#55: Maya Kotomori
"If my current lifestyle had a title, it would be 'Outer Borough Cheap Hedonia ft. Pilates.'"
#55: Maya Kotomori
Maya (@utilitiesnotincluded) is a writer, editor & cultural critic. Alongside contributing to publications like i-D, Document, and Artnet, like many Health Gossip guests (past, pending, future), she also runs a fabulous blog. At the end of her latest post, a word of advice: “Say no, and do something even more daring; mean it.”
Health Gossip with Maya Kotomori
Responses logged May 4, 2025
New York, NY
What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?
The pinnacle of health and well-being for me revolves around both the depth and duration of your sleep, as well as pooping twice a day. I learned very recently that a large part of “I’m just a girl” ED-associated online discourse centers having poor gut health as if it somehow comes with the territory of being a girl. Cannot relate. I feel my least healthy during my first couple days of traveling when my bowels are adjusting to a new timezone, and I’ll have to void them at, like, 3pm in the middle of fashion week. That will actually put me in a cosmically bad mood, same with not feeling like I’ve slept properly. While I know a full eight to 10 hours (depending on depression, seasonal or otherwise, and/or general illness like the common cold) is very important, some of the days I’ve felt my strongest/most virile have come after a coma-like five hours of sleep. I will say though, there’s nothing better than the morning after defeating a fever or hangover with the most deep and restful dreamless 10-hour sleep. As long as I am sleeping and sh*tting, I am healthy and happy.
What was your upbringing like? What are some of your earliest associations and memories of health?
I used to be a nationally-ranked synchronized swimmer from the ages of nine to 13, so my image of health was being fed enough to contort my body in increasingly punishing yet cool ways, but not full to the extent that I would aspirate on my own vomit while twirling upside down and underwater. Health was being able to do that and not feel like I was going to drown or die. Around pre-teens I really started to feel the need for sleep because not only was I growing, but my involvement in synchro was getting more intense; that’s when I started drinking coffee on occasion and really paying attention to my sleep schedule. My dad once read that as a kid, Obama would wake up early to do his homework rather than stay up late, so whenever I was exhausted after swim practice he and my mom would encourage me to enjoy dinner and family time, go to sleep, and wake up at 4am to do my homework before school. Honestly, it worked.
How would you describe your current lifestyle?
As a freelance writer, I can do “whatever I want” in theory, but in practice I really just read, write (both for work and pleasure), think, amble, and watch copious amounts of TV. If my current lifestyle had a title, it would be “Outer Borough Cheap Hedonia ft. Pilates.”
How do you start and end your days?
Every day is different depending on whether there is an arts/culture/reading event the night before or how early my favorite Pilates class is, but I try to wake up between 6.30 and 8am naturally. First thing, I make sure to drink 8oz of water to hydrate after brushing my teeth, and then I caffeinate: if I’m working out, I will substitute my coffee with a Celsius because they actually have clinically proven metabolic benefits, which is something I need. I’ll head to the gym, shower there, return home and eat breakfast (I prefer morning workouts done fasting), make a deeply pathological to-do list of all my assignments and other things I need to do like dust or re-organize my closet, complete the list, eat a snack, go for a walk, and then typically around 6 or 7pm I’m doing something social, like seeing a movie, going to a reading, hanging out with a friend. I’m a fairly type-A person so giving myself structure with time in between to bee-bop around is my ish right now.
Can you recall a moment when you became more aware of your health, or your relationship to it changed?
I tore my ACL at the end of 2022 and then got fired from my job and therefore lost my health insurance during the very beginning of 2023, so I was down horrendous. Didn’t have any money, needed to have invasive surgery that would require me learning how to walk again. It was the pits. But, once I was able to walk again and started physical therapy, I realized how I’d been taking my body for granted a bit: after quitting synchronized swimming due to a severe concussion when I was 13, I played water polo in high school, and abandoned all physical exercise all together when I decided I wanted to be a writer and journalist at 15. So by the time I tore my ACL, I hadn’t exercised at all beyond your average daily New York activities for 9 years, and honestly, it was because I was somewhat scared and ashamed of my own internal competitiveness that I learned from doing sports so intensely as a kid. Physical therapy taught me that exercising is restorative, equal parts re-framing fears and being kind to yourself. Today, two years and some change past my ACL reconstruction, I still feel like my left leg is stronger than my right. I also have mild scoliosis that makes me naturally favor my right side, so now I try and exercise in the pursuit of evenness in my body.
What’s your relationship to self-healing?
Though I am from Southern California, I am not woo woo enough to fully believe in the concept of self-healing because it feels like more jargon from Big Wellness aimed at selling crystals, weird-smelling tinctures, et al. Skepticism aside, there are tenets of self-healing that I do believe in, such as diet and exercise. I pretty much cured all the symptoms of my PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome) by starting to exercise every day and make sure I was eating enough protein. What people don’t know is that while PCOS causes insulin resistance and hormonal imbalances, insulin resistance as a result of poor diet, no exercise, genetic factors, etc can also cause hormonal imbalances that make symptoms so much worse, like weight gain and hirsutism. So, while doctors will definitely participate in a bit of FUPA physiognomy to tell you, “Hey, you’re fat and have PCOS so diet and exercise will solve your problems,” a bit of what they’re saying is true. I kind of love Western medicine for this reason, because it’s a reminder that absolutism will never make you feel better. Treating a condition or self-healing can never be, “I did this, therefore I solved all my problems.” It’s all about finding what parts of logic, modern science, and self-exploration can make you feel good inside yourself.
Do you work with any practitioners, texts, or modalities on a regular basis?
Like many young Zillennials, I am a student of the teachings of Joseph Pilates. Pilates has been really positive for me because it employs the same flexibility and body-weight-as-resistance that training for synchronized swimming does. While I wasn’t the most talented synchro swimmer, I was pretty good — doing Pilates is like my adult exercise version of dapping up my inner child while still using weird muscle groups in the funky, bendy ways that drew me to the sport when I was a kid.
Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism and RSVP Cycles by Anna and Lawrence Halprin are two key texts that, in tandem, ground my current life philosophy. (I’m only 26, so I don’t know if I’m allowed to have one of those yet.) Specifically I’m drawn to Berlant’s idea of toxic positivity as it relates to ideas of progress — both capital-P Progressive Thought, and the idea of personal progress or growth. Next to the Halprins’ RSVP Cycles, a protocol for creating dance scores with intuition rather than 5678-style choreography [editor’s note: see image above], both ideas become a kind of worldview for me — avoid setting so many goals, feel as much as you aspire. As a dancer and an urban planner couple, Anna and Lawrence Halprin created the RSVP Cycles to decenter goals or accomplishments within developing any work; in dance, it might be choreographing through a “problem,” in urban planning, the idea of focusing a project on progress rather than people. Putting Berlant and the Halprins in conversation, positivity, growth, and progress can very quickly become toxic standards people hold themselves to and in turn, automate their lives more than they live them.
I use both of these texts as a reminder for me to experience rather than goal-orient my life; if there’s something I want to accomplish, I know that a series of step-by-step wins won’t get me to where I want to be, they’ll pacify me into becoming a swagless striver. I am a striver (born in ’98), just with swag. To quote RSVP Cycles, “The real hub of the issue, however, is what you control through the score and what you leave to chance; what the score determines and what it leaves indeterminate…the variables of unforeseen or unforeseeable events, and to the feedback process which initiates a new score.” I like to hold both of these ideas as simultaneously true: life is a score, and a score can be determined by both controlled and uncontrolled events. It makes me feel grounded in my experience here on earth.
How do you reset?
There’s nothing quite like watching several hours of procedural television with at least three beverages (water, kale smoothie, Diet Coke). If I’m feeling overstimulated or just generally stuck, I will lay on my floor in complete silence with absolutely no media intake until I feel like I am floating. Some people have told me this is meditating but I don’t think I’d like to give this activity a label.
When do you feel the most nourished?
After eating literally anything cooked and served to me by my mom. I feel bad for everyone who has not had a meal prepared by Yasmin Kotomori. Spiritually though, I feel my most full and open after doing the Pilates series of 5 followed by the 100 and then an isometric straight-arm plank hold until burn-out, and then taking a quick Shavasana. I don’t set any intentions because I don’t really believe in that per question 7, but it feels good to be awake and laying on the floor like a sexy corpse.
What types of foods are you typically drawn towards? Do you have a favorite meal?
My favorite food has to be a big ass assortment of sashimi. I love raw fish so much that the way I crave it makes me think I’m deficient in some key vitamins or something (my doctors unanimously disagree; I’m, like, aggressively healthy for being nearly medically obese). My ideal sashimi plate has tuna toro, hamachi, salmon, eel, seabream, amberjack, and regular tuna, with a side of warm white rice and wasabi. Controversial take: I don’t like to put soy sauce on my sashimi because I really love that clean fleshy taste of the fish with a bit of bright-heat from the wasabi and the warm rice.
I also love to tweet what I’m eating in the format of an all-caps run-on sentence. Here’s today:
PASSIONFRUIT CELSIUS 8OZ WATER OVERNIGHT OATS WITH HOMEMADE BLUE SPIRULINA MILK ALMOND BUTTER AND RASPBERRIES FRESH DELI TURKEY HOMEMADE MARINATED BEETS SMOKED PROVOLONE AND ARUGULA DRESSED IN BALSAMIC VIN CALABRIAN CHILI PASTE AND OLIVE OIL SALT PEPPER ON SOURDOUGH TABBOULEH WHICH IS COUS COUS CHOPPED TOMATO CUCUMBER HELLA PARSLEY OLIVE OIL SALT AND LEMON WITH 2 OF MY SIGNATURE SPICED CRISPY CHICKEN THIGHS HOMEMADE BROWNIE WITH ONE SCOOP OF VAN LEEUWEN FRENCH VANILLA BEAN ICE CREAM.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
People don’t hate you because you didn’t tie your left shoe before your right shoe that one time and disrupted the universe, people hate you because you’re a dick. Be nicer.
To the person reading this?
Start wearing earplugs. Dirty stank filthy putrid bass is the greatest feeling in the world and you’re gonna want to be able to hear it past 35.
What would you like to see or create more of in the world?
I would love to see people un-pill themselves. Ideology is one big philosophical in-group out-group exercise and I think we need less subscription to that. Don’t be a joiner.
What Maya is listening to: “The Three D’s: Death Grips, Drexciya, and Dionne Warwick.”
What Maya is reading: “Middlemarch by George Eliot, Heroines by Kate Zambreno, aye, and gomorrah and other stories by Samuel R. Delaney.”
Bonus recs: “The Alaïa corset belt I just got, Isamaya Hyalurolip Lip Gloss, Celsius On The Go packets, OPI Pro Spa cuticle oil (it is the only thing that stops me from feasting on my cuticles), Papermate Flair Medium tip pens (hella ergonomic), Beautifying Botanicals Beauty Sleep Herbal Tea, The Boob Tape Boop Tape & Nipple Covers (for underbreast sweat).”
