I don’t remember which appointment it was. There were too many by then.
What I remember is the drive home after one of them. Sitting at a red light with a new protocol on the passenger seat, not even looking at it. Just staring through the windshield, numb, thinking, I can’t do this anymore.
It felt like I’d been there before. The same light, the same seat, the same sentence in my head. Different day, different practitioner, same exact moment. Like I was stuck inside something with no actual way out of it.
By then I’d been to naturopaths, functional and conventional doctors, GI specialists, colon hydrotherapists, acupuncturists, nutritionists. In person, virtual, some weeks more than once, for years. I even saw a medical intuitive and a psychic at one point.
Nearly every appointment began the same way.
“Where do we begin? Tell me everything.”
My history had gotten so long I could barely get through telling it anymore. I’d open my mouth and feel exhausted before the first sentence was even out.
Each of them did what they were trained to do. Ran their tests. Gave their read. Sent me home with something new to try.
And days later I’d feel awful anyway. No closer to anything, just lighter in my bank account and heavier everywhere else.
I was so tired.
Not just from the symptoms. From the searching.
The appointments. The money. The hope I kept rebuilding every time, only to watch it fall apart again a few weeks later.
There was real grief in that. Grief for the version of my life that wasn’t built around my gut. Grief for the money that kept disappearing into appointments that promised hope and rarely delivered it.
Some days I wasn’t even sad anymore.
Just numb.
Like this was simply who I was now.
I Became a Patient Instead of a Person
Every decision ran through my symptoms first.
Every conversation eventually circled back to my gut.
I’d wake up and check in with how I felt before I decided anything else about my day, before I decided who I even wanted to be that day.
My world had gotten so small without me noticing it happening.
Fewer plans.
Fewer people.
Fewer things that had nothing to do with my body.
I didn’t realize how much of my actual life I’d handed over until I started wanting pieces of it back.
The Direction I Hadn’t Tried Yet
I stopped asking practitioners for the answer and started asking myself the questions instead.
It wasn’t a decision. It was closer to running out of other directions to look.
I started journaling, and not to track symptoms, but to get honest with myself in a way I’d stopped letting myself be.
What came out first was anger.
Then fear.
Then grief I’d been too busy trying to fix to actually feel.
I sat and meditated, badly, mostly just sitting there.
I found actual minutes in my day that belonged to me and nothing else.
I let myself feel things I’d been pushing down instead of moving through.
I brought people into it, my closest friends, my family, and let them see me somewhere I usually kept composed.
That part was the hardest. Being that open about how lost I actually felt.
Somewhere in that stretch, I found Human Design, and I went deeper into it than I expected to.
Not because it was the thing that fixed anything. I was just fascinated by it, and it turned into something I’d genuinely never had before, a real spiritual practice of my own.
It gave me language for how I actually function instead of how I’d spent years forcing myself to.
None of this replaced the labs or the appointments. I’m not saying any of it was wasted. Some of it mattered, and I needed to find that out for myself the long way. But it was never going to be the whole answer by itself.
My body wasn’t only waiting on another answer.
It was waiting on me to stop leaving myself out of the search for one.
Looking Back
I don’t regret the appointments.
I don’t regret the labs.
I don’t regret a single person who tried to help me, even the ones who couldn’t.
I just wish someone had told me earlier that so much of the work wasn’t going to happen in those offices at all.
It was going to happen in the early mornings with a journal.
In the hard conversations I kept avoiding.
In the moments I finally stopped running from myself.
If you’re still searching, still stacking up appointments and hoping the next one will finally explain everything, the Gut Overload Cycle Quiz is a place to start.
It won’t diagnose you.
But it might help you recognize patterns you haven’t been able to see yet and remind you that your own relationship with your body is part of this too.