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~ episode SUMMARY ~

A story about dreams, disillusionment, and redirection. About self-love, chronic illness, and overcoming trauma.

A story about befriending change and preempting crisis.

In this episode, I go deeper into how I got to where I am now, discussing topics like:

What IS self-love?
How does our subconscious drive us to “repeat history?”
How do you know when it’s time to redirect?

And, what do you do when no one can help?

This episode is all about hope and how incredible it is to be a human. If you have any doubts in yourself, in your dreams, in your ability to do something - get ready to shed those doubts, because they’re not the truth of who you are.

~ episode transcript ~

Change can be exciting or scary, or both at the same time.

Change can be uncertain and uncomfortable. Disruptive. Traumatic. Change can be intentional or unexpected. Have you ever had a big change that shook your entire life? Sometimes we don't choose change, but it happens anyway. If I had my way when I was 10 years old, I would have never moved to the United States. I certainly didn't choose my stepfather. I didn't choose to get a tick bite that gave me Lyme disease. But funny, now at 31, in 2024, I see these things that I didn't choose as some of the most defining driving forces in my life. The driving forces that created the conditions that I needed for growth and happiness.

It's easy to look at what happened to us, the bad things, painful things, awful things, as just that - awful things. “I'm a survivor of awful things and this means my life is inherently harder than everyone else's.”

This is what I used to think. “My life is, by default, harder.”

And this had all kinds of implications. Like, I must work harder than everyone else. I can't just rest when my body needs rest. Or everyone else doesn't know what it's like to struggle. At least struggle this badly. And I can't share my heart with them. They won't understand. Or that people should pity me, and help me, and treat me differently. It's easy to carve out a ditch in the ground for yourself and sit there, for years, waiting for someone to come and say, “wow, your life is so hard. Everything that happened to you is awful. You didn't deserve it. How terrible that you can't be like everyone else out there enjoying the sun.”

Luckily for me, that never happened. Oh, and it hurt! It hurt that no one ever came to rescue me from my self imposed emotional prison. No one ever said, “poor thing, you have it so bad.”

Thank goodness no one said that, because that's simply not true. The emotional pit of despair was dug by me, pitying me, and it was me who didn't want to climb out.

Hard to see it that way when we're sitting in the pit of despair. I was always waiting for someone to save me and tell me, “it's okay, you don't have to change! Here, have everything good that you deserve.” But the universe never sent me a knight in shining armor, because that would've been a confirmation that I'm small and incapable of getting out of the pit of despair myself. Having someone else break my trauma shackles and save me from my emotional distress would've meant: “You're right, Kat. You're not big enough. You're not strong enough. You can't do it on your own. You need help,” and that's simply not true.

No matter what crisis you're in, no matter how awful your life may have been, no matter how many unfair things happen to you, no matter how much love you didn't get from your family, no matter how fast you were forced to grow up, no matter how little money you had, no matter how terribly you were treated, no matter how many dreams got shattered - you are big enough, strong enough, smart enough, and capable enough to overcome all of that.

All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. All of it. If it happened to you, it means you are big enough to overcome it and turn it into a strength, a story to tell, a lesson for others, a creation for the world, a healing balm for yourself. Life is telling you: “no, you have the capacity to rise above it. You just need a mirror to see how big and incredible you are.”

I want to tell you a story about dreams, disillusionment, and redirection, but I'm setting the stage for it with this little preamble, one about big changes that can be traumatic and beneficial at the same time. Ultimately, everyone has trauma, but what's important is our relationship to trauma. Do we see it as something more powerful than us? Something that keeps us down? Or something that we can overcome to become bigger and stronger, to grow, and to help others with the same thing?

It took me a while to see my trauma and the big changes in my life as the latter, but I now see it very clearly, and I'm so grateful for it. Moving to the United States gave me freedom, opportunities, and love. My stepfather was the catalyst for 15 years of self destruction and self hatred, but ultimately, the catalyst for me to learn how to love myself and rebuild myself from ground zero.

And Lyme disease saved my life.

October of 2015. I lay on the deflating air mattress in my friend's living room, exhausted, weak, feeling my heart palpitations shake my ribcage and echo in my throat. It's a feeling you don't forget, feeling your heartbeat in your throat. I was so tired, but I was afraid to go to sleep. What if I don't wake up?

I'm 22. I just got the job of my dreams. It's a five month internship for now, but I'm hopeful. I'll just work really hard and blow them away with my skills and professionalism and make sure I get the full time after that. I need it. The five month internship doesn't come with benefits and I'm in a different state, which means my Medicaid doesn't cover me here. So I can't go to the hospital. I can't see a doctor. I only have myself to rely on, so I need this job. But I'm not even sure if I'll wake up in the morning.

All day long, I fought brain fog, trying my hardest to think, to work, to form sentences. This isn't me. I'm smart, I'm quick, but I must fight the brain fog and keep going. All day long, I would lean on the walls to make my way to the restroom. My balance is off and my fatigue is overpowering. I hope no one sees that I'm using the walls for support. I hope no one notices how long I sit in the bathroom stall just resting because the short walk from my desk to the bathroom got me out of breath.

All day long, I'm hungry. I've lost a lot of weight in just a few weeks, because I keep reacting to everything I eat. My neck swells up, I get a headache, and I guess something in today's salad didn't work. Okay, write out the ingredients. I'll think about it later.

When I get back to the boys’ apartment after work, I'm on the couch, on my laptop, Googling my symptoms again, trying to figure it out.

I've tried asking everyone I know over the weeks, Posting on Facebook, texting people, but I haven't gotten any answers. So I'm doing the research myself because I must find out what's wrong. All I know is that a person is not supposed to feel this way at 22.

I cook myself dinner. Boiled chicken with salt and a cucumber. It doesn't give me a reaction, thank goodness. A small win. I don't care that it's just boiled chicken with salt and a cucumber, I'm so happy to find foods that are safe. But, cooking dinner takes my last energy, and I spend the rest of the evening on the couch, resting, feeling my heart skip, feeling it struggle after my body struggled to get through the day.

Tomorrow I'd do it all again, and hope that the day's research brings me a bit more clarity. Because I want to live. So I'm trying to fall asleep, and my pounding and skipping heart keeps waking me up, keeps shaking me awake. And I just lay there and pray. I think I believe in God at this point in my life, so I pray. “Help me,” on the inhale, “God,” on the exhale.

This breathing prayer stayed with me for years. I would do it whenever the heart palpitations came back, when I couldn't sleep for days in mold infested rooms and had to find a new place to live again, when my body was detoxing too hard from heavy metals, when I got anxiety once I started living alone, when I was having an adrenal episode on a plane and thought it was a heart attack, when I was at the ER thinking I have appendicitis, but it was just extreme intestinal pain. “Help me,” on the inhale, “God,” on the exhale. A mantra to keep the fear at bay. A mantra to keep me breathing. I didn't know it back then, but I was practicing nervous system regulation in the best way I could.

I was intuitively doing the best thing for myself. Because I wanted to live. It was one of those nights in 2015, on the air mattress in the boys apartment, trying to fall asleep, but scared to, that I realized that I wanted to live. I never had suicidal ideation, and I was never clinically depressed, but throughout my teenage years, I really hated myself.

And not just in passing as teenage angst. I wrote in my journal about all the reasons I don't deserve to live. I wrote an essay once in school arguing that my parents lives would have been better if my mom had gone through with the abortion she was considering. The teacher did not refer me to counseling, and in hindsight, what the heck.

But I was calmly convinced that the world doesn't need me. I did self harm. I pushed myself way too hard in college. I punished myself with more work because of how I saw myself, and It hurts me to say this now, but I saw myself as someone despicable, unlovable, unworthy, weak, and deserving of bad things.

From age 14 to 22, I had weekly breakdowns when I'd cry myself to sleep because I couldn't bear living with myself. And it was a combination of hating who I was, and feeling so, so hurt that the person I'm closest to, me, doesn't love me. I lived with this for about 8 years, and working harder and harder was the only thing that made me feel any good. Overloading on college credits, three part time jobs, side projects, running three to eight miles multiple times a week, swimming a mile three times a week, barely eating because I thought I was fat, burning out before senior year of college, injuries in both my arms from working on a computer for too long, and then migraines, the first food intolerances, extremely painful periods.

I pushed myself so hard that my health collapsed at age 22, three months out of college. I didn't know it at the time, but the basement room I was renting for a month was infested with black mold. It suppressed my already strained immune system, and that's how it all began. But I look back and realize: the mold poisoning, and the dormant Lyme disease that was activated as a result of the mold, saved my life. Because I was on a trajectory of self destruction, and the health crash forced me to redirect, change my ways, do everything differently.

I had no choice if I wanted to live. And I realized that after eight years of hating myself, punishing myself and thinking that the world is better off without me, when the moment came and the universe asked through the heart palpitations that shook my entire frail body, “Kat, do you want to live?”

I realized that the answer is yes.

Yes, yes, yes! I do! I do! I want to live! I want to experience life, I want to make things, I want to see the world, I want love, I want children one day, even if I don't deserve it, I want to! I fought for survival and for the job of my dreams, and now I'll fight for my life, as much as it takes, I want to live, please.

And the universe helped me through. But it said, “if you want to live, you're gonna have to change everything.”

I always knew that I could get anywhere through sheer willpower, hard work and struggle. That's how I achieved my biggest goals. It's how I got to Pixar - late nights, pushing myself past my limits. But this time, I knew it had to be different, because the willpower and hard work is how I got sick in the first place.

What got you here won't get you there. So over the next several years, I learned how to take care of myself, what my body needed, what health truly means. I investigated a lot on my own. I found functional Lyme-literate doctors to help me along. And I tried a bunch of different holistic and alternative modalities and options.

From 22 to 27, I had become my own expert in healing. I was very fortunate I caught Lyme early, got a diagnosis and the first treatment within six months. I know people who weren't so lucky, people so sick with Lyme that they were in a wheelchair in their mid-30s and couldn't work at all. Lyme is a scary, complex, debilitating thing, but for me, it saved my life, because it forced me to change everything.

It was important for me to prove myself at work during those years. Go above and beyond, show everyone how valuable and skilled I am, earn my spot in the company. But I couldn't stay too late because of my fatigue. I couldn't eat the food they offered to people working overtime because I was on a very strict elimination diet for autoimmune disease. I was on an hour-by-hour schedule of medications, tinctures, and supplements, and I had to abide by it.

At home, I had to cook my meals. All of them. I had to lay down with a castor oil pack over my liver every day. I had to rest. I had no choice. So my old patterns of overworking, overexercising, eating poorly, drinking too much coffee, pushing myself to do extra projects after work, all of these old habits had to go. In their place was rest, sleep, cooking 100% of my meals, and following my crazy regimen of pills, procedures, and routines that my doctors had me do, which, gosh, doesn't leave a lot of room for the brain to ruminate and overthink.

So I couldn't overwork if I wanted to. I simply couldn't! In the choice between my life and my old ways, I chose, well, life! I want to live, and I'll do anything for it.

This was a different kind of survival, one I wasn't used to. I had to redefine survival and redefine success. If success is no longer defined by the hours I work, what is success? What is progress? What can I feel proud of?

I remember swimming in the Pixar pool in the morning, out of breath after two laps. Only six months before that, I was swimming a mile three times a week. Now, two slow laps, and lightheaded. Humbled. But so proud. So proud. “I'll rebuild myself,” I kept thinking, “I'll figure this out, but I need to be gentle with myself.” Gentle, slow, and kind in everything that I do. The new success is making slow incremental progress and paying attention to my body during everything that I do.

The big disruptive change to my physical health showed me all the places where I was overdue for conscious and intentional changes. From my daily routines, to how I treated my body, to how much I worked in a day, the balance of work and rest, how much I sleep, sleep hygiene, what I eat and how and when, but also - what's going on in my head all day. My thoughts, my self talk, my attitude. I was overdue for a big change in my relationship with myself. If I want to live, that means no longer abusing myself like I did before. No longer the abuser and the victim waiting for an outside savior to come and fix me and tell me that it's okay to stop working and it's okay to rest.

This change had to come from within. I was slowly learning what it means to love myself, in practice and in my head. The thoughts of self hatred got replaced by thoughts like, “okay, I'm doing it, I got this, I'm getting through the day, I made it home, I cooked myself healthy meals, I'm doing my best, I'm doing okay, I did it, I did it.” I didn't know what I know now about brain rewiring and changing our subconscious mechanisms, but that's exactly what I was doing, fueled by the desire to live. And outwardly, loving myself looked like following the healing regimen: going to bed early, laying down to rest with the castor oil pack over my liver while reading. Gosh, I haven't let myself read books in years, because I never let myself do anything for me. And now here I was. Re-learning how to love.

See, self care is not about baths, and lotions, and shopping, although those are great. Self care is about paying attention. What are my needs right now, in this moment? What does my body need? And how can I take care of that right now? What am I feeling? And what can I do about it? What's running through my head? And what actually matters right now?

My body trained me to do this because I was constantly experiencing symptoms all over.

Sometimes really subtle symptoms. One thing about Lyme is that it can attack any and all organs and tissues of the body. So the symptoms are really varied and often random. This is why it's so hard to diagnose, because the symptoms can be all over. So my body trained me to pay really close attention to every little sensation so that I can take action or tell my doctor or find a new treatment as soon as I could.

I learned to love myself without therapy, without digging in trauma, without diving deep into my emotions. Simply through actions. All day, hour by hour, every day. Small actions, but actions that add up. Actions that aren't to check off a checkbox in a to do list, but to respond to my immediate needs in each moment. That is self love. And slowly, over time, through big and small acts of true self love, I got better, and better, and better.

But just like intentional positive change can be incremental, gradual, and slowly add up to something big, so can negative change creep up on you without you noticing. And even though I was so keenly aware of the sensations in my body, the physical symptoms, I didn't have the muscle of noticing and understanding my emotions quite yet.

So while I was so busy focusing on my health, something big was growing in the back of my mind. A mounting sense of dissatisfaction. All these years, I'm working at Pixar, giving it my best. I'm getting busier as my energy slowly comes back to me, taking on more projects, assisting my leads with their tasks, you know, doing all the things you're supposed to when you're ambitious and want to climb the ranks.

I'm taking all kinds of leadership trainings at work, prepping myself for my next big career steps. And in the evenings after work, I'm taking care of myself, doing my health routines and supplements, cooking the next day's meals, but right before bed, I'm noticing that something's missing.

And I don't know what. And no matter what I do, the strange feeling is always there, ready to greet me with open arms at the end of the day. It doesn't matter if I had a great day at work, if I went on a cool weekend adventure, or if I had a fun date with my boyfriend, at the end of the day I keep thinking, “this isn't quite enough. Something's not right.. Why am I doing this? What is my life amounting to?”

Our movies came out about once a year, and for a week I felt good, like I'm doing something meaningful. But for the rest of the year, my days felt honestly quite empty. Like I'm working, but none of it matters. I was so confused. There's got to be a good reason, a meaningful purpose for me. Now that I've fought so hard for my life, I really needed my life to feel worthwhile.

So my subconscious mind resorted to doing the only thing it knew - work more and keep busy. When I applied to a leadership position, it was both a career move and a desperate attempt to feel like I'm doing something important with my life.

My days felt so meaningless at this point that I thought, “if I don't get this role, I'll just quit.” I didn't know what I would do, but I couldn't keep staying in a job where I felt like my work, my effort, and my strengths aren't really adding up to anything.

Well, I got the lead role and my fire was reignited. This was something new and I was good at it. But of course, being in leadership came with its own challenges, new challenges, and much more stress. And my subconscious, once again, did what it does best: the solution to everything is just to work harder.

There's a lot to be said about the culture of devoting ourselves to our work, at companies that don't reward you for such acts of sacrifice. But for now, I want to focus on my personal experience. One of high stress, trying my best. Not knowing when to stop and burning out really, really bad. I was 26 at this point, having mental breakdowns on my way to work. Wondering, “how did it get here? How did this dream job that I worked so hard to get turn into a stereotype where I'm crying on my commute to work because the thought of the day ahead is just too much, too stressful, and my whole body is rebelling against it and shaking in a full on breakdown?”

How did it get to this?

I really came to dread it. At this point, my numerous physical health issues were, I'd say, 80-90% resolved. I felt good. I exercised. I didn't have the complicated regimen of pills and tinctures that I had to take by the hour anymore.

I also learned a lot about meditation and mindfulness, went to a weekly meditation class and practiced breathing techniques at home. But even with my physical health under control, in the back of my brain, I knew this isn't good. And moreover, this isn't for me. This is not how I'm meant to live my life. The dream job is not supposed to turn into an exhausting daily test of my emotional limits.

And in the back of my mind, a little voice was saying, “careful. You'll land right back where you started if you keep going this way. Remember the stress, overwork, and mental self-abuse that got you in a health crisis in the first place, five years ago? This is way too similar. Watch out.”

History repeats itself because human behavioral patterns are ingrained in our brains. My own pattern of survival simply showed up again.

In high school and college, I didn't feel my own worth, and my subconscious learned to subdue that pain through working harder and harder. And now at Pixar, when my life's work didn't feel worthwhile, my subconscious once again turned to overwork to escape this feeling.

But the universe asked me, “you really want to do this again? Are you waiting for another crisis to save you or are you going to save yourself this time?”

What's ingrained in our brains through years of conditioning, survival, and trauma doesn't have to always be that way. Stuckness can feel like a life sentence, but there's always a choice.

I had a choice. Will I let my past define my future, or will I redirect?

Sometimes, we're put in situations where we simply must adapt to keep going. Other times, if we adapt and change before a crisis hits, we can avoid a whole lot of pain. I had to learn the difference.

When my mother married my stepdad, I had to adapt. When my family moved to the United States, I also had to adapt. When mold and Lyme disease halted my life, I had to figure out a whole new way of living, but with my career at Pixar, I had a choice. Because even though I was burned out like crazy, I wasn't facing a dead end crisis.

Back in college, when I ignored all of the red flags about the state of my health, I didn't realize it, but I made a choice. A choice to not stop and not take care of myself. And because of that choice, eventually I got to another point, where the choice was made for me: change, or possibly die.

With Pixar, in my situation, the choice to redirect was still there. Am I going to keep going? Keep sacrificing what I want? Sacrificing my mental health, my life energy, for something that's not giving me what I need in return? For money, for status, for ego, for a stellar career, for the movie credits? Or am I going to look myself in the eye and decide to finally start living in a way that feels good?

Finally honor my body and my mind. Finally have a lifestyle where my needs come first. Finally pursue a path where I feel like my days have purpose and my effort is rewarded. Finally use my strongest skills and qualities for the work I do. Finally find what this path looks like for me when I abandon the ideas of what's prestigious, smart, or socially accepted.

I thought back to that 22 year old girl on a deflated air mattress, praying because she's scared for her life, spending every free hour trying to find answers, and eventually pulling herself out of the quicksand of a debilitating disease. I owe it to her.

I'm going to leave this career.

Say goodbye to this dream. Figure out what to do next based on what I need and want.

Because just like the 22 year old me…

I want to live.

Redirection is more than quitting a job. It's a realignment of your outer reality to match your inner needs and desires. Whatever that means for you. Whatever it entails. Redirection is preempting a crisis by making a conscious choice. Keep letting the past define your future - or take a risk, try something new and aim towards something better. Choosing to change is hard until the choice is made for you. Adapting to a change that you had no choice in is much, much harder than deciding to change while you still have the choice.

How do you know when it's time to change? If you pause and ask yourself, really take the time to ask your body for the answer, you'll know. There'll be signs. Constant exhaustion is a big sign. Dissatisfaction, frustration, a daily sense of something is off in my life - all signs to redirect.

When you're stuck in a pattern or a routine that's not serving you, that's not fulfilling, not fun, and it's so hard to break it - that's a sign. Searching for meaning or feeling like your work isn't amounting too much are signs. And honestly, if anything in your life is not quite the way you want it to be, that's a perfect invitation to redirect in that area of life.

It can be subtle, only resurfacing late at night when you're falling asleep. Or it can be really big and glaring. if life's falling apart, it's definitely a sign to make changes and create something better. Because, like me, I bet you want to live.

What does living mean to you? Truly living. What would an amazing life look like? It's okay if it's hard to answer. It might be hard to answer if you've been heading in the same direction for a while, trying to make something work with all of your effort over the years. It's so easy to get busy, aim ourselves at a big shiny goal, and do everything in our power to achieve it for months, for years.

And this goal somehow narrows our vision and hides from view the things that we've let slide. Just like my pursuit of a dream career narrowed my vision so much that I didn't see that I was heading right back to illness and burnout until I started getting mental breakdowns and panic attacks.

That's not life. That's not success. That's not prosperity. Success is not sacrificing one essential part of you for another part. Look at your life from a bird's eye view. Are you currently fighting for a false dream while everything else is falling apart?

I believe in the possibility of an amazing life for all humans, but we've got to get in the driver's seat, decide where we want to go, and begin heading there.

I believe in the reality of a wholesome and joyful life for you. But you've got to look at all of you, all areas of life and love them all equally.

I believe your wildest dreams are possible, but you've got to decide to pursue them, follow your highest purpose and do acts of self love for your physical, mental, emotional, and soul needs.

This is a story about fulfilling needs. And what happens when we don't. And how it's always possible to redirect and begin fulfilling our needs to heal. to rebuild, to find happiness.

I've looked back on this whole experience and saw that everything that happened to me, even the bad things, especially the bad things, are stepping stones for me to ascend towards the life I want. Once I looked at it this way, things just started to make sense. And now I invite change into my life. I no longer wait for it to strike out of the blue or creep up over time.

Change is flow. Change is health. When some part of life starts to feel stagnant, I know it's time for a shake up, for an experiment, for something new. I tune into my body, I use my emotional state as a compass to guide me and practice making big and small changes to keep myself going where I want to go.

Change is a tool for avoiding crisis and creating a life you enjoy. And this is what I really wanted to bring to you: no matter how bad things are, there are options, there are pathways to redirect to a better outcome. There's always a way to react to something happening to you in a way that turns the circumstance into a benefit. There's always a choice.

I look forward to being on this journey with you. A journey where we get to change, to preempt crisis and pain, to create meaningful rewarding lives and see how good it can be. I am here for your journey of self love, your journey of healing, of claiming your passions, of finding your strengths and of becoming as big as your soul wants to be.

Let go of the false dreams. It's safe. It's time. You're meant for more. And together we'll discover exactly what it is.

RR Podcast Ep 2: Chasing a False Dream While Fighting for my Life

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~ episode transcript ~

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RR Podcast Ep 2: Chasing a False Dream While Fighting for my Life

~ episode SUMMARY ~

~ episode transcript ~

Grab it here! >>

RR Podcast Ep 3: Midlife Crisis and Meaning of Life

RR Podcast Ep 1: What is radical redirection?