It has been a while because my life went a bit fucked for a bit. And I want to tell you why, but not because I want sympathy, or because I want “good content” in this weird-ass social media dystopia we’ve created. It’s because I think what went wrong is something a lot of us are doing right now without noticing.

Here’s the story…

I went to live in Bali for a bit, and one morning while brushing my teeth I realised my arm felt kind of tired. It was almost like I’d been brushing for about ten minutes, not the thirty seconds I’d actually been brushing for.

That was it. That was the whole signal. And even though I chose to totally ignore it, that little ache was correct.

Over the next four or five years, everything got harder, physically and mentally. It came on so slowly it was almost imperceptible. It was brain fog, puffiness, tendon and muscle pain, backache, memory loss, air hunger, shortness of breath, my voice got lower and slowed right down….

Now, I could have gone to a doctor. But I didn’t. Instead, I did the ultra-sensible thing of blaming the deterioration of my life on all the things society has taught us to blame when we become exhausted, weak, foggy, and broken — not exercising, eating badly, too much stress, working too hard, not working hard enough, not being disciplined, not being motivated, perimenopause, and just generally being a shit human. It doesn’t matter whether these things were true or not — I was a good citizen and blamed myself for my problems.

To explain why I did that, I need to back up a couple of years.

If you’ve seen any of my previous writing, you’ll know I had a major falling out with the fitness industry about 10 years ago. I used to be a personal trainer and a gym owner, and I fully believed I was saving people’s lives by making them healthier.

Then I started having some very honest conversations with myself about what I’d been doing with my entire life. Do gym people really feel less achy and move better than non-gym people? Do gym people really have better and healthier lives than non-gym people?

Sometimes the answer was yes. But in far too many scenarios, the answer was a big fuck no.

It started to dawn on me that maybe people didn’t want to exercise because it’s a little bit shit. And maybe gyms themselves are a little bit shit too. Maybe gym-based exercise was making people move less and move worse. Maybe the whole idea of exercise conformed rather neatly to a very patriarchal, ultra-consumerist, neoliberalist, industrialist, puritanical ploy to make the masses obedient, quiet, and buying a tonne of shit we probably don’t need.

I even started to question the very idea of science. Most science that makes it to the headlines is hyperbolic bollocks written by marketers and journalists, either to scare us into buying something or to prop up the narrative of whoever’s in charge. Science is expensive, so the things that get studied tend to be the things that make money or support power. Evidence gets bent — often through no fault of the scientists — towards whatever’s most useful to the people paying.

So, I had a proper tantrum. I stopped exercising, took up intuitive eating, and opted out of the whole business-as-usual apparatus.

But the thing I’ve only just understood about that tantrum is that I didn’t stop following directions. I just picked up a different set.

When my body started falling apart, I went looking for a map that would tell me what was happening.

The fitness and body-positive lot said move, so I tried a bit of that. The somatic, listen-to-your-body lot said I clearly needed rest, so I tried a bit of that. Neither worked, and neither touched the fog or the pain or the puffiness. The next obvious step as a human in the 21st century was Googling my symptoms, which narrowed it down to a scarily long list: high blood pressure, low blood pressure, long Covid, short Covid, low iron, high salt, stress, perimenopause, lymphatic issues, childhood trauma… the list went on for several million pages!

When I really think about those maps now — move more and rest more — they are clearly opposite instructions, from opposite politics, opposite industries, opposite ideas about what a body even is. And yet every single one of them handed me back the same destination: You are the problem. Fix yourself harder.

Move more meant I wasn’t trying. Rest more meant I wasn’t allowing. Google meant I’d failed to manage my stress, my hormones, my childhood. And my own anti-establishment position — the one I was so proud of — meant I’d failed to opt out cleanly enough. Four completely different maps, but only one destination predetermined by the very people I was trying to avoid.

I feel so fucking stupid that I didn’t notice that if every route on the map ends up in the same place, the problem isn’t which route you picked.

Eventually my girlfriend, who’d been initially supportive of my “fuck the world” style of healing, got bored of my online shenanigans and made me go to a doctor. She did it out of love and concern. Although, looking back, the messaged links to articles and studies and the 10pm “Ooh, guess what I might have…” were probably a bit much.

I’ve always hated doctors. Their usual response to my complaints was “nothing’s wrong.” And of course, women always respond well to being told our issues are all in our heads. Probably just being too emotional, or having too many ovaries or something.

There was no fucking around with this one. She sent me straight for blood tests, and within a week I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease — an autoimmune condition that primarily attacks the thyroid, but which had also been messing with my heart and with how much of certain vitamins and minerals I could absorb.

My endocrinologist said that with my levels, she was surprised I could get out of bed.

I felt a weird sense of validation. Up until that point, I hadn’t given myself permission to feel as bad as I actually did. I’d trusted my conditioning instead, and believed that I felt shit because of how I was living. Which meant that if I could just convince myself I felt less shit, I’d have less blame to carry.

Now I know that the maps were created for blame management rather than navigating our bodies.

Six months on and I feel like a whole new person. Physically, obviously — if you want to hear the difference, go back and listen to the video I made about maps. But mentally I’ve crossed something too.

Science and medicine aren’t bullshit. The way we use them is. A blood test is a piece of information about my body that I could not have obtained by any other means… not by trying harder, not by resting, not by reading, not by opting out. What I’d been avoiding for five years wasn’t information. It was being told what my experience meant, which is a completely different transaction and one I’d had bad experiences with since I was young.

I’ve been saying for years that you’re the authority on your own territory, and I still mean it. But I got it slightly wrong, and the five years cost me the correction.

I never actually stopped listening to myself. Standing at that sink in Bali, I had accurate data. I knew it wasn’t unfitness and I knew it wasn’t tiredness. I was right, on day one, before anybody else got a say.

What I handed over wasn’t the noticing. It was the meaning. I let everyone else — the industry, the counterculture, the internet, my own politics — tell me what my correct observation was evidence of. And every single one of them said it was evidence of me being shit.

Which is why I think “just listen to your body” is fucked, because it’s unfinished. We’re a culture with no idea how to do it. We research symptoms, read other people’s strategies, download templates, listen to podcasts and read self-help books, all before looking honestly at our own behaviour and our own environment. And when we do finally hear something from the inside, we immediately hand it to somebody else to interpret.

Hearing it is the easy part. Holding onto what it means, long enough to go and get it properly investigated instead of pre-emptively convicting yourself. That’s the actual skill. Nobody teaches it. I certainly didn’t, and I was a personal trainer for twenty years.

I’m going to keep writing about what I find. I’ll only ever be able to give you my own experience, and I trust you’re smart enough to take what’s useful and leave the rest.

But I’d rather you had this than another map. Because if every road you’ve been offered ends up with you being the problem, stop looking for a better road.

Somebody drew that map. It’s worth knowing who, and what they were selling.

Even when the person who drew it was you.