Dealing with Uncertainty

We Sold Everything | May 11, 2026

I am writing this from the couch, recovering.

This weekend I had the most painful and difficult RA flare I have experienced since the one that sent me to urgent care almost two years ago — the one where a PA took one look at me and said everything you are describing is classic rheumatoid arthritis and my entire life rearranged itself around those words. That flare brought the diagnosis. This one brought something else. Something I am still sitting with.

But I want to start with the physical, because I think most people do not understand what a flare actually costs a person. I want to be honest about it because honesty is the only reason to write any of this down.

What a Flare Actually Feels Like

I could feel it coming. You learn to read the signals — the particular quality of stiffness in the morning, the way the fatigue sits differently when inflammation and pain is gathering. Kelly urged me to take the Prednisone. I resisted, the way I always resist adding more medication to the stack — I know it is not good for me in the long run, I have very little prescribed, and I am careful about when I use it.

I waited too long.

By the time it took effect, I was laid out. The timing made it worse — it was a shot weekend, the Humira generic I inject once every two weeks, which already leaves me more vulnerable. The hydroxychloroquine I have been taking seems to be losing effectiveness over the past month. My specialist — I had seen him just Friday, May 8th — had prescribed a new sulfa medication to address this. I had just started it. Not in time.

The pain was everywhere. Fingers, hands, wrists, shoulders, knees. Getting up and down from any surface was an exercise in managing the distance between where I was and where I needed to be without using my hands. Hands that were so stiff and swollen they felt like they belonged to someone else. And underneath all of it — the fatigue. Not tiredness. Not sleepiness. Something I have come to call existential fatigue because that is the only description that comes close. It pervades my very soul. I feel it deep in my eyes, in every system, a heaviness that is not about sleep and cannot be fixed by it.

Today is Monday. I called in sick for the latter half of the day. The fatigue still there, the pain minor, but still there, my brain not quite right — words are slipping away from me, patience is paper thin, the cognitive fog that comes with a serious flare is its own particular indignity on top of everything else.

This one scared me. This one rocked me in a way the smaller flares this year have not.

And I know exactly why it happened.

The Car

We are pretty sure we sold the Volvo.

The 2021 XC90 T8 plug-in hybrid. White. The first truly beautiful, truly nice car we have ever owned — a car that felt like an achievement, a milestone, evidence of something we had built together. Kelly loves this car. Loves it in the way that a person who has spent years doing unglamorous work loves the beautiful thing he worked his way toward. It was not in the cards financially to bring it to Europe. We knew this. We accepted it. And we listed it.

If the sale goes through this Saturday, the last significant thing that had to go in order for this move to happen will be gone.

I want you to understand what that means.

We gave our notice. Last day of work: June 12th. That was already a commitment with weight to it. But the car — the car was the last big question. Will it sell? Will it sell in time? Will it sell for enough? We were not certain. We are not certain of very much right now. But we are looking at the answer being yes, and that yes changes everything.

There is no going back now.

I felt that land in my body this weekend alongside the flare, and I believe — I genuinely believe — that the two things are not unrelated.

The 3am Fear

We have been dealing with imposter syndrome.

I want to say that plainly because I think it needs to be said plainly. We are not sailing through this on a wave of confidence and excitement, though there is plenty of both. There are also moments — usually in the middle of the night, the particular darkness of 3am — when one of us jolts awake with a fear gripping us that is hard to name in daylight but very real in the dark.

Is this the right thing to do?Can we actually do this?Who are we to live our dreams this big?

We have confessed these moments to each other. Quietly, carefully, checking in the way people check in when they are trying to hold something together by mutual agreement. You had that fear last night? So did I. We are still in it. We are still going.

But I notice, underneath the practical fears about money and logistics and timing, a deeper question that has been running in me my whole life and is simply louder now because the stakes are higher.

Do I deserve this? Do I have the capacity to hold a dream this large? Can I allow this to unfold — really allow it — without something in me finding a way to make sure it doesn't?

These are not new questions. I have been asking versions of them since I was a girl enduring life, wondering what was wrong with her. They are just wearing new clothes right now.

What Gabor Maté Has to Do With Any of This

I have been reading Dr. Gabor Maté's work — particularly When the Body Says No — with the particular hunger of someone who recognizes themselves on every page.

He identifies four traits that appear consistently in people, predominantly women, who develop autoimmune conditions. I want to share them here because when I read them I felt simultaneously seen and undone.

One: Prioritizing others' needs. Compulsive caregiving. Putting everyone else's emotional needs ahead of your own so consistently and so automatically that you stop noticing you are doing it.

Two: Rigid identification with duty. A compulsive focus on roles, responsibility, and obligation over personal needs. Showing up for everyone and everything because that is what you do, regardless of what it costs.

Three: Repression of anger. The inability to express healthy anger or say no. Appearing endlessly accommodating, endlessly nice, endlessly available — while the anger that has nowhere to go turns inward.

Four: Responsibility for others' feelings. The bone-deep belief that you are responsible for how other people feel and must never disappoint anyone. Ever. Under any circumstances.

I have all four. I have had all four my entire life. I did not know that is what I had — I just thought it was who I was.

The Mathematics of an Empty Cup

When I first encountered the concept of the highly sensitive person I felt something I can only describe as a quiet explosion. An aha that kept expanding the longer I sat with it.

I have always been easily overwhelmed. By noise, by conflict, by the swirling complexity of ordinary life that other people seemed to navigate without effort. By too many demands arriving at once. By the weight of other people's expectations, even loving ones, even ones I genuinely wanted to meet. I spent most of my life believing this meant something was wrong with me. That I was broken in some specific, unfixable way that I could not name but could always feel.

What I understand now is that I am simply wired to feel more. To take in more. To process more deeply. In the right conditions — quiet, slow, spacious, safe — this is a profound gift. In conditions of chronic stress and overwhelm and hypervigilance, it is an accelerant on an already burning fire.

And here is the thing about a nervous system running perpetually on empty: there is a mathematics to it that is not about character or discipline or how much you love the people in your life.

You cannot give what you do not have.

I have let people down throughout my life. I know this. I have carried the guilt and shame of it for years — the birthdays I did not remember, the calls I did not make, the cards that were never sent. Even after smartphones made forgetting inexcusable I still struggled. Not because those people did not matter to me. They did. They do. But because the bandwidth required to track and tend to others was already fully consumed by the work of keeping myself upright.

I could show up — fully, steadfastly, with everything I had — for stretches of time. And then there would be a crack. A withdrawal. A disappearing. Not from lack of love but from lack of resource. I was living on just enough. Allowing just enough good in, managing just enough connection, sustaining just enough of myself to keep going. The overwhelm was always just behind my line of sight, imminent if not already present, and I unconsciously kept my life small enough to stay just ahead of it.

There were opportunities I declined not because I did not want them but because some part of me could not believe I was worthy of them. Could not hold that much good. Could not trust that the floor would hold if I let myself have something that large. I had a ceiling — invisible, self-constructed, maintained by the same beliefs that made the four traits possible — and I kept bumping against it and calling the bumping discipline problems, or laziness, or fear, when what it actually was, was a nervous system that had never been given enough safety to expand.

I have been getting better. Kelly is a large part of why. Fifteen years of consistent, quiet, unwavering love has done something to my nervous system that decades of self-work alone could not quite accomplish. We heal in relationship. Bessel van der Kolk says this and I believe it completely because I have lived it.

But I am not fully healed. The overwhelm is still there, still just behind the line of sight. The capacity to hold all of the things simultaneously — the healthy eating, the meditation, the relationships, the exercise, the work, the creative life, all of it at once, all of it sustained — is still something I am working toward rather than something I have arrived at.

I used to call this a discipline problem. I no longer believe that is what it is.

This is about healing. About learning, for the first time in my life, how to fill my own cup from an aware and healthy place — not from survival, not from performance, not from the hypervigilant girl's exhausting calculus of managing threats and meeting expectations. From genuine nourishment. From real rest. From the slow accumulation of safety that allows a nervous system to finally, finally stand down.

I do not know yet exactly how to do that. Not completely. But I am more committed to finding out than I have ever been committed to anything. And I believe — I have to believe — that the life we are building in Europe, slower and warmer and quieter and more human than the one we are leaving, is part of how it happens.

Not a cure. A condition. The right soil, finally, for the right kind of growing. In taking care of myself. Instead of what Brene Brown calls “armoring up”.

Where It Came From

When you grow up never knowing what mood your mother will be in — when you learn to live your days by walking on eggshells, reading every room you enter for threats and danger and the emotional weather of whoever is in it — your nervous system learns something. It learns to stay alert. It learns to never fully relax. It learns that safety is conditional and can be withdrawn at any moment, so you had better keep watching.

This is called hypervigilance. I did not have a name for it until recently. I just thought I was a careful person. A sensitive person. An observant person. All of those things are true. But underneath them was a nervous system that had never been given permission to stand down.

I am a highly sensitive person — my acupuncturist named it after a few sessions, gently, the way a good healer names the thing you have always known but never been able to say. Highly sensitive people feel everything more intensely — the beauty and the pain both, the energy in rooms, the emotional states of people around them. In the right environment it is a gift. In a chaotic or unsafe environment it is an accelerant.

I masked. I performed. I learned to present a version of myself to the outside world that could fit in, pass as fine, manage the expectations of whatever context I was in. And underneath the performance I always had the low hum of waiting to be caught — not at anything specific, just caught, found out, exposed as someone who did not quite belong in the place she was standing.

I walked away from the family legacy that created all of this. The generational poverty, the addiction, the abuse, the perpetual grief and low self-esteem that comes from these experiences — I left that behind. What I did not fully understand until recently is that leaving the source does not mean leaving the patterns. I took the hypervigilance with me. I took the compulsive caregiving and the repressed anger and the belief that asking for help was failure and the responsibility for everyone else's feelings. I took all of it, packed neatly into my nervous system, and carried it into every room I walked into for the rest of my life.

And my body, eventually, said no.

The Cost of Independence

I have always taken fierce pride in being independent. In taking care of myself. In not needing help.

I am no longer proud of this.

What I understand now is that the independence was not strength — or not only strength. It was armor. It was the hypervigilant girl's solution to a world that had taught her that needing things was dangerous, that depending on people was a setup for disappointment, that the only safe position was the one where you needed nothing from anyone.

The armor worked. I survived. I have been learning, slowly and imperfectly and with great dedication, to thrive. But thriving requires softness. It requires the willingness to be seen needing something. It requires emotional safety — not the performed safety of someone who has learned to look fine, but the real thing, the kind that lets you set down the armor because you genuinely believe it is safe to do so.

I am learning to be soft. I am learning what it feels like to be grounded and slow and present. I am learning that I do not thrive in high-performance environments that reward grinding — that the hustle culture that has shaped so much of American working life is genuinely antithetical to my nervous system's needs, and that choosing peace over performance is not failure. It is, finally, listening.

The Meditation I Forgot

I had a lapse in my meditation practice this winter. Weeks went by. I felt the difference — in my regulation, in my patience, in my ability to hold difficulty without being swallowed by it — and I kept meaning to return and didn't.

Last night, after the flare had exhausted itself and I was finally still, I put on a guided meditation I love and lay in the dark and let it do what meditation does. Afterward I felt the thing I always feel after — like something that had been clenched very tightly had been gently reminded that it was allowed to open.

I know what I need. This is perhaps the most clarifying gift of this season, difficult as it has been. I know what I need, and I know what I need to stop doing, and I am making choices accordingly.

Drink water. Eat well. Sleep. Move gently. Meditate. Stay grounded. Visualize — not the mechanics of the move, but myself actually living the life. Myself having the capacity to hold this dream. Myself deserving it.

Because I do. We do.

What This Move Is Really About

I am moving to a country — to a continent — that does not worship at the altar of hustle. That values the long lunch and the afternoon rest and the idea that a life should have room in it for living. That does not consider it weakness to work fewer hours or measure a person's worth by their productivity metrics.

Perhaps, just perhaps, I can carve out a place for myself there that nurtures my soul rather than depletes it. A pace that my nervous system can actually sustain. A life that does not require constant performance just to get through the day.

That is what Spain is. That is what France is. That is what all of this is.

Not just an adventure. Not just a dream finally lived. A genuine, medically necessary, soul-level recalibration toward the life my body has been asking for since it started speaking in the only language I was finally forced to hear.

The Volvo is selling. The notice has been given. The flare has passed, mostly, and I am still here.

I am bolstered by one thought as I close the laptop and rest.

I do not have to earn this. I just have to allow it.

More soon — including a deeper dive into the overwhelm that contributed to this diagnosis, and what I am learning about healing the roots rather than just managing the symptoms.