At the end of this year I had to give up dairy. Some of you are thinking, oh how unfortunate. Some of you are thinking, shut up and get over it. Some of you maybe don’t actually have emotional attachments to food and might not understand why I’m talking about that at all.

October 31st is the last day I ever knowingly consumed any type of product that contained dairy milk or any derivative thereof. And it sucked. It really did. It really fucking sucked. I’m not over it. It sucks.

Do you have any idea how much I love cheese?

A lot.

I love cheese a lot.

Also yogurt. Lemon flavored yogurt has been a safe food for me since long before I had any idea what a safe food was. It became a safe food the very first moment I put it in my mouth.

Steaming hot cocoa with whipped cream on top. Wow.

A milkshake? A chocolate milkshake? No notes.

So saying so long to dairy was hard. But was it any harder than giving up any of the other things I’ve given up in the past few years?

In reverse order, I’ve had to cut the following things out of my life during 2025:

• All dairy products, regardless of the animal they come from or how long they have been aged
• Seed oils. All of them. I can’t have fucking sesame oil. Sesame oil, people.
• Caffeine. I mean, I can still have a cup of decaf something or other, but I can’t caffeinate. Did I mention I used to be a barista? Did I mention that for much of my life my favorite liquid to pour into my mouth, second only to water, is hot black coffee untouched by petty things like sugar or cream? So yeah. No more caffeine.
• Corn syrup. But from what I hear, everyone needs to give this shit up.

That was just this year.

Several years ago I had to give up bourbon because drinking it caused me to have horrible skin reactions. On my fucking toes. Do you have any idea how uncomfortable that is?

Then I gave up alcohol entirely a couple of years ago. I quit eating gluten more than a decade ago. I quit smoking when I was 23 or 24, but that was just sensible. Walnuts. I gave those up because they make my mouth break out in sores.

I’ve had to give up strawberries a couple times in my life because I thought I was allergic to them. It turns out I’m just a little bit allergic to almost everything if my body isn’t in the mood to deal with it.

Plain regular cow’s milk I gave up after I tasted it for the first time as a kid because that shit was always nasty to me and I could never understand why anyone would drink it.

I have given up so much.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize that giving up is something I have been doing my entire life. But I don’t mean it as an insult.

Though it’s painful, all these things I’ve given up have been things that don’t serve me. Some of them go deeper than that. I’ve given up so many tangible things in life. I’ve given up home. I’ve given up humans. I’ve given up the hard shell coating over my soft skin.

There’s also the matter of the rights that have been forcibly stripped away under the current governmental regime. Bodily autonomy. Safety. The expectation of privacy. The idea that what happens to my body should involve my consent.

None of that was given up. It was taken. So for the purposes of this post, it doesn’t count.

But I’ll grieve it anyway. I don’t need permission for that either.

This isn’t a post about food. It’s a post about loss that doesn’t look dramatic enough to be taken seriously. About how survival keeps asking me to loosen my grip, again and again, on things I love.

I’m tired. I’m compliant. I’m still grieving. And I’m not done giving things up… but I wish I could stop pretending it doesn’t cost me anything.

I give up because my body demands it. I give up because keeping it would hurt more. I give up because I’ve learned how.

And I keep going anyway… pared down to function, hauling grief like a requirement, not a choice.