There was a practitioner in Temecula, CA I drove an hour to see.
No joke, I found her because a woman I met at a local café told me about her.
That’s where I was at the time.
Someone mentions a practitioner while you’re waiting for coffee and suddenly you’re writing down a phone number on a napkin because maybe... just maybe... this is the person who finally sees something everyone else missed.
The visits were $250 each.
And honestly? At the time I thought that was a steal.
Which is kind of absurd when I think about it now.
An hour drive. A few hundred dollars. More supplements. More appointments. More explaining my story from the beginning.
Because that’s another thing nobody tells you.
You don’t just keep paying money.
You keep retelling the story.
Over and over.
The symptoms. The timeline. The diagnoses. The foods. The tests. The things that helped. The things that made it worse. The things that worked for three weeks and then suddenly didn’t.
After a while you can tell your story so well it almost sounds rehearsed.
the voice message
I remember leaving one appointment and calling my husband.
Actually, I didn’t call him. I left a voice message because I was crying and couldn’t get my thoughts together.
I remember hearing myself talk about the exact same things I’d been talking about for years.
The same symptoms.
The same frustration.
The same confusion.
Different office.
Different practitioner.
Same conversation.
Same feeling when I walked out.
Empty.
That’s the word.
Not angry.
Not hopeful.
Not even disappointed.
Just empty.
And I remember thinking:
I cannot keep doing this.
the part i didn’t understand back then
At the time I thought I was burned out.
And maybe I was.
But looking back, I think something else was happening too.
I don’t think I stopped looking because I lost hope.
I think hope got too expensive.
I don’t think most women stop looking because they’ve given up. I think they stop because every new possibility starts feeling like another opportunity to be disappointed.
Not financially.
Emotionally.
Every failed protocol.
Every practitioner who sounded confident.
Every supplement order.
Every round of testing.
Every moment where you think:
Maybe this is finally it.
And then six weeks later you’re sitting in the exact same place wondering what happened.
That adds up.
People talk about the financial cost of chronic illness all the time.
They don’t talk nearly enough about the emotional cost.
The emotional cost of getting excited.
The emotional cost of believing.
The emotional cost of starting over.
Again.
And again.
And again.
After a while your system starts paying attention.
It starts recognizing the pattern before you do.
And eventually getting excited doesn’t feel exciting anymore.
It feels risky.
what i started seeing in other women
This is one of the reasons I never buy the idea that people “just aren’t committed.”
I’ve worked with too many women who have spent years trying to figure this out.
The women with spreadsheets.
The women with folders full of test results.
The women who know every diagnosis they’ve ever received and the date they received it.
The women who have read more books than some practitioners.
They’re not sitting there thinking:
“I don’t care anymore.”
They’re sitting there thinking:
“I don’t know if I can do this again.”
Big difference.
When a woman tells me:
“I don’t know if this is going to work.”
I don’t hear skepticism.
I hear someone who’s gotten tired of getting her hopes up.
Honestly, that makes perfect sense to me.
What looks like resistance is often self-protection.
What looks like apathy is often exhaustion.
What looks like giving up is often someone who’s gotten tired of getting their hopes up.
And who could blame her?
the eighteen months that changed everything
For about eighteen months I backed away from all of it.
No new practitioners.
No new protocols.
No obsessive research.
No hunting for the next answer.
And before anyone gets the wrong idea, I wasn’t enlightened.
I wasn’t sitting on a mountain meditating.
I was frustrated.
Very frustrated.
I just didn’t have the energy to keep chasing.
The weird thing is that backing off helped.
It sure as shit wasn’t because all my symptoms disappeared or I suddenly figured everything out.
It helped because the noise started settling down.
I wasn’t consuming twenty different opinions anymore.
I wasn’t changing directions every two weeks.
I wasn’t asking everybody else what they thought.
And slowly, I started hearing myself again.
the outsourcing problem
This is the part I think about a lot now.
I got into the habit of assuming everyone else knew more about my body than I did.
And look, expertise matters. I’m not anti-practitioner. Obviously.
But I had reached a point where every new opinion carried more weight than my own experience.
Somebody suggested something?
I was in.
Somebody had a theory?
Let’s do it.
Somebody recommended another supplement?
Sure.
Why not.
When you’re desperate enough, you stop questioning things.
You hand over the steering wheel because surely somebody else knows the way.
I did that for years.
And after enough years of doing that, I couldn’t hear myself anymore.
I knew what every practitioner thought.
I knew what every lab result said.
I knew what every expert recommended.
I had absolutely no idea what I thought.
maybe that’s where it starts
I wish I could tell you there was some huge breakthrough after that.
There wasn’t.
It was much less exciting than that.
It was space.
Space to stop chasing.
Space to stop trying to solve myself every waking minute.
Space to notice what felt true.
Space to notice what didn’t.
Space to remember that I was allowed to have a relationship with my own body that didn’t require somebody else’s permission.
And honestly?
I think a lot of smart women need more of that.
Not more information.
Not another protocol downloaded at midnight.
Not another person promising they’ve found the missing piece.
Just a little more space.
A little less noise.
A chance to hear themselves again.
If you’ve reached a point where you’re skeptical of everything...
If you’ve stopped booking appointments...
If you’ve ignored the ads, closed the tabs, and rolled your eyes at the promises...
I get it.
I’ve been there.
And maybe this isn’t about forcing yourself to become hopeful again.
Maybe it’s about creating enough space to figure out what your own voice sounds like underneath all the noise.
I’d love to hear from you.
Have you ever reached a point where hope felt too expensive?
Leave a comment or hit reply and tell me your story.