A hungry woman is easier to dismiss than a well-fed woman.

Years later, after my second child, norovirus made the rounds in my home and took me down for two full days. It was vomiting, diarrhoea, my liver working so hard that my eyes turned yellow, actual jaundice, because my body had stopped pretending it was fine well before I had. I kept going to work during this, not because I was unaware of how ill I was, but because I had spent so many years treating depletion as a manageable condition that it had stopped reading as a reason to stop. When a male colleague saw me a few days afterward, thinner and wrung out, he actually said: ‘Wow, you finally bounced back from your baby. You look like yourself again.’ My weakened body and jaundiced eyes had been read as an achievement.