What came next

The part of the story I wanted to skip

I tried a lot of things.

That is the part of the story I almost skipped over when I started writing this. Because it is uncomfortable. It requires me to admit that I, a clinician with years of training in exactly this territory, did not get it right on the first try. Or the second. Or the several that came after that.

The thing about knowing what is happening to you is that it can actually get in your way. I recognized the pattern. I named it correctly. And then I did what every competent clinician does when they identify a problem. I treated it.

I went to therapy. I adjusted my sleep. I started exercising more intentionally. I made (small) changes at work. I set what I believed were boundaries, said no to a few things I would have previously said yes to, tried to carve out time that was supposed to be mine. I did the things. The actual, evidence-based, clinically appropriate things.

And for a while, some of them helped. I want to be honest about that, because I am not interested in telling a story where none of it counted. The therapy mattered. The movement mattered.

But something kept not shifting.

I would have a good week and then slide back. Rest and still feel depleted by Thursday. Feel better and then feel worse in the same month, sometimes the same week, for reasons I could not track. The interventions were touching the symptoms. They were not reaching whatever was underneath them.

Here is the part that took me a long time to understand: I was trying to solve a pattern problem with symptom-level tools.

The symptoms were real. The tools were real. But symptoms are downstream of something. And the something I kept trying to treat was not where the actual leak was. I was mopping the floor without ever turning off the faucet.

I also kept trying to fix it alone. Or more precisely, I kept trying to fix it by becoming more efficient at managing myself. Which is a very clinician thing to do. We are trained to assess, diagnose, and intervene. We are not trained to sit inside something without immediately trying to resolve it. That is actually a liability in clinical work if you are not careful. The discomfort of not acting can push you toward action before you actually understand what you are acting on.

I did not stop long enough to understand what I was actually acting on.

What changed is not a clean story. It did not happen in a single moment or a single modality. It happened slowly, through a combination of things that most of my clinical training would not have pointed me toward. Some of them I would have dismissed outright five years earlier. I am not the same person I was five years ago.

I started paying attention to what I am made of in a different way. Not symptoms. Not function. The underlying architecture of who I am and why I move through the world the way I do. The patterns that were not random. The pulls that kept showing up in different containers.

That is what eventually led me here.

Part 3 is where I tell you what I found. Not as a prescription. As the thing that actually worked, which I am still living inside of now.