Skinny

TW: body image, eating/dieting

In December 2025 I was given a miracle drug.

Miracle drugs are so rare. It feels like fictitious or biblical to hear about miracles at all. But in December 2025, after four and a half years of near-relentless suffering, I started taking a drug that had only been approved by the FDA a month earlier. It was a drug to combat recalcitrant chronic hives.

And it worked.

Since July 2021 I had woken up more days than not sprinkled, if not covered, in swollen itchy hives. The medical consensus was that I would never find the cause. I took quadruple doses of antihistamines and, starting that September, began monthly (then bimonthly) painful injections of what was then the best and safest treatment for the condition. It worked until it didn't. The hives came back with a vengeance. I started taking thyroid medication, which helped with the constellation of other strange symptoms I was enduring (racing heart, brittle skin, constant chills, freezing hands and feet), but not the hives. Eventually I went the woo woo route and narrowed my diet to a pinprick of low histamine unprocessed foods. This narrowing resulted in eliminating all restaurants from my life entirely.

To no one’s surprise, I became quite thin.

The thinness was complicated. On tour, without access to a kitchen, the thinness was body-achingly exhausting, and also terrifying for me to look at in the mirror. My clothes hung off my body like tarps. I was tired all the time. People filled my inbox on Instagram, begging for my secret.

When I started the miracle drug, I started eating again, too.

Of course I indulged. How could I not? For two years of asceticism I had daydreamed of bread and sugar (and strawberries and avocados but that’s beside the point). I thought it would be too overwhelming to return to my favorite foods, but it didn’t take long to get back on the habit. And it didn’t take long for the habit to show up on my frame.

I need to make something clear: I know that at my current size, I still have thin privilege. I can walk into most clothing stores (well, maybe not in LA, where they hide all the jeans above a size 2 in some kind of shame closet) and find something that will fit me. I can fit into airplane and theater seats, and generally speaking my weight does not cause people to treat me differently. It is also true that I weigh more than I did six months ago. My clothes no longer hang off of me. My ribcage no longer ripples through the skin on my chest—my stomach no longer curves inward like a satellite dish—my hipbones no longer poke me when I lay on my stomach—and I have an ass now, so it doesn’t hurt when I sit down (BTW, that’s a real thing, for anyone considering the pursuit of extreme thinness. It literally hurts to sit when there’s no cushion there my loves!)

I am 28 years old. I feel too old to gaze longingly at photos of Alexis Ren’s thigh gap and to suck in my stomach when my boyfriend puts his arm around my waist. I did this self-loathing bullshit already when I was a teenager, and I find my circular thoughts about it self-indulgent and wasteful and boring. But they still appear. I started doing Pilates so I could improve my core strength for tour, and I wish that was my only motivation. Truthfully, the thing that keeps me going—the thing that stops me from skipping meals and denying myself the culinary luxuries I already had to deny myself, against my will, for two years—is you. The people reading this. The listeners of mine—especially young girls—who are being bombarded with images of medically altered women, naturally beautiful women who have starved and carved and injected themselves into blinding, unnaturally beautiful submission. Submission to standards that even they, with all the money and time in the world, find out of reach.

I promised myself, when I was hungry and weak and crying myself to sleep because of my chronic illness, that if I ever got a miracle, I wouldn’t use it to hate myself. I promised myself that if I was able to live in a body that worked, I would appreciate it regardless of the size. The Western propaganda machine worked so swiftly that I forgot that promise immediately. I am working really hard to make good on it anyway. I am looking at myself in the mirror and repeating kind things. I am taking in images of extremely thin women with a neutral eye instead of an envious one. I am reminding myself that I am five foot ten and descendant from people on both sides who suffered unimaginable trauma across generations, and that a well-fed, free body is a gift. I am determined to set a different kind of example to the people who read my words and listen to my music and come to my shows—I am determined to be a beacon of imperfect beauty in a world that has told me since my Y2K childhood that imperfection must be punished.

Chronic illness taught me the value of resilience and patience and gratitude for small victories. The rest I think I am going to have to teach myself.