Natalia

Natalia’s five words are Boisterous Comical Animated Attentive Turbulent. An only child of immigrant parents, raised in a large Midwestern city among people speaking many languages, she was a traveler and party-goer who just couldn’t sit still before family. She now lives with her partner of twelve years and their son and daughter, manages a few family-owned buildings part-time, and lost her freelance event work when the pandemic hit. Her dog of twelve years had just died: He was my best buddy. She names the limit that still shapes her plate: If I could afford to buy all organic food all the time I would.

She drew one of the most striking lifelines in the study: a single line crossing a baseline. It dips when, as a young child, she watched her mother’s depression; climbs through a camping trip with her father, volleyball and soccer; plunges at twenty-two into an unhealthy relationship; and reaches its highest point at twenty-three, a year wandering a continent with a backpack: I always say that by getting lost, I found myself. It falls to its lowest at twenty-eight, with her father’s death, then climbs and holds high through the births of her son and daughter.

Read with her diary, the deepest valley has two parts. As her father declined from a progressive illness, she had to stand in court for him at twenty-seven, composed on the outside and, in her words, a scatterbrained mess (which in reality I was.) That is where her superpower comes from. And she writes, carefully and in her own time, that an eating disorder she had quietly struggled with for years took over my life then. Veganism, begun for love of animals, had also given her an excuse to refuse food. Friends cooked for her and begged her to eat. The births of her children, she writes, symbolized a re-birth for me as I found a sense of complete love after so many years of pain and self-loathing. This portrait records what she chose to say, and adds nothing.

Food now is abundant and global. Her mother cooked curries; her grandmother next door made soup and sweets with her; her father kept a cooler in the car with some grainy bread, a jar of peanut butter, a banana and a jalapeno, the pepper just in case of an emergency. As a child she would go back to the kitchen after dessert, looking to see if there was any leftover salad. She cooks the lighter half of the household’s meals while her partner cooks the heavier. Her peace with food is hard-won: now if I feel the need for ice cream or anything else I treat myself to a little bit And enjoy it without shame.

She often puts others’ needs first: many times I sacrifice my own preferences in order to appease the needs of those around me, and I end up feeling miserable and resentful. Her coping is running, walking and biking, and sometimes wine, which she calls only a band-aid. Her civic ideas are gentle and practical: letting families who use food benefits know they can shop at farmers markets, and a shared dinner exchange between neighbors. Her 2 a.m. person is a cousin, also an only child, like my honorary brother.

Her Day 5 goal is to sprout, can and dry her own food; what stands in her way is a two-year-old at home. Her letter is a statement of self-forgiveness: please be forgiving and know that at any given time in my life I’m always doing the best I can.