By Olivia Struble*
I sink into the soft dirt beneath me. While my eyes are closed, I can still feel the relentless rays of the sun on the lids of my eyes. Around me I can feel blades of grass digging into my skin. I take a deep breath and turn to look at the spectacle of robins that have joined me underneath an oak tree. The earth is soft from the rain that an Alabama summer always promises. The robins plunge their sharp beaks into the ground, ripping up fat earthworms.
On my walk home, I notice a wild violet growing through a crack in the sidewalk, stretching toward the sun despite the weight of concrete around it. I am jealous of the delicate wildflower. It grows despite all expectations that it will fail. A flower doesn’t care if it is beautiful, it grows upward and expands, defying what is wild and natural. For a long time, I was that flower struggling beneath the weight of expectations. Only my concrete was society’s idea of beauty, and for years I starved myself to fit within its mold.
I used to think that complete control meant being the strongest. The hungrier I was the more disciplined. That as the number on the scale shrank, the happier I would be. I denied myself food and rest because I believed shrinking would somehow make me worthy. I mistook deprivation for power, but what I was really doing was silencing nature’s voice inside me. My body, like the earth, had rhythms and needs, but I learned to ignore them. I wasn’t living in harmony with nature I was trying to control it.
We live in a culture that tells women that their value lies in smallness — in restraint, in disappearance. Advertisements sell wellness as restriction; social media rewards the most edited versions of ourselves. From the very beginning, I knew that beauty meant control, not vitality. In chasing this illusion, I cut myself off from the natural systems that sustain life: nourishment, balance, and self-love.
I remember looking outside and noticing how the trees never seemed ashamed to take up space. A forest doesn’t apologize for growing thick with life. A snake doesn’t question its hunger as it swallows a mouse whole. Nature is raw and violent, but it is honest. That honesty became a mirror for me. A realization that the problem wasn’t my body or my appetite; it was a society that had made me feel unnatural for having them.
Nature doesn’t strive for perfection, it just is. It’s messy, unpredictable, and yet, beautiful. A storm may destroy a coastline, but the same storm makes space for new life. That duality taught me something about myself: I could be both hurt and healing, fragile and strong. Just as a flower can bloom through concrete, I too could grow through the stifling weight of society’s pressures.
As I began to eat again and reconnect with the simple act of feeding myself, I started to feel gratitude for the earth that sustains the nourishment that fuels me. Food stopped being a number and became something sacred. It was a connection between my body and the land. Every apple, every loaf of bread, every sip of water became a reminder that my wellbeing depended on the planet’s wellbeing. When I denied myself food, I was rejecting the natural world’s gift of life.
I used to think of wellbeing as individual happiness, but recovery showed me it’s much bigger than that. True wellbeing is collective, it grows through connection. I would not have healed without the people who reminded me I was more than what I looked like. The people closest to me encouraging me through the darkness to grow into the light; these relationships became the soil I grew from.
In the novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Sadie, Sam, and Marx build entire worlds together through creativity and shared purpose. Their wellbeing depends not only on their individual success but on the strength of their connection. I see that same truth reflected in my own life. Healing was not a solitary act; it was a shared one. The love I received from others gave me permission to extend that love to myself. My recovery, like theirs, was collaborative — proof that personal wellbeing and social wellbeing are inseparable.
At first, it might seem unrelated to something as personal as an eating disorder, but the truth is that the beauty industry thrives on insecurity. There’s a system of profit built on convincing people that they are never enough. When we buy into those standards, we sustain an economy of harm. My healing, then, became a small act of resistance: choosing nourishment over consumption. Sustainability, I realized, isn’t just about conserving resources, it’s about refusing to participate in systems that exploit human vulnerability for gain.
Reconnecting with nature helped me understand that sustainability is a way of being. The planet’s cycles mirror our own: both require balance, care, and renewal. When I started honoring my body’s natural rhythms, I also noticed the rhythms of the world around me. I watched the seasons change, noticed how even decay has purpose, and learned that growth is never linear.
Like the earth, I can exist in my own time.
Author: Olivia Struble
Both the wild violet and I are testaments to resilience, to the beauty of imperfection, to the will to live despite harsh surroundings. I no longer measure myself against society’s polished ideals. Instead, I measure myself by how deeply I can live in harmony with the world and how kindly I can treat my body, others, and the planet that sustains us all.
Wellbeing, I’ve come to learn, is not something we achieve alone. It grows through our connections — to people, to nature, to the systems that give and receive life. When we nurture those connections, we create the conditions for both personal healing and collective sustainability. The flower and the sidewalk coexist; the cracks make room for life. Likewise, the cracks in my past have made space for something stronger: an understanding that real beauty and sustainability both begin when we stop fighting against our own nature and start learning from it.
