Navigating a system that fails you

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Yesterday, I went to the osteopath. We start the sessions with her asking what the issue is, after which she focusses on that area of the body.

Although the session was ultimately helpful, I can’t help but feel that there is something a little backward in this. Me, the non-expert, ends up needing to explain my symptoms and what I think is going on with my body.

I think I am particularly bitter this week because of the realisation about how much my chronic bodily tension has affected me up until this point. I actually follow a pretty typical route for a high-masking autistic person, where I held so much tension that went unnoticed for decades by everyone around me. I think it’s why I’ve had so many difficulties in eating, sleeping and weight management.

What frustrates me with modern healthcare is how little focus there is on overall wellbeing. The culture is that you go to the doctor because you have a problem. Once the problem is negligible enough to be ignored, we forget and carry on with our lives. It then slowly gets worse until we need to look for miracle drugs or interventionist surgeries.

For me, this has meant that healthcare becomes an activity of self-advocacy. With the osteopath, I talked about how my body has undergone pretty rigorous changes in the last few weeks – demonstrated by daily photos that I had taken and asked for analysis through AI. I wanted a second pair of eyes to actually confirm whether this was the case.

Her reframing response back to me was that oh, so you’re saying your body changed a bit? I had to reassert the point that my physical shifts have been rather dramatic, not ‘un peu’. These small areas of undermining can be subtle, but they are quietly debilitating.

I had jaw pain come up as a sensory response to the session. When I told her, she did massage it which did help a lot. At the end of the session, I mentioned how teeth grinding is a common autistic trait. Although I can’t expect the professionals to know everything, there was something quite frustrating of having to explain in french something that I only learnt by going to self-organised autistic gatherings.

The verdict from my session was that my system has improved, with better breathing, but some tension still. I got some basic exercises to improve the situation. After that, it was on me. Not a more holistic view that I was hoping for, nor a practical suggestion of when or whether I should come back.

I want to emphasise that my osteopath is clearly skilled and knows what she is doing. She is also generally pleasant and friendly. So this is not about railing against a single professional. Yet the medical care, and overall culture and system towards healthcare leads to these rather unsatisfactory situations where I feel like I am left fending for myself.

When people talk about privilege, I’m not sure they fully understand how widely privilege affects different walks of lives. This isn’t just about being able to be treated better in the judicial system. It also affects how we navigate pretty much every single system in our life.

For example, many neurotypical, white people can go to a dietician or personal trainer that would give advice that broadly work for their body. The chances of me, coming from a racialised and genetic makeup, along with neurodivergent traits would be pretty likely to be failed.

My personal gym plan helped build muscle, but overall caused my health to suffer. It put more stress onto a system that was already chronically braced. I constantly felt like the regime I had was too intense for my body, but I bought into the gym mantra that my personal trainer also implicitly encouraged that this was just about pushing through. Now, in hindsight, it makes sense why the regime didn’t work.

This whole predicament leaves people like me in a difficult situation. On the one hand, we know how the system can inadvertendly harm us through well-intentioned but misguided advice. On the other hand, we also realise that we are not experts in everything, and so we need to be open to getting genuinely valuable support.

The uneasy compromise is to take more of the burden: we research and prepare extensively ahead of getting professional advice.

The challenge is that we cannot put full trust into a professional who may mix genuine scientific knowledge with cultural biases or outdated viewpoints.

Dealing with a body on reboot

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A key moment for learning is when things stop working properly.

Most of us have no idea how our car works. We don’t really need to either, so long as its functioning correctly.

But the moment something goes wrong, we decide to investigate. We open up the hood of the car, only to have the level of our ignorance be laid bare. We have no idea what we are looking at, nor how any of it really works.  Time for us to learn quickly, else we be stuck on the side of the highway in the middle of the night.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on my breathing. Without realising, I would take shallow breaths, likely fuelled by general stress and anxiety. Even in yoga classes, I learnt of ‘belly breathing’, and thought that this was the correct way to regulate the internal system.

It was only when my osteopath pointed out the need for me to breath through my diaphragm that I really started paying attention to it. Suddenly, I realised I had a muscle that I was previously unaware of. I think I follow the path of many high masking autistic people in this regard. Chronic body tension being held together into adult life.

The good news was that once I had identified the issue, the changes have come pretty quickly. I’ve felt my chest open up a lot more, and my posture has improved significantly. My shoulders have gone from being heightened and tense, to lower and more relaxed. My pelvic tilt has also shifted to a more neutral, healthy stance without me even actively trying. I didn’t even know I had a pelvic tilt until now.

The bad news is that his has had a whole lot of destabilising effects. On Sunday, I had a ‘vestibular episode’. I woke up dizzy, and household objects felt weirdly distant from my depth perception. By the later afternoon, I needed to throw up several times.

My body had such a rapid body alignment correction that I was standing slightly taller, and with a more upright head. This confused my spatial perception to the point where I’ve had to basically avoid sudden movements for the last few days. I spent the evening lying in bed with a weird spinning sensation going on in my head, even with my eyes closed.

I’ve also had weird feet pain. Someone asked me yesterday whether I was limping, and the answer was yes, apparently. I had random pain in my right foot. I think due to putting weight on parts of my foot that had previously been underused.

Today, I have quite acute jaw pain, which I think is a sign of the releasing pattern from habitual clenched teeth. A few days ago, massaging my cheek bones seemed to help. Now I’ve noticed the pain has shifted, and it’s further down, towards the inner part of my jaw. To massage it, I have to reach my finger inside my mouth and rub it gently.

This has not been a particularly enjoyable period, but it’s at least been informative. But perhaps one silver lining is that I’m gaining a lot of really valuable insight into how my body works.

I’m seeing that the more I tune into the different mechanisms, the more attuned I am to myself. My eating habits have become more particular, and I think it’s a positive sign that I’m desiring what my body actually needs, rather than stress eating out of a fear of scarcity.

Mentally, it’s also been relieving to break out of the autistic stereotypes too. I believed for a while after my diagnosis that I had poor interoception, meaning that my ability to read my body was poor. Now I’m realising that it’s probably actually very strong, but been numbed from a lifetime of being taught to ignore it. As I let go of my conditioning, I’m regaining a strength that will serve me for the rest of my life.

Building my own physical rehabilitation

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This morning, I felt like I wanted to stretch my body.

This small fact may sound unremarkable, but it is probably the first time that I genuinely wanted to move, rather than felt like I should.

I’ve previously exercised because it was good for me, or it made me feel better. In my recent low-activity state, I’ve missed the psychological relief it gave me.

But nowhere did anyone explain to me that the body is actually meant to want to do these things. Rather than being a rag doll to command, it is a living, breathing organism with its own signals and impulse.

I spent a large part of last year trying to kick start my health at the gym. I had a personal trainer with a strength building regime. It did work – I gained muscle, felt stronger and generally much fitter.

But in many sessions, I felt like I was pushing my body through it. I was pushing my strength of will to force myself to lift weights. By the end of the session, I felt tired. My digestion worsened, and I would often spend the rest of the day recuperating at home.

I was getting stronger, but not healthier. In some ways, my body was struggling even more than it had been. It’s why I realised I needed to actually stop for a while. I needed to re-learn how to listen to my body. A life of neurodivergence and masking has meant it’s something I’ve not done in a long, long time.

What seems to be missing in modern day beliefs around exercise is that the desire is meant to come as much from the body as it does from the mind. If the body is not wanting to do something, that’s actually an important sign.

I’ve noticed this for myself. As the weather brightens up, I get some sense of pressure that I should go outside and enjoy it. Good Belgian weather doesn’t last long, after all. But if I do a quick check-in with my body, I find that it would much prefer resting at home.

When I have tried to override that by forcing myself outside, I end up exhausting whatever small energy I had left. This often means that I feel very wiped out for the next few days. I’ve had to learn that it’s often not worth the cost.

In the past, I always wondered how people had such discipline to wake up early to go for a run or do yoga. I never realised that it’s not all meant to be a battle of the mind. When the body wants it too, there’s an alignment which makes everything easier. But you can’t align with the body if you’re not listening to it properly.

Although not quite a physical activity, it’s similar to what I feel like with my writing. This will be my 220th article since January 2022 without missing a week. If this was just a question of discipline, I would have got tired many months ago. But now, my sense of expression is as much integrated with my body as it is with my mind. If I haven’t written anything in a week, it is as if I have an internal bodily impulse that tells me that it’s time to write.

So my conclusion is that we ought to listen to our bodies far more than we are currently doing. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that if you internally feel that you don’t want to do that exercise class, you shouldn’t go. The short term gain of psychological relief is not worth the longer term effect of telling your body that it’s signals do not matter.

We only get one body in this lifetime, so it’s probably worth listening to it.

Is it Trauma or is it Habit?

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Why do we do the things that we do?

Many people smoke to regulate their stress rather than actually enjoying the taste. People often drink heavily as a form of escapism, rather than the social aspect.

There are often deep, underlying reasons for harmful behaviour. Without addressing these, you’re unlikely to kick any type of bad habits.

But equally, there comes a point where certain things have just become habits. If we do something long enough, it becomes an automatic instinct, even if we know they no longer makes sense.

I was reflecting on this question in regards to my health. I have chronic tension. I was functional, until I was not. A burnout precipitated the need to open up the hatch and see what was really going on underneath. I have essentially trained myself to be in a state of constant brace, and heightened vigilance. I seem to have followed a relatively typical pipeline as a high-masking autistic person (happy autism awareness day)

When you grow up not really understanding what’s going on, you learn to be constantly monitoring how you should act. It’s a bit akin to having to be an actor performing on a stage, making sure that you memorise and deliver your lines correctly (many autistic people actually do this as a coping mechanism).

No doubt, there has been things that I have needed to process. It’s a big psychological burden when someone finally explains why things didn’t really make sense to you for your whole life. I’ve needed that time to essentially re-evaluate my life up until this point.

But there comes a time to address the real, practical dimension of it all. My chronic tension has led to consistent, shallow breath and braced posture. Although this has slowly improved with rest, I’m still some way from a healthy breathing pattern and posture.

A lot of the back issues I’ve had recently have been a result of this tension. My osteopath told me that the source of my back pains were actually from a lack of breathing from the diaphragm. This was having a knock-on effect on the rest of my body.

For all the trauma and explanation, it’s now about shifting the habits I’ve built. That means consciously changing the way I breathe rather than further delving into why.

I felt prompted to write this article because I sometimes feel that people can get too caught up on talking about their traumas. Not to say that healing trauma is not a crucial element, but because I find that people use it as a reason to explain and justify, rather than as a means to actually change.

I had a conversation with someone recently who was so caught up in her own trauma that it became impossible to speak with her. She interrupted me mid-sentence on a totally different subject to talk about how women were given no rights in Ireland 50 years ago. When I tried to point out she had just completely derailed the conversation, she accused me of not caring about what she said. In the end, I had to just walk away.

Trauma cannot be used as a justification for being rude. If you genuinely want to overcome it, you also need to build healthy habits. If you’re constantly fixated on something, you have to shift your brain’s habits. This person could not hold a conversation with me without constantly interrupting me. She also kept pulling it back to what she wanted to talk about.

I’ve been in many spaces where the logic has just become ‘communicate more’. If we all just speak and speak about how hard we have it, we will solve everything. Unfortunately, that’s not actually how it works. In fact, it can actually make people end up being more self-centred and narcissistic.

At some point, we do need to take responsibility for where we’re at. Understanding our past can help bring us peace, but ultimately, it doesn’t change our current predicament. The only way to do that is shifting our habits and behaviour.

The virtue of appreciating the small wins

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A few days ago, I went to the cash machine, then walked directly to the supermarket. I bought a full load of groceries and walked back home.

I had no major fatigue or back pain flaring up. Believe it or not, this was notable progress.

It sounds so insignificant, but in the context of what I’ve been experiencing, this is a sign that I can slowly rely on my body again. It’s also incrementally more than I’ve been able to do in the last few weeks, and a much better bodily response than I’ve had in years.

I like to pretend that I’m some sort of wise oracle, but sometimes my philosophical messages come purely out of a survival instinct. The truth is, if I didn’t appreciate the small positive steps I’ve been taking, I would probably have gone insane by now.

I’m not one for massive reminiscing into the past. I find that if we dwell there too long, we lose our grip on the present. But having a reference point to small incremental gains can be useful. The fact that I’m functioning far more effectively than I was about a year ago demonstrates that my health is improving.

In a world where want instant, dopamine providing feedback, there are many things that inevitably take a long time. Health is an obvious example of this, but I think it goes for many things, like building a skill or any other long term project. Attempting to speed up the process only ends up making it slower, and often more painful.

I’ll admit that it’s a challenge to find the balance. Whilst it’s good to appreciate when things go well, too much naval gazing can be risky. For example, it’s handy to look at the immediate past, but if I compare myself to before my burnout, I would undoubtedly get depressed. Back then, I was working full time, regularly travelling, writing and pursuing several hobbies.

It’s also important not getting too caught up in what it all means, and over-extrapolating the win’ part of it either. After all, the night after I woke up with anxiety in my throat at 4am, which messed up somewhat my next day. The small steps aren’t big ones, no matter how much we might wish them to be.

Small wins are just that, small. They build up incrementally, but only when we continue sowing the seeds for them to grow. A lack of patience and discipline can squander our progress.

And so, I plod along. I see recovery in sight. Part of me feels like it’s not too far. But another part of me feels like it will take longer than I expect. Either way, it doesn’t change too much practically. Slow recovery, step by step. I’ll get where I need to be.

Surrendering to the winds of the world

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For the first time, I played with the notion that I may never recover. Perhaps the energy of old will never return. My new existence is one of exhaustion and management.

This may sound defeatist, but I don’t think it is. I do believe that I will recover, slowly, but surely. But considering how long this has gone on, and realistically how far off anyone’s expectation this has been, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility to think that I may never get better.

Rather than sounding bleak, there is a sense of simplifcation that comes with such a thought. No longer do I need to constantly find this something that I need to fight. No longer do I need to feel like I am delaying my life to a magical ‘when’ time. It allows me to be present, and not worry too much about the future. There is a freedom in this.

What has really struck me around burnout in western culture is how much this becomes a constant battle with your health. It’s as if we are a captain of a ship, furiously turning one way or another. Maybe one miracle drug will solve all. When that doesn’t work, maybe some ancient meditation practice will be the cure. Many of us have been sent into burnout due to micromanagement, but we may be doing the exact same thing to our bodies.

The double edged sword of our modern lives is that there is always more information. If you’re not satisfied, there is an endless burrow of further things to research. The idea that people can get sick at any point has disappeared from the modern psyche.

When we are sailing our ship through the rocky terrain of life, sometimes it’s better to flow with the viscous waves rather than constantly trying to fight them. People often prefer to try directly into a torment, rather than admit to themselves that such a storm is brewing. The damage will be done, no matter how hard we pretend it’s not there. But being in constant denial will only heighten the pain when it inevitably comes.

This is not a post in favour of fatalism. Some people do just give up. To them, the torment spells doom. Perhaps they may see the pain as deserved, or over-interpret it as a sign that nothing can ever be good. These aren’t healthy positions. Life is too short to give up on it.

There is a middle path. Being conscious about the realities of the world, whilst also doing what we can about it. I fear that it is a point that is too nuanced for people in this day and age.

But all I can do is practice what I preach. Be cognisant that I cannot control the world. Surrender to its torments, but not surrender to myself

The Paradox of Recovery

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I’m waking up with nausea. My back is flaring up. A fifteen minute walk is leaving me in agony. I’ve had to cancel on three social events this week.

I’ve regressed to the point that leaving the house seems like a risky endeavour. The nausea leaves my appetite in confusion. I know that I need to eat, but my sense of appetite is totally suppressed.

Such is the world of recovery. One week is good, another three weeks are difficult.

I’ve felt quite bitter around how isolated I’ve been forced to be. My small sources of regular social contact have been stripped away. I miss regular exercise, and the sense of calmness from going to the gym. But I also know any attempt to force myself into such activities will only make me worse.

Patience, is the answer, as they say. But it is far easier to give it as advice than actually live it. ‘These things take time’, as if I didn’t know after two years. By the end of the conversation, I mention the end of the year as a rough recovery date. The response? ‘Oh wow, that’s a long time’. Turns out that the people preaching patience aren’t often very good at it themselves.

At least I am no longer in the spiral of wondering whether I am doing something wrong. Many people end up panicking when they see new pain arising. In reality, this is a moment where my body is releasing a lot of tension. The back pain, according to my osteopath, is coming from my breathing coming more from my chest, rather than my diaphragm. The sense of anxiety has had such an effect on my body that it has changed the way I breathe.

I’m not an anxious person. I actually have a far healthier mentality around worries than most people. The problem is that I am in a system which has pushed my sense of concern and worry to a consistently heightened level. It’s an important distinction to make, because there isn’t anything about me to fix. But there is something to fix with the system.

Nonetheless, I do feel somewhat in despair. It’s hard to navigate a sense of isolation and pain, particularly when I know there’s nothing I can really do about it. I can either choose to accept it, or try to avoid it and ultimately just make it longer and harder.

The additional loneliness is having few outlets to talk about these difficulties. Well meaning friends, and often even professionals, give generic advice. They essentially revolve around worrying less, taking a break or changing diet.

Such conversations quickly become tiring. I end up having to explain that if it were that simple, I would have ‘fixed’ this years ago. But I also need to be careful in the way I phrase my answer. If I push back too much on someone arguments, they may react badly. Many people without realising it have cult-like beliefs around health.

Because going to the gym worked for them, they believe that this is a solution that will work for everybody. The idea that people can do all the right things and still be doing poorly makes them question their sense of fairness in the world. Many people are not willing to do that.

There is no magic solution, aside from rest. Flare-ups during recovery are documented, and they will pass. It was previously digestion, then it was feet issues, now it is back pain. I don’t know what the next issue will be, but I guess I’ll know soon enough.

The fact that I am feeling pain is the sign that my body is cleansing and waking up. This is the paradox of recovery.

When conventional wisdom isn’t working

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Last year, I stopped going to the gym. I had been going around two to three times a week. I had a personal trainer, who set me different strength exercises and increasing weight goals. On paper, I was doing everything I should have been.

Just before stopping, I got a blood test. Generally my health was good, but my cholesterol was particularly high. Most notably, my HDLs (the ‘good’ cholesterol) was quite a lot lower than they should have been.

If conventional wisdom were to be followed, my health should have gotten worse. I was no longer exercising, I stopped paying too much attention to diet and I returned to a very sedentary lifestyle.

When I got a blood test around a month ago, I asked to check my cholesterol again. The results were stark. I had a rather large improvement. My HDLs had sizeably increased, whilst the LDLs (bad cholesterol) had also dropped. Other markers such as my CRP which measures inflammation also dropped from 2.2 to 1.0.

The reason for this change I believe was that I have finally been addressing long-term, in-built stress. Trying to push my way through this hole was only digging me further into health issues. When I stopped exercising, I ended up having a large crash. I ended up resting a whole lot. It was some of the most miserable months of my life. But it was also what my body needed.

I’ll admit that I write this with a level of bitterness. It has been frustrating that I have had to essentially figure this out on my own. The advice around me has consistently pointed me in the wrong direction. Doctors tried giving me antidepressents, which only served to numb sensation rather than improve things. Therapy felt like I was paying for the privilege of explaining to a white person the complex nature of migration, racism, autism and other areas.

My personal trainer didn’t really understand burnout. He got so caught up in increasing the weights and improving form that he forgot that my original aim was to improve my health by losing weight. People around me, meanwhile have suggested that I just move around more, or try and eat healthier to kick my health back into gear.

The first place where I saw burnout written in a more open way was in ayurveda. I remember reading Prakriti: Your Ayurvedic Constitution which talked far more openly about energy depletion. My energies were things to be balanced. The solution depended on the person’s constitution, not what worked for the majority of people.

What I’ve found particularly striking is how much people seem to have a cult-like belief in the conventional wisdom’s we get taught. When someone with authority tells us that exercise = good, eating more = bad, we take this as gospel.

In reality, the best thing I could have done was to take a break from exercising and stop worrying about what I was eating. The sad reality is that I learnt to ignore my body telling me this, because everyone around me was saying that this was wrong.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I understand why. My body is so genetically and physically different to the people I live around in Brussels that following norms around health and wellbeing can be fraught with risk. If I’m not careful, I will be told things that may be actively bad for my health.

I’m not anti-science, nor anti-western. But I am anti-oversimplification. In our attempts to constantly streamline and simplify, we have lost the essence of seeing diverse realities.

Studies that are supposedly unanimous turn out to be based upon group-think, tested on a homogeneous population. In the worst case scenario, such as on MSG, we see big powerful lobbies creating studies to actively discredit ethnic foods for financial reasons.

So if I can give any conclusion, it is this. Neither blindly follow, nor be a blind skeptic. Be wary of results that aren’t really working, but also be wary of conspiracy theories or alternatives that are too good to be true.

Ultimately, we only get one life. We might as well live it by doing what is best for us.

The Frustration of an off-beat Body

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A few weeks ago, I decided to start exercising more. I thought swimming would be a good, low impact activity that my body could metabolise.

Instead, I ended up doing less exercise, rather than more. I started randomly having ankle pain. It’s got to the point where the awkward pain has kept me from falling asleep.

These seemingly small issues can start having a large impact. My lack of sleep has meant other issues started emerging. I am now getting pain on my side, and my digestion problems have re-awoken. Now that my feet are somewhat better, it’s these stomach pains that are keeping me awake at night. I haven’t had a proper night sleep in the last week.

The mix of these awkward pains have meant that I’ve cancelled the few social plans I had. I’ve felt further away from my goal of physical activity, rather than closer to it. It’s been frustrating.

Yet I’ve learnt the hard way that there is no point trying to force my way through. My body will only crash even harder. I managed to seem functionable a few months ago. But this was based upon a mix of mentally forcing myself to do basic activities through time-pressured adrenaline and energy drinks. This was not a recipe for long term health and wellbeing.

I do feel a sense of unjustness at how innocuous these issues have arisen. I had a bit of foot pain when travelling to the UK and back. Perhaps I hurt my feet somewhere. But I do not recall any injuries. I wore shoes that I had worn before. I routinely travel to the UK, and there’s not actually a whole lot of walking. My best guess is that I caused some issues in attempting to plant my feet more firmly on the ground as a means of regulating my nervous system.

My stomach issues are also frustrating because I feel like I’m generally eating okay. When I went to see my parents, I could barely eat my mum’s cooking without having bad stomach issues. It’s improved somewhat now, but I have to be careful. It seems pretty farcical that I decided to not have a small can of cola yesterday because the drying nature of it might ruin my digestion and therefore my sleep.

Such is recovery. We often simplify sickness, then a linear path to healing. But in practice, it comes in sporadic and oft confusing waves. It may be frustrating, but there are no shortcuts. Attempting to outsmart recovery only leads to even longer illness.

I’m also conscious that I’m in some ways lucky. I do not have a chronic condition (as far as I’m aware). My energy will recover eventually. There are many who must live with such difficult conditions that my years of difficulty are what they must live their whole life. Such thoughts are very humbling.

My lack of energy feels additionally stark in a societal context. For all intents and purposes, I look young and healthy. Young people are meant to be vibrant, rushing around with energy. Old people, meanwhile, are expected to slowly withdraw into isolation and nonexistence.

This is what we are led to believe, even though we see plenty of examples to the contrary. Younger people are having more mental health issues, and burnout is an ever-growing phenomenon. Meanwhile, many older people are fitter and healthier than ever seen before. I remember meeting a group of women in Peru who were in their 70s and doing an intensive hiking schedule that was well beyond my capabilities.

I am cautious about preaching clichés around taking care of our bodies. I feel there are enough voices with more in-depth knowledge on such things. Yet if I had one plea, it would be to break out of our societal expectations around age and energy. Young people are allowed to rest. Old people are allowed to be energetic.

It may sound like a small shift, but I think it is what traps many people into unhealthy patterns. Younger folk feel they must squeeze the most out of their youth before it ‘runs out’. Older folk learn to give up their health because their ‘best days’ are supposedly already passed.

Our best plan is to work with our bodies, rather than against them. We can do this at any age.

Aging and the Quest to Find Peace

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I’ve come to the conclusion that my happiest days will be my final ones. I think I will live a long life, and I think I will be fortunate to retain relatively good health up until the end.

In those final few years, I will be at peace. I will, perhaps finally, feel free. No pressures from society. Enough financial security to live out my last days. And, most importantly, my internal pressures to serve others finally satiated.

It’s probably odd for me to talk about the end of my life. Indeed, I think it’s actually somewhat taboo. Going past our ‘prime’ years in the big cities is some frightening thought. The idea of even mentioning death brings up such discomfort that people avoid it at all costs.

I think people are frightened at zooming out of their lives. The questioning of something as grand as life’s meaning is so overwhelming that many prefer to keep their head’s down and pretend the end will never come.

There’s also the fact that youth is so heralded in modern, and particularly western, cultures. No longer being young means no longer being relevant. A whole culture has been built upon avoiding growing old.

But for me, I think my later years will be far more enjoyable. The earlier period has been a lot more difficult, particularly so in the last few years. But this has also meant that I’ve come to terms with a lot more things much earlier.

Writing my father’s biography was my own way of understanding legacy, heritage and mortality. These are no soft topics, and they are taking their toll on me. I am often waking up with my body completely braced. I feel like I have gone for a two hour gym session. Instead of resting, my existence has been doing heavy processing and re-framing. I often wake up exhausted.

My trajectory makes me feel out of sync with the world. Many things I create don’t seem to resonate with the people around me. I am too young to be seen as a wise person, but my soul is too old to want the frivolities of modern life. I’ve often had the sense that I do valuable things, but any effort I make registers barely at an imprint.

I have found great comfort in Jyotish, or vedic astrology. Of all the attempts at explanations I have found, it is the one place that seems to explain my predicament. My life is one with a heavy burden and difficulty from a young age. It’s what has honed this sense of wisdom. It also has predicted fairly accurately why the last few years have been so difficult. Both my vimshottari and yogini dashas highlight particularly difficult times from around 2023 up until late 2026. The themes it often assign – burnout, career collapse, stripping away of falsehoods – have broadly come true.

This period has been about learning to learn discipline without reward. More deeply, it’s also been about releasing the tension in my body, and not constantly hustling to get through. The intense dreams I have are my body releasing internalised tension. So although they are exhausting, they are actually a positive sign.

The astrology shows that my life will improve a lot. I follow a later bloomer archetype. The height of my powers will likely be in my 40s/50s, perhaps even my 60s. By then, the tables will shift. I think I will have moved from being a strange, sometimes morbid oddball to one of being a respected, albeit somewhat eccentric elder. Although I care little for titles, the idea of being respected and valued is something I greatly look forward to.

And as for the end of my life? By my 80s I’m due to have a very calm, peaceful and loving end.