15 yrs with RA and I finally realized the search itself was making me sicker
It makes me laugh how much I've done in pursuit of being healthy.
For 300,000 years, humans didn't have health routines because life was the routine. You ate what you could find. You moved because you had to. You slept when it got dark. Then in the last 200 years we built a world that doesn't really work for our biology anymore, and now people like me spend adult lives trying to claw back to something that used to just be life.
I started at 15, when I was diagnosed with RA. For the next fifteen years, I looked for the answer. The perfect diet. The right protocol. The supplement, the doctor, the test, the fix. I tried things that worked a little, things that worked for a while, things that didn't work at all. I got really good at researching.
I wish someone had told me then that all the searching was part of what was keeping me sick. Not because any one thing I tried was inherently wrong. It's that the constant pressure to find the one thing, in that endless sea of information, is its own kind of stress. If you're searching, your mind is running, your eyes are straining, your body is never relaxed.
The quick-fix industry isn't just selling supplements. It's selling the idea that an answer exists. That somewhere in the next protocol, the next diet, the next device, there's a key that unlocks the version of you that isn't tired or in pain. I spent fifteen years inside that loop. The loop is the product. As long as you're searching, you're buying.
What changed for me wasn't finding the answer. It was a specific moment sitting in front of yet another browser tab about yet another supplement, just tired. I closed the laptop and went outside instead. Not because I thought it would fix anything. Just because I was done for the day. That became a habit. And then it became the thing.
In the last year I've lived closer to nature than I ever have. Outside barefoot every day. Real breaks from screens. Real food, simply cooked. That's it.
I'm still on medication. I want to be clear about that. But under my doctor's supervision, I've gone from weekly injections to monthly. I spent years chasing that result with protocols and research. It came from changing how I live, not from finding the perfect thing.
I still don't have it all figured out. Some days I crush it. Some days I want takeout and TV until my eyes hurt.
The point isn't that I've arrived somewhere. It's that I stopped looking for the answer in a bottle or on a screen and started looking for it out the window.
Most of what we call wellness is just an elaborate, expensive attempt to simulate what's already free outside our doors.