On Living Through Illness

How I thought my way to health (sort of)

If I listen to my brain and body and honor their impulses, I believe I’ll live longer. That’s my theory. It might sound absurd, but after 30 years of illness, I’ve become something of an expert in what keeps me upright. It’s the work of my life.

My body doesn’t have the defenses most people take for granted—it doesn’t produce antibodies. Even the smallest crack in my spiritual foundation can unravel everything. I use the term spiritual foundation deliberately because my illness isn’t just physical. It affects my hypersensitive nervous system, which I enjoy believing is the gateway to my spiritual core.

Understanding how the nervous system responds to the world—its inputs and outputs—has been key to maintaining balance. The story of my health struggles is long and complicated, but here’s the short version: I have an immune condition that keeps me in a near-constant state of illness. Each day is a buffet of symptoms.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe (rightly or wrongly, but mostly rightly) that the work seeking to come through me either supports my health or undermines it.

The same goes for the people I’m around.

If my nervous system doesn’t like someone, I try to move away. That’s the goal, anyway. It’s not always easy to extract yourself from low-level stressors that quietly pile up over a lifetime.

These days, my work revolves around noticing an impulse—an inspired idea, instinct, or urge—and instinctively weighing its impact on my body. Then I decide whether to follow it or let it go. It’s rarely easy and almost never obvious.

I wrestle constantly with ambition and ego. Because too much ambition will thwart my efforts, too little ambition makes me depressed.

Letting go doesn’t come naturally to me. But I’ve learned that I can move forward when I lean into deeper thought and focus on creative work that nourishes me—work with substance and meaning, the kind that feels like a hearty meal rather than a bag of Doritos.

The way I live—my work, energy, choices, and the people I surround myself with—directly shapes how sick or well I feel.

That might sound obvious: smoke cigarettes, and you’ll eventually feel awful. But for me, it’s more nuanced.

My lifelong dance with illness requires constant recalibration and relentless attention to even the smallest decisions. There are infinite ways to get it wrong, and my nervous system knows them all.

Then there’s my other complication: bipolar II disorder. I hesitate to mention it—not because I’m embarrassed (even though it’s a pain in the ass, I also think it’s one of my superpowers) but because of how labels are treated in our culture.

We’re obsessed with them. We slap them on like shiny name tags—bipolar, ADHD, autism, narcissist, neurodivergent—and cling to them for identity or validation. Yes, labels can make us feel seen, but they also risk flattening the messy, nuanced ways we inhabit the world.

(Plus, they can sneakily act as an excuse and then result in no progress. For me anyhow- “Sorry, got bipolar- can’t make it!”)

And here’s where I might get into trouble with an unpopular opinion- although I’m hoping it gets more popular as people wake to the kind of world we are living in: we rush to medicate the label without asking how it intersects with our creativity, our vocation, our lifestyle, our bad habits, or how the universe (now I’m getting real woo) might be trying to work through us.

I don’t mean this in the clichéd “find your passion” way. Let’s be real—if you have kids, aging parents, debt, or chronic illness, abandoning your responsibilities to become a poet isn’t noble. It’s selfish.

What I’ve learned over 30 years of illness is this: if you want to feel better, live better, or evolve, you have to let go of certain behaviors. And these aren’t dramatic, life-altering sacrifices—they’re often the mundane, pedestrian things we cling to without realizing the toll they take.

For me, that’s meant walking away from teaching dance fitness classes that spiked my adrenaline and wreaked havoc on my sensitive body. It’s meant distancing myself from friends and family who made my nervous system flare up.

And then there are the quieter, less obvious sacrifices. Like learning to stop having so many opinions, or reigning in my tendency to talk too much—even though I talk for a living. It’s stepping back from giving people unsolicited advice (which is so hard for me!) and feeling crushed when they don’t take it, whether they’re a client, a friend, or even my kids.

Lately, I’ve been working on letting go of my expectations around friendships. I push too hard—trying to get people to like me, to spend time with me, to reciprocate effort. It’s frustrating, and I’m not there yet, but I’m starting to recognize the bitter edge of resentment that comes when I overextend myself.

Ultimately, evolving requires giving things up: dopamine rushes, easy distractions, and the illusion of control. It’s not glamorous, but it’s necessary.

There’s a letting go of old patterns, a process of adulting up so that you and your immune system can evolve. It’s not glamorous, but it’s necessary.

I say this as someone who has made plenty of mistakes. For years, I craved a diagnosis, believing it would either unlock my potential or give me permission to step off the relentless treadmill of life.

Contradictorily, I also thought it might launch me to stardom (I’m a performer)—after all, niches like bipolar disorder and chronic illness are trendy, don’t ya know?

Instead, medicating quickly pushed me down. On Depakote, Lithium, or other mood stabilizers, I became a shell of myself. The gifts of my constantly iterating mind—the ideas, the creativity—were gone. My spirit was dampened.

It turns out that living a meaningful life with both an immune condition and bipolar II has nothing to do with quick fixes. It’s about alignment: trusting that the impulses seeking expression through me have a purpose.

Breaking free of cultural programming—the kind that tells us to fit in, follow the rules, and not make waves—is the hardest work of my life.

James Hollis writes:

“There is no going forward without a death of some kind: a death of who we thought we were and were supposed to be; a death of a map of the world we thought worthy of our trust and investment; a death of expectations that by choosing rightly we could avoid suffering.”

To step into a larger life—one that won’t kill me faster—I’ve had to confront the ways I sabotage myself through avoidance, adaptation, or retreat into the conventional. It’s easy to hide in suburban routines, especially in Silicon Valley’s culture of ambition and tech-driven distractions.

Recognizing these patterns is only the beginning. They don’t disappear. They linger, whispering doubts and luring me back into smaller, safer versions of myself.

This is the heart of my theory: the impulses I feel—the sparks of ideas, instincts, and creative pursuits—are not random. I like to believe, rightly or wrongly (because placebo effect is real so I’m sticking with that theory) that the universe enjoys expressing itself through me.

Ignoring that isn’t just a missed opportunity. It’s a betrayal of my own self.

Honoring those impulses is messy, and often goes slower than I’d like.

But I’m learning (at age 48)  it’s also the only way I know to live—and, maybe, perhaps to live a little longer. Or at least enjoy it more while I’m here.