About My (re)Birthday - EP 019

In this deeply personal episode, I open up about my personal journey of navigating through a massive transformation over the past few years. Facing challenges like fatigue, brain fog, anxiety, and an identity crisis—stemming from perimenopause and undiagnosed ADHD—I found myself questioning everything and learning to walk my talk in a whole new way. I share my thoughts on the need to search out the right professional help and guidance when needed to support our own wellbeing and healing, even when we, ourselves are qualified professionals. I also talk about the significance of understanding and honoring one's natural cycles and seasons in life, and how this awareness can lead to greater ease and alignment. 

My experiences taught me to let go, trust the process, and fully embody my own Satisfaction Strategy by doing the best I could, even when that meant doing nothing at all.

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Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome to Pleasure and Profits. I'm your host, Rachel Anzalone, and I am recording today, July 31st, 2024, a couple of days after my 46th birthday. And I have to tell you that when I was jotting down my notes for this, I kept typing the 26th. I kept thinking, the 26th. And so apparently I think I'm still 26, but that is definitely not the case. I turned 24. my gosh, I just did it again. I can't stop. I turned 46. Maybe I'll just start saying I'm 26. I turned 46 a few days ago and it was a really, really interesting day and I really want to share it with you. and not just the day, but sort of what led up to the day and what my realizations were around the day.

And it was a really interesting day that I would love to share with you. So first, on the morning of my birthday, I slept in, got up around 8:30. You might not think that's sleeping in, but that's about as late as it gets for me. I fed Trixie, I made coffee, I did all the usual morning stuff, and it was raining super hard that morning. And I just had the most relaxing time just sitting on my couch, drinking coffee, reading a book and talking with my husband and watching the rainstorm. It was really beautiful.

My idea of the best birthday ever is the most chill day that you can possibly think of, like getting a massage, coffee, reading a book, super low key, maybe a glass of wine in the evening. Even when I was in high school, my mom would ask me what I wanted for my birthday. And I would say, I just want the house to myself. I just want to be alone for the day. That was at 16, and that has never changed. I still feel that way about my birthday every single year.

And so this was my plan to have a super relaxing and quiet day. So a little later on that morning, I decided to make breakfast and I cooked up some blueberry protein pancakes and some bacon and I ate breakfast with my husband. And by the time I finished breakfast, I was feeling really, really tired.

And I told my husband I was gonna go lay down for a little bit and I brought a book. I grabbed my iPad. It didn't really feel like reading, so I kind of laid down and thought I was going to read for a second, and then I decided to put on an episode of Lost. And yes, I am watching Lost for the first time ever 20 years after it came out. No spoilers, please. Hahaha.

So I was laying there for a while and I was feeling kind of down. Like I wanted this to be a chill and relaxing day, but not this chill, not zone out and watch Netflix kind of chill. So I was feeling kind of sad. I was feeling sad because I didn't even feel like doing the things that I enjoy doing. And after a little while, my husband came in and he asked me how I was doing and the tears just started pouring out.

Like they had been sitting just below the surface and just waiting for an opportunity to release. And I realized that I had been feeling kind of down most of the week before my birthday. And I just, hadn't been able to put a finger on it. Like it had come up a couple of times, like Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, but I just, I just felt emotional. I felt a little mopey, a little sad.

And I'm laying there and I'm just crying and like I could not stop crying. And my husband came and he laid down with me for a little bit and he just let me cry. Just let me get it out of my system. And after laying there for a while, just letting it pour out, I realized that the emotion that I was feeling wasn't actually sadness, that it was a release. It was, it felt like a relief. It felt like letting go of something that I had been carrying around that had been really, really heavy and finally I could set it down. It felt like coming through something really fucking difficult and finally being able to relax and let it go.

And so I started to talk to my husband about that and reflecting on what has gone on over the last couple of years and how really, really challenging this time has been for me. And that finally, finally, after so much confusion and chaos and effort that I finally feel really, really good. But it was like for so long, I had just been hanging on by my fingernails just to get through and just to do, like as much as I could on any given day, however little that was. Just to be able to to do whatever I had the capacity to do. It was like I had been living in this tension of trying to survive really and simultaneously to not push or strive to like trust the process and get through the experience.

And then finally I'm here, like this tension had been building and building and building. And finally I'm on the other side of this where I can actually fully relax and feel good and enjoy the fact that I feel really good and that this season had passed. And so I really want to share with you what it was that I had been experiencing and I want to give some context to what led up to this massive emotional release.

So the first thing you need to know is that my birthday is like New Year's to me. I don't really get January 1st. I don't feel any connection to it. I do feel a little bit of connection to the astrological New Year, the Chinese New Year in February. And that's about six months before my birthday. And so those are kind of my two touch points in the year.

I tend to get super reflective around my birthday as if it is the New Year. I like to spend time reflecting, taking stock of the previous year, looking forward, sort of tuning into what's going on and what it is that I want to be experiencing in the next season.

I don't generally follow numerology. It's just, it's not something that I'm super into or I know that much about, but I have a really good friend who is super into it. And she and I are on the same personal year. And so even though we're like some years apart in age and we live very, different lives and we're going through very different experiences, every time we talk, it's like we're living these parallel experiences. And so this year for me, 2024 is a seven year.

And the seven year is about reflection and introspection and personal evaluation and internal growth. And it's really about questioning everything. And I remember when she told me that at the beginning of the year, I just remember feeling super annoyed. Like, you gotta be fucking kidding me. Isn't like, isn't this what I've been doing all along? How am I still doing this? And yet here I am, deep in the theme of questioning everything.

Trixie's here for our recording. Okay, and so of course, I talk about this all the time. We live in cycles, we live in seasons, we live in the moon cycles. As women, we have our menstrual cycles. Everything in nature is in an ebb and a flow. Everything is constantly being born, expanding, dying off, being reborn again. It's nature and it's our nature.

And so when we tune into these cycles, if you're listening on audio, I have a cat between me and the microphone right now. And so when we tune into these cycles, we start to see the rhythms of what's happening beyond what we're trying so desperately to control. And we become aware that we've been trained to operate in ways that don't honor our cycles. And it's something that I've been really keenly focused on the last probably a decade or so really learning to listen to and pay attention to what cycles we're in collectively, what cycles I'm in personally. And it's a really important part of how I experience life and the lens that I look through.

And so one of the things that's happened over the last, it's been just about 18 months, is that I'm no longer on a clear personal moon cycle, menstrual cycle. Like I am deep in the midst of perimenopause. And so while I used to be so tuned in to how I was feeling throughout the month based on my hormone cycles, that clock, that measurement that was reliable and consistent, it has completely disappeared. It's totally unpredictable and it feels chaotic and it feels like being a drifted sea with no compass and no map. And so this has been a time for me of feeling really lost and actually questioning everything.

And there's been so much uncertainty. Not in my vision and not in my purpose, but there has become an unreliability and an unpredictability to my capacity and to my abilities. Things that I never questioned before suddenly feel like I don't know if I can actually do that. I don't trust my own capacity to make commitments and get things done because my energy, everything has just become so unreliable and so unpredictable.

And it's been pretty fucking hard. It's been a really hard time. And as I was thinking about sharing this, I thought for sure there's going to be some people who are like, but I saw you on Instagram and you look like you were doing all right. You know, or they've had an experience with me of, a 10 minute exchange or an hour exchange. And they'll think like, you seem fine. I don't really, I don't really get it. I never would have known.

And in the last couple of days, I've had conversations about this with more people outside of my immediate circle. And it's been reflected back to me a number of times. Like, I never would have known what was going on. And I think that that is a common story. Like, we don't really know what's going on with people. And so we only see these little snippets, these little moments. And so there's two really important things that you need to know.

One is that everybody who's close to me knows that this has been going on because I have talked incessantly about it. I have researched obsessively and shared resources and people who are close to me and in my circles know that this is a thing that has been really, really present in my life the past few years. And if you saw me, whether it was online or in person, what you saw and all we ever see is a tiny snapshot of time and it is not the whole picture.

And so let me just be super clear that I do not feel at any point like I've been putting on a show of any sort or trying to put out some image of perfection, definitely not perfection, but some sort of an image of like, you know, sort of living in the clouds all the time and like living the high life or anything like that. What you see is that, you know, that snapshot might be like the one moment in that day where I did feel really genuinely good and happy and I took a picture and I wanted to share it. Or I felt really inspired to write something and created it and delivered it. Or I, you know, got on a summit or an interview or taught a class or something where I just, I like felt great in that moment or I knew that I was doing that. And so I focused my energy to feel great in that moment.

But what you don't know is that that might have been the one moment, the one hour, the one day that I felt that way. And what I certainly have never taken a photo of is the days where I felt like shit and only made it to lunch and then had to lay down for three hours because A, who wants to see that? And B, in those moments, I sure as hell am not thinking about showing other people what I'm doing. I'm just in the experience that I'm having.

And so, I heard somebody say a long, time ago, never talk about your mess while you're in it. And I think that there is value sometimes to sharing an experience while you're going through it. And if there is value for other people in that, then you should do that. And if that feels good to you. But I do not believe that there is value in sharing what's happening to you when you are in a hot mess and you can't make any sense of it.

When if you're doing that, to me, it feels like you're just vomiting all over people. And I feel like for myself, if I until I have something constructive or useful to say about it, then there's no point, right? Yeah. And so I've shared what I felt like sharing and I haven't shared a lot of this because I didn't have clear answers. And even a year ago,

I was looking at my Facebook memories, and a year ago, I shared a reel on my platforms of me working out that my trainer, I worked with him a couple days a week, he had put it together. And at that point on that day, when I shared that, I read the post and I was like, I really thought that I had it figured out here. And then,

And I realized looking at that, like in that moment, I felt good. And I was like, yes, I am on this. I am on the right path. I'm going to talk about this. I'm going to tell people what I've been experiencing. But there were just so many ups and downs that seemed, but there were just so many ups and downs and If I had gone on to share more and more about what I was experiencing, it probably would have been like, it wouldn't have even been half the story. It would have been a tiny fraction of the story because I definitely did not have figured out. Because I definitely did not have it figured out. I was so in the very beginning of figuring it out.

And so what I can say now is that I'm in a really good place. I believe that I am over that hump. And while I'm certainly not 100 % on the other side, I feel like I have some really valuable perspective and insight that could actually be helpful.

And so I'm super grateful that there are leaders in women's health and women with huge platforms who are speaking about perimenopause and menopause and women's health in general, because it's a conversation we need to be having more and more so that we're not caught completely off guard, which is what happened to me, or that we're not being dismissed or ignored or wrongly diagnosed, which happens to so many women. And so when I think about the women in my communities, my peers, my clients, you listening to this podcast, as an entrepreneur who's running a business and has a big vision and has things that you're really excited about and being a high performer, which you are, whether you realize it or acknowledge it or not, being all of that and then not actually being able to get the work done because of energy levels, hormone chaos, body aches, brain fog, anxiety, like the list goes on and on and on. It can feel really, it can feel totally derailing and devastating. And that's how it felt to me.

So I also want to say that because I know that many of the people in my audience are holistic wellness professionals and coaches, personal development coaches, and live deeply immersed in the world of personal development and natural healthcare and wellness, that the thing that is most empowering for us about those industries, the understanding that we have the ability to transform ourselves, to transform our circumstances, to nourish and care for ourselves can also be the liability, when we then feel like it's our responsibility to do everything in our power before asking for help.

And I know with 100% certainty that I prolonged my own misery by believing that I should do everything that I can do for myself first, because I'm trained in natural health and wellness because every symptom that I was experiencing, I have experienced before and I had healed before and I have helped clients heal before, but because I didn't fully understand or appreciate the special circumstances at play, namely like a dramatic drop in estrogen and progesterone and testosterone that all of the tools in my toolbox were only marginally effective if they were effective at all. Because some of it, it was like these things that had worked a million times before suddenly didn't work at all.

And so specifically in the world of the coaching industry, I have seen and experienced myself so many times over these past few years of being in this process, received feedback from people or received guidance or instruction from people that I just needed to change my mindset or I just needed to want it bad enough. And that was so demeaning and insulting and counterproductive in every single way. And it was really frustrating.

And so it's something to be mindful of in terms of how you think and feel about it for yourself. And then also, as you're working with clients, whether those are wellness clients or clients that you're, you know, health coaching or life coaching or business coaching is that there may be things going on that don't just involve making a choice or making, you know, changing your mindset or committing to do something, that there are so many factors and that this is just one of those things.

And so while I wholeheartedly believe that we do have the ability to nourish ourselves, transform ourselves, and care for ourselves in so many ways. If I had to do it over, I would have sought out the support that I needed way, way sooner than I did. And so I want to share this timeline with you to give you some perspective on when things started to get wonky over here in my world.

So first, there was this period between 2016 and 2020 where I was feeling super empowered, motivated. I was excited about life. In that time period, I did a number of pretty intense endurance athletic experiences, including running a marathon, doing a couple of centuries, gravel centuries on my bike. And ultimately, the longest bike ride that I did was 165 miles in a day. And it was a period, a time period where I pushed my body physically in ways that I had done before in my life. And at this period between age 38 and 42, my body just did not recover and did not respond to the way that it previously had. And so through that whole time period, I knew something wasn't quite right, but I was doing everything that I knew how to do.

I was searching and experimenting and trying different approaches to nutrition and to supplementation. But I knew that my recovery was poor. I knew that I felt inflammation in my entire body and I was having increasing anxiety.

And so, as I said, I was like 38 to 42 in this period. Menopause was the farthest thing from my mind. If anybody had ever asked me at that time point if I had given it even a second of thought, I would have said it was a decade away before I even needed to start to think about it. It was not even a consideration. It was not on my radar.

But knowing that something was off, finally in the fall of 2019, I went to a holistic practitioner. I told her what was going on. And I think we checked my thyroid, which was completely fine. And we did a whole bunch of allergy testing and nutrient testing. But we didn't even talk about perimenopause. We didn't test my sex hormones. There was just no conversation around that. It was thyroid, cortisol, potential allergens causing inflammation, et cetera.

And so I just continued down this path of experimenting and experimenting. And then it wasn't long after that. So that was the fall of 2019. It was, you know, four or five months later when the whole world shut down and there was this collective anxiety and fear. And I was tired and I knew that I had been pushing myself beyond my capacity. But it wasn't beyond my normal capacity. wasn't I wasn't pushing myself beyond my 35 year old capacity or my 30 year old capacity, but I had been pushing myself beyond this new lower capacity that I still didn't have any explanation for. I didn't know what was happening.

And so I really took that the shutdown in 2020 as a message from the universe that it was time to slow down, but my clients did not. And I spent about six months trying shift the dynamics of how I was working, like put boundaries into place that I hadn't needed before, or I probably did need, but I wasn't aware of. And while my clients were all moving forward with even more intensity than usual, because they were trying to figure out how to survive with their business in this new world, I just kept doing the best that I could for as long as I could. And in September of 2020, I stopped.

And the truth is that I honestly don't even remember a lot of that year. There are huge chunks of time. Over the last, I would say between 2020 and 2023, there's huge chunks of time that I just, I don't feel like I don't even remember. And I know so many people say that about the COVID year. So I'm sure that it's not just me and it's not just the hormonal stuff. But I really just don't remember specifics of that time period.

But I do remember that I just had to stop and take a break for a little while. And then going into 2021, I was planning a wedding. We got engaged on that 165 mile bike ride on that trip. And so I became really determined to feel better for my wedding. And I hired a coach who was a holistic practitioner and he was a fitness trainer and a mindset coach. And we worked together for like eight or nine months and I was doing all the things. I was super focused on my diet. I was dialing in nutrients. I was taking a boatload of supplements. I was meditating. I was doing heart breathing sessions. I was lifting weights and he even got me to give up coffee for six months. There were so many things that I was working on and trying to do. And I got marginally better during that time period and the wedding happened.

And a wedding is an intense experience, not just the event itself, but all of the people and the personalities and the family in town and people traveling. And then of course, during that time period, there were people canceling at the last minute because of COVID and sort of, there was just, it was a lot. And so what I felt leading up to the wedding, was having this, I had been on this very kind of like slow season. I had really like taken some time to rest and recover and really focus on my own wellbeing. And then a couple months before the wedding, I was having this intuitive sense that there was energy building and that after the wedding, there was like something big coming. I could feel it. And then, yeah, it was just like, bam. Before I was even home from the honeymoon, I had new clients. I had like, my phone was ringing, I was getting emails. It was the wildest thing. It was like somebody flipped a switch and all of a sudden, the flood gates opened, the clients came in and I went into 2022 on fire in my business. I was taking on who I perceived to be better and better clients. I was super excited by the momentum. I was having the best year ever financially. I was really wrapped up in the momentum and the excitement of it and what I perceived as this epic growth happening for me and my business.

And I just was like, yes, yes, yes. Like I yesed everything because I wanted to ride that wave. And then pretty quickly around April or May, I started to develop an awareness that this wave of momentum I was riding was not a wave that was sustainable or nourishing or supportive for me in any capacity besides the revenue that was happening.

So I had built a thriving business squarely in my zone of excellence or what I perceived at the time to be my zone of excellence, which involved me being the problem solver, me being the knowledge holder and the manager of all the things. And that was the role that I had put myself in over and over and over again for the last 20 years. I'm referencing, if you don't know, The Big Leap by Gay Hendrix. So if you haven't read that, I highly recommend it.

And so I look back at my career in the hospitality industry and I thrived and succeeded again and again because I put myself in the role of the person who, whatever the problem was, I could figure it out and I could take care of it. I would be the person to get it done or to make sure that I got done. And that is a really brilliant skill set to have. Like no matter what comes up, I got it. I'll figure it out. I'll take care of it.

It made me really valuable to the people that hired me and it was also draining the life out of me. It was a skillset that while it was really valuable in the hospitality industry and then as a contractor, as a freelancer, supporting people behind the scenes in their businesses, it was really invaluable to them and it was also a skillset that had led me to burn out multiple times in my life. And every time I would think it was the place I was working for, it was the person I was working for, it was the circumstances. And so I said a moment ago that I had been working in my zone of excellence. But what I know now after the experiences of the last couple of years is that I was not even in my zone of excellence. When I look back now at how I developed those skills that thought were my special talents and how I've operated in those roles for all these years and burned out doing them again and again. Now I know that my quote zone of excellence skills were really all well executed coping mechanisms for undiagnosed ADHD. I had constructed an entire identity and an entire business out of coping mechanisms for undiagnosed ADHD.

So just let that sink in for a second because I am 100 % certain that I am not the only woman who is an over performer, who is really sharp, really capable, who everybody relies on to get things done, to take care of problems, who's really good at those things because she mastered them as a child or as a teenager because she had to in order to survive, in order to function in the world. So whatever the job was, or the company was, it really didn't matter. I was a valuable resource for many businesses for many years because I had created this identity for myself. And you know, people around me would just be like, yeah, Rachel, take care of it. Rachel, fix it. I would get called in to do things I had never done, never seen, never touched, never experienced just because I was known to be a reliable person who could take care of business.

I would always get, when I worked in the hospitality industry, I would always get sent to the places, to the restaurants, to the stores that were a hot mess because somebody else had made them a hot mess. And I would be the person to go in, clean them up, fix it up, get it operating well, because I had this intensity and this drive and this anxiety that fueled all of that in order to be able to do those things.

And so, I think it's really tragic that there is an entire generation, like all of Generation X, an entire generation of women who learned how to function as best they could and get by. And we're all now figuring out in our 40s because what happens is once your hormones start to change in perimenopause, those coping mechanisms that you develop to survive, they stop working. Your energy drops, brain fog takes over, suddenly you can't think clearly, you can't keep track of things, and the anxiety just ratchets up out of control. And so this is the pinnacle of the experience that I've been having for the last two years. I lost the ability to function in this zone, what I thought was my zone of excellence that I had developed. And so just super quickly, because it's not an area of expertise of mine. These are just my insights from my experience. I don't love the term ADHD. I don't think it's helpful. I don't think it's useful. I think that there are some better, more interesting perspectives that feel truer and more aligned to me. There's a book called Driven by Doug Brockman, and he talks about the hunter brain and the driven brain and that they're actually genetic differences.

This is the most fascinating thing to me, learning that there are genetic differences that 10 % of the population has and that they are the differences that are what makes somebody a hunter or an entrepreneur and not necessarily able to sit at a desk or sit in a cubicle or do the same thing day after day after day. And there's increasing research on trauma response and what aspects of activating those genes are the result of trauma, whether that's big or small.

And there's so much we don't know, but what we do know is our own personal experience. And I feel super grateful to have figured this out for myself and to have this new improved understanding of myself and my own experience.

But it's taken me over two years to get to this spot because as my hormones started changing dramatically and I no longer had the ability to use the coping mechanisms that I had developed, it went into an identity crisis. I really was like, okay, if I'm not the person who does all this work that I've always done, then who am I and what do I do? Like this is my identity? This is my business, this is my revenue source, this is my livelihood, and it's not actually who I am. Like what do I even do with that information? And that identity crisis really fucked me up for a while, like a really long while. And over about 18 months, I went deep, deep, deep into who am I, what do I do with this information, and how do I show up and function in the world?

And so these two interrelated things happening simultaneously, the hormonal change and how that hormonal change affects brain function.

These are both happening at the same time. And I was having all of these physical symptoms, body aches. Like I would go to sleep and I would fall asleep on this side and my shoulder would hurt and my hip would hurt. And then I would like roll over and then I'd, this shoulder would hurt and this hip would hurt. It felt like I was sleeping on the hard ground and I was sleeping on a Tempur -Pedic mattress. My sleep was really poor. Obviously I'm waking up and tossing and turning all the time. I couldn't fall asleep. I would wake up over and over throughout the night.

I was gaining weight, I had super low energy. I went from running a marathon to like, couldn't even walk a mile without being fatigued. Sometimes I would like get to noon and just have to lay down the rest of the day just out of total exhaustion. I had allergies that were completely out of control.

I had itchy ears that I thought were allergies and then I learned that that's not the case, that that is a hormonal symptom of perimenopause. And then on top of all this physical stuff that was happening, I had all this mental and emotional stuff too. I had brain fog, out of control. I could not keep track of anything. I couldn't find my words to speak or articulate. I was having mood swings and the biggest, biggest thing, the craziest thing that was the most challenging for me that took me so long to figure out what was happening was that I was having intense and paralyzing anxiety. And I have no problem sharing openly that I've had anxiety probably my entire life, but I never knew that I had anxiety until into my early 30s. If you had asked me and you know, like you fill out health forms when you go to college, you you know, get a new doctor.

And they always ask, it's one of the symptoms, they ask you to check off, I always would have said no. It never crossed my mind that I had anxiety. I didn't know that I had anxiety until I didn't have anxiety.

It was while I was working in the holistic health world that, and I had really like dialed in my nutrition so carefully and I was immersed in my own self care and my own wellbeing. And I was experimenting with some supplements because I knew I had a little bit of adrenal stuff going on. And so I was experimenting with volume, this supplement on the bottle, said take one or two and I was sort of like, well, what happens if I take three or what happens if I take four? And when I got up to five, I remember so clearly having this moment where suddenly I realized that everything was still and my mind wasn't racing. And it was the first time that I remember ever experiencing that. I think I was 32 or 33. And I remember thinking, my God, is this how other people feel? Like I didn't know that other people weren't having the experience that I was having.

And so until it was gone, I didn't have anything to compare it to, or even to have any idea that I had. And so in the aftermath of that, I developed a toolbox and I mostly didn't have anxiety for like at least a decade. Or if I did have it, feel it come up, like I knew how to handle it quickly and easily. But what happened over these last couple of years was that nothing I had in my toolbox was working. In fact, it was just getting worse and worse and worse. And at times it felt completely out of control. And all this time, I was so focused on figuring out what was happening, figuring out what was wrong, and trying to fix myself. And I still had no idea that any of this or all of this was related to perimenopause. It was not a word that would have even been in my vocabulary. I just felt like I was losing my mind and that my body was entirely out of control.

And so finally, in the spring of 2023, I went back to the holistic practitioner that I'd been to in 2019 and I asked to have my hormones tested. I'm not sure what inspired that now that I think about it. Something, somewhere it clicked that I should have my hormones tested and lo and behold, I had no hormones. And I'm exaggerating, but they were so low. They were so, so low.

I would say this practitioner that I was seeing, she has a very cautious approach. And so I started bio identical hormone replacement therapy, little bit of, know, progesterone and then a super low dose of estrogen and DHEA. And then about six months later we added in a tiny bit of testosterone and I started to feel marginally better. About a month after starting, I was like, I feel a little bit better. My energy started to improve. I would say that I went from like 30 % to 50%.

And then there were months or days where it was like better, maybe I'd at 60 or 70, but I definitely wasn't at 100%. I definitely didn't feel like myself. And then in February of 2024, I found a new doctor and I walked into her office and she's 51 and she's super fit and energetic and happy and healthy. And I was like, whatever you're doing, that's what I want in my life.

And we came up with a whole new approach to the hormone replacement therapy that is definitely more aggressive and it's working. It's fucking working. And I have been experimenting with different approaches to ADHD and I'm still experimenting there. So I don't have any confirmed solutions there, but there's definitely been significant improvement. And so since February, it's been sort of a gradual process of things getting a little bit better and a little bit better every month. And now here I am. And I feel like myself for the first time in so many years.

And so looking back on the last two plus years, I feel like I experienced a complete disintegration of self. And I feel like at this birthday, my 46th birthday was really a re birthday, like a caterpillar who forms in the chrysalis or the cocoon and then dissolves into the pupa, into a gooey mess before emerging as a beautiful moth or butterfly. The genetic coding for that moth or that butterfly is inside the caterpillar, but it has to go through that messy dissolution in order to become the fullest form on the other side. And that is what it feels like I've been through these last couple of years.

And here's what has been beautiful about this for me. Now that I'm on the other side, now that I'm sitting in this spot and this is why I'm ready to share this with you is because that process forced me against my will because I was doing everything that I could to talk my talk, to share my beliefs and to still get all the things done and do the work and hang on with a death grip to this old version of myself that was living in this quote zone of excellence that is great and makes money and makes people happy but is not soul satisfying is not sustainable and is not who I am meant to be or what I meant to be doing in this world. This process has really forced me to walk my talk.

It's like the universe said, I will take you out at the knees if you keep doing what you're doing. And then that's what happened. It forced me to test my own hypothesis in a way that I could not or would not have done otherwise. And it forced me to see and to really ask myself the questions and to witness how do I respond when things get really hard? How do I respond when the shit hits the fan?

Am I in a panic? Am I in a fear? In fear, am I in a death grip or am I letting go and am I trusting? And if I'm gonna walk my talk, then I have to learn how to fully let go and trust and listen and believe that the universe has my back. And I had to learn to embody that at a whole new level through this experience. And I had to learn what it meant to not push at all, but to just do as much as I could, no more, no less, and be happy with that. And some days that was no hours of work and some days that was two hours of work and some days it was a full productive day. But the thing was it was beyond my control and beyond my planning. And I really had to learn to trust that things would unfold in the best way possible if I just trusted that.

And I also really had to wrap my head, my being around a different understanding of time, that there is no timeline or that there are infinite timelines and that it's all perspective and that most of what we see, do participate in, imagine, we make up these stories. It's all a construct of what we choose intro, what we choose out of. It's a story that we tell in our head.

And our attachments to those things are the things that make us sick, that make us tired, that make us overwork, that make us feel frustrated that we didn't get where we thought we needed to get to when we thought we needed to get there or to get done what we thought we needed to get done. And so all of this, all of this happened over the last two years. This is what I cried about on my birthday. It was the release. It was the relief.

It was the gratitude that I came through this and that I'm sitting here on the other side of that feeling fantastic and with a clear vision and embodied knowing of what it means to walk my talk and to really live into my own satisfaction strategy. It was a season that I had to go through and we all go through these seasons.

So if you're going through a season like this, or you find yourself in a season like this next week or next month or next year, whether it's perimenopause or something completely unrelated, just know that if it feels monumentally challenging, then it's something that's monumentally beneficial and necessary for your growth. And you will make it to the other side, and it will be beautiful.

And so we're going to end there. And I'm sure that there will be more to share about this over these next months, different aspects of this. And I will. I will share it. But for now, this is it. And until next time, I am wishing you even more pleasure and profits. I will see you soon.