Thirty years chasing the wrong kind of vitality.
I spent over three decades in corporate investment banking. Global markets. Mergers. The relentless, high-stakes pressure that comes with being responsible for significant amounts of other people's money. From the outside, I had the career most people spend their lives trying to reach.
Inside, I was quietly collapsing. I told myself the exhaustion was the price of ambition. The constant headaches were stress. The digestive chaos was just “getting older.” I had no vocabulary for what was actually happening — so I did what high-performers do. I pushed through.
The diabetes diagnosis was the first thing that made me stop. Then the hyperthyroidism. Then the panic attacks — not the mild kind. The kind that land you in the ER at 2am convinced something is catastrophically wrong. The kind that turn ordinary things like air travel into enormous acts of courage.
“I wasn't looking for a wellness journey. I was looking for a way to function. I was looking for a single day where I woke up and didn't feel like I was already losing.”
Depression moved in quietly. Stretches where I could not sleep for days. Vertigo that made the world feel unstable in the most literal sense. A low-grade current of worry and fear that I had normalised so completely I thought it was just who I was.
Medicine managed my conditions. It did not restore me. And it wasn't until I began — somewhat reluctantly — to explore what the ancient Chinese understood about the body, energy, and the relationship between the two, that things began to genuinely shift.
The turning point was Qigong. Then the principles of traditional Chinese medicine. Then the broader framework of Taoist health philosophy — the understanding that the body has its own intelligence, and that when you learn to work with it rather than against it, things that felt irreversible begin to change.
Sleep came back. Not all at once. Gradually, reliably. The fatigue began to lift. The panic quieted. My relationship with food changed when I understood it as nourishment rather than fuel. The conditions didn't all vanish — but the way I inhabited my body became, for the first time I could remember, sustainable.