Neuroplasticity
There is a belief I held for most of my twenties that I no longer hold: that my brain had a ceiling. That the capacity I had was the capacity I got. I know now that this is not how the brain works. Neuroplasticity does not pause for difficult years. And in the female brain, it runs on a hormonal architecture that science is only beginning to take seriously.
Swimsuit Body
There is a specific version of summer dread I have felt every year since I was a teenager. It is not the heat. It is the swimsuit. More precisely: it is standing in front of a mirror and having the number on the scale still running in the background of my brain. What I now understand is that my body was not bigger because of anything I did. It was cycling. And that changes everything.
Cravings & Their Doings
There is a particular kind of afternoon I know well. It is not quite hunger — it is more specific than that. A pull toward something sweet, something salty, something warm. For most of my life I named it by the only word anyone had given me: weakness. It took reading a significant amount of nutritional neuroscience before I understood why the signal never went away. It was not the problem. The translation was.