A Life Update

There are experiences that quietly change the way you understand yourself, and they don’t announce themselves as transformation while you are living through them. They simply feel like difficulty. Or inconvenience. Or frustration. It is only later, when you begin to reflect, that you see how much was rearranging beneath the surface.

Over the past year, I have been navigating more than one health condition. There has been a gastric issue, including chronic gastritis, and alongside that I have been living with dysautonomia, something that has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Dysautonomia affects the autonomic nervous system. It impacts blood pressure, hydration, circulation, regulation. It makes stability more fragile than most people realize. The gastritis, on the other hand, made eating painful every single time I ate. Not occasionally uncomfortable. Not unpredictable in a mild way. Painful, consistently.

These two conditions complicate one another. The gastritis made nourishment something I began to brace for. The dysautonomia made nourishment essential. One made eating hurt; the other made not eating destabilizing. Living inside that tension required a constant negotiation that, over time, became exhausting.

A few weeks ago, I was in my kitchen trying to make something simple. I could feel that I was depleted. There is a particular sensation that comes before a dysautonomic episode. The room feels slightly off. Your vision softens at the edges. There is a subtle drop in stability that you cannot quite control. I was trying to get food and minerals into myself because I knew I needed them, even though I knew it would hurt.

Then everything began to fade.

It wasn’t a dramatic blackout. It was more like the world drained of color. My peripheral vision narrowed. The room felt distant. I could feel myself descending, aware enough to know what was happening and aware enough to know I might not be able to stop it.

What surprised me was not fear.

It was the thought that rose immediately to the surface: I don’t have time for this.

That sentence revealed more to me than the episode itself.

It told me something about the pace I had internalized. It told me something about how interruption registers in my nervous system. It told me that, even in a moment when my body was asking for attention, part of me was still oriented toward productivity, toward responsibility, toward being needed.

I have long been described as strong. The steady one. The one who can hold emotional space. The one who shows up. And I do not resent that identity. I care deeply about people. I value being present. I value service.

But somewhere along the way, strength quietly merged with the belief that I could absorb anything without consequence.

I did not consciously ignore the signals my body was sending over the past year. I sought care. I researched. I adjusted. And yet, underneath all of that, there was still an assumption that I could continue moving at roughly the same pace. That I could keep holding the same level of responsibility. That I could make minor modifications and everything would stabilize.

Looking back, I can see how I minimized the cumulative effect. I told myself it was manageable. I told myself it was temporary. I told myself I could move through it without making deeper structural changes.

I did not feel ashamed of being sick. But I did resist the restriction. I did not like losing independence. I did not like needing to step back. I did not like feeling limited.

This is where urgency culture reveals itself in a more subtle way.

We often speak about urgency culture in terms of capitalism or productivity, but it also operates internally. It shapes how we experience pause. It shapes how we interpret interruption. It teaches us, quietly, that momentum is safety and that slowing down is risk.

In my case, urgency was not frantic busyness. It was something quieter. It was the belief that I could not afford to fully stop. It was the reflex that categorized my body’s demands as inconvenient rather than instructive.

Urgency culture becomes especially complicated for women who are seen as strong. When someone is perceived as capable, steady, resilient, there is an unspoken expectation that they will remain so. When we put people on pedestals, even gently, we flatten their humanity. We turn them into symbols of steadiness rather than complex, fluctuating human beings.

I have been placed on pedestals in subtle ways, and I have participated in that dynamic myself. There is something seductive about being perceived as solid and reliable. But it leaves little room for visible vulnerability. It leaves little room for collapse.

I am more than my physiology. I am more than my nervous system. And yet, my physiology is not separate from me. It is the terrain through which my life is lived. Ignoring it does not make me more powerful. It only creates misalignment.

What this year has required of me is not a withdrawal from love or service. It has required a rebalancing. It has required me to acknowledge that showing up for others cannot continually outrank showing up for myself. It has required me to create more quiet than I once believed necessary. It has required me to treat nervous system safety as foundational rather than optional.

The world feels loud right now. The political climate is charged. Social media amplifies outrage and fear. I am sensitive to collective activation, and for a long time I believed I could metabolize that intensity indefinitely. I am learning that I cannot do so without cost.

If my body had not brought me to my knees in the kitchen, I suspect I would have continued adjusting around the edges. I would have continued believing that small changes were sufficient. Instead, I have been invited into something more honest.

Strength, as I am coming to understand it more deeply, is not the ability to endure without interruption. It is the willingness to listen when interruption arrives. It is the humility to admit that independence has limits. It is the maturity to build a life that honors those limits rather than fighting them.

I am still strong. I still love deeply. I still care fiercely.

I am simply no longer willing to confuse endurance with empowerment.

And perhaps what has been rearranged this year is not my identity as someone capable, but my understanding of what true capability requires.

I share this not as a dramatic turning point, but as an honest recalibration. I am learning, in a way that feels deeper than theory, that strength without gentleness becomes brittle, and service without self-attunement becomes depletion. I am learning that being human is not a liability to overcome, but a reality to honor. If there is anything I hope you take from this, it is not that you should slow down in some performative way, but that your nervous system matters, your limits matter, and your humanity is not diminished when you acknowledge them. None of us belong on pedestals. We belong in lives that are sustainable, reciprocal, and real.

With love,
Dee