Learning to Live the Journey
This blog post is entirely a personal reflection on my journey over the last two years. There is no science here, nothing about anatomy or movement. Simply me sharing my story.
In the last several years we have all had our worlds rocked. Some of us weathered the storm with barely a change to our lives and some of us have been profoundly affected. This is my story, my journey through the beginning of the global pandemic, and finding myself underneath layers of obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and self-esteem issues.
In the beginning of 2020, I had a plan. I had budgets, timelines, business models, internships… ya know, plans... I had a vice grip on my future, with each decision agonized over to secure the outcome that would allow me to be “successful” in my pursuits. I was also incredibly depressed, struggling with near constant panic attacks and crippling self-doubt.
Cue the emergence of the global pandemic. I shifted quickly from functioning reasonably well to barely functioning at all. In the summer of 2020, after graduating from my Chiropractic program with both a Doctorate and a Master’s of Sports Medicine and passing my National Chiropractic Board Exams, I sat in my apartment in LA unable to eat because I was terrified that the food that I brought home from the store might have glass in it. The contrast was unreal. I sat in my apartment learning how to eat chips with a fork because I was convinced that I couldn’t wash my hands thoroughly enough to decontaminate them. I cancelled classes because I couldn’t touch the floor of my apartment for fear that I would become contaminated by some invisible germs. I cut off my dreadlocks, one of my favorite attributes of myself, because I was washing them three times a day out of constant fear that I had contaminated them in some way. I listened to my family as they tried to tell me the things that I was afraid weren’t real, and it felt like being outside myself, watching as my mind seemed to continue losing touch with what was and wasn’t real. I hid from basically everyone, lost touch with friends, because I didn’t know how to talk about what I was going through, didn’t want to be a burden to anyone, and was no longer able to maintain a façade I had been holding up for years.
But this isn’t a story about the dark stuff. The dark stuff happened; it was real, it was incredibly painful, and I have the deepest empathy for anyone else who has been or is still in that place.
This is a story about what happened next.
Realization #1: I didn’t want my life to be over, I just wanted to stop suffering.
In the fall of 2020, I found a therapist who helped me figure out how to save myself. She diagnosed me with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and, as I learned about it, I started to understand my struggles and myself so much better.
For those of you who don’t know much about OCD, it is not just wanting the clothing in your closet in a particular order or keeping a super clean house, in fact it can make cleaning your house incredibly difficult. OCD manifests in different ways in different people, but the characteristics include intrusive thoughts (obsessions) and compulsive behaviors (compulsions) that result in difficultly functioning (disorder). The best way I can describe this that it is like having an incredibly disagreeable radio station switched on and the only way to turn it off is to do the ridiculous thing the radio station is asking you to do. It starts out small, but the more you do what it asks, the more you feed it. The more you feed it the louder it gets when it comes on, and the more ridiculous the ask is to get it to turn off. It is insidious, the way the most successful cult leaders are charismatic, and before you know it, you have been brainwashed by your own mind. Cue feelings of watching yourself going slowing insane.
Breaking these cycles is challenging, to put it mildly. I found success through exposure therapy, guided by my therapist. During exposures, you literally do the things that turn on the radio station (bring on the obsessions) and then resist doing the things the radio is telling you to (resist the compulsions). I will never forget the first one. It involved taking a clean plate and fork from the dishwasher, putting a little bit of fresh tuna salad from the store on the plate, and eating it with the fork. I was nearly in tears. But more importantly, I beat the compulsions in that moment. It was the first time in months I had been able to exert my own will over the obsessions. It was terrifying. But I kept doing it.
I continued to learn about OCD, I learned to recognize the attributes of obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors. I gained the confidence to start doing exposures on my own. I started to trust the process and my doctors as they put me on a holistic plan help me find myself underneath all of this. I started the process of taking back control of my life.
As I regained some control, I started to realize I no longer knew what direction I wanted my life to take. I looked at my old timelines and business models. I spent five years working on this degree, taking on student loan debt, adding stress to my marriage because my career path and my husband’s career path had us living in different states. All of that had to be for something, right? I felt that I had a responsibility to prove that it was all worth it by using my degree and becoming some version of a chiropractor.
Realization #2: I wanted to learn about the human body, and movement in particular, on a scientific, fundamental level. I did not want to be a doctor.
There is a difference between wanting to follow intellectual curiosity and wanting to take on the responsibility of applying what you have learned to address the broad spectrum of ailments that can affect humans. What I wanted when I went to school was to understand the human body, specifically the way healthy movement practices could help people. The way I found to learn this was through the career path of being a healthcare professional. While I truly enjoy helping people to learn to move better and to understand the relationships between musculoskeletal disorders, movement pattern disorders, and health movement training, that is only a small piece of being a practicing doctor. I learned this as I watched and learned from some amazing, intelligent, dedicated chiropractors, who demonstrated for me what it takes to be an excellent doctor. Being a doctor, even a chiropractor, must be about more than just movement related issues. Even if you specialize, you must be able to help your patients find the right help, which requires you be able to assess and understand the plethora of more insidious disease that masquerade as common musculoskeletal aches and pains. To be the doctor that I would want my patients to have, I would have to be someone that I am not. My decision to step back from this path was simply a recognition that I have a tremendous amount of respect for the excellent chiropractors I have met and the expanding scope the profession is moving towards, but that it is not what I see myself doing for the rest of my life.
As all of this was going on… learning about and working to function in spite of the OCD; having profound realizations that I wanted to change my path, but not sure what I wanted to change my path to; missing the Pacific Northwest and disliking basically everything about being in southern California (other than being with my husband and closer to my family, which made staying here worth it); feeling isolated, losing touch with friends, and not knowing how to reach out; all of that… I started to live the journey…
In early 2021, I decided to take a yoga teacher training. I think the universe was really tossing me a bone, because I could not have asked for a better instructor or group of people to go through the training with at this point in my life. I started the training still in a fairly dysfunctional place in my life. I’m not going to say that yoga saved me, and I mediate daily now or anything. But the training and the discussion absolutely helped me to gain some perspective, to learn some new skills, to open my mind further to new concepts, and through all of this to have more compassion and patience with myself on my own journey.
Later in 2021, I explored an opportunity to revisit a path I had given up a decade ago. My bachelor’s degree was in theatre and dance. I worked in the live events and performance industry for several years and at the same time I had started teaching Pilates. I loved both paths, but I was burning the candle at both ends and decided to stick with the one that was more likely to pay the bills. I quit my jobs in the performance industry. I tried to make independent entertainment drafting into a thing, as computer drafting had become one of my favorite parts of my other job, but there was not enough demand, and I shifted my focus entirely to learning about human movement. And then, in the summer of 2021, when I found myself with an opportunity to brush off my drafting skills and go to work in the film industry here in LA, I figured it wouldn’t hurt anything to explore. So, I took a deep breath, all the skills I learned from my therapist and my yoga training and stepped out of my house and back into the world. Despite having innumerable panic attacks the first several months, as I was working in a number of locations across LA, each with their own obsession inspiring triggers; I completed several months of work on a large production, without ever letting the OCD stop me from completing a task, and I found that I loved the work.
Realization #3: There is a massive difference between functioning and living.
And now as I sit back and reflect on the last nearly two years, I am struck by this third and somewhat obvious sounding realization. I started out my journey of adulthood living. Somewhere along the way I started struggling, didn’t know what it was or how to ask for help, and so I focused on functioning. But functioning started feel more like surviving along the journey rather than living it. Functioning meant my focus was on achieving, after which I could crash, until finding a new target and repeating. That pattern can just run out the clock until the journey is over. I had been inspired by the phrase “be the change you wish to see in the world” and thought that meant I had to give back, move forward, grow myself and those around me, be an endless source of goodness and understanding. And I thought if I could be that, if I could be as selfless as possible, that I would feel that it was all worth it somehow. That if I had a capacity for something that would benefit others it was selfish and wrong of me not to explore it and give more of myself to others. Well, here’s the thing, the further down that path I went the more I felt like all I was doing was functioning. I don’t want to see the world made up of people who are only functioning. I want to see the world made of people who are living. So, if that is the world I want to see, I wasn’t being it. If I want to see a world full of people who are living, I need to live. I need to be on alive on this journey, not just surviving it.
Now I feel more like I’m living this journey. Today I stood outside and felt the warm sun on my back. In that moment my mind was quiet, and I was simply feeling the warmth from the sun. Nothing else. That was living the journey. Two weeks ago, I was on a ski slope, and I watched two moose dancing against each other, in a grove of trees as it gently snowed around them. That was living the journey. Yesterday I led a small class, a part of this community, through a yoga practice, in which I laughed at myself as I couldn’t keep my left and right side straight. This morning I cuddled with my dog while I drank my coffee, last night I had dinner with a new friend, this weekend I’m off on another adventure with my favorite travel partner (my husband). These are the moments that help me define living the journey.
Perhaps the most significant statement about how I have changed over the last two years is that I don’t have a detailed plan for my future. I am working to understanding that no matter what I plan, the journey will have unexpected bumps and surprising crests. If all I do is focus on executing the plan, I’m functioning, not living. To live the journey, I need a compass to point me in a general direction and the courage to continue when I don’t know what is around the next corner.
(P.S. For those of you wondering where my compass is pointing now… I plan to continue teaching for the foreseeable future through virtual interfaces and balancing that with being a film lighting draftsperson, as I travel the world with my husband and dog.)