The Catalyst

When I got really sick in 2021, it blindsided pretty much everyone but me. On the surface, I didn’t fit the mold of someone you would expect to be taken down by a chronic illness. I was young, had a thin, athletic build, ate healthy, slept well, and always passed any tests at the doctor with flying colours. I had a supportive family, a stable childhood, well-established friendships, a meaningful job with coworkers I liked, a comfortable financial situation, and a generally optimistic view on life. I kept a cool head in high pressure situations, was ambitious at work, and didn’t have issues advocating for my worth as an employee. People often looked up to me, wrote me glowing reference letters, and put me on a pedestal as an ideal to aim for.

But I was not at all surprised that I got sick. I knew that I had been running on fumes for years as I tried to balance the demands of life with maintaining a positive outlook and sense of meaning. I knew that I had always struggled with my mental health despite being brought up in a stable environment, and that I had a growing list of physical health issues that evaded tests and were invisible to the naked eye. I was trying my best in a world that I didn’t understand, trying my best to fit into a world that never understood me. This feeling of pressure and invisible pain was so extreme that when I was bedbound and struggled to stand, think, eat, sleep, socialize, clean myself, or generally succeed at any normal human functions, the dominant emotion I felt was relief because I literally couldn’t hide anymore. As bad as it was, it felt like I finally had a brutal, honest view of the things I was fighting to overcome my whole life, and that I had nothing to lose in taking a new approach.

Brain Retraining

This new approach came in the form of brain retraining, a healing modality that began to gain traction in the 2000s, but really took off after it showed promise as a treatment for long COVID during the pandemic. Brain retraining programs target the stress response, which modulates when the body is in a relaxed state and when it is in a state of stress. The idea behind these programs is that by retraining the stress response to spend more time in the relaxed state through a variety of self-administered techniques, you can give your body the energy it needs to heal a wide range of treatment-resistant chronic illnesses.  

As soon as I encountered brain retraining and all of the testimonials that sounded so much like me, I knew I had found a vehicle to heal, and more importantly, to change the deeply ingrained perspectives and behaviours that kept me feeling like I was falling down an up escalator. I spent the next year and a half dedicated to the practice, only improvising here and there when I felt that the program was missing something I needed. And the results of my commitment were nothing short of miraculous - within 3 months I was able to roam the house and make my own meals again, within 6 months I was taking up mountain biking, within 8 months I was making my way back into the workplace, and within a year I had every aspect of my life back with much more vitality than before.

A Big Pivot

But as I got past the 1 year mark, I began to feel a deeper, nagging sense that something was off. I had gotten my life back and learned how powerful it could be to relentlessly focus on creating the life experience I want, but I still had no idea how to approach the nebulous undercurrent of existential angst that flowed beneath all of my "wins". I didn’t know what I really wanted or how to figure that out, but I was increasingly certain that almost nothing about the life I had was actually what I wanted. This was a scary situation, as the tools I had learned only worked when I had an idea of the life experience I wanted to create for myself, and since I didn’t know what I wanted my life to look like, I increasingly found that those tools no longer worked for me. My stress (and symptoms of burnout) mounted as it became increasingly clear that my job, my relationships, my living situation, and pretty much everything fundamental to my identity didn’t suit me anymore, and all I had to replace these things with was a big, blank space. 

Thankfully, it was at this point that I found a brilliant coach who helped me find the courage to transition to a more self-led healing strategy with a greater focus on somatic work (i.e. body-focused rather than brain-focused). Since I was in danger of burning out again in a line of work that no longer suited me, I made the decision to leave my job with the intention of starting my own business in the self-led healing space, and more importantly, the intention to gain clarity on what I really wanted out of life. I once again dove headfirst into healing, this time learning the skill of listening deeply to myself through modalities like yoga nidra (non-sleep deep rest), internal family systems therapy (IFS or “parts work”), and a smorgasbord of other skills that I patched together to create my own system. I found parts of myself that I didn’t even know existed, had tons of new ideas around what I wanted my life to look like, and felt genuinely and exhilaratingly alive for the first time.

The Cocoon

As much as the pivot phase was awesome, I couldn’t keep pace with all of the changes happening within me. My well-worn ways of doing things clashed with all of the beautiful new things I wanted to go after in life, and I realized that my old identity would need to fall away before I’d be able to embrace a new life in any sustainable way. I chose to lean into what is most commonly referred to as a “dark night of the soul” or "positive disintegration", which is essentially a period of deeply questioning everything you know, feeling completely untethered, and embracing the uncertainty of it all. I felt like I had the emotional equivalent of food poisoning much of the time, with the entire contents of my subconscious brain spontaneously surfacing to be healed now that I had built a resilient enough nervous system to handle it. This got so intense that I had to leave home for a season to isolate from my family and everyone else, spending most of my time in nature and silence instead to allow my nervous system to sort itself out. I honestly felt insane at times, but I could tell that I was building a strong foundation of neural pathways with every challenge I faced. After a little over a year and some fresh perspectives from a well-timed gifted trauma therapist, it felt like I had finally built the stability I needed to move forward - a stability based on how life really flows rather than the rigid systems we create to feel safe. I look back at this phase as both a dark and profoundly beautiful time since it finally gave me the opportunity to be there for the parts of me that have been in the dark my whole life.

The Test

The Pause

The Present

Now that I’m feeling stable again, I’m putting my energy towards building the content for outliers that you see on this website. I decided to focus my business on helping outliers because out of all the things I had to heal, the pain of not belonging was the most intense and difficult. I see this pain to some degree in everyone I meet (which is why I called my business The EVERYDAY Outlier), and I want to offer a kind, grounded, nuanced approach to navigating all of the challenges that come with feeling like a misfit or a defect. Life has given me no shortage of opportunities to embody the outlier experience, and I’d be honoured to guide you through your own challenges with the skill set I’ve developed. Whether our social systems label you as an outlier or not, if you feel my message resonates with you, you’re in the right place, and I’d love to play a role in helping you feel at home in the world around and within you.

Background

Education

B.A.Sc. Civil Engineering, Queen's University, 2018 

• Engineers are problem solvers first and foremost, and the skills I learned in engineering allowed me to take a novel approach in navigating my healing and the life transitions that came afterward

• In Canada, every engineer is given an iron ring when they graduate; these rings were originally crafted from the metal of a collapsed bridge to serve as a reminder of the responsibility engineers hold to prioritize the wellbeing of the people first, and I continue to carry that mindset of meticulous care into the work I do today

• While attending my degree at Queen's, I completed two terms as a research assistant in the Faculty of Civil Engineering and completed my own research project in fourth year; while I acknowledge that the nuances of research differ between fields (and I am by no means an expert), my research experience gave me a solid foundation of skills I could use to look at research papers with a discerning eye, which was invaluable in grounding my own approach to healing myself and helping outliers 

High Flow Coaching Certification, Flow Research Collective, 2023

• ICF-recognized peak performance coaching certification

• This certification caught my eye because the founders of Flow Research Collective were both chronic illness survivors as well, and I wanted to build up my skillset of non-medical interventions for burnout, chronic illness, and living in a sustainable, impactful way