For most of my life, I thought my exhaustion was a problem to be solved.
So I went looking for the solution. I did the bloodwork, more panels than I can count. I did the hair tissue mineral analysis. I did acupuncture and energy medicine. I tried the treatments and all the supplements. I am, by every measure, a healthy person, and I have the lab results to reflect it. And still, there were stretches where I was so tired I was almost delirious. I remember making dinner with friends after a hike, cutting carrots like a zombie, barely stringing my thoughts together, while they enjoyed their beers and made a feast, as if no energy had been expended that day. I remember phases where I was crawling up the stairs because my body was too heavy to climb them upright. My friends would say, this isn’t normal. And the bloodwork would say, you’re fine.
I lived in that gap for years. The maddening space between a body that was clearly struggling and a medical system that kept telling me nothing was wrong.
I want to be honest about how long I searched, because it matters. I didn’t skip anything. I’ve done the psychedelic journeys. The breathwork. The energy work. EMDR. Meditation. I’ve done the deep work, the clearing work, the years of trying to find the thing that would finally fix it. And I say that not to dismiss any of it. Some of it changed my life and certainly has made me a healthier and more self-aware person. But what I eventually understood, I understood after the search, not instead of it.
Here is what I found at the bottom of it all.
It wasn’t a deficiency. It wasn’t a diagnosis. It was an imprint. The deepest one I have.
I was born eight weeks early, lungs not developed. I came into this world fighting to breathe, fighting to live. My first experience of being alive was an incubator: a box, needles, hands reaching in to do things to a body that couldn’t consent or understand. My parents unable to hold me, only to reach in and touch my little head, sitting next to me in the NICU. Before I had language, before I had any say in anything, my nervous system learned the foundational equation of my life: survival means fighting through, alone, because no one is coming to regulate me. I have to do it myself.
That isn’t a story I tell about myself. It’s something written into my physiology before I drew a single self-directed breath.
And a nervous system that learns that lesson at the very beginning grows up fluent in exactly two languages: fight, or shut down.
The fight, in my adult life, looks like high performance. The ability to kick into gear and override my own limits indefinitely. Through grad school, through licensing, through building practices, through carrying things and people far past the point my body had anything left to give. I’m good at it. It’s the oldest skill I have. I learned it in an incubator.
And the shutdown looks like the fatigue. The dragging. The delirium after a normal hike. The weeks where I could sleep all day and still sleep at night. For a long time, I thought these were two different problems. They’re not. They’re the same wound wearing two faces. And I started to notice they had a rhythm. The deep fatigue tends to arrive around loss and transition. After my dad died, after breakups, after any shift in relationships that meant a lot to me. This makes sense from an attachment perspective: I feel the grief of the loss and the aloneness, and my body learned to go inward, to self-manage. Cue fatigue. The same thing the newborn did in the box when fighting wasn’t enough.
This is the thing I most want to say, the thing it took me my whole life to learn:
You cannot override what the body already knows.
I tried. I’m exceptional at trying. But you cannot think, push, supplement, or protocol your way out of a survival pattern that was installed before memory. The body keeps its own record, and it does not care how capable you are.
So my work changed.
For years I believed the goal was to heal it: to clear it, purge it, process it, finally arrive at some version of myself that was fixed. I think a lot of sensitive, searching people are caught in that loop right now, exhausting themselves with the healing itself, certain that the next modality is the one that finally empties the well. But that was never going to work for me, because there is no finishing line where the imprint disappears.
What I came back to, after all of it, is almost embarrassingly simple. A nervous system that needs safety and rhythm. Not as a six-week protocol. As a lifestyle. As the actual shape of my life.
We live in a world built to override the body’s signals. We’re inside, at desks, under fluorescent light, still for most of the day, grinding, feet never bare on the ground. And then we wonder why so many of us are tired in a way no lab can explain. The things that actually regulate a nervous system are the ones we’ve designed out of modern life.
I’m still learning what rhythm looks like for me. It’s messy. There are still weeks I drag myself through the fatigue, and weeks I kick into high gear. But now I know what it is, and I know how to meet it instead of fight it. Rhythm, for me, looks like waking with the sun. Going outside first thing. Eating slowly. Coffee I actually taste. A moment of connection to something larger than me. Friends that are fulfilling. Every piece of that, I’ve realized, is the precise antidote to what my body first learned. It is, quite literally, a nervous system reparenting itself. Which is to say: the work, now, is to stop working on it.
I still like working hard. I get something real out of growing a business, helping people, challenging myself. But I cannot live there as a constant state. And learning the difference, between the work that lights me up and the override that slowly empties me, is the self-work of my present life.
I’ll say the obvious thing, because it’s important: I’m not a doctor, and I’m not telling you to stop looking. If you haven’t been thoroughly checked, get checked. Rule things out. Take your body seriously enough to do the medicine.
But if you’ve been in the rabbit hole for years, if you’ve done the panels and the specialists and the protocols and you keep coming back fine while your body keeps telling a different story, I want to offer you the thing I wish someone had offered me sooner. There may be something deeper than a lab can see. Not something broken. Something learned. An old strategy your body adopted to keep you alive, still running long after the danger passed.
And when you finally learn the language of your own nervous system. When you can trace your symptoms back to their earliest strategies, you don’t just understand your fatigue, or whatever pattern you experience. You start to understand a much more whole picture of yourself.
I’m done with the never-ending chase of “healing.” I’m now just building a life around listening. Listening to what my body has been trying to tell me all along.