I've always felt deeply connected to my body. As a young girl, that connection blossomed through my love for dance, where I expressed myself through choreography and movement on stage. In my early adulthood, I embraced the outdoors, moving from the Chicago suburbs to Charleston, SC for my undergraduate studies, and then to Jackson Hole, Wyoming; where I took my first leap into the unknown, an experience that truly reshaped my identity.
However, I soon realized that what I thought was passion was, in fact, an obsession intertwined with disorder. With the support of loved ones and trained professionals, I confronted my Eating Disorder, which was its own form of Body Grief—though I hadn’t yet found the words to describe it.
Fast forward through my recovery and my pursuit of a Master’s in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, specializing in Eating Disorders and Grief. I briefly worked as a therapist until my own health began to unravel. At 27, I was living happily in Charleston with my fur babies and my sweetheart, but that joy quickly turned into a battle with multiple health challenges. My life went from adventures to countless hospital visits, learning my diagnoses, and counting blessings; alongside surgeries, as if it were a full-time job. This journey led me to open my own practice as a Recovery Coach, where I developed a curriculum to guide clients through recovery, building a comprehensive support team, and training fellow Recovery Coaches to work ethically within Eating Disorder frameworks.
Today, I navigate life with diagnoses including Classical Like Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, intracranial hypertension, endometriosis, vascular compressions, and an incomplete spinal cord injury. After enduring 20 brain and spine surgeries and a radical hysterectomy, I now live with my Medical Mobility Service Dog, I am a wheelchair user, and proudly embrace every mobility aid available. I believe in empowering others to live fuller, more independent lives with these tools.
You can learn more and fill in the blanks by reading This is Body Grief!
It's All a Beautiful Process
Jayne chooses to lean into Body Grief with each and every brush stroke, splatter and scratch of the canvas, creating layered and mixed media work much like life with chronic illness. Her written words published in THIS IS BODY GRIEF with Penguin Life, define and conceptualize the under-recognized grief experiences that come with living in a body.
Through her lived experience with an eating disorder, as well as navigating life with a physical disability and chronic illness, Jayne invites individuals to wonder about their own experiences with body grief.
Jayne coined the term Body Grief to name the very real and often overlooked mourning process that comes with living in a body from puberty, to aging, chronic illness to menopause, and gender dysphoria to disability.
Body Grief, although universal in concept, is incredibly personal in how each individual experiences the feelings, needs and emotions surrounding said Grief. This is not a “fix all” or “miracle” solution to the intense loss that comes with living in an ever changing body that doesn’t seem to fit in an ableist world, instead Body Grief is a framework that gives us language, tools and compassion towards ourselves and our story.
Want to book Jayne as a speaker? Email [email protected]
Book Jayne as a Speaker
Bring Jayne Mattingly into your classroom, conference, workplace, community, or book club for conversations that make space for what it means to live in a body; and in a world that often asks us to change it. Jayne speaks on disability rights and inclusion, Body Grief, body trust, and body image, weaving lived experience, professional expertise, storytelling, humor, and practical tools into every conversation. She also offers intimate book club conversations around This Is Body Grief, creating space to explore the book’s ideas together and connect them to our own lives. Whether you’re looking for a keynote, workshop, panel, or book club conversation, Jayne brings an honest, accessible, and deeply human approach to every room.
jayne speaking
with oprah
speaking engagements
gloria steinem &
Dr. Nolah Haynes
jayne with
sunny hostin
A little more behind the scenes: I’m finding myself after divorce, trading Charleston sunshine for Chicago city lights, and midwestern suburban friendly neighbors and embracing my identity as a late-in-life lesbian. I’m also navigating a high-masking autism diagnosis while living with my parents as a high-needs, chronically ill, disabled 35-year-old—because apparently, my plot has several character arcs….Oh Hey Body Grief!
Come A Little Closer
i think i like it here...
Looking back on my life, I struggled with academics; especially math and reading. I was constantly pulled out of class, enrolled in after-school programs, sent to school at least an hour early, and in tears over homework with one of my parents every night.
It wasn’t until third grade, when I was confidently reading Britney Spears and *NSYNC fan magazines, and eventually the Harry Potter series (I know I know) that something finally clicked. I began to comprehend what my fingers were underlining as I read aloud.
As I loudly and playfully embrace my inner child as part of healing from my late-in-life diagnosis of high-masking autism, I find it karmic that I’m doing so back in the house where I was raised…with the career title “Author” from the publishing house I could always recognize as a child because it was the one with the little penguin on the binding.
As I close my eyes each night through excruciating chronic pain and say goodnight to the Spice Girls poster hanging above my bed, I realize that maybe my hyperfixation on Baby Spice was more than that. It was probably my first gay awakening; I was just too conditioned by a hetero world to understand it.
So now, I make art; playful, vibrant art, like a child.
I think I like it here.
Wheatie is my mobility service dog; a program-trained service dog, trained especially for me, protected under the ADA. Technically, he is considered a medical device. He is trained to retrieve anything I need, open and close doors, help me up from the floor or out of my wheelchair, turn lights on and off, assist with laundry, and retrieve my keys, phone, and medication.
He provides deep-pressure therapy by lying on top of me to help with pain and low blood pressure. He alerts me when I’m dissociating due to PTSD and comforts me when I’m anxious. He also alerts me when someone is in my blind spot; when I can’t see them, and helps keep me safe when it’s just the two of us.
When he’s “on duty,” he wears his vest and is working exclusively for me, so please don’t touch or talk to him. When he’s off duty, he’s my best friend and lover boy, though he’s still always looking out for me.
Wheatie and I are a package deal. Wherever I go, Wheatie goes, and vice versa. You may even find little pieces of him in my art: stray whiskers or bits of fur layered into the paint. It all tells the real story of us.
I love you, Wheatie.