My Story

Living with PCOS, I’ve had to learn a lot about food, hormones, and care—especially as a queer person, a witch, a bruja. There’s something deeply political about managing your health when the system isn’t designed for you. I had to unlearn a lot. I had to start building a healthier relationship with food—not because I wanted to, but because I needed to. Culturally appropriate food, food that makes sense for my body, food that actually nourishes instead of depleting.

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Periods, the full moon—it all connects. Food and the body, body and identity. There’s power in knowing how to feed yourself through those cycles.

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In undergrad, it was the opposite: nutritionally weak food, culturally inappropriate options, a lot of drinking. It’s like—how do you expect me to be in an 8AM class when all I had last night was ramen noodles, pizza, and chicken fingers? What was accessible wasn’t what was nourishing. Food became a task. And then my body started shutting down—I gained 20 pounds, I got sick, and worse than that, I started feeling sick of my own body. Like I was disconnected from it. There was a real dissonance between my palette, my place, and my plate.

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Taking care of myself became an act of resistance. I had to do what was right for me and my body. Because no one else was going to do it for me. I had to reclaim my body—my plate taking up space, my appetite taking up space. Subconsciously, I used to stop myself from going up for a second plate even when I was hungry. Now? I feed myself when I need to. I stopped caring about the male gaze. I know when men aren’t looking at me, and I know I’m not presenting myself to be looked at. There’s freedom in that.

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Yes, there is also a spiritual component. I don’t want to call it prayer anymore. It’s something else. It’s about thanking the greater forces that allowed this meal to happen—thanking the farmers, the laborers, the people who helped make this possible. There are hierarchies in food systems. Someone had to plant it, pick it, ship it. And we forget that—especially when it’s not grown locally. This is a sacred act. Eating is sacred.