When You Desert Yourself

Reflections on self abandonment, anorexia, and allowing life in.

The desert did not feel the same this time, perhaps it was the rush, we only had about 28 hours there.

When we arrived, it felt different, or I felt different. Perhaps it was the significant shift I’ve had in screen time, since following the path of becoming a writer and diligently working to finish my book. I felt my usual level of over-stimulation, a bit tired but wired, and a strange new sense of fearing being unplugged.

We arrived mid day and spent some time in town. I found it odd that the first thing I felt like doing was shopping, I bought a nice cactus hat and way too expensive beach towel. I was putting off actually having to face myself in the silence of the sandstone which is exactly what I had come to do.

The desert has a cleansing quality to it, it tends to strip you of everything you are not if you allow it.

Corona Arch Trail 2026..

I wasn’t allowing it. I was distracted. Moving from my baseline frenetic energy of task managing. I briefly became aware of my state of being- or rather not being in contrast to the wild times in my twenties using plant medicine in the desert when I had days here, not one day. I remember then, my body felt resilient, and I could handle hours of the beating sun on my back. Then, I wasn’t worried about sleep, or aging, or skin cancer, work emails, or who I was becoming. I felt like I had time.

Eventually we made it to our campground positioned by the Colorado river. We were not able to find a spot easily the way I always had in the past, and ended up in a parking lot with no shade, side by side many other people car camping. Instead of silence there was noise. I don’t know why this surprised me, Utah has blown up to be a major travel destination post 2020, especially places like Moab. I felt exposed under the desert sun, which in the past has felt comforting. Now it felt as if it was going to burn me alive.

As we sat on the beach by the river, I stared down at my body and suddenly felt complete disgust.

Agitating, nauseating, shame. How did I let myself get like this? I wanted to crawl out of my skin and into another body entirely.

Where there once was visible ribs, and protruding hip bones there now was a soft looking belly and layer of subcutaneous fat that will not dissipate despite my 100% organic whole food, sugar free, dairy free, gluten free, low carb, high protien diet, and continual daily ab workouts, weekly strength training, and cardio. Triple the effort of my twenties.

I can’t believe this is my body now. Frustration and despair began to grip me.

This was the insanity loop underlying inside that I could feel when I was in town. The thoughts I wanted to keep myself distracted from, this is why I did not want to be still with myself. Truthfully since I have restored my weight and stopped starving myself, this feeling is always humming in the background. Healed “looking” on the outside, still static invasive corrosive thoughts on the inside. It’s not always like this, but when it flares up, it burns.

Knowing my cells are listening, despair washed over me at my realization that all my current efforts to control anything including my thoughts, fall short.

No matter the diet, or exercise regimens, my body will not let go—because my mind will not let go. At this point the only other option to lose weight would to be to starve myself or relapse. With the idea that this would alleviate the cyclic thoughts of how to essentially eliminate myself as I am.

This is a thought cycle I have been stuck in for over a decade, programming from a patriarchal consumer culture that wants you small, weak, and compliant. Internalized beliefs by various comments I have received over the years of how my body should look. Even dumped once for being “too fat.” Followed by the euphoric praise I received when I weighed in double digit pounds- and my efforts of control were working.

Embedded in the cells of my mother line, both my own mother, and grandmother rejected their bodies and focused on purification and shrinking. There was constant chatter of this food or that food being “toxic” and regular commentary on my weight, diet, and those of my siblings.

I always felt I was being “watched” in this way. So now as my soft belly protruded, hips threatened to spill over my waistband of my bathing suit, I watched myself vigilantly. From a far, judging, objectifying, and planning “corrections.” Completely deserting myself.

The cyclic thoughts swirling like a whirlwind. Maybe my posture is just shit, maybe it’s too many blueberries, maybe too much protien, maybe I need to cut carbs entirely again.

I will say I am in a much healthier phase with my body then I have been these past two years since restoring weight and focusing on strength and athletic goals based in ability not aesthetic.

I have spent time in my recovery carving new neuro-pathways into the sandstone of my mind. I have trained my brain to realize food isn’t an option, and hormone health is everything. Low calories and high intensity exercise wreaks havoc on cortisol, and suppresses hormone production, while lowering thyroid function. I cognitively understand, that I can’t do it anymore.

However, the programming still is installed, it’s just taken on a different form of neurosis. Weather it’s tweaking my diet to be even cleaner or just cutting certain foods out all together. There is still a quiet desperation to just have my bones protrude again. To know I am in control.

Since restoring my weight, I have found dissolving into creative projects has helped immensely— as it gives me something else I can carve, manipulate, and create. Although there is a positive aspect of channeling energy and focus into creative endeavors, I believe it is equally important to allow yourself to drop into these uncomfortable feelings. It’s part of the stripping process the desert embodies. I had a backlog, that was now flooding me.

There are periods of time when the ED voice is quieter. It tends to surface when a major change and transition is happening, it gives me something more “manageable” to think about, though the actual ability to manage at this point is elusive. It also flares up whenever I enter a gym or competitive environment where everyone is working out, or when I have to wear a bathing suit, in public.

What I realized sitting on this beach, under the sun, in my bathing suit, as I felt like an ant under a magnifying glass, is number one: I have to move out of the sun. And number two: I was in it again. The same cycle, a new layer.

Corona Arch trail May 2026...

Later in the day we set out on a hike to Corona Arch, a hike I took at age twenty five. I watched my body the same way then, as I do now, but then with more extreme vigilance for what was acceptable. I would hike all day in the desert sun and eat only cucumber, celery, and hummus. Vegan then, my body was light, lean, flexible and resilient to my abuse. I also had cystic acne, as my body rebelled in some way early on.

As my Fiancé and I walked amongst the sandstone, amongst the ED chatter, the stillness from the rocks actually became a source of anxiety. I realized the level of desertion from my body I had entered. These thoughts were always there, I had just created enough distraction in my daily life I wouldn’t have to hear them. My limbs felt heavy and my heart constricted. My body leading me to feel all the pressure I put on myself to perform, create, and make it all happen now in my thirties.

This was new to me, the desert had historically always been the place I felt my best, spacious, expansive, and dissolving into the delicious stillness.

The desert was the first place I fell in love with the earth, the first place my mother took me on trips. It was in the desert, I learned to be in silence, to embrace the idea of death, to be stripped of distraction, to enter the emptiness.

May 2026...

What I realized here now, is I have deserted myself for some time. I have not allowed myself to still the muddy water inside, and my tolerance for stillness has atrophied.

I’ve deserted my body because there is still a wound where I so deeply reject it.

If I go a layer deeper..

I never knew how I would embrace aging, and I always hoped I would enter it gracefully, but with years of wellness programming, there is still some distorted belief that my body changing is a personal failure, and that disease is a manifestation of something I lacked the ability to notice or correct, or afford. Like a failed test of life.

Thats whats so ironic though, is I know this wellness charade is a multi-billion dollar industry that dresses up as spirituality and purity but is actually just capitalism masquerading as “health.” Why do I comply?

Even one layer deeper.

Somatically, there is a part of me that does not want to let anything in, due to fear of more loss. It’s the same part of me that disengages in intimacy, if I leave before I am left. Then, I won’t have to feel the gaping hole in my chest, If I have already deserted the situation.

Somatically my body learned in childhood receiving something means owing something back. Weather it’s calories in or calories out, or having to maintain a relationship that puts sudden demands on my energy. I feel burdened by having to give when I don’t know how of if I will have the capacity. If I am always in a deficit, then I can afford to receive without debt.

So the voice of the disorder is an adaptation created long ago for a level of protection. In this numb, empty place inside, I am safe from feeling. I am safe from touching the texture of my life slipping through my fingers. If I am not present, then I don’t have to “lose” those moments because I was never there in the first place.

I realize this is the wound embedded in society, of the conditioning around the obsession with youth, patriarchal power, and control. We become so “youth obsessed" That we never really stop to take in the preciousness of life passing us by. I am deeply disturbed that I can realize this, and write about it, yet the coding in my cellular memory still runs me to some degree.

I know I have to find a way to meet that part of me that is so deeply scared and that protects me through various forms of deserting my body and therefore life as it unfolds. From entering my body, I can take the armor off and truly bloom.

We all desert ourselves in some way, because the dissipation of life is often too painful. The very core of any addiction, is fear of loss, fear of change, fear of death, fear of no control. We all have this wound to some degree, and we all have our various mechanisms of numbing out and leaving ourselves behind. What ever it is, it is an avoidance of the absolute shattering grief that this all ends.

But in contrast, if we can allow that grief to crack us open to the preciousness of life, even the most mundane landscapes become extraordinary, there is a flood of presence, magic, and luscious rivers of aliveness when we surrender.

The desert truly does have a way of stripping you with it’s silence of all that is not you.

I am walking this path along side you.

Let this be a reminder to slow down, allow yourself to take in everything rising inside you. None of this life is truly ours anyways, so let it in.

Thanks for reading.