Why We're Doing This — The RA Journey

We Sold Everything | April 2026

I have always listened to my body.

Even when the world around me wasn't ready for that conversation. Even when listening meant standing apart from the people around me, making choices they didn't understand, following an inner knowing that I couldn't always justify with evidence. From the time I was twelve years old and walked away from a PBS documentary about baby seals and declared myself a vegetarian — on a farm in rural Minnesota, in the 1980s, where this made absolutely no sense to anyone around me — I have been someone who listens when the body speaks.

Which is why it took me so long to understand what was happening to me. Because I was listening. I was doing everything right. And my body kept getting louder anyway.

It Started in One Finger

It started in my left index finger.

Excruciatingly painful. But intermittent — it would flare and then disappear, then move to another finger, then vanish again as though it had never been there. On my daily walks I noticed a fullness and stiffness in my hands that would ease slightly by the time I got home. Strange. Manageable. Easy to dismiss.

I went to my doctor. Blood tests came back normal. I was told I was fine and sent on my way.

So I kept going, the way you do, because what choice did you have.

Over the following months and years the symptoms spread and deepened. What had begun in one finger moved to every finger, both wrists, my shoulders, my knees, my toes, my ankles, and eventually my right jaw. The fatigue arrived alongside it — not tiredness, but a heaviness that made ordinary activities feel monumental. Things I had always done without thinking became effortful. Then impossible for stretches of time. And still, every time I went to a doctor, the blood work came back normal. I was fine. There was nothing wrong.

Two years is a long time to know something is wrong and be told you are fine.

I want to say that plainly, because I know I am not the only one who has lived inside that sentence. The dismissal of women's pain and women's bodies by the medical system is not a new story. It is not even a surprising story. But living inside it — being the person who knows, who keeps going back, who keeps being sent home — is a particular kind of lonely that is hard to explain to someone who hasn't been there.

Doing Everything Right

I had been dismissed enough times and read enough on my own that by the time the symptoms had been going on for two years, I had convinced myself this was menopause-induced joint pain. Of course it was. After years of having the worst PMS of anyone I knew, I said it to myself with a kind of dark humor that had become familiar. My body had always had opinions. This was just the latest one.

That same spring I decided to take matters into my own hands — the way I have always eventually taken matters into my own hands when the people who are supposed to help haven't.

I eliminated nearly everything from my diet. No dairy, no meat, no sugar, no alcohol, no corn, no preservatives, no oils, no caffeine, no gluten. Just fruits, vegetables, rice, and beans. I returned to acupuncture. I went back to therapy, this time specifically addressing the psychoneuroimmunological connection — the relationship between emotional stress and physical inflammation — and doing somatic work. I began meditating every day.

I was doing everything right.

And then in July I had the largest flare of my life.

I woke up completely incapable of movement. My arms, hands, fingers, knees, jaw, ankles — everything. A quarter inch of movement was excruciating in a way I had never experienced before and hope never to experience again. Very carefully, very slowly, Kelly helped me into the car and drove me to urgent care.

The PA who saw me took one look. She didn't run tests first. She looked at me — at my hands, my face, the way I was holding my body — and she said:

Everything you have described and everything I am seeing is classic rheumatoid arthritis.

I was shocked. And then I was relieved. And then came something more complicated than either of those things — a deep, frustrated recognition that I had been right all along, that my body had been telling the truth all along, and that the burden of figuring it out had fallen almost entirely on me. That this was not the first time. That it would probably not be the last.

What Rheumatoid Arthritis Actually Is

RA is not the arthritis most people picture — the wear-and-tear kind that comes with age. It is an autoimmune condition, which means my immune system, rather than protecting me, has turned on my own tissue. It attacks the lining of my joints, causing inflammation, pain, swelling, and over time, if unmanaged, damage that cannot be undone.

They say it is not curable. But it is manageable. And the distinction between those two things has become one of the most important organizing principles of my life.

The medical establishment's primary answer is pharmaceutical — disease-modifying drugs that suppress the immune system and reduce inflammation. These drugs work for many people and I am not here to tell anyone what to do with their own body. But they come with significant side effects, require ongoing monitoring, and do not address the underlying conditions that contributed to the disease in the first place.

I want to be honest with you about something, because this blog is nothing if not completely honest.

I take the medication.

I have to. Without it I cannot function — the acute pain and the existential fatigue that come with this diagnosis are not things I can think or meditate or supplement my way through on their own. Not yet. The medication allows me to get through the day, to walk with the dogs, to write, to plan, to be present with Kelly in the ways that matter. Without it, none of that is possible in the way I need it to be.

I find this deeply, almost painfully ironic. I am a woman who has valued the natural path her entire life — who grew up on a farm growing organic vegetables with her family, before that word existed in rural Minnesota, who walked away from meat at twelve, who spent decades choosing acupuncture and herbal medicine and somatic therapy over pharmaceutical solutions. And here I am, unable to function without prescription drugs for the first time in my life. Forced into the very system I have always questioned by a body that left me no other viable choice.

The irony goes deeper. If I had been diagnosed with cancer, there would be a clear and well-documented natural path laid before me — decades of anecdotal evidence and growing scientific study pointing toward diet, meditation, and alternative healing as genuine interventions. That literature is rich and available and real. For rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune conditions, that path is not yet as clear or as documented. I am researching. I am working on it. I believe it exists. But I have not found it yet in a form that allows me to let go of the medication without losing my ability to live my life. I’ll keep you posted as I journey through this.

So I do both. I take the medication that keeps me functional, and I pursue every alternative path available to me — the diet, the acupuncture, the nervous system regulation work, the climate change, the somatic therapy, the Dispenza meditations, the research. I hold the pharmaceutical intervention and the integrative healing practice in the same hands at the same time, because right now that is what the reality requires.

I am not at peace with this yet. I am working toward it.

What I have chosen, in addition to the medication, is to refuse the idea that pharmaceutical management is the only path available to me.

Dr. Gabor Maté's work has been central to this understanding. His framework — that autoimmune conditions often have roots in chronic stress, emotional suppression, and the nervous system's long-term dysregulation — does not assign blame. It offers compassion. It says: your body was trying to survive. It did what it needed to do. Now let's figure out what it needs in order to heal.

I am figuring that out. Slowly, honestly, with Kelly's full support and more hope than I have had at any previous point in this journey.

What I Have Learned

The research on climate and autoimmune conditions is consistent and clear: warm, dry climates reduce inflammatory symptoms in a measurable way. Vitamin D — which the body produces through sun exposure — plays a direct role in immune regulation. Cold, grey, damp climates do the opposite.

I had already felt this intuitively before I knew it intellectually. When we left Oregon for Arizona years ago, something shifted in me that I couldn't fully name at the time. The sunshine did something. The warmth did something. My body moved differently in it. My mood was different. My energy was different.

Spain, with its Mediterranean climate, is not a dream destination with a health benefit attached. For my body, it is the destination because of the health benefit. The warmth is the prescription. The vitamin D is the medicine. The slowing down — the slow living, the walking, the unhurried pace of Mediterranean culture — is the nervous system regulation that no pill has yet offered me.

This move is not just about adventure. It is about healing.

I also understand now, in a way I did not fully understand before the diagnosis, the connection between the chronic stress of an unlived life and the inflammation that resulted from it. I spent decades knowing I was supposed to be somewhere else, doing something else, living differently — and suppressing that knowing in favor of practicality, safety, the voice of fear over the flash of knowing. That suppression has a cost. The body keeps the score, as Bessel van der Kolk so precisely named it. Mine was keeping it in my joints.

Moving to Europe is not just the adventure I always knew I would have.

It is, quite literally, part of how I intend to get well.

What This Means for the Blog

I will write about the RA journey honestly and in real time — what I am doing, what is working, what isn't, what the research says, what my body says when the two disagree. I will write about the climate shift and whether it makes the difference I believe it will. I will write about managing a chronic illness in a country where I do not yet speak the language and am building a new healthcare relationship from scratch.

I will not be a wellness influencer. I will not sell you a protocol or promise you a cure. I will tell you what I know and what I don't, what I've tried and what it did, and I will be honest about the hard days alongside the good ones.

Because that is the only kind of writing I know how to do.

And because somewhere out there is a woman who has been told she is fine for two years when she knows she is not. Who is doing everything right and still waking up some mornings unable to move. Who is carrying the burden of figuring out her own health because the system hasn't figured it out for her.

This is for her.

You are not imagining it. Your body is not lying. And you are not alone.

Next — the pivot. Why the road to Spain goes through somewhere unexpected first, and what Widespread Panic has to do with all of it.