The Return

How it started ....

For a long time, I was really moving.

Not just busy. Moving forward. With intention. I was doing the right things in the right order and I knew it. I was present in my career, present as a mother, showing up in my community. A dedicated clinician. A PTA parent. A partner. There were hard things along the way. There always are. But I was getting through them.

I finished graduate school. By the following year, the economy had collapsed. I built a career anyway. I had two young children when COVID arrived and the world shut down. I was working in a remote digital health space, at exactly the moment telehealth became the only way anyone could get care outside of the emergency department. It was insanely busy. It was also terrifying. Navigating the fear of a pandemic while managing risk to my family, my community, my patients. All of it at once, from inside the walls of my own home.

And then I turned 40.

I was excited about it. Genuinely. There is this thing people say about turning 40, about the confidence that arrives, the awareness, the sense of finally settling into yourself. I believed it. I had navigated so much. I was ready for that turn.

What I was not ready for was what actually happened.

The image I keep coming back to is a car. My foot on the gas, moving at sixty miles an hour, burning rubber. And then a wall. Not a slowdown. Not a warning. A brick wall. Out of nowhere. Nothing in my prior history that made me see it coming.

I just remember the feeling of not recognizing myself anymore. Not recognizing my life. I was not getting joy from time with my husband or when I hugged my children. The things that were supposed to reach me weren’t reaching me.

As a clinician, I recognized this for what it was (and what that ICD-10 code would show up in my records). When your professional identity has been built around managing patients who presented the same way - it is a specific kind of hard I was not prepared for.

I did what I had always advised my patients to do. I made an appointment with my primary care provider. She was kind. She was open. I started therapy. And therapy was helpful, eventually. Finding the right person took time. Real connection took time.

But here is the thing no one tells you. Or the thing you do not fully understand until the shoes are on the other foot.

When you are a clinician who becomes a patient, you are still perceived as a clinician first. Some providers will speak to you differently. They assume you already know. They abbreviate. They skip the part where they just sit with you in it because they respect what you have built and assume you do not need the slower version. I understand that. I even appreciated it in some ways. But it also meant I was never quite allowed to just be the person who did not know what was happening to her. I was supposed to know.

And that brings its own guilt.

Because I did know, intellectually. I had studied this. I had treated this. I knew the clinical framework, the evidence, the pathways forward. And it still was not working the way I needed it to. The knowing and the healing were not the same thing. I had never fully understood that until I was standing in that gap myself.

That is a very hard place to live in. Knowing everything you are supposed to do. Doing it. And still feeling like the version of yourself that used to exist has gone somewhere you cannot reach.

And despite knowing where to go for help, the places and resources I had recommended for patients were not working the way I had hoped they would.