My Story

I didn't come to this work from theory alone.

 

Growing up as a twin, comparison came early — the kind many of us learn young, whether from media, culture, or the people around us. There's a lot of good in having a built-in best friend. But that early comparison didn't stay external. It became an internal standard — a version of myself I measured against, shaped by the messages I absorbed from everyone around me.

 

In high school, I found sports — cross-country running, cross-country skiing, track. At first, it gave me purpose, outside of being someone's twin. Then it became something else. A way to control my size. To earn what I ate. To manage a body I didn't feel safe in. Maybe you know this one too — something that started as joy, and quietly turned into another way to manage your body instead.

 

By university, what had been quietly building came fully into view, and I was diagnosed with an eating disorder. What followed wasn't a straight line toward getting better. There were years of doing the work and still struggling. Of thinking I'd figured it out, and then finding myself right back in it. Of learning, slowly, that recovery wasn't a single moment I'd arrive at, but something I kept choosing, over and over, even on the days it felt impossible.

 

What I hadn't yet learned was how disconnected my nervous system was from any felt sense of safety. Being in a body that feels unsafe, uncomfortable, foreign — that's real. And it's not felt the same by everyone. Privilege shapes what safety in a body even looks like, and whose bodies are met with more threat in this world to begin with. My own experience is one version of that, not the whole picture.

 

Noticing the disconnect at all was its own kind of shift. What had been unnoticed for so long — numbed out, pushed down, not even registering as something happening in my body — was starting to surface. That surfacing wasn't a sign I was failing. It was the start of thawing.

I also didn't yet have language for the grief that comes with living in a body. Jayne Mattingly, in her book This Is Body Grief, names it as "the loss that comes with living in an ever-changing body." Body grief shows up in a lot of places, not only eating disorder recovery — chronic illness, disability, aging, any body that changes in ways we didn't choose. Mattingly also writes about the sense of perceived body betrayal that can come with that grief — the feeling that your body has failed you, or turned against you. Naming the body grief and perceived body betrayal helped me see my body in a new way, one that was fighting for me, not against me. If any of this sounds familiar — grief you've felt but never had a name for — you're not alone in it. Part of recovery is learning that who you are, and the body you live in, isn't a threat, something to fix or apologize for but rather a home, the one vessel to live this messy life in.

 

Over 5 years into my own recovery, I lost my mother to cancer. Grief has a way of clarifying things. In the middle of that loss, I made a quiet promise — to myself, and to her — that this wasn't going to be the moment I lost my footing. I fought for the support I needed, and kept digging for the pieces of my own recovery that were still missing.

 

Two years after she passed, I was interning with a mental health nonprofit, thinking I might be headed toward a career in therapy. But it was in my own sessions with my therapist that I realized what I actually wished I had — support that lived in between, alongside therapy, not instead of it. Something for the in-between days, not just the fifty-minute session. Maybe you know that feeling too — leaving a session with insight, but no idea what to do with it on an ordinary Tuesday. I didn't know yet that this was something coaches could offer. I didn't know it existed at all.

 

A couple of years later, I learned that eating disorder recovery coaching existed — that the in-between support I'd wished for actually had a name. So I completed my training, and in 2022 I started coaching. I finally got to be, for other women, the support I'd wished someone had offered me — not a replacement for therapy, but something alongside it, for the in-between days that make up most of a life.

 

Around that same time, I began my own somatic work with a therapist, and something in me recognized it right away. Over the years since, I kept following that thread — reading, learning, looking closer at nervous system and body-based approaches to eating disorder recovery and body image work. That search eventually led me to my somatic practitioner training, and to the piece I'd been missing all along. Found, again, through my own experience of figuring this out.

 

That's the work I do now — body image coaching and somatic practice, built on eating disorder recovery and body image coaching, and shaped by over 10+ years of my own healing. You're already the expert on your own body and your own story. What I offer is a safe container — guidance, information, and support — so you can stop bracing against your body and start trusting it enough to live your actual life.

​

With Hope,