.

A Quick Note on Security & Guidelines

To keep this launch safe and fair for everyone, please keep a couple of standard industry guardrails in mind:

1. Accountability Watermarking: The download system automatically applies an invisible watermark tied to your download email. Please do not share or distribute this file publicly.

2. The FTC Disclaimer: Per Amazon and FTC guidelines, please include a brief sentence at the very end of your review stating: “I received an advance review copy of this book from the author.”

3. Exclusivity: Please do not share this invitation with others without permission from me.

If you have the time to read and share your honest thoughts by August 3, I would love to have you on the team.

To download your advance digital copy, click here:👉 https://bookhip.com/HCQATBP

Thank you so much for walking this path with me and helping me bring Ten Past Four into the world!

With gratitude,

There is a specific kind of magic that happens in the absolute stillness of a bedroom or while sinking into a lounge chair. It is the moment when you realize, with a sudden and quiet shock, that nothing hurts. In those precious, fleeting minutes, a wave of emotion hits so close to the surface it can bring you to tears—not from sadness, but from the sheer, overwhelming relief that the background noise of your own body has finally gone quiet for a short time.

Because for those of us living a life of boots-on-the-ground reality, pain is no longer an occasional visitor. It has moved in, unpacked its bags, and become the baseline. Maybe it is life’s way of coaching us to look forward to death when, in theory, nothing ever hurts again.

For me, the roll call is daily and predictable: my lower back, my right rotator cuff, and my injured right knee. Then there is my left knee, which has spent the last eight months carrying the extra weight and compensating for the right one, and finally, the sharp, stubborn ache at the base of my left thumb. You learn to navigate your day around the physical geography of your own joints, mapping out movements like a general plotting a course through hostile territory.

The Gospel of the Forever-Young

If you turn on your phone or listen to the modern health industry, you will hear a completely different sermon. We are constantly barraged by wellness enthusiasts, biohackers, and influencers who preach that physical deterioration and chronic pain are not endemic to aging. They insist that with the right combination of collagen powder, mobility drills, anti-inflammatory diets, and sheer willpower, your joints should function like a well-oiled machine until you’re ninety.

But let’s look closely at the people delivering this gospel: it is almost always the young.

It is easy to lecture the world on how the body should naturally age when your cartilage hasn’t yet left the building and your joints haven’t accumulated decades of historical mileage. It is a philosophy born of theory, a luxury of those who are still operating on their factory-default settings. They treat pain as a personal failure of maintenance rather than the natural, standard tax of living a long, full life on a planet with gravity.

Normalization as Survival

Out here in reality, normalizing pain isn’t about giving up—it’s a sophisticated psychological survival strategy. If we stopped to mourn every single ache, creak, and structural protest our bodies made throughout the day, we would never leave the house.

Instead, we adapt. We learn the exact angle to lift an arm so the shoulder doesn’t catch. We know precisely how to swing our legs out of bed to protect the back. We accept that one joint is going to scream because it’s been heroically doing the job of two for the last eight months. We normalize the discomfort so we can get on with the business of being fabulous, sovereign, and productive. We absorb the ache into the background static of our lives.

Reclaiming the Pain-Free Moments

Recognizing this reality doesn’t make us defeated; it makes us present. When you stop fighting the natural trajectory of a changing body and accept the boots-on-the-ground truth of aging, those moments of pure physical quiet become holy.

Here is how we honor the reality of our temples this week:

• Dismiss the lecturers. Stop letting thirty-year-old fitness gurus make you feel guilty for having a body that remembers its history. Your joints have stories; their joints just have metadata.

• Honor the compensators. Give a little mental gratitude to the parts of you that are over-performing to keep you moving. That left knee taking the brunt of the weight deserves a medal, not resentment.

• Melt into the quiet. When you do find yourself lying down and the pain recedes, don’t immediately fill the space with thoughts or tasks. Stay there. Let yourself feel the luxury of zero resistance. If it brings tears to your eyes, let them come. It is the sweetest meditation on earth.

We are not broken machines that just need a new part; we are living, breathing monuments to survival. The background noise might be louder than it used to be, but when it fades into a whisper, the silence is absolutely beautiful.

Katrina's Website

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Popular culture loves to warn women about the impending doom of hitting a certain age: The Great Vanishing. We are told that once we cross a specific chronological threshold, the youth-obsessed spotlight clicks off, and we slide effortlessly into societal invisibility.

But nobody ever tells the fat girls that the standard rules of invisibility simply do not apply to us.

When you are a woman of significant size and vintage, you never truly have the luxury of disappearing into the background. You cannot fade neatly into the wallpaper when your physical form inherently demands coordinates in a room. We exist in a bizarre, exhausting paradox: we are hyper-visible to public judgment, yet entirely erased when it comes to human desire.

Hyper-Visible for Condemnation

Let’s be real about how the world looks at us. We are never invisible when we are navigating a narrow grocery store aisle, trying to find a seat on a crowded train, or merely existing in a public space. In those moments, the public eye is a laser beam.

And heaven forbid we dare to publicly enjoy an ice cream cone on a hot summer day. If we do, we instantly become the focal point of the entire street—the target of side-eyes, silent scolds, and the collective intake of breath from people who think our joy is a public offense.

We become a canvas for total strangers to project their cultural anxieties, their unprompted medical opinions, and their deep-seated biases. The world watches us with a critical, policing gaze—ready to condemn the space we take up, the food in our hands, or the audacity we have to exist without shame. We are hyper-visible as a cautionary tale, a talking point, or a target for societal disapproval. Our size makes us a monument that everyone feels entitled to comment on.

The Invisible “Good Fat Girl” (Until It’s Time to Ridicule)

Yet, the second we try to play by their rules, the magic trick happens in reverse.

When we do the “good fat girl” thing and walk into a gym to step on a treadmill, we suddenly become entirely transparent to the establishment. The fitness enthusiasts and gym bros look right through us as if we are part of the drywall. Our presence in a space dedicated to fitness is ignored because we don’t fit the aesthetic narrative of the environment. We are invisible when we are sweating, invisible when we are working, and invisible when we are doing exactly what society claims it wants us to do.

Unless, of course, the cell phones come out.

That is the vicious underbelly of the gym paradox. We are ignored by civilized society, but we become hyper-visible to those folks who pull out their phones, thinking they are being entirely inconspicuous. They snap a photo or record a quick video just to upload it to their social media for a laugh, ridiculing a woman who is literally doing the exact thing they mock her for not doing. In that moment, we aren’t seen as human beings putting in effort—we are stripped down to a meme, a cheap punchline for a toxic internet culture.

The same erasure occurs when the conversation shifts to romance, intimacy, or baseline human desire. The spotlight completely vanishes. Culturally, the aging, plus-size woman is neatly categorized as the safe best friend, the comforting maternal figure, or the asexual placeholder. We are stripped of our nuance, our fire, and our sensuality. Society decides that if a body does not conform to a rigid, youthful, narrow ideal, it must no longer possess a libido, a longing, or a magnetic charge. They look right through our passion as if it’s a structural impossibility.

The Architecture of Resistance

But a sovereign Goddess does not wait for a broken culture to grant her permission to be desired.

I know fat women who have looked this hypocrisy dead in the eye and chosen a path of radical defiance. They become intentionally, vibrantly, and unapologetically expressive with their sexuality because they resist being overlooked. They don’t do it to perform for the male gaze; they do it to shatter the matrix of erasure.

When you lean into your sensuality with intention—whether that’s through the clothes you choose, the way you carry yourself, or the unapologetic ownership of your pleasure—it is a fierce act of resistance. It is saying, “You do not get to look through me. You do not get to relegate my fire to the shadows just because you don’t know what to do with the heat.”

But man, it’s exhausting.

Reclaiming the Full Spectrum

Living fabulously in this skin means refusing to accept a half-life. You are allowed to take up physical space and sensual space.

Here is our directive for rewriting the rules:

• Reject the split screen. You are not a public problem to be managed by day and an invisible ghost by night. You are a whole, unified, radiant entity.

• Own the stage. If they are going to stare at you eating that ice cream, give them an absolute masterclass in self-sovereignty. Savor every single bite.

• Feed your own fire. Sensuality belongs to you, not to the audience. Dress for your own texture, move for your own joy, and express yourself because your vitality demands to be felt.

The world might try to balance its books by making us hyper-visible for critique and invisible for love, but a Goddess knows how to break the scale. We are here, we are large, we are fiercely passionate, and we are absolutely not fading away.

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We need to talk about the absolute lie that is the phrase, “You should only eat when you’re hungry.”

If humans only ate when our biological engines required fuel, the snack food aisle would not be a multi-billion-dollar psychological wonderland. The truth is, a large portion of our relationship with food has absolutely nothing to do with an empty stomach. Sometimes, your stomach is perfectly content, your macros are met, and your nutritional needs are entirely satisfied.

But your mouth is bored. And a bored mouth is a dangerous thing.

The Dopamine Grab

We like to pretend eating is a purely mechanical act—fuel in, energy out. In reality, eating is also one of the fastest, most reliable ways to get a hit of dopamine, the brain’s favorite feel-good chemical.

When your mouth is bored, it isn’t crying out for sustenance. It is staging a protest against monotony. It wants texture. It wants a contrast of salty and sweet. It wants that specific, satisfying crunch that lets your brain know you are doing something exciting.

You open the refrigerator door and stare into the illuminated cavern, not because you need a meal, but because you are looking for entertainment. You want a taste experience to break up the mundane reality of a Tuesday afternoon. Eating a handful of chips or a piece of chocolate in that moment isn’t a failure of willpower; it is a micro-vacation for your brain.

The Hidden Catalog of Non-Hunger Eating

Once you look past the myth of physical hunger, you realize your metabolic survivalist has an entire catalog of reasons for wanting you to chew:

• The Transitional Snack: This happens when you finish one task and are about to start another. You cannot just move from answering emails to cleaning the house without a transitional cracker to mark the boundary. It is the punctuation mark of the afternoon.

• Procrastination Chewing: You have a difficult phone call to make, a spreadsheet to organize, or a looming deadline. Suddenly, the absolute necessity of toast reveals itself. You aren’t hungry; you are just using the act of chewing to delay facing the monster.

• Emotional Insulation: Food is soft, warm, predictable, and entirely under your control. When the outside world feels spiky, chaotic, or ungrateful, eating acts like a soft blanket for your nervous system. It creates a temporary buffer between you and whatever fresh hell is trying to breach your peace.

• Soothing Fight or Flight: Our human wiring is weird and often, we remain in a heavy state of anxiety and fight or flight long after a threat has passed. If we are lucky, food is one of the very first acts of intimacy we share with another person. We have a need we do not understand and someone fulfills it for us. Our nutritional needs are met. We are held and comforted. We feel safe and provided for. Sadly, as adults, this often is not the case and because that first intimacy occurs at such a formative time, we are deeply imprinted to associate feelings of security with food.

Negotiating with the Senses

The diet industry loves to make you feel guilty for this. They tell you to drink a glass of water or chew on a piece of ice when your mouth gets bored. But your brain is a sophisticated machine; it knows the difference between tap water and a salt-and-vinegar potato chip. You cannot trick a dopamine-seeking brain with an ice cube.

Being a sovereign Goddess means understanding these non-hunger cues without judgment. If your mouth is bored, acknowledge it. Sometimes, you just need to give the survivalist a little entertainment so it stops banging on the bunker doors.

Here is the Goddess guide to navigating the bored mouth:

• Identify the mood before the food. Ask yourself if you are empty or simply uninspired. If you just need a dopamine hit, choose the item that actually delivers it instead of eating five things that do not satisfy the itch.

• Remove the morality. Eating for pleasure, for comfort, or because a flavor is spectacular is part of the human experience. It is not a character flaw.

• Savor the entertainment. If you are eating purely because it tastes really good, then actually pay attention to it. Turn off the screen, put down the work, and let your mouth have its little party.

The non-hunger reasons we eat are just as much a symptom as hunger is itself. When we are hungry and think “Why do I want to eat?” we usually have an answer: I haven’t eaten anything for six hours.

We should give the same attention evaluating our non-hunger responses. In normal circumstances (meaning for people who are not obese), there is no negative judgment for eating when you are hungry. No one questions it. For an overweight person, if you eat when you are hungry, you’d better be eating the “right” foods or suddenly everyone has an opinion. Goddess help us if we eat for reasons other than hunger.

For many of us (me included), when asked why we eat, the surface answer is, “Because I love food. Food is amazing.” On a deeper level, what that means is, “I have a dopamine deficiency. Every fiber of my being is screaming for a fix and let me tell you, a celery stick is not going to serve the purpose any more than a handful of sawdust.”

If I have a vitamin C deficiency, I can eat roasted chicken breast all day long and still have a vitamin C deficiency. If it is ignored, scurvy is not off the list of possibilities, even if I’m eating healthy proteins and salads. Until we address the deficiency, it will continue to compromise our healthy balance. The most common nutritional theories treat the need for food as the filling of an empty space rather than meeting one or more of the other needs food fulfills.

If we feel sad and unappreciated, what was there in times like birthdays, weddings, and retirements that celebrated us? Cake.

If we feel compromised, what happened when we were sick? Mom put us to bed with chicken soup and ginger ale to heal.

When we feel lonely, what do we associate with a first date or going out with friends? Going out to dinner and eating great foods; maybe having popcorn at a movie.

Your body is a complex system designed to seek joy, comfort, and survival. Sometimes, the most spiritual thing you can do is acknowledge that you don’t need a math equation to justify a piece of dark chocolate—you just need a little sweetness in a bitter world.

Katrina's Website

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Y’all, we need to talk about the strange, slow-motion magic trick our bodies perform somewhere after the youth-obsessed world stops checking us out.

If you have ever looked down at your hands or caught your reflection and thought, “Who authorized this upholstery?” you are not alone. There comes a point where your reflection stops matching your internal map, and your skin decides to start playing by its own set of rules.

The Paper-Thin Truth

The biggest shock isn’t just how the skin drapes; it is how incredibly frail it becomes. I distinctly remember being younger and looking at the elderly women in my life, noticing the permanent collection of purple bruises and half-healed scrapes on their forearms. I used to wonder what on earth they were doing to get so banged up.

Now, that is me.

I am they.

We are one.

Namaste.

Suddenly, your skin changes texture, losing that firm resilience and turning into something resembling crushed velvet or expensive, delicate tissue paper. Every little scratch—the kind you wouldn’t have even noticed thirty years ago—seems to slice deeper than it should. A clumsy run-in with a cardboard box or a momentary swipe from a pet leaves a mark that takes weeks to fade and makes you wonder if you need stitches. You become a walking canvas of your daily collisions, carrying a constellation of tiny, healing wounds that remind you exactly how thin the barrier between you and the world has become.

The Midnight Asset Migration

When you are a Goddess of a certain vintage and volume, gravity stops being a theory and becomes a highly aggressive project manager. For decades, you know exactly where everything is. Your body has a layout.

Then, the migration begins.

You catch a glimpse of your arm waving goodbye, and the skin keeps waving for a full three seconds after your hand stops moving. Your knees, which used to be perfectly serviceable joints, now look like two grumpy faces staring back at you from the mirror. It is a bizarre disconnect. Inside, you feel vibrant, wise, experienced, and completely sovereign. Outside, your skin is slowly draping itself over your frame like a slipcover that belongs to a completely different sofa.

The Elasticity Mirage

The beauty industry loves to target us with potions containing camel milk, pulverized diamonds, the placenta of a baptized baby, and the tears of a thousand youth-industry interns, promising to restore “elasticity.” What they don’t tell you is that fat skin behaves differently than thin skin when it ages.

On the plus side, our gorgeous curves act as a natural filler, smoothing out the wrinkles that our thinner peers spend fortunes trying to inject away. We are blessed with a natural, built-in plumpness that keeps us looking radiant.

But the trade-off is structural. When that skin finally decides to soften and thin out, it doesn’t just wrinkle; it drapes. It gathers. It pools in places we didn’t even know had zip codes. Getting dressed becomes less about fashion and more about architectural containment, trying to tuck, smooth, and negotiate with a surface area that seems to expand even as we try to shrink it.

Reclaiming the Temple Cover

So, how do we handle a shell that feels like it was delivered to the wrong address?

We stop treating our changing skin like a failure of maintenance. This skin has stretched to accommodate growth, cushioned the blows of a chaotic world, and protected a living temple through decades of survival. It might feel softer, it might tear easier, and it might texture differently in the light, but it is the physical record of your endurance. Every scar and stretch mark is a battle we won. Why? Because we are still here.

Goddess Directive for the Week

• Stop pinching and start polishing. Moisturize the drapes. Treat the thin spots with care. Oil the velvet. Treat the skin you are in like the sacred tapestry it is.

• Fire the mirror critics. If a mirror only tells you what has shifted or scratched, look away. Your presence in a room is measured by your energy and your sovereignty, not your elasticity. If I’m having a down day, I can dress in front of a mirror just fine and never actually see my body once.

• Own the drape. If your skin wants to soften, let it be soft. There is immense power in a woman who refuses to apologize for taking up space, marks and all.

You are not a museum piece meant to stay frozen in amber. You are a living, breathing, gorgeous Goddess, and every shift in that skin is just proof that you are still here, still reigning, and still completely fabulous. We get to decide and we get to set the terms.

Katrina's Website

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One of the greatest curses and greatest blessings of the catastrophic house fire of 2021 is that all of my clothes burned. This was a curse because I really needed some damned undies but a blessing because all of my clothes burned… including the bins and bins of skinny clothes in the sheds and closets!

But I do remember what it was like to have those bins and wow, is it ever “a thing.”

There is a unique kind of archaeological dig that only women of a certain vintage and size truly understand. It’s the seasonal closet switch-over. For a Goddess of substance, this isn’t just about moving sweaters to the top shelf. It is an emotional gauntlet where you are forced to confront the ghosts of your former bodies.

Closets and storages containers are not just for seasonal choices. They are a historical timeline of a woman who has lived, expanded, contracted, and fiercely survived.

The Wardrobe of Wishful Thinking

Every woman I know who has ridden the weight roller coaster has at least three distinct wardrobes hidden away.

First, you have the “Now” clothes—the trusted, comfortable garments that fit the body you actually woke up in this morning. These are the pieces that don’t cut off your circulation, don’t require tactical athletic tape, and let you breathe while you’re working.

Then, you have the “Just in Case” section. This is a collection of clothes that are exactly one size smaller. They are the optimistic garments whispering, “Maybe next month.”

Finally, deep in the back, shrouded in dust and old dry-cleaner plastic, lies the “Museum of Misery.” These are the single-digit jeans from 1998 or the tailored dresses from a decade ago. We keep them like holy relics, as if throwing them away means admitting defeat to the universe. We look at them and think, “If I just eat nothing but ice cubes and anxiety for six months, I’ll get back into that… maybe.. but probably not.”

The Architecture of the Over-The-Shoulder Boulder Holder

And while we are excavating the wardrobe, we absolutely must discuss the structural engineering disaster that is the modern plus-size bra.

When you possess a chest of a certain vintage, viscosity, and volume, the lingerie industry gives you an ultimatum: torture or erasure. First, there are the underwires. Why must I wear rigid pieces of metal that poke, prod, and attempt to impale my ribs every time I sit down? I chose long ago to say “No more” to that particular brand of everyday suffering. Life is too short for underwires that hurt.

So many people tell me, “You just need to get professionally measured and buy quality bras! Then they won’t hurt.” I did and they still did.

But when you abandon the wire, you enter a horrifying landscape where you are forced to choose between one titty or four.

On one hand, you have the wireless comfort bras that completely lack central scaffolding, compressing everything into a massive, singular “uniboob” that looks like a shelf of bread dough resting on your ribs.

On the other hand, you have the traditional cups that simply cannot contain a pair of rather liquid breasts. They slosh right out over the edges, creating a bizarre quad-boob effect that makes your shirt look like a topographical map of the Andes. There is no middle ground. It’s either a monolithic block of flesh or an over-spilled structural emergency.

And let us not forget the nighttime migration. If you dare to go to sleep in a loose nightgown or a comfortable tank top, your breasts will immediately execute a prison break. There is nothing quite like waking up at 3:00 AM to realize that while your body was resting, one of your boobs completely wandered off and is currently in the kitchen making a sandwich.

The Emotional Weight of Cotton

The fashion industry loves to tell us that clothes are about self-expression. What they don’t tell you is that for a fat woman, clothes are often used as a emotional report card. We let a zipper determine whether it’s going to be a good day or a “What Fresh Hell Cometh Today” kind of day.

We hold onto the tiny clothes because society has conditioned us to believe that our smallest self was our best self. But if I really look back at the eras when those tiny clothes fit, I wasn’t happier or smarter or kinder. I was usually starving, exhausted, obsessed with a number on a scale, and entirely disconnected from my own personal sovereignty.

Why are we keeping garments that actively make us feel like a failure before we’ve even had our morning coffee?

Cabbage Roses and Sovereign Style

When you do cross over into a certain size bracket, the retail world tries to punish you by offering only two stylistic choices: “Aged Matron” or “Circus Tent.” You are suddenly surrounded by a sea of loud cabbage rose prints, polyester tunics that could double as boat sails, and elastic waistbands that lose their dignity after two washes. It’s as if the designers believe that because we take up more space, we want to look like a walking sofa.

But being a gorgeous Goddess means refusing the tent. It means standing up and saying “No more” to clothes that don’t honor the temple they are covering.

The Great Cleansing

It is time to clear the stagnation out of the closet. If your body is currently a beautifully efficient survival machine, it deserves to be dressed for the present terrain—not a hypothetical future or a romanticized past.

For decades, I based every clothing purchase on one metric: “Could I sleep in this?”

Here are the new Goddess Laws for the wardrobe:

• If it requires you to hold your breath to button it, it goes. You need your oxygen.

• If it evokes guilt instead of joy, it goes. You are a healer and a practitioner, not a prisoner to a piece of denim.

• If it’s a cabbage rose tunic you bought out of desperation, burn it. (Metaphorically, of course. Or literally, if you need a good ritual cleansing).

We are the architects of our own survival, and that includes how we clothe ourselves. Dress the Goddess you are today. She is the one doing the heavy lifting, beating off the pounds when she can, and steering the ship through the storm. She deserves a fabulous outfit right now. And time, she is a’tickin’ away.

Katrina's Website

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A few days ago, a random thought crossed my mind, the kind that usually leads to a pleasant trip down memory lane. I realized I hadn’t heard from my friend Charlene in a while. We had been friends since the third grade, one of three girls who I could genuinely call my friends in high school. We kept in touch over the decades, exchanging messages a few times a year.

I pulled up her social media to see what she was up to, only to collide head-first with a digital wall of mourning. Charlene had died some time ago.

Stunned, sitting in the quiet of my office, a cold wave of panic washed over me. I immediately looked up Sandy, the second member of my friend short list. She had also died some time back. I searched for Paula, the final piece of my teenage puzzle. Also dead. In the span of twenty minutes, the entire landscape of my youth was wiped clean. None of them were left.

Seeking some kind of comfort, I looked up Susie. Susie was an older neighborhood girl who used to let me hang around her when I was just a kid looking for a role model. Her Facebook profile exists, but it is completely hollow—no photos, no posts, just an empty digital shell. I spent hours researching her family members, her late husband, her children. There is literally no mention of her existence anywhere online. It is as if the internet simply swallowed her whole.

The Haunted Arithmetic of Survival

The silence that followed that search was deafening. Neither my mother nor my father lived to be as old as I am right now, so I am already operating in uncharted territory. But realizing that the witnesses to my own beginning have exited the stage left me feeling entirely empty. Haunted.

If we weren’t living in the digital age, I would never have known. I would have gone on with my week, assuming my friends were out there somewhere in the world, living their lives, breathing the same air, and holding our shared memories in their hearts. The internet gave me the truth, but it also delivered a sudden, crushing isolation.

It is a strange kind of vertigo to realize you are the last woman standing in a room that used to be full of laughter, secrets, and terrible high school haircuts. When the people who knew you before you knew yourself disappear, you start to wonder if your own past is just a story you made up.

Reclaiming the Hearth

For twenty-four hours, I sat with that hollow feeling. But a goddess doesn’t sit in an empty temple and let the fires go out just because she is the only one left to tend them.

We have to shift the narrative from nearing extinction to ambassadorship. I am not just a survivor left behind in a ghost town; I am the chosen custodian of that entire era. If I don’t remember the exact cadence of Charlene’s laugh, the specific brand of mischief Sandy preferred, or the way the leather in Susie’s Nova smelled on a hot July evening, then those things truly cease to exist.

Outliving your peers doesn’t mean you are ancient. It means you have been promoted to matriarch. It means your work here is far from finished.

Living on Borrowed Credit

The weight of being the one who remains is heavy, but it is also a profound honor. We owe something to the ones who checked out early. We owe it to them to live with absolute, unapologetic relish.

We cannot afford to waste time hiding our larger-than-life bodies, shrinking into the background, or waiting for a “perfect time” to be happy. Our friends didn’t get the credit of these extra years. We are holding the wallet now, and it is an insult to their memory to spend it frugally.

Eat the food. Wear the ridiculously bright colors. Speak the terrifying truths. Occupy your space in this world with pride and sovereignty. You aren’t walking through this life alone; you are carrying a whole crowd of girls inside you now. Keep the lights on in the temple. You are the last witness, and you have a magnificent story to tell.

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I had a deeply unsettling experience in my bathroom this morning. I walked up to the sink, splashed some water on my face, looked up into the mirror, and honestly wondered who let the nice, silver-haired lady into my house. Given the level of supernatural woo woo that is active in this house, for a moment, I thought I was looking at the true form of one of our beloved ghosties. But no. I was the ghost this time.

Inside my head, I am perpetually thirty-five. I am vibrant, a little dangerous, and entirely convinced that I can still pull off a dramatic exit from a room. My internal ecosystem operates on the assumption that my skin possesses the bounce of a fresh marshmallow. Then I catch my reflection in a store window or under the aggressive, unforgiving fluorescent lights of a public restroom, and the cognitive dissonance hits like a splash of ice water. Or a fire hose of it.

The woman looking back at me has stories etched into the corners of her eyes. She has a jawline that has decided to explore a downward trajectory. She looks lovely, mature, and completely unfamiliar to me.

The Stranger in the Glass

This is the strange vanishing act of aging. It isn’t that we disappear from the world; it is that the person we have always known ourselves to be vanishes behind a curtain of time, replaced by a stranger who has inherited our wardrobe.

It creates a bizarre emotional vertigo. You reach to push back your hair and your hand—which is now oddly spotted with colonies of brown dots that are not cute freckles—looks like your mother’s hand. You catch a glimpse of your profile and realize that gravity is no longer just a theory; it is an active, aggressive landlord collecting rent on your flesh.

Finding the humor in it is sometimes the only thing that saves us from despair. There is an undeniable comedy in watching your body perform tricks it never used to do. The way a deep, dramatic sigh now leaves your mouth when you simply bend over to tie your shoe. The way your knees make a sound like a handful of gravel being thrown against a window when you stand up from a low couch. We are goddesses, yes, but currently, we are goddesses operating under a comedic curse.

Vulnerability is the True Sovereignty

Let us be completely direct here: it isn’t just disarming, it hurts to watch the youth fade from your face. It is a vulnerable thing to admit that you miss the elasticity of your thirties or the effortless energy of your twenties.

I watch people fly up and down staircases and marvel at the Witchcraft they wield as I peck, peck, peck my way to the stairs with my cane, wincing when I have to put pressure on my knee to do so.

Society tells us to fight it, to buy the creams, to freeze the muscles, and to pretend that the numbers on our birth certificates are just a clerical error. To be clear, in my entire life, I have never been a vain person. I was never super pretty. Just ordinary. My Goddess, how I miss ordinary! Caring about how I look is another change that keeps me from feeling like me.

I fully understand and agree that the true power of a goddess doesn’t come from pretending the mirror is lying. It lies in looking that silver-haired stranger directly in the eyes and claiming her anyway. That, my friends, is a work in progress for me. First, I have to get her to stop startling me. I know in twenty years, I will look back at the now me and think about how few wrinkles she had (comparatively).

Realistically, the cognitive dissonance only wins if we agree that the younger version of us was the only version worth knowing. The truth is that the woman in my mirror right now has survived things the thirty-five-year-old version of me couldn’t even fathom. She has buried things, birthed things, built things, and walked through fires (literally) that would have scorched the youthful skin right off her predecessor. She accomplished a lot. She endured a lot. She lived a lot… and she kind of looks like she got put through a wringer.

Reclaiming the Reflection

I know we are not vanishing. That will come when they put our bodies in the ground and we fade into the memories of others rather than the “real” person. I deeply hope they glamorize my memory and make me more than I am. The gilded me could be so much cooler than the real me.

I’m sure there are Hallmark cards that read, “Every wrinkle is a line of dialogue from a life lived out loud. Every soft curve and silver strand is proof of endurance. The external shell is changing, absolutely, but the fire inside the temple remains entirely untouched by the passing of the years.”

That is just so precious and I’m sure it’s true. I’m not turning sixty-five years old in September. I’m turning sixty-five years young and I will look back at people who lean down and speak loudly to me (and likely in a baby voice) and think, “I have cookie sheets older than you are.”

When I look in the glass and find myself wondering where any hint of youthful self wandered of to, I must stop searching for a ghost who is no longer there. She is the one who vanished. I’m still here. I am one of the final expressions of me.

I did not expect it to be this way. I imagined my older self as wise, strong, wizened, even. She’s clever and has witty old lady retorts that no one sees coming because they underestimated her. She’s one they talk about being “sharp as a tack” despite her advancing age. She is the bog witch who is over everybody’s shit and lives to please herself and her clever, nearly human cats.

Of course, a bog witch does not conjure up mental images of “eternal youth,” now, does she?

One of my goals for this year is to work harder to be fully present in each moment rather than thinking on or lamenting the past or focusing on or worrying about the future. I want to be here… now. Part of that involves me reconciling this huge abyss between who I think I am and who I am now. I hope that the old lady who lives in my house likes me.

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It’s Obesity Week here at Body of a Goddess, and I want to talk about how my “willpower” is currently losing a wrestling match against a biological system that thinks it’s living in the Ice Age.

I have decided that if eating one sensible salad causes your body to scream in terror while a single slice of pizza is treated like a precious heirloom to be stored in the hip vault forever, we aren’t failing—we’re just inhabited by a very dedicated survivalist.

The Dragon in the Bunker

We like to think of our metabolism as a simple calculator—calories in, calories out. But in reality, your body is more like a paranoid prepper living in a bunker. It doesn’t realize it’s 2026 and there’s a 24-hour grocery store three blocks away. It thinks it is 10,000 BCE, a blizzard is coming, and you haven’t seen a woolly mammoth in weeks.

The moment you start a “diet,” your internal alarms go off. Your body doesn’t see “health goals”; it sees a famine. It immediately deploys a coordinated strike of metabolic and hormonal changes to defend your fat stores like a dragon guarding gold.

The Survivalist’s Tactics

When you try to lose weight, your survivalist metabolism uses some pretty dirty tricks to make sure you stay prepared for the coming winter:

• The Hunger Drive: Your appetite ramps up to a fever pitch, making that leftover crust in the pizza box look like a religious relic.

• Energy Throttling: In a celebration of life-preserving efficiency, your body lowers your resting metabolic rate and reduces how much energy you spend on basic movement.

• The “Poor Responder” Effect: For some of us, these compensatory adaptations are so strong they can fully counteract a 500-calorie daily deficit. You’re doing the work, drinking so much water your back teeth are floating, counting proteins and carbs and calories and fat, but your body is doing the bookkeeping and necessarily adjusting to make certain nothing leaves the vault.

The Battle of the Zeros

I am feeling the looming presence of this metabolic pushback right now. Whether it is mental or physiological or both, my body resists the zeros. I can move freely up and down digits 1 through 9 in any given decade of weight. But as soon as the scale creeps toward a zero threshold, my body freezes up and absolutely refuses to cross it.

Right now, I am teetering on a zero, and my internal survivalist is trying to decide what comes next. I am on the zero and can hear the drumroll that heralds whether or not I can get past the zero… in the right direction.

It might not sound like a grand saga to the outside world, but since the beginning of February, I have managed to beat 20 pounds off my body. If I continue to lose at my current pace, this month—May 2026—I will drop down to the lowest weight I have been since October 2017. In fact, it will match the lowest weight I’ve managed to hit since 2009, despite decades of radical, exhausting yo-yoing up and down.

I feel different 20 pounds smaller. And yes, I feel better. Several physical issues have cleared up, which I deeply appreciate. My insides work better, and my clothes fit differently. When you are my size, 20 pounds doesn’t make a massive visual impact to a casual observer, but I feel like I will finally reach a visible difference this year.

I haven’t made a big deal about this journey until now because I have lost 15 to 20 pounds so many times before. Honestly, I could probably create 10 or 12 entirely separate versions of myself using just the lost weight I’ve recycled over the years. I will know I’ve truly crossed into new territory when I get below 200 pounds—and while I’m entirely open to the option, I don’t think that milestone will happen this year.

My metabolic survivalist goes absolutely ballistic when it sees a zero at the end of my weight numbers. Right now, it is battling that numerical change like Jacob fought the angel.

Redefining the “Win”

This is why the mainstream “willpower” narrative is such a fresh hell. Science shows that weight loss is a complex, chronic condition—not a simple choice or a character flaw. For the vast majority of people, the body’s biological response to shedding pounds is so persistent that weight regain isn’t a personal failure. It is an expected, predictable consequence of a biological system that is hardwired to survive.

So, what’s a Goddess to do? We shift the focus. If your body is a survivalist, stop fighting it with brute force and start negotiating. Success shouldn’t be measured solely by a arbitrary number on a scale that your body is actively defending.

Real success is found in:

• A better quality of life.

• Higher energy levels, even if your metabolism is still “prepping”.

• Improved self-esteem and overall daily health.

Your body isn’t trying to make your life miserable; it’s just a beautifully high-functioning survival machine that loves you very much and wants to make sure you’re the last one standing in the tundra. Eat the banana, forgive the “vault” when it panics over a zero, and remember that you are a sovereign, living being—not a static math equation.

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When a slender, athletic person hears the word “camping,” they get a misty look in their eyes. They start vibrating at a frequency only detectable by hiking boots and high-end granola. To them, camping is a spiritual return to the earth, a chance to “unplug” and “recharge” while sleeping on a yoga mat that provides all the structural support of a single flour tortilla. They’re going to HIKE, and FISH, and ROCK CLIMB, and SLEEP ROUGH.

When those same words reach the ears of a goddess of substance, the reaction isn’t a vibration; it’s a full-body trauma shutdown. We don’t hear “nature.” We hear “logistics.” We hear “gravity.” We hear the sound of a plastic chair screaming for mercy in the middle of a forest where no one can hear you scream except for the bears who check their watch to time how long it takes for you to die after you hit the ground because you will feed their entire family for a year while your campmates are just the toothpicks that will dislodge your vital organs from their teeth after the feast.

The Tactical Scouting Mission

The true horror of camping begins the moment you arrive at the picturesque site. While the gazelles are busy tossing a frisbee, we are performing a high-stakes structural integrity survey of the terrain.

You aren’t looking at the sunset; you are looking for the Load-Bearing Log. Every outdoor gathering involves the “Lawn Chair Russian Roulette.” You know the one—the collapsible bag chair with the thin aluminum legs that look like they were manufactured by a company that specializes in coat hangers.

Sitting in one of those as a fat person is an act of extreme faith. You don’t just sit; you descend with the slow, agonizing precision of a lunar lander. You spend the entire conversation monitoring the tension of the polyester fabric, waiting for the inevitable “pop” of a rivet that signals your sudden, undignified transition from “Goddess at a Fire” to “Human Taco trapped in a Canvas Coffin.”

The Physics of the Sleeping Bag

Then there is the sleeping arrangement. To an athletic person, a sleeping bag is a cozy cocoon. To us, it is a restrictive, nylon straitjacket designed by someone who has never seen a hip in their entire life. The pain of old bones sleeping on the ground is beyond belief.

There is a specific, quiet desperation in trying to zip up a mummy bag when you have more “mummy” than “bag.” You spend twenty minutes performing a series of horizontal yoga poses just to get the zipper past the mid-thigh mark. It harkens back to sweeter days of lying on the bed and “sucking in” to get that single digit pair of jeans to zip up.

Once you are finally encased, you realize the devastating truth: you are now in a sensory-deprivation tank with no exit strategy. If you need to pee at 3:00 AM, you aren’t just getting up; you are embarking on a multi-stage extraction mission that involves rolling like a beached seal until you gain enough momentum to hit a vertical plane.

You’re basically fuct.

The “Awe” vs. The “Ugh”

The thin crowd loves to talk about the “awe” of the great outdoors. They love the challenge of the vertical incline. They don’t understand that for a person of size, the challenge started at the car door.

Every step on uneven dirt is a negotiation with your knees and ankles. Every charming narrow trail is a potential “Winnie the Pooh stuck in Rabbit’s house” situation waiting to happen. While they are busy connecting with the spirits of the trees, we are busy connecting with the reality that we are the only creature in the woods that didn’t come equipped with four-wheel drive and a built-in fur coat.

The worst part is not that our slender campmates didn’t likely consider how hard this would be for us. The worst part is that several of them think we deserve this torture as a punishment for being fat and hope that the experience will motivate us to “just lose the weight” so we can have a fantastic time (like them!) next year.

The Verdict

The next time a slender friend suggests a weekend in the wilderness, remember: you are a goddess. Goddesses belong in temples—preferably temples with central air, reinforced mahogany seating, and a bathroom that doesn’t require a flashlight and a prayer.

If they want to sleep on the ground and eat dehydrated peas, let them. We’ll be right here, maintaining our sovereignty on a couch that was actually built to hold a queen.

Aftercare Note: After the emotional detox of even thinking about a camping trip, please treat yourself to a long soak in a tub with Epsom salts. Drink plenty of water to flush out the phantom stress of that collapsible chair. Your energies are moving healthily now—safely away from the woods… and the bears.

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Gentle Reader,

There is a distinct moment every morning, somewhere between the first screaming demand of my bladder - I swear, it is like a spoiled toddler - and the first creak of my ankles, where I lie perfectly still and perform a full-system diagnostic. I’m like a NASA engineer checking a 1970s satellite that’s been floating in deep space for way too long.

Oxygen levels? Stabilizing. Hydration? Critically low. Joints? Reporting back with a series of pops and clicks that sound suspiciously like a bowl of Rice Krispies.

As a Goddess of a certain vintage, I’ve realized that aging isn’t a slow, graceful decline. It’s more like a synchronized protest occurring faster than I ever imagined. It seems my body parts have formed a union, and they are currently on a collective strike. If one more important body part goes all Norma Rae on me, I’m just going to check myself into a facility that serves Jello way too often and smells like a hybrid of pee and antiseptic.

Somebody please tell Eric to marry again and this time, pick someone who is young and skinny. That man deserves a trophy wife and she can reap the benefits of me having spent three decades forming him into the perfect husband.

For now, I wake up, blink at the ceiling, and ask the universe: “What fresh hell cometh today?”

The Spotted Map of My Life

Before I even get out of bed, I notice the new additions to the “collection.” Lately, it seems as if the frontier of my skin is being colonized by age spots. Or are they liver spots? Whatever the medical term, they are suddenly everywhere.

I’m not just talking about the back of the hands—the classic “old lady” giveaway. I’m talking about the unexpected frontier. There are spots on my forearms. Spots on my shins. I found one on my shoulder yesterday that I’m fairly certain wasn’t there when I brushed my teeth. It’s as if my skin has decided to become a Seurat painting without my permission. I’m starting to look like a very large, very tired Dalmatian. I spend half my time wondering if it’s a freckle or a sign of the end times, and the other half wondering why “Goddess Gold” looks so much like “Rusty Brown Spatters.”

The Barnacles of the Soul

And then, we have to talk about the Seborrheic Keratoses. My nurse practitioner —who has been my medical person for around fifteen years —wryly informed me that these are commonly called “the barnacles of aging” and that I can just “scratch them off.”

Barnacles. Apparently, my body has decided that since I’ve been sailing the seas of life for well more than six decades, it’s time to start looking like the hull of an abandoned tugboat. These little “stuck-on” growths appear out of nowhere, looking like someone dropped a tiny bit of brown candle wax on your ribcage or your back. They aren’t dangerous, they’re just... there. Eric noticed one on the top of my ear. I mean seriously, WTF? It’s as if this Goddess is slowly being encrusted by her own history. I’m half-tempted to go down to the shipyard and ask them to just scrape me down with a putty knife and a stiff drink.

The Potassium Rebellion

Once I’ve finished cataloging the new topography of my skin, the physical rebellion truly begins. My body has decided it is no longer satisfied with the amount of potassium I provide and chooses to communicate this via eye-watering leg cramps.

At any time in the day or night, my calf muscle can suddenly and without warning turn itself into a (badly rendered) piece of origami. It’s a pain so sharp it makes you want to apologize for every banana you ever neglected to eat. I’m currently one leg cramp away from legally changing my name to Chiquita. Drink more water - my internal organs are already drowning and scrambling to find Wilson, their companion volleyball - and take those horse pill sized supplements!

Mentally in the Desert with Jim Morrison

Then there is the sleep—or the lack thereof. O Captain! My Captain! Brucifer is still waking up at random times in the night ready to join the Rockettes and build houses with Jimmy Carter. My sleep cycle has become more of a sleep “suggestion.” This eight-to-ten hour girl is having to wring a thriving life out of five to seven hours and it just isn’t working.

Neither CBD, liquid doggie melatonin, crating, exercise during the day with no naps, nor gloom of night keeps this little asshole from the completion of his appointed rounds. All you have to do is note the time stamp of this blog post (does Substack use time stamps?): 3:18 am.

By 10:00 AM, I am no longer a functioning member of the 21st century. I am mentally wandering through a hazy, psychedelic desert with Jim Morrison. I’m staring at my computer screen, listening to “The End,” and wondering if the Lizard King also had to remember his password for the pharmacy app. When you haven’t slept, the line between “deep spiritual wisdom” and “I forgot why I walked into the kitchen” becomes dangerously thin.

At this point, I don’t think I have had a good night’s sleep since the Nixon administration.

The Retirement Paradox

And wasn’t I supposed to be retired? I love what I do and times are hard and crazy right now, so a Witch’s work is never done, but this diamond art ain’t gonna do itself. I have a list of things I want to do—the books I want to read, the magic I want to make—but I am perpetually thwarted by the “Things I Must Do.” This conflict takes on a whole new perspective when you have way more road behind you than in front of you.

I’m crabby. I’m “Get Off My Lawn” adjacent. I’ve realized that retirement is actually just a full-time job where your boss is a demanding, potassium-deficient, barnacle-covered body that requires constant maintenance and a very specific type of ergonomic chair.

The Goddess Grace

But even in the “fresh hell,” there is grace, right? …right? Because even if I am mentally in the desert with Jim Morrison, at least I’m in good company. If I’m crabby because I have too much to do, it’s because I still have a life worth living and can still be valuable to others.

We are “Goddesses in the Trenches.” We may be held together by Spanx, Geritol, and the sheer force of ornery will, but we are still here. We are the architects of our own survival even if that survival looks more like the Brady Bunch house than Downton Abbey.

So tomorrow morning (later this morning?), when I do the “Morning Inventory” and find a new “barnacle” has docked itself onto my shoulder, I’ll just sigh, eat a banana, scratch Bruce on his entirely kissable little head and remind myself: I’ve survived every other fresh hell the universe has thrown at me. Today is no different. BRING IT!

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There is a recurring myth in the textile industry that the moment a woman’s dress size enters the double digits, her aesthetic preference immediately reverts to “Grandma’s Guest Bedroom.”

I have spent years scouring the racks for clothing that says “I am a powerful, sophisticated woman of a certain vintage,” only to be met with a sea of cabbage roses and puff sleeves that make me look less like a Goddess and more like a very large, upholstered ottoman. It is a mystery of the modern world: why does the fashion industry believe that the more surface area we have, the more cartoon characters we want to wear on our chests?

The Cabbage Rose Industrial Complex

If you are a woman of substance, you know the struggle. You walk into a Plus Size section (usually tucked away in the basement near the luggage or the industrial-sized vacuum cleaners) and you are immediately blinded by the prints.

Huge, loud, aggressive florals. It’s as if the designers think that if they cover us in enough botanical chaos, we will simply blend into the wallpaper and disappear. And don’t even get me started on the Puff Sleeve. On a sprite, a puff sleeve is whimsical. On a 3x Goddess, a puff sleeve is a structural hazard. It adds four inches of shoulder width I didn’t ask for, making me look like I’m ready to start for the Raiders.

The Workout Wear Paradox

Then there is the supreme irony of the Workout Gear. The industry loves to tell us that we need to “get moving.” But have you tried to find high-quality, moisture-wicking, non-see-through leggings in a 3x? Apparently, the designers believe that only people who are already fit deserve to wear spandex.

The people who actually need the support, the compression, and the reinforced inner thighs to prevent chub-rub friction fires are left with flimsy cotton sweatpants that sag in the seat and feature a poorly placed Tweety Bird. If I am going to attempt to move 300 pounds across a gym floor, I need a garment that has the structural integrity of a suspension bridge, not a oversized pajama pant that gives up the ghost after three lunges.

The Footwear Dilemma: Pumps vs. The Orthopedic Sled

Let’s talk about the Physics of the Pump. Balancing 300 pounds on a two-inch stiletto heel is a feat of engineering that should be studied by NASA. It is a high-stakes gamble with my ankles and my dignity. One wrong move on a sidewalk crack and I’m not just falling; I’m creating a seismic event from which I might never arise.

The alternative, of course, is the “Comfort Shoe.” We’ve all seen them—those velcro-strapped, beige, orthopedic sleds that look like they were carved out of a single block of Styrofoam. They are a fashion nightmare. There is no middle ground for the Goddess foot; it’s either a death-defying heel or a shoe that says, “I’ve given up and I’m here for the early bird special.”

The Spanx Standoff

To bridge the gap between the Cabbage Rose Tent and actual fashion, many of us turn to the Body Shaper. Now, I appreciate a smooth silhouette as much as the next woman, but at what cost? These garments are essentially a full-body hug from a boa constrictor. Just climb into a gigantic blood pressure cuff and let it squish your entire body. They smooth the lumps, yes, but they also prevent the minor biological necessity known as breathing.

You put it on, and suddenly your internal organs are forced into a game of musical chairs. Your liver is now where your lungs should be, and your dinner has nowhere to go. You look fantastic in that cocktail dress, but you can’t laugh, cough, or sit down for more than four minutes without seeing spots before your eyes. It’s a literal “breathtaking” look.

The Caftan: The Forbidden Comfort

Finally, we have the Mama Cass Caftan Collection. Don’t get me wrong. I love a caftan. It is airy. It is roomy. It allows for a full range of motion and a triple-cheese pizza without judgment. It is the ultimate expression of Goddess comfort.

But try wearing a floor-length, psychedelic-print silk tent to a professional board meeting or a high-end law firm. For some reason, the Professional Arena has a bias against garments that could double as a parachute. Apparently, if people can’t see the exact location of your waistline, they assume you aren’t capable of handling a spreadsheet. I also abhor that weird polyester smarmy material used to make most caftans. Use silk. Use t-shirt material. Use a soft feedsack material. Don’t use fabric that feels like plastic and cellophane had a child.

The Goddess Verdict

The fashion industry needs a wake-up call. We aren’t looking for tents, and we aren’t looking for kitschy prints. We want what everyone else wants: clean lines, quality fabrics, and the ability to work out without looking like a Saturday morning matinee.

Until the designers realize that a 3x body deserves more than a “forgiving” elastic waistband and a giant daisy, we will continue to perform our tactical recon at the department stores—armed with safety pins, body tape, and - for now - a healthy sense of humor.

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There comes a time in every Goddess’s life when she realizes that her internal plumbing has transitioned from a high-speed fiber-optic network to a dial up modem.

When we were twenty, we lived on black coffee, cold pizza, and pure spite, and our systems didn’t skip a beat. But as we move into our sovereign years, our insides decide to adopt a more meditative, glacial pace. Suddenly, a trip to the bathroom isn’t just a routine pit stop; it’s a high-stakes dramatic event—a physical labor so intense you’re tempted to call a midwife and start practicing Lamaze breathing.

The Diet Mountain Dew Delusion

For years, I believed I was hydrated. I was an avid connoisseur of Iced Tea and Diet Mountain Dew. I figured that since they were liquid, they were doing the job. I was “Doing the Dew,” and the Dew was doing... well, not much for my colon. In all candid transparency, “for years” means “until this past Sunday.”

Here is the real talk part of being a Goddess: Caffeine is a liar. It gives you the illusion of movement, but it’s actually a diuretic that leaves your bowel coughing up dust. It’s like trying to wash a car with a handful of sand. My system was essentially a desert landscape, and I was wondering why the cargo wasn’t sliding down the tracks. I knew my Dew was not optimal liquid nourishment. I didn’t care. I still don’t. I still do my Dew, but I have to have my water first. And I don’t like plain water and I’m not thrilled with those little squirty additives. But I have my water first.

The Slowing of the Great Goddess Machine

As we age, the muscles in our digestive tract (peristalsis, if you want to be fancy and technical) get a bit... relaxed… lazy even. They’re like an old houseguest who has decided to stop helping with the chores and just lounge on the sofa. Things take longer to get from Point A to Point B. The mail is slower to move. Media mail and not Express Delivery.

When you combine slowed transit time with a lack of actual water (in my case), you end up with what I like to call the “Bathroom Labor.” You find yourself gripping the towel rack, staring at the tile grout, and wondering if this is how you finally meet the ancestors. It is an undignified, sweat-inducing ordeal that makes you realize your natural padding isn’t doing much to help the situation. You face the stark realization that like Elvis, you are going to die on the toilet.

The Dynamic Duo: Fiber and Water

To avoid the Bowel Birth, we have to employ the two most powerful tools in the Goddess toolkit: Fiber and Water. Think of Fiber as the “broom” of the body. But here is the catch: if you use a broom without any water, all you’re doing is pushing a bunch of dry dust around. You just end up with a bigger, drier pile of dust.

• The Fiber (The Broom): You need the rough stuff. Beans, berries, oats, and leafy greens. It provides the bulk that gives those lazy digestive muscles something to actually grab onto. So I upped my fiber and Metamucil is on its way to me, along with some magnesium citrate.

• The Water (The Lubricant): This is the game-changer. Water turns the dry fiber into a slippery, manageable vessel. Without water, fiber is just a brick. With water, it’s a waterslide. At least that is what Dr. Google tells me, so we’ll see. I am “in it to win it” with Operation Bowel Redemption.

The Iced Tea Transition

I’ve had to make a peace treaty with the kitchen sink. I still love my tea, but for every glass of caffeine, I now owe the Goddess a glass of plain, unadulterated water. Not “sparkling,” not “dewed,” just... water.

The goal is to stop the internal construction project before the bricks are laid. We want a transit system that is efficient, quiet, and doesn’t require a coaching team and a cold compress.

The Goddess Verdict

Taking care of your bowel health is an act of self-respect. It’s about recognizing that this vessel we inhabit requires a different kind of maintenance than it did in 1994. We are no longer Ferraris that can run on low-grade fuel and neglect; we are vintage luxury liners. We require high-quality lubricant and plenty of ballast.

So, put down the Mountain Dew for a second, grab a glass of water, and eat a prune. (No, I don’t eat prunes, but sweetheart, you rock those prunes if they are your thing). Your tailbone, your towel rack, and your dignity will thank you.

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This week’s Body of a Goddess addresses a beautiful, heavy, and yet strangely absurd topic. It’s the “Identity Witness” crisis. When the people who knew you when you had a healthy metabolic rate and a different set of knees are gone, you essentially become the sole proprietor of your own history—and let’s be honest, the filing system in our heads isn’t always audit-ready.

There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes with being a Goddess of a certain vintage. It isn’t the kind caused by standing up too fast from a low-slung sofa (though that is a legitimate medical event). It’s the unsettling realization that I am slowly becoming the only living person who remembers that I used to be a girl who could do the splits or that I once owned a pair of electric-purple suede boots and had the confidence to wear them in public.

We have talked about the “Grey Tsunami” of aging in this blog, but we rarely talk about the Theft of the Witnesses. When you lose the people who knew you twenty, thirty, or fifty years ago, you lose your external hard drive. You are left holding a stack of memories that no one else can verify, and frankly, some of them are starting to look a bit suspicious even to you.

The Great Memory Audit

When my mother passed, and then my oldest friend, and then that one aunt who remembered me as the awkward third-grader with a bowl cut and a grudge against peas, I realized I had been promoted. I am now the Chief Executive Officer of My Own Legend.

There is no one left to turn to at dinner and say, “Wait, was it the 1984 New Year’s Eve party where the cat knocked over the punch bowl, or was that 1986?” There is no one to correct the record when I claim I was “quite a talented disco dancer, if I do say so myself.”

In one sense, this is a Goddess-level superpower. I can now officially edit my past. They say you can’t change the past?

Hahaha, au contraire, Mon Ami.

Au Freakin’ Contraire.

In my current version of history, I never had that unfortunate perm in the 80s (all of the 80s), and I definitely didn’t cry when the rat bastards I went to high school with teased me mercilessly. If there’s no one left to argue with me, then my version of the truth is the only version. I am the Supreme Court of my own biography.

The Loneliness of the Unverified

But beneath the humor, there is a sharp, quiet poignancy to it.

There is a profound loneliness in having a memory that has no place to land. I see a specific shade of sunset, or smell a certain brand of vintage hairspray, and my brain instinctively reaches out for the person who would say, “Remember when we smelled that at the state fair?” And then... silence. The line is dead.

When your witnesses are gone, your past becomes a ghost limb feeling phantom pain. You can feel it, it itches, you can remember exactly how it moved—but when you reach out to touch it, your hand passes right through. You start to wonder: Did that actually happen? Was I actually that brave? Was I really that thin, or is my brain just applying a nostalgic Instagram filter to 1978?

The Body as the Final Record

As a Goddess in a big body, this lack of witnesses is particularly strange. The world sees the woman I am today—the ample soft curves, the silver hair, the somewhat halting pace—and they assume this is all there ever was. They don’t see the girl who climbed trees until her knees bled, or the young woman who danced until 3:00 AM on heels that would now be considered a health hazard.

Without the people who saw those iterations of us, our bodies become the only physical evidence that we lived through those decades. Every wrinkle is a witness. Every scar is a storyteller who outlived the rest of the cast.

My knees may creak like a haunted house, but they are the only ones left who remember that I used to run three miles every day, feeling the wind in my hair and my breath surging through my body like a lightning bolt. My hands may have age spots, but they are among the only ones left who remember the feel of my Granny’s kitchen table or the feel of my child’s tiny hand, warm in my own.

Curating the Museum of You

So, what do we do when the archives are closed and the librarians have moved on?

The only choice is that we become the curators. We have to tell the stories anyway, even if the only one listening is the dog. No one really cares about our stories once we are gone, so we must treasure them while we are here.

Now, we must validate our own experiences. If I remember being a Goddess in a bikini in 1980, then by the power vested in me by the lack of contradictory witnesses, then kapow… I was. It is unsettling to be the last one holding the torch, but it’s also a sacred duty. We are the keepers of the flame for everyone who isn’t here to say, “Yes, you were there. You existed. Yes, it was beautiful. And yes, those purple boots were spectacular.”

We don’t need a witness to prove we existed. We are the proof.

But Dear Goddess, I miss my witnesses.

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I am sixty-four years old, a professional witch, and a resident of a perfectly accessible ADA-compliant fortress in a remote mountain area of El Dorado County, California. By all accounts, I should be drifting through my golden years on a cloud of lavender-scented serenity. Instead, I am currently being held hostage by a two-year-old death row survivor from an orchard in Porterville.

Meet Bruce (short for “Brucifer”). To the casual observer, he’s a charming Jackshund. To the officer who tried to abduct him in Central California, he’s the reason for a tetanus shot. To me? He is the sovereign ruler of the 3:00 AM hour, the high priest of a cult of one, and the primary reason the bags under my eyes have their own matching set of Samsonite luggage.

If you’re wondering who the cult leader is, consider that this is usually described as “a charismatic leader.” Trust me. In this situation, “charismatic” does not apply to me, but seriously, wook at dis face:

The VIP Section (Population: 1)

It is a well-documented fact in the magical community that a witch’s familiar is supposed to be a bridge between worlds. My familiar, however, is a biological “No Trespassing” sign with a wagging tail.

Bruce doesn’t just “prefer” me; he has joined a localized religion where I am the sole acceptable provider of affection and the only human being on Earth who warrants his love. Bruce hates everyone who is not me. To Bruce, the rest of the human race—including my husband, Eric—is a collection of suspicious entities clearly plotting to abduct him back to the orchard.

Eric is a nice guy who provides yard time, but to Bruce, he’s basically a glorified roommate to be barely tolerated, provided he doesn’t breathe too loudly. Being the “Chosen One” of a traumatized Jackshund sounds romantic until you realize it means you are the only person allowed to touch him without a formal risk assessment.

Anatomy of a Midnight Heist

My night usually begins in a state of grace. Bruce is tucked into the crook of my leg like a warm, dappled comma. It’s a scene of domestic tranquility that lasts exactly until Bruce’s internal “chaos clock” chimes around 12:30-1:00 am.

The first sign of the apocalypse isn’t a trumpet blast; it’s The Flap. Bruce sits up and aggressively shakes his head. His ears hit his skull with the rhythmic velocity of a helicopter rotor. Thwack-padda-thwack-padda-thwack. Behind my eyelids, I offer a silent prayer to any deity working the night shift: Please, let him just be repositioning. Please, please, please let me sleep. Please Bruce, Goddess, and Jesus, please just let me sleep.

But then comes the death knell: The Leap. He launches his sausage-shaped body off the bed and hits the hardwood floor with a sound like a dropped sack of flour. Then begins the pacing. Click-click-click. Click-click-click. If I attempt the “Play Dead” strategy, Bruce escalates to structural sabotage. He jumps back onto the bed, then off, then back on. He whimpers. Eventually, he uses those teeth to physically peel the blankets off my body. At this point, my bladder joins the mutiny. I have to pee, Bruce has to pee, and the dream of REM sleep is officially buried in the backyard.

The Office Lockdown

While Eric sleeps peacefully on the other side of the house—blissfully unaware that a biological weapon is being detonated in the hallway—I have to go into containment mode. Because I am the only one Bruce trusts, I am the only one who can talk him down from the ledge. If Eric tries to intervene or assist, Bruce looks at him like he’s a stranger trying to sell him a sketchy extended car warranty.

So, I lock the Manic Meatloaf and myself into my office. For the next two to four hours, Bruce is loaded for bear. He zips. He zooms. He conducts high-speed maneuvers around my desk while I sit there, fueled by pure cortisol and the flickering glow of YouTube videos I don’t even remember clicking on. I am a Bog Witch, but at 3:00 AM, my magic is mostly limited to trying to write blog posts without crying.

The Audacity of the Slumber

Eventually, the sun begins to peek over the horizon, and Bruce’s battery finally hits 1%. He stops zipping, looks at me with big, soulful eyes, and lets out a judgmental whine. He wants to go to bed. He cannot understand why I am stupid enough to be awake at this hour.

This is where this Goddess takes her revenge. Because Bruce spent the night acting like a cracked-out squirrel, he expects to sleep for the next fifteen hours or so. But a Bog Witch never forgets. My day is now a dedicated mission of Aggressive Dog-Waking.

“BRUCE! Wake up! No sleeping!” If I let him nap, I am signing my own death warrant for the following night. Eric does his part by putting the outlaw into our fenced yard to run off energy since my knee injury still prevents me from walking him. We are a team, unified in our goal to make sure Bruce is exhausted enough to let me close my eyes for more than twenty minutes. It doesn’t work.

The Samsonite Life

I am tired in a way that sleep cannot fix. My brain is a slurry of cortisol and trauma-informed canine management. But then, in those rare moments when he isn’t pacing or trying to eat the mailman, he puts his head on my knee and sighs.

I realize that while I might be theoretically set for old age in my ADA home, I am actually just a very tired Goddess serving a very specific, very grumpy, very loyal sausage-shaped god. If you see a “Katrina Sighting” in public and I seem to be vibrating slightly, don’t worry. I’m just listening for the faint, phantom sound of clicking nails on a hardwood floor which I quite literally hear in my sleep.

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Let’s be real for a second. There is “stomach hungry,” and then there is “soul bored.”

Stomach hunger is a biological necessity. It’s your body politely tapping on your shoulder—or aggressively growling in a quiet meeting—reminding you that you need fuel to, you know, keep existing. But “mouth boredom”? That’s an entirely different beast. Mouth boredom is that restless, twitchy sensation where your stomach is perfectly fine, but your taste buds are staging a protest because they haven’t had any excitement in the last forty-five minutes.

In the world of the Body of a Goddess, we sometimes talk about good nourishment. But today, let’s talk about the dopamine hit that comes from the crunch, the melt, and the “Mmm.” This installment is exclusive about the culinary nurturing of the eternal, enduring soul rather than the pejorative, score-keeping body.

The Dopamine Dance

We aren’t even talking about the chemical hooks here. We know sugar is more addictive than certain 1980s street drugs that shall remain nameless, and we know caffeine is the only thing standing between us and total societal collapse. In fact, it’s hilarious how aggressively Western eating plans and nutrition guidelines bend over backward to ensure we never have to give up our liquid crutches.

Most “diets” are restrictive minefields, yet they almost always carve out a holy sanctuary for wine and coffee. Even Fasting—a practice literally defined by not consuming anything—hastily adds a disclaimer: “But you can totally have black coffee!” Heaven forbid we face the morning without our sacred hot bean water. We’ve collectively agreed that while we might consider foregoing carbs, joy, and our basic will to live, the caffeine stay-of-execution is non-negotiable.

The Mount Rushmore of Emotional Eating

When the mouth is bored, it usually requests one of the four horsemen of the Delicious Apocalypse:

• The Delight of the New: That high-end, artisanal, “I can’t believe this exists!!” food. The kind of meal where you close your eyes and ignore your dinner companions because the flavor profile is far more interesting than their story about their f***king Tesla or their brilliant grandchild. In the last years of a lifetime when it feels like there is truly nothing new under the sun, if we do find something new under the sun, we want not only to savor it, but to overindulge in it because we have so little runway left ahead of us to get our fill of it.

• The Comfort Classics: This is the culinary equivalent of a weighted blanket. We’re talking macaroni and cheese that looks like a yellow hug. Mashed potatoes with enough butter to glaze a small sedan. It’s not about hunger; it’s about the feeling of safety. Potato soup in a sourdough bread bowl, chicken pot pie, homemade bread slathered with butter, and chili with cornbread deliver a payoff that wedge salad and steamed broccoli just cannot touch.

• The Nostalgia Trip: Sometimes we eat a specific brand of mediocre crackers because they taste like 1971, sitting on the floor of our grandmother’s kitchen. We aren’t eating calories; we’re eating memories. Circus peanuts don’t taste good at all, but the six-year-old in me can power eat a bag of them and not even notice I swallowed.

• The Celebratory Spark: We have been conditioned since birth to believe that if something good happens, a cake must appear. Promotion? Cake. Birthday? Cake. Wedding? Big cake. Managed to put on jeans with a zipper today? Definitely cake. Strawberry shortcake, pineapple upside down cake, birthday cake with buttercream frosting… From the finest patisserie Opera Cake to Zebra Cakes from Little Debbie (who must be Big Debbie by now because… mmmm… Nutty Bars), as long as the word “cake” is spelled out in the name, anytime is party time.

The “I’m Old and I Have Earned This” Factor

Now, let’s add the secret ingredient to this recipe: Age.

There comes a point in a Goddess’s life where the “shoulds” start to lose their power. When you’re twenty, you eat a kale salad because you’re terrified of a future wrinkle or a lingering extra ounce on your waistline. When you reach a certain level of vintage excellence, you realize that life is unpredictable, joints creak for no reason, and the world is a chaotic inferno of a dumpster fire.

There is a profound sense of entitlement that sets in—and I mean that in the best way possible.

When you’ve paid your dues, raised the kids, survived the corporate ladder, or just navigated the general nonsense of several decades on this planet, you start to feel like you are owed some kind of dependable joy.

If the day has been long, the news has been bad, people have let you down, and the weather is gray, that piece of gourmet milk chocolate or that bowl of pasta isn’t just “mouth boredom.” It’s a reward for services rendered. It’s the one thing in your day you can actually control. You can’t control the economy, you can’t control your neighbor’s barking dog, you can’t control the dumbass choices your adult kids make, and you certainly can’t control the passage of time—but you can control the fact that for the next ten minutes, something is going to taste absolutely spectacular.

The Verdict

Is there a difference between eating for hunger and eating for a dopamine hit? Absolutely. One keeps you alive; the other makes life worth living even if nothing else does.

So, the next time you find yourself standing in front of the pantry at 9:00 PM, not because your stomach is empty, but because your mouth wants a hobby—don’t judge yourself too harshly. You’re just a Goddess looking for a little dependable magic in a world that’s - quite frankly - coming up short on it lately.

Pass the sea-salt caramels. We’ve earned them.

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Welcome back to Body of a Goddess, the digital sanctuary where we celebrate the divine reality of being both vintage and voluminous. Today, we’re diving headfirst into the linguistic minefield that is talking to people while inhabiting a larger body.

If you’ve lived long enough to appreciate a good supportive bra and a purseful of ibuprofen, you’ve likely encountered the “Skinny Person Panic.” It’s that specific brand of social awkwardness that occurs when someone thin realizes they are standing next to a fat person and feels the urgent, spiritual need to “fix” the situation with their words. It’s a fascinating, if exhausting, anthropological study in how uncomfortable people are with the simple reality of flesh.

Let’s explore, shall we?

The High-Octane “You Look GREAT!”

We’ve all been there. You run into a former colleague at the grocery store or a distant cousin at a wedding. Before you can even say hello, they gasp—clasping their hands over their heart as if they’ve just witnessed a minor miracle—and squeal, “Oh my god, you look GREAT!”

Now, if this were a normal world, “great” would mean you look happy, vibrant, or perhaps that your eyeliner is particularly symmetrical today. But in the world of fat-phobia, this specific inflection carries a heavy subtext. It translates directly to: “I noticed you’ve lost an amount of weight that I find socially acceptable, and thank god, because usually, your existence makes me confront my own mortality and fear of carbs while simultaneously recognizing that I am the superior one of us.”

The Problem with the “Great” Baseline

When “looking great” is tethered exclusively to “looking smaller,” it implies that our natural state—the one where we’re eating what we want and happily living our lives—equates to “looking shitty.” It suggests that beauty is a sliding scale tied directly to our gravitational pull. If I’m a size 22 and I’m glowing because I just had a fantastic vacation, I’m “brave.” If I’m a size 16 because I’ve been too stressed to eat, I “look great.”

The skinny-person perspective often fails to realize that weight loss isn’t always a victory. Sometimes it’s a tragedy.

A Lesson from a Goddess: I remember running into a dear friend of mine who had clearly shrunk. She had lost around 80 pounds (she was under 5’ tall), and in the eyes of the world, she was finally “succeeding” at being a person. When I asked her, with genuine curiosity, how she’d done it, she looked at me with a hollow, weary expression and said: “All you have to do is be profoundly ill for a year or so. I would give anything to be fat and healthy again.”

That moment stayed with me. While the world was busy throwing her a metaphorical parade for her smaller waistline, she was grieving her strength and her health. By praising the shrinkage, people were inadvertently praising the disease that was eating her alive. When we celebrate weight loss without context, we are essentially saying, “I’d rather you be sick and thin than healthy and fat.” It’s a ghoulish trade-off that we need to stop applauding.

As a PS, that dear friend is also dead now. Since she has clearly lost even more weight in the five years since her passing, I’m sure she looks amazing.

The “Don’t Say That!” Reflex (The F-Word Phobia)

This is perhaps the most common interaction in the Goddess’s daily life. You’re talking about shopping for clothes or the logistics of a theater seat, and you use the word “fat” as a simple, neutral descriptor—like saying you have blue eyes or a penchant for expensive cheese.

Immediately, the air sucks out of the room like our airplane just lost a cabin wall. Your thin companion will wave their hands frantically, as if trying to swat away a swarm of bees, and cry: “Don’t say that! You’re not fat, you’re beautiful!”

The Logical Fallacy

Let’s look at the math here. This response relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of adjectives. It assumes that “fat” and “beautiful” are polar opposites on a binary scale.

• Fact: Fat is a physical state (adipose tissue).

• Fact: Beautiful is an aesthetic and soulful state.

You can be both. You can be one. You can be neither. You can want to lose weight or not want to lose weight and be beautiful either way.

When people rush to “correct” you, they are inadvertently admitting they think “fat” is the worst possible thing a person can be. They think they’re being a good friend by shielding you from a “slur,” not realizing that by treating the word like a curse, they are the ones giving it the power to hurt.

“I Feel Fat Today, Too.” (The False Equivalence)

This is usually whispered by a woman who wears a size 6 and once saw a carb in a dream. While we all have days where we feel bloated, using “fat” as a synonym for “feeling gross” is a slap in the face to those of us who move through the world in fat bodies 24/7.

When a thin person says they “feel fat,” they are co-opting the language of a marginalized experience to express a fleeting mood. We can be empathetic to their body dysmorphia, sure, but we shouldn’t have to validate the idea that their temporary bloat is the same as our permanent social status.

Why People Do It: The Discomfort of Meeting the Unapologetic Goddess

Most people aren’t trying to be villains. In fact, they’re usually trying to be “nice.” But “nice” is often just a mask for profound discomfort. We live in a culture that treats thinness as a moral virtue and fatness as a personal failure. When we reclaim the word “fat”—or when we refuse to play the “I need to lose weight” shame game—it breaks the social script.

The “Dessert” Derision

Nowhere is this discomfort more visible than in a restaurant. Have you ever noticed the shift in the atmosphere when a fat person truly relishes their meal?

When a thin person eats a decadent molten lava cake, they are seen as “indulgent” or “lucky.” When a Goddess orders the same dessert and actually dares to enjoy it—no self-deprecating jokes, no “I’ll have to run five miles for this tomorrow” disclaimers—the “Skinny Person Panic” reaches a fever pitch.

There is a specific, derisive side-eye reserved for the fat person who eats with pleasure. It’s as if the world expects us to eat in a state of perpetual apology. By enjoying our food, we are breaking the unspoken rule that fat people should always be in a state of caloric penance. People find our joy offensive because it suggests that we aren’t miserable. If we aren’t miserable about our bodies, then their entire system of “working for thinness” loses its value. Our relish is their existential crisis.

Reclaiming the Narrative: The Goddess’s Response

So, how do we handle these verbal gymnastics? We do it with the grace and wit that comes with age. We don’t have to be mean, but we don’t have to be small, either.

• When they say “You look great!” (implying weight loss): Try, “Thanks! I feel great, too. I’ve finally stopped letting my scale dictate my mood.”

• When they say “Don’t say fat!”: Try, “Oh, it’s okay! It’s just an adjective. I’m also tall and a Capricorn. None of those things are insults.”

• When they give you “The Look” while you eat: Take a slow, delicious bite, close your eyes in genuine ecstasy, and say, “You have no idea what you’re missing. This is divine.”

The Power of Being Seen

Being an “old, fat” person in this society is, in many ways, a superpower. We have reached a point where we are often invisible to the gaze of the people who would otherwise find us alluring, not to mention the “fashion police.”

We are dismissed and ignored by society until we get up in a restaurant to waddle our way to the bathroom or the person who barely makes it onto the airplane cannot manage their dismay over sitting next to someone who is using a seatbelt extender.

And in that invisibility, there is a tremendous amount of freedom.

We don’t need the frantic, high-pitched validation of people who are terrified of their own shadows (or their own thighs touching). We know who we are. We are the Goddesses who have seen it all, eaten the cake, lived the life, and come out the other side with a fierce sense of self.

You are not required to live your life as an ongoing apology to the world if, like 43% of the American population as of 2025, you exist in a body medically classified as “obese.”

The next time someone tries to perform verbal gymnastics around your body, just smile. You’re not the one who’s uncomfortable; they are. And that, dear Goddesses, is their problem to solve—not yours.

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There is a specific, heart-stopping sound that only a person of a certain carriage and vintage can truly identify. It isn’t the wind in the trees, and it isn’t the gentle chime of a mindfulness app. It isn’t even the gentle, apologetic wheezing sound of an unauthorized fart in a crowded elevator.

It is the Wicker Warning. It’s that sharp, frantic creak-snap a chair makes when it realizes it has bitten off more than it can chew. It’s the sound of a structural integrity crisis happening in real-time beneath your Spanx. As a Goddess of substantial proportions and a “silver” age, I have learned that the world is increasingly designed for sprites, elves, and people who can comfortably sit on a stalk of asparagus.

We live in an era of “Mid-Century Modern” revivals, which is just code for “furniture with legs like a nervous flamingo.” I no longer enter a room; I perform tactical reconnaissance. While my thinner friends are already scanning the menu for the calorie count of a Kale Caesar, I am scanning the floor plan for stability. I am the Navy SEAL of seating.

The Mathematics of the Steering Wheel

Forget the bathroom scale. That flickering digital traitor in the guest bath hasn’t told me the truth since the Clinton administration. If you want to know if a Goddess is ascending or descending in volume, don’t look at the numbers—look at the Subaru Metric.

[As an aside, a long-ago sister-in-law - we have both subsequently divorced the brothers and did not like one another enough to stay in touch - commented to me that “Subaru” spelled backward is “u r a bus” and now that lives rent-free in your head just as it has in mine for the past forty years. You’re welcome.]

But back to the “Subaru Metric.”

My car seat is the only honest witness I have left. On “good” weeks—the weeks where I’ve swapped the midnight brownie for a sternly worded piece of celery—I find myself clicking the seat one notch forward. It’s a moment of silent triumph. Look at me, I’m practically a waif! I have room to breathe! But then there are the “other” weeks. The weeks where I get behind the wheel and realize my midsection is making intimate, unsolicited contact with the horn. I have to power-slide that seat back until my Hobbit-sized can barely reach the pedals, praying I don’t get into a fender-flair because my “Goddess-ness” has effectively turned me into a human airbag. The steering wheel doesn’t lie; it just judges you in inches.

The Restaurant Booth: A Study in Compression

Then, of course, there is the Fixed Booth. The ultimate test of spatial awareness.

In a world of movable chairs, I have power. I can scoot. I can angle. I can create a buffer zone. But the Fixed Booth is a rigid, vinyl-clad middle finger to anyone over a size 14. There is a specific mathematical formula involving the distance between the table edge and my dignity.

I’ve had those moments—we all have—where the hostess leads you to a booth that was clearly designed for a Victorian child. You slide in, or rather, you wedge in. You spend the entire meal exhaling. You can’t drop your napkin because if you lean forward to retrieve it, you might actually fuse with the mahogany. You eat your Cobb salad while perched on the very edge like a gargoyle, trying to look casual while your internal organs are being rearranged into a Tetris pattern. When the check comes, you have to perform a shimmy-and-pop maneuver to get out that looks less like a graceful exit and more like a cork being pulled from a bottle of cheap Prosecco.

The Floor: A Forbidden Realm

When we were young, “sitting on the floor” was a casual lifestyle choice. It was boho. It was “down to earth.” We sat cross-legged on shag carpets and talked about the meaning of life for hours.

Now? If I find myself on the floor, it’s because a catastrophic war with gravity has occurred and I’m going to need a three-to-five business day window and a series of sturdy vertical surfaces to return to a standing position.

The combination of age and obesity has turned the floor into a “Forbidden Realm.” It’s a one-way trip. I look at people who sit on cushions at workshops with the same awe I reserve for Cirque du Soleil performers. For a Goddess of my vintage, sitting on the floor isn’t “zen”—it’s a hostage situation. If I drop a pen under the desk, that pen now belongs to the carpet. It has been reclaimed by the earth. I’m not going down there to get it unless I have a written guarantee of a pulley system and a team of strong firemen waiting in the wings.

The Recliner: The Beached Whale Aesthetic

You would think that the “Recliner” would be our sanctuary. It’s soft! It’s padded! It’s wiiiiide and built for relaxation!

But have you ever seen a fat, older woman trying to operate a manual recliner lever? It is a study in undignified physics. You pull the handle, and the footrest kicks out with the force of a disgruntled mule. Suddenly, you are horizontal.

The problem is that once a Goddess is reclined, she loses all leverage. She stays reclined. Your center of gravity has shifted to the Great Beyond. To get back up, you have to perform a series of frantic, core-straining pelvic thrusts that make you look exactly like a walrus trying to navigate a slippery boat ramp. There is no “graceful” way to un-recline. You have to rock. You have to grunt. You have to use your momentum like a tidal wave just to get your feet back on the carpet. It’s not “relaxing”; it’s an unscheduled workout that leaves you gasping for air and questioning your life choices.

Add to that the “snap, crackle, and pop” soundtrack of old hips and knees flailing helplessly about and you have the makings of an unflattering sitcom stereotype.

The Irony of the Tailbone

You would think—and the world certainly tells us—that having “extra padding” would make us immune to the hardships of the world. They call it “cushion for the pushin’.” They assume we carry our own built-in pillows.

This is a damned lie.

The irony of obesity and aging is that despite the generous upholstery we carry, our bones are still very much in charge. When you sit on a stadium bleacher or a hard wooden church pew, that “natural padding” seems to magically displace itself to the sides, leaving your poor, aging tailbone to fend for itself against the cold, hard reality of The Bench. Within ten minutes, my coccyx is screaming. It’s a deep, radiating ache that mocks the sheer volume of my backside. It turns out you can be a size 22 and still feel like you’re sitting directly on a sharpened rock.

Reclaiming the Throne

We are told that “taking up space” is an act of empowerment, and on a spiritual level, it is. But on a physical level, it’s a logistical nightmare.

The built world—the chairs, the turnstiles, the theater rows—is a silent way of telling people like us that we don’t belong. It’s a design flaw that we have internalized as a moral flaw. We apologize for our bulk when we should be criticizing the flimsy craftsmanship of a world that can’t support a Goddess.

So, the next time you hear that Wicker Warning, or the next time you’re performing the “Walrus Rock” to get out of a recliner, remember this: A Goddess doesn’t “fit” into things. Things are built to accommodate her. If the world is designed for sprites, that’s their problem. We aren’t “too big”; the world is just too small.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find a chair with four solid oak legs and a seat wider than a postage stamp. A Goddess has to sit somewhere, after all.

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In the lexicon of demography, they call it the “Grey Tsunami.” It’s a clean, clinical term for a messy, human reality: the Baby Boomer generation is aging out. Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine and the fact that we’ve mostly traded manual labor for ergonomics, people are living longer than ever before.

But here is the irony of our “Body of a Goddess” pursuit: we spend our entire lives worshipping the maintenance of the vessel—the skin, the muscle, the longevity—only to find that society has no idea what to do with the vessel once it hits its eighth or ninth decade.

The Mirror of Mortality: Why We Look Away

Why do we warehouse our elders? Where do we warehouse our elders? Why has the “elder” role become something we contemplate with a shudder rather than a sense of arrival and reverence?

The truth is uncomfortable: We are terrified of them because they are a mirror. When we look at a person in their 80s or 90s, we don’t see a human being with a lifetime of stories; we see a “future self” that we have been conditioned to fear. In a culture that fetishizes youth, an aging body is seen as a failure of will. We’ve been sold the lie that if we just eat enough kale, lift enough weights, and buy enough serum, we can opt out of the breakdown.

But the unavoidable reality is that there are only two paths in this life:

1. You age. Your skin loses its elasticity, your gait slows, and your role in the “productive” economy fades.

2. You die young. That’s it. That is the binary. You do not get another choice. Yet, we treat the first option—the one that represents the literal success of our biology—as a tragedy. We have made the elder role so uncomfortable to contemplate that we would almost rather ignore the reality of it until it’s too late. By pushing the elderly out of sight, we are trying to push our own mortality out of mind. We aren’t just neglecting them; we are practicing the neglect of our future selves.

Currently, only about 40-45% of seniors in assisted living report a high "Quality of Life" score regarding social connection and purpose. That gap exists because by pushing the elderly out of sight, we are trying to push our own mortality out of mind. We aren't just neglecting them; we are practicing the neglect of our future selves

Where Are We Piling the Bodies?

When we talk about the “Grey Tsunami,” we have to ask where the water is going. Right now, it’s being diverted into a fragmented, profit-driven labyrinth of assisted living facilities and nursing homes that often feel less like communities and more like waiting rooms.

We have a habit of “warehousing” the elderly. We tuck them away in beige corridors where the air smells like industrial lavender, pee, antiseptic, and regret, hidden from the sight of the young. We’ve commodified aging to the point where “care” is often reduced to a checklist of medications, completely ignoring the goddess within—the spirit that still craves agency, beauty, and touch.

The Sandwich Squeeze

For many, the solution isn’t a facility; it’s the home. This has birthed the “Sandwich Generation”— 65% of middle-aged adults now pinned between the needs of their aging parents and the demands of their own children.

It is a grueling cycle of changing diapers at both ends of the age spectrum. I speak from a strange place of observation here; my parents and in-laws died young. I escaped the “sandwich,” but I feel the weight of its absence. Because if I am lucky—if I am truly, biologically fortunate—my children will eventually have to care for me. To be cared for by your children is a privilege, but in our current society, it’s also a burden we haven’t taught our children how to carry.

Of course, the more money you have the less of a problem this becomes. When you can hire staff to take care of Gram in Downtown Abbey, you aren’t feeling that Sandwich Squeeze (or any other squeeze) choking the life out of you. For most of us, however, the concern is real.

If we had a great childhood and adore our parents, we glamorize the idea of, “Dad will just come live with us when he can no longer take care of himself.” That’s a fantastic solution when it works, but even the best dad on earth can be difficult to care for when he’s throwing dinner plates and peeing in the neighbor’s flower bed every morning.

Then we have that significant cohort of people who had less than supportive childhoods and must contemplate navigating elder parent care around a toxic dynamic they have endured for decades.

The Math of Neglect

We see the waves coming, but do we understand the volume?

• 70%: The projected growth of the 65+ population in the next two decades. In many developed regions, we are rapidly approaching a reality where for every 100 people, a massive chunk is shifting into the senior category, while the birth rate—represented by that smaller 30%—is failing to keep pace. This creates an inverted pyramid. We have a top-heavy society where the few (the young) are expected to support the many (the elders).

• 65%: This often refers to the projected percentage of "Sandwich Generation" members who feel significant financial or emotional strain. It’s a reflection of the fact that over two-thirds of people in that middle-age bracket are currently providing some form of unpaid, intense labor for both a child and a parent.

• The 40-45% Quality of Life Gap: This is perhaps the most sobering stat. It reflects the percentage of seniors living in "clinical storage" who report feeling a lack of daily purpose or social connection. It’s the gap between being medically stable and actually being alive.

• 30%: The shrinking percentage of the workforce available to actually staff the facilities we’re piling people into.

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How to Teach the Heart to Care

How do we move from piling people up to actually integrating them?

• Visibility as Resistance: We have to stop looking away. Reintegrating the elderly into daily life—parks, schools, town centers—forces us to confront our own timeline.

• Aesthetic of Dignity: We must demand that elder care be designed for living. Natural light and intergenerational programs (sharing space with daycares) should be the standard.

• Exercising the Empathy Muscle: We teach our kids how to code, but we don’t teach them how to sit with the elderly. Empathy for the aged is a muscle that must be trained.

The Final Act

The “Grey Tsunami” isn’t a disaster; it is the natural, desired result of a long life. We need to stop treating the elderly as a problem to be solved and start treating them as the goddesses they are—just in a different phase of the moon.

If we want our children to care for us with grace, we have to build a world that values the body at every stage of its journey.

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