I cried in a restaurant, left my friend with the bill and spent the next week telling everyone I had lost my shit. Then someone asked me to change the story. Turns out, the words we use to describe our hardest moments may matter more than we think.

For eleven years, I helped other people navigate their health while quietly asking my own body to carry more and more. It took grief, illness, and eventually closing the medical practice I helped build for me to understand something I thought I already knew: caring for others should not require abandoning ourselves.

Sometimes healing isn’t about doing more. Sometimes it begins with finally deciding what we’re no longer willing to carry.