A sibling who thinks I took the easy way

The comments at family meals were relentless for about a year and then stopped, mostly because I stopped responding to them.

My sister started too, six months after me, and it has been unexpectedly lovely to have somebody in the house who understands.

No wisdom, just: I am sorry. That sounds genuinely hard.

My mother cooks as an act of love and my appetite changing felt to her like a rejection, and naming that out loud helped both of us.

I would gently say that a partner's worry is usually love with nowhere to go, and asking them what they are actually worried about often unlocks it.

The thing that changed our house was me being honest about the tiredness rather than pretending I was fine and then being short-tempered.

Quietly agreeing from the other side of the country.

My partner was frightened for me, which came out as disapproval, and it took a long time to hear it as the first thing.

I asked him to stop commenting, once, clearly, and he did, and I had spent four months building up to a two-minute conversation.

Something I did not expect was how much of our relationship had been organised around food, and how much we had to rebuild.

Tegan — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

My family's reaction was the hardest part and I have had to accept that some of them are not going to come round.

Recognition rather than advice, if that is any use at all.

He does the injection, which was his idea, and it turned out to be a way for him to be part of something he had felt excluded from.

What I did not anticipate was how much better things got once I stopped managing everybody's feelings about it as well as my own.