I'm Esther.

My plan, once, was the "Land of Opportunity." After high school my heart was set abroad; I took the SATs, earned a partial scholarship and a pre-med placement. The money didn't add up, so I "settled" for medical school at home. In my second year I met Keith — charming, sharp, broke in the same way I was — and we married on the last day of 2005, two weeks after our degrees. A senior colleague joked that I graduated with two things: an MBChB and a husband.

More than twenty years later, I've built a life I didn't know to ask for. We travel, but we've chosen to be home in Kenya, raising our three children within our community, eating our own food, and offering our work where we're from. Being home let us care for our parents to the end; I've since lost both of mine, and I'm grateful beyond words that we were there.

In the clinic I kept seeing the same thing: medicine is brilliant at emergencies and failing at the slow diseases that start at the dinner table. So my work widened, into how women eat, move, rest, and see themselves. Into the seasons we're told to be quiet about. Into the truth that a woman's worth was never meant to be measured by sameness with a man.

I believe your body is a gift you've been given to steward. I write and teach so that more women steward theirs well — strong, clear, and fully themselves.