Have you ever noticed how we speak to our bodies? We complain about them. We criticize them. We compare them to everyone else’s. We look in the mirror and focus on what we wish were different. We punish ourselves with restrictive diets. We promise ourselves we'll “be good” tomorrow after eating something we decided we shouldn’t have today. We tell ourselves we need to exercise more, weigh less, eat better, sleep more, stress less… And somehow, along the way, health became a b

It was a cold Friday evening in late January. I was on the couch, waiting for my husband to come home, when a notification lit up my phone: my test results were ready. I didn’t open them right away. I sat very still, took a few deep breaths, and braced myself for what the earlier tests had been hinting at. A small, stubborn part of me hoped for a benign explanation, but I knew better. Finally, I opened the MyChart app. At the top of the screen, in bold, was Cytology report. I