My CFS Recovery Story

The Beginning of My Journey

Like many of us, we come from a childhood where proving your worth was met with praise, valiation and love. Acting extra good at school was met with awards and stickers. Talking too much, being too expressive or crazy, letting adults know our big feelings, was met with parent calls and principal office visits. Fast forward to the real world, our jobs are unfulfilling but you stay because that's just what people are supposed to do. Keep to yourself, work hard, prove to yourself and everyone that you're not struggling. That relationship seems out of alignment but it's better than feeling like you've failed or that you're alone in the world.

If you can relate to any of this, you're probably a highly sensitive person. Like me :)

Something about a intuitive, emotionally curious and a deep feeler, is like the perfect storm for something like CFS. But it's because our bodies are so intellegent, our bodies are just sending a message. A message that we are allowing someone or something to dysregulate us for too long. A message that we have pushed down our real feelings for too long, we've ignored getting out of something that we aren't aligned with. You may be saying, but I was so happy before I got sick! My life was so good! Same. But our NS doesn't care if we are happy. It cares if we are safe.

I lived and worked in NYC for 4 years after college. I was an incredibly exhausting hustle culture, but I enjoyed the fast pace, go go go energy. On top of working jobs where I didn't really align with, I started my own business, mobile spray tanning. I would push myself to work late hours and take clients after I worked my 7-4 job. I remember one night after work I was so tired I just wanted to go crawl in bed and watch Sex and the City, but I got back on the subway and went downtown to take a client. I remember sitting in between people on the subway, coats pressed against eachother, staring into oblivion, and then tears started streaming down my face. I started sobbing uncontrollably in the middle of rush hour and not a single person asked if I was okay LOL. I would expect nothing less for NYC. But as I cried felt this deep sense of unfulfillment. I thought that if I started a business I would get satisfaction from that. But I was exhausted. And for the first time in my life I thought to myself, "I don't want to prove that I can do this. I don't want to prove anything. Why can't I just exisit and feel like I'm enough?"

The summer before I got ill, I had the best year of my whole life. It was 2023 and I was running a successful beauty business, taking lots of clients a day (probably more than I should have), and traveling almost every weekend. I had a solid friend group and I loved my friends. Over the summer I did a two month trip abroad, to Europe and Asia. The last month of my trip I was in Thailand and Bali/Gili T. Something about this trip changed me. I had never been to Asia and I had never seen how that community had to live. Indonesian people were the kindest people I have ever met in my life, and they had nothing. Something about this left me so unsettled, I cried in business class on my way back to the US, wishing I could have used the money I paid for my upgrade to give to the friends I had made. I returned to America so angry. I would look at people on the street, my clients, my friends, and think "You have no idea... you're so lucky. You have no idea what sometime in Indonesia living under a blue tarp would give to have your home, your food, your clothes, your job, your comfort." I started to slowly feel so disconnected from the people around me. It was like I felt so trapped somewhere that I couldn't relate to anymore, and all I wanted to do was help those people in a country across the entire world away. I was stuck living a bubble that I didn't want to live in anymore, but I pushed on. This is when I first started getting symptoms of CFS. My body finally had enough of the misalignment.