Songfacts®:

• Some people learned to bake bread during the COVID-19 lockdowns but Raye Zaragoza told the Songfacts Podcast she "learned how to never eat bread ever." The singer-songwriter has struggled with disordered eating since she was a teenager, but shrugged it off as not being serious because she wasn't sick enough to be hospitalized. As a result, the stress and isolation of the pandemic caused her to dangerously spiral into her obsession with being as thin as possible. Thankfully, she realized she needed help but she still had bad days during her recovery. One of them was during a writing session with LA singer-songwriter Anna Schulze.
  
  "It was one of those days where I felt like I couldn't be present because my brain was so fixated on all these obsessive thoughts, and I just wasn't in it with her," she recalled. "I was so sad about it and she was like, "Let's just write about this," and we wrote 'Not A Monster.'"
• Zaragoza knew she wanted to write a song about her eating disorder after she found out that so many women shared her struggle, and through the lyrics encourages them - and herself - to stop attaching their self-worth to their weight.
  
  "The song is exactly what it sounds like," she explained. "It's about how even when you struggle with something like this, you are not a monster. If you're not rail-thin, you're not a monster, you're beautiful, and that's something that I've taken a long time to figure out and I'm still figuring out."
• Zaragoza sings about a pair of hands wrapped around her throat, which personifies the illness that has its grip on her. "A lot of people with eating disorders describe having an eating disorder voice - it's almost like this second voice that you deal with every day, which is exactly how I felt," she elaborated on the lyric. "It literally feels like there's this friend/enemy with you at all times with their hands around your throat and they're controlling what you do and you feel helpless."
• This is a single from Zaragoza's 2023 album, Hold That Spirit. Zaragoza, who is of mixed Indigenous, Latina, and Asian heritage, built her career on folk-pop tunes, like her breakout 2016 protest number "In The River," that addressed social-justice issues affecting women and people of color. Her early albums, Fight For You (2017) and Woman In Color (2020), were about finding her place in the world as a mixed-race woman, while Hold That Spirit is about grappling with her internal reality.
  
  "It's not about as much of the outside world as it is about the world inside," she told Songfacts. "And I think that ends up relating to the outside world. It has a lot of similar themes from my last records, but this album is so much more personal than any of my other records. My spirit isn't mixed-race, my spirit is just a spirit. There's no box around that. There's no real identity to that."