The theory that keeps me alive
On nervous systems, letting go, and the radical act of trusting what wants to come through you
If you've ever wondered whether listening to your body is actually a survival strategy, this one's for you.
Here’s my theory: if I listen to my brain and body and honor their impulses, I’ll live longer.
I know how that sounds. 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 word spiritual deliberately because my illness isn’t just physical. It affects my hypersensitive nervous system, which I like to believe is the gateway to my spiritual core. I don’t know it’s true. I just know it’s true.
Understanding how the nervous system responds to the world, its inputs and outputs, has been key to my maintaining any kind of balance. 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, ranging from IBS to migraine, to total inflammation of my entire body.
I know things about my nervous system that most people will never know about theirs. I know the precise early warning signs of an incoming crash. I know which relationships cost me more than they give. I know which work fills me up and which leaves me feeling empty. I know the difference between the tiredness that means stop and the tiredness that means I should push gently forward.
What I’ve Learned
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, an instinct, an urge, and weighing its impact on my body. Then deciding whether to follow it or let it go. It’s rarely easy and almost never obvious.
I wrestle constantly with ambition and ego. Too much ambition thwarts my efforts. Too little makes me depressed. The sweet spot is narrow and it moves around.
Letting go doesn’t come naturally to me. But I’ve learned 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 Label Problem
Then there’s my other complication: bipolar II disorder. I hesitate to mention it, not because I’m embarrassed, though it’s a genuine pain in the ass, but also one of my superpowers, but because of how labels get treated in our culture.
We’re obsessed with them. We slap them on like shiny name tags 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 actually inhabit the world. And they can quietly become an excuse for no progress. Sorry, got bipolar, can’t make it.
Here’s where I might get into trouble with an unpopular opinion: we rush to medicate the label without asking how it intersects with our creativity, our vocation, our lifestyle, or how the universe might be trying to work through us. I rushed to medicate for sure. I was panicked and just wanted it to be fixed. But then I wrote myself through it.
I don’t mean this in the clichéd find your passion way. Not everyone can do this, I realize. If you have kids, aging parents, debt, or chronic illness, abandoning your responsibilities to become a poet isn’t noble. It’s selfish.
But for me, medicating quickly pushed me down. On 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 meaningfully with both an immune condition and bipolar II has nothing to do with quick fixes. It’s about alignment.
The Actual Theory
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 wrecked my body. Distancing from people who made my nervous and immune systems flare. Learning to stop having so many opinions was a big one. Most stuff is not my fight. Reigning in my tendency to talk too much, even though I talk for a living. Stepping back from giving unsolicited advice and feeling crushed when people don’t take it.
Lately I’ve been working on letting go of my expectations around friendships. I push too hard. I’m not there yet. But I’m starting to recognize the bitter edge of resentment that comes when I consistently overextend myself.
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.”
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, and retreat into the conventional. 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.
The impulses I feel, the sparks of ideas and instincts and creative pursuits, are not random. The universe enjoys expressing itself through me. I believe that. Placebo effect is real and I’m sticking with it.
Ignoring those impulses isn’t just a missed opportunity. It’s a betrayal of my own self.
Honoring them is messy and goes slower than I’d like.
But at 48 it’s 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.
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