The Person Who Was Right Before I Was

Part One

The thing about the body, when it has been carrying a role for a long time, is that it tends to know what is happening before the person inhabiting it does. The body has access to data the mind has trained itself to overlook. The mid-afternoon energy that did not used to be like this. The sleep that has thinned. The morning waking that arrives slightly heavier than it used to. The recurring small illnesses that hang on a little longer each time. None of these are framed, at the time, as information. They are framed, at the time, as the cost of the work, or as the noise of getting older, or as the kind of thing that everyone in the role experiences.

What the body is doing, in the same period, is a quieter calculation. It is reading the role against what the role is asking of it, and against who the person has been becoming. It is registering the gap. The mind, busy in the role, does not have the bandwidth to register the gap, and would not have the framework to read it if it did. The mind reads everything through the lens of the role, because the role has been generative of identity, income, network and recognition for decades. The body has no such lens. The body just keeps the books.

By the time the books are unignorable, the gap has usually been there for years. This is what made my own diagnosis at forty, when it came, not a surprise. The diagnosis arrived several years after the body had begun making itself heard. The mid-afternoons. The sleep. The morning waking. The small illnesses. All of it had been ongoing. None of it had been read as a verdict on the role. By forty, the verdict came in a form the mind could not negotiate with, because the body had run out of softer ways to be heard.

What I would say now, with the distance, is that the body was right before I was. The body had been reading the gap accurately for a long time. I had been refusing to read it. The diagnosis was not the start of new information. It was the start of new information arriving in a format that the part of me running the career could no longer overlook.

Part Two

The recovery that followed took three years, and it was not, as I had initially assumed it would be, the answer to what the body had been asking. The recovery addressed the diabetes. It did not, on its own, address the question underneath the diabetes. I learned this the slow way, in the period after the body had returned to functional health and the underlying sense of misalignment had not.

For a long stretch of the recovery, I was running the recovery the way I had run the career. Same operating system, different output. The metrics had changed. The relationship to the metrics had not. I was tracking the heart rate variability with the precision the career had taught me to bring to numbers. I was reading the Oura ring data with the same diligence I had brought to the work. I was, in effect, running the body as a new project that the same self was managing. The project was succeeding, by every measurable indicator. The thing underneath it was untouched.

What the body had actually been asking, when it produced the diabetes, was something the recovery could not, by itself, answer. The body had been asking whether the role I was performing was still the right role for who I had become. The role had been built around a version of me that had been right at thirty, and that version was not right at forty. The body had absorbed the difference, year after year, until it could no longer absorb it. The diagnosis was the way the question got asked in a form I could not ignore. The recovery was, in some sense, the work I did to prove that I could still ignore it.

I could not ignore it forever, and partway through the recovery I stopped trying. The work that came next was not on the body. The body, by then, was largely repaired. The work was on the role, and on who I had been performing the role for, and on what I was willing to keep doing now that the conditions had changed. The frames I encountered in that period, the Vedic chart, the Human Design, the work with the energy centres, were the ones that gave the question a longer-range view. They did not provide the answer. They provided enough shape that the question could be held without it collapsing back into the same urgency the career had trained me to bring to everything.

The practice I run now is built on the territory that opened up after the recovery ended and the question began. The Diagnostic is the conversation that finds the shape of that question for the person in front of it. Thirty minutes, free, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Continue reading: The Room That Stopped Speaking →

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