When Your Life is in Limbo

I'm Lisa 👋 Welcome to the latest edition of Stream of Consciousness!

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Over the past several years, my health has been deteriorating.

I’ve tried to find the silver linings, go out of my way to figure out creative solutions by doing a shitload of research and running my own experiments, connected with really smart humans in different fields to learn from them, changed my diet, improved my sleep, and done a lot of therapy and nervous system regulation. Heck, I even wrote about a lot of the things I was doing here.

None of these things I regret, and they have all helped in some way.

They have all helped me become a more aware, deeper, more conscious person. They have helped me figure out what I definitely DO NOT want my life to look like, and what I DO want it to look like. They have helped me understand myself better and lean into my intuition more and more. I will forever be grateful for this.

Something that has been difficult for me to write about is the feeling of having your whole life in limbo.

I’ve been unable to work since October of last year.

I have a million things I want to do and feel like I can only do a very small percentage of them, or on some days, none of them.

I am in medical limbo, now having gone through many, many rounds of tests via traditional medical streams and more holistic ones and I am hoping that I can some more clear answers soon even though I know it’s a possibility that I might never get a clear diagnosis that makes everything make sense. TL:DR I have about 100 different symptoms affecting many different systems and a lot of abnormal test results but no one has been able to help me put together the pieces to understand why. I don’t feel good and I haven’t for a long time.

I also have anxiety, PTSD, and depression, all of which seem to be tied at least in some way to some physiological things I have going on, in addition to my life experiences. For example, when I got hearing aids a few months ago, my anxiety improved and I didn’t feel like I was on a rocking boat for the first time in a long time.

Some days my body feels broken. Some days my brain feels broken. And lately it’s been both.

If you’re reading this and we have met in person, worked together, perhaps played a sport together, or met in another venue, you’ll know that there’s a lot of things I am not good at, but one thing I am exceptional at is working really hard.

I feel like I am going crazy right now because I want to apply that work ethic to feeling better, and would spend all day every day doing things to support this, but I am really struggling with where to focus my efforts if I am playing whack-a-mole without understanding how everything is connected or what inputs will result in better outputs.

But the hardest part for me has been…the feeling of being left behind.

Don’t get me wrong - I am extremely grateful to be able to have time to focus on my health right now. I was really struggling trying to juggle this and working full-time before.

I am at a point now where I have spent almost a year with my life “on pause”.

I’ve been fielding questions like, “When will you know what’s wrong?”, and “When are you going back to work?”. It’s really difficult to answer both of those and frankly, I don’t know what to say at all.

People around me are moving through life - some with traditional milestones like marriage, having kids, buying homes, moving forward in their careers - and some with things that just make them happy, like travelling, running marathons, getting dogs, playing pickleball, going to cottages, dating, experiencing concerts, and more.

I know that I am moving through my life in a very different way right now and it’s okay - it’s what I need to do to take care of myself at this point. And, at the same time, it’s been incredibly isolating.

When you’re in your 30s and on the outside look relatively “normal” (PS I hate this word and the word “perfect”), people make a lot of assumptions that most of the time aren’t true. It costs energy to reset the baseline and the ability to decide if it’s even worth it given the situation. A “choose your battles” situation.

I get asked how I am doing or what’s new and my gut reaction is that I do not want to share anything about my life or what I am going through. It’s complicated to articulate and my experience has been that most people don’t understand.

I get asked a lot if I am seeing anyone, if I am married or if I have a partner or a family, etc. The truth is, it’s really hard to start to invest in those things when you don’t feel good. Most days I feel like I can barely take care of myself, let alone have the capacity to be a good partner to someone else.

I have a small group of friends that I really, really appreciate. I always feel better when I can spend a part of my day feeling like I’m part of something and I belong somewhere or am seen or can broaden my perspective outside of my own internal world.

I want to make it clear that I am not writing this for sympathy or because I am expecting anything. I’m writing this because I want to share a perspective from lived experience that I realized is rarely shared. It’s something I wish I could have read before being on this path.

So - thank you for reading. If you have someone who is important to you in your life who is in limbo or who is on pause mode, some questions that might be helpful to ask are:

• “What does support look like right now?”

• “Is there anything you want to share with me that would help me understand you or your experience better?”

• “Is there anything I can do that would help you feel less alone?”

• “What are the things that are hardest for you day-to-day right now?”

• “Do you need someone to just be with you, to listen, to give you space, to help distract you or think about something else, or to give you a hug?”

If you’re reading this and are the person on pause, something that I have found helpful is to spend time understanding what I need first so I can communicate these things more clearly.

For example, I just had to have a brain MRI and I have been feeling increasingly exhausted and honestly, kind of sad from having to go to what has now become a massive pileup of tests by myself. So, I reached out to two friends and asked if it would be okay if we did a check in before/after so I didn’t feel as alone. It really helped.

There’s a lot of things I don’t know, but one thing I do is that everybody goes through hard things. To live is to suffer. It just looks a bit different for everyone.

Having empathy and compassion for and curiosity about other peoples’ experiences goes a long way in making the hard stuff…a little less hard.

If you’re on pause right now…I sincerely hope you can press play soon.

And I am trying to remind myself that sometimes a pause is the best thing to get you to stop climbing the wrong ladder and switch to a better, more aligned one.

Thanks for reading!

I hope that you enjoyed this post and it inspired you to think slightly differently about how to navigate life more consciously.

Thank you for supporting me, for following along, for emailing me, and sharing your thoughts and ideas 🙏

Always open to your feedback on each edition - it helps me feel less like a robot behind a glass wall.

Here’s to navigating life off of autopilot together.

Lisa ✌️