Nobody Cares
Would you believe me if I told you that the thought, nobody cares, got me through one of the toughest struggles of my life? Let me explain.
In my late teens, I developed an eating disorder (ED). It started small—restricting food on days when there was a school dance. I had decided this practice kept my belly flatter when wearing tight dresses later in the evening. By the time I was studying abroad at twenty-one, restricting my food had become constant. I spent an entire semester abroad in Greece running miles every day, obsessing over every morsel I ate, and drinking excessive amounts of water. The more out of control my life felt, the more my ED symptoms would grow- something I later understood as a coping mechanism for distracting me from my anxiety and depression. Food intake and exercise were things I could control, and it gave my mind a preoccupation from the chaos of my family and a budding mood disorder. It became a cycle of self-medication and control.
Nobody noticed or said anything until I ended up in the hospital with blocked bowels. My father’s response was blunt: “You need to start eating more.” That was the beginning of my recovery journey. A nutritionist opened my eyes to how the rules I’d made up about food and exercise were entirely wrong. She explained calories, nutrients, and the importance of combining proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. One particular moment stands out: she told me coffee had no calories. I had no idea. I’d been wracked with guilt for years, thinking beverages like coffee, tea, or even diet soda would make me gain weight. This is how little I understood about nutrition at the time. Simply understanding caloric intake felt like unlocking a secret to the universe.
Knowledge helped at first, but things got worse before they got better. Back at college for my senior year, living alone in a garage apartment, I shifted from restricting to binge eating, and flipped from excessive exercise to not exercising at all. My weight skyrocketed, and I felt out of control. I was considering unaliving myself and even wrote a goodbye note after a particularly terrible binge. I joined Food Addicts Anonymous (FA) and got a sponsor who told me exactly what to eat for every meal. We talked daily, but I couldn’t go more than two days without binging. I poured out my fears of being in a 12-step program where sugar and alcohol were restricted. I was fixated on not being able to eat cake or drink champagne at my wedding or continue my career as an international food writer.
One day, she told me something that hit like a ton of bricks: she said in her 5 years of being a sponsor, she never had a sponsee with whom she wasn’t able to work, and ultimately, she didn’t think she could help me. She felt I needed to see a professional. This was a turning point. Her tone and words made me realize I needed medical intervention. I saw a psychiatrist within days, was diagnosed with an eating disorder and OCD, and started medication. The change was almost immediate.
At the same time, I was making mistakes—like drinking while on medication, despite the clear warnings on the label. Still, the serotonin boost helped me dig out of the depression and unaliving myself. After college, I moved to the mountains to start fresh. I paid out of pocket for my medication when my father’s insurance was no longer an option, knowing I couldn’t go without it. I eventually found a job with benefits, scaled back my drinking, and started settling into a new life.
Even then, my ED would resurface when life felt out of control. Restricting again became my go-to coping mechanism, but I learned to recognize the patterns and seek help, adjusting my medication with my psychiatrist as needed. What I would later realize is that it wasn’t the ED, but the distraction of it taking up mental space and allowing me to hide from what I really needed to address. The ED was a symptom of instability in my life.
Years of motherhood changed a lot as well. As my time and energy shifted, I began to care less about being “perfect.” I also didn’t have the brain space. I realized that the people who truly liked me did so because of who I was—not what I looked like, said, or did. Most of all, I began to see myself through my three daughter’s perspective.
Over time, thinking the thought, nobody cares freed me from the arbitrary rules I had about being perfect. If I thought, “I have to be this weight to be attractive,” I would replace the thought with, “Literally nobody cares about my weight and my weight doesn’t have a damn thing to do with my attractiveness.” Nobody cares became a mantra. Every time I started to spiral about my appearance, exercise, or food, I reminded myself: Nobody cares.
When I say nobody cares, I don’t mean nobody cares about you. Quite the opposite—I care deeply. That’s why I am writing this- in the hopes it helps even one other human being. At this moment, we’re connected, and that connection is beautiful.
When I say nobody cares, I mean most people don’t care about the superficial things society teaches us to obsess over. Your weight, your hair, your outfit—these are just noise. Marketers use their education and psychology to train us to care about and buy billions of dollars’ worth of quick fixes in the beauty industry every year. But, just like my ED, we use these superficialities to distract ourselves from what we inherently need - things that are unique to all of us.
If someone does care—if they judge or comment unproductively—that says more about them than you. Why are they so invested in what you wear, how you look, or how you express yourself? The people who love you celebrate you for you. If you find yourself tiptoeing around someone, trying to hide who you are, I promise—they are not your people.
The people who matter care about how you make them feel. They’ll remember your warmth, your laughter, and your overall essence —not minor superficial details seen only under a magnifying glass.
I realized this while observing my stepmom’s constant announcements of self-contempt. In her fifties, she constantly remarked on how much she hated her hair or needed to lose weight, all while young children were around. It happened for years, and I remember thinking: Doesn’t she see? Nobody cares or wants to hear about this stuff. She was a mom and a grandma. All anyone wanted from her was love, warmth, joy—not self-loathing. Her focus was such a massive contrast to what my selfless grandmother demonstrated. Watching this unfold, I made a quiet vow: I will not hate myself as I age, or make others miserable for my insecurities. Overall, I wanted to remember nobody cares except for how I make them feel when they are around me.
Then, I turned 40. And, just like that, my hair started to thin, glasses were essential, and the wrinkles began to set in. All those old fears surfaced. I became self-conscious in ways I hadn’t expected, and I still struggle. But here’s the truth I came back to: The people who love me most love me for what’s inside. They don’t want to hear me whine about the old me any more than I wanted to hear about my stepmother’s two-hour natural curly girl method and makeup routine. They want me to be my warm, loving self so they can enjoy themselves in my presence.
Every day, we have a choice to spend our precious minutes on this earth worrying about minute crap nobody cares about or release ourselves from the burden. I want to reclaim those minutes and invest them in something that matters—something that fills my life, rather than drains it. In doing so, I can also model graceful, rather than loathsome, living and aging.
When I think of someone who truly embodied this freedom, I think of my aforementioned grandmother, whom we called Nanny. She didn’t fuss over appearances or pretend to be something she wasn’t. She was a GRANDmother, through and through, and she knew who she was. She was a breast cancer survivor. Both her breasts were amputated, and for years, she wore prosthetics she kept in a drawer at bedtime. The grandkids loved playing with her backup set of boobs, but I am sure it was painful for her mentally and physically to wear them. From what my aunts and uncles told me as an adult, her cancer survival softened her. She had been quite a control freak in her younger years. All I ever knew of her was a selfless matriarch who was the glue that kept our family together and my rock when a dependable mother figure was nowhere to be found. She didn’t sweat the small stuff and offered a legacy of unforgettable love.
I still remember the wide-open arms that greeted me, the way she’d stand outside on her back porch and hug us and watch us get in our cars, then wave until the car disappeared. She always wrapped her caring around us—both physically and emotionally. She was a steady river of love. That’s what people remember: your presence and the way you do or don’t take up space in their life. Otherwise, nobody cares.
