The Shape of Hunger

We are hungry because we don’t feed ourselves.

Let me explain.

I recently finished reading Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab and absolutely loved it. At face level, it’s a historical fantasy following three women across centuries: Sabine (d. 1532), Charlotte (d. 1827), and Alice (d. 2019). They live in different worlds, under different constraints, but they are driven by the same force: hunger.

Some of that hunger is metaphorical. Sabine, a Spanish Viscountess, longs for independence in a time when women could not move without their husbands beside them. Charlotte, a British noblewoman, wants to love boldly — and to love who she chooses. Alice, a college freshman, craves reinvention. Each of them is powerful. Each of them is starving.

I am interested in hunger — specifically how it manifests in women. Schwab and I share that curiosity. The novel explores it through blood and longing and immortality. I explore it through memory.

I have an intimate relationship with metaphorical hunger. I have wanted, needed, believed in so many fantasies, people, and places that the weight of it sometimes tilts my head to the side.

I have also known physical hunger — the kind that rewires the brain. The kind that makes you dream of pasta slick with marinara and meatballs the size of tennis balls. The kind that sends you to YouTube to watch strangers crack open crab legs and pull sweet meat from crooked shells. That kind of hunger doesn’t disappear. It lingers in the body.

Recently, I’ve been hungry again. Voracious, even.

I wrote about this in my last article. The start of 2026 cracked something open in me — a desire to go out and do things. All of them. To learn, to grow, to challenge myself. To live bigger.

But hunger requires feeding.

This week, I was left wanting.

On Tuesday, I ran a writing workshop in a half-empty program room. On Wednesday, I sat at a book club for forty-five minutes while the conversation detoured into ROTH IRAs and warnings that young people lack fiscal responsibility and will die bankrupt on a Walmart floor. I didn’t say a word.

On Thursday, I had so many meetings I barely had time to pee, let alone write.

There was one bright spot: an author’s roundtable twenty minutes from the library where I work. I would be thirty minutes late, but I went anyway. I needed something. I arrived to find the room empty. The meeting had been moved.

Who knew?

Not me.

Today is Friday. I fell into a domestic rabbit hole this morning — cleaning, reorganizing — and didn’t pack lunch. I’m physically starved. It snowed this morning, and we had a two-hour delay. I’ve spent most of the day covering the circulation desk and trying to remember what those meetings were about.

There has been no time to do the work that would actually nourish me.

I feel depleted. Underfed. Slightly disoriented.

Hungry.

What I need is a good meal — literal and metaphorical. A long stretch of time to lose myself in the story I’m writing and the one I’m reading. A library program that scratches the itch instead of dulling it. An afternoon disappearing down the aisles of Marshall’s or Michael’s or Barnes & Noble. Time to think strategically about launching the next thing for my writing classes.

I need to feed myself.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: no one else is going to do it for me.

Women are taught to endure hunger. To delay it. To make it smaller. To call it ambition, or ego, or impracticality. To wait until everyone else is served.

But hunger doesn’t disappear. It ferments.

So I’m trying something different. I’m trying to treat myself like someone who is hungry and seeking — someone worth feeding.

If you need permission to do the same, here it is:

Go nourish yourself.