May 19 • General discussion
The article I didn't plan on writing ....
Good morning! I couldn’t sleep. Somewhere between 2 and 3 am, something I didn’t know existed clocked me so hard I couldn’t ignore giving it some attention.
For years, I’ve been publishing work on essential oil constituents:
- the specific molecular components that explain why one chemotype of thyme behaves differently in the body than another
- why a particular fraction of rosewood interacts with one receptor and not its neighbor
- why biochemical individuality means that the same oil produces different effects in different people
This is the work I invested in doing throughout my adult life. It sits at the intersection of pharmacology, neuroscience, epigenetics, and aromatic chemistry, and it highlights, I believe, the most honest answer to questions like what actually helps and what actually changes.
And it has, with one exception, struggled to find an audience.
The exception is the addiction work. That material has connected with people. They’ve written to me, enrolled in programs, asked harder questions, and kept reading. The constituent-level work on inflammation, on hormone regulation, on neuroplasticity — work I consider equally rigorous and arguably more useful — has not produced the same response. For a long time, I assumed this was a communication problem. I’ve spent considerable energy trying to make the science more accessible, the writing more inviting, the entry points more numerous.
Last night I understood it isn’t a communication problem.
It’s that the people who responded to the addiction work had already, often through great suffering, been forced to recognize that something essential had gone missing in them. They weren’t looking for a better intervention. They were looking for themselves. The readers who came to the constituent work, by contrast, were still — most of them, most of the time — asking a different question. They were asking, ‘What do I take for this?’ And no amount of refinement in my answers changed the fact that the question itself was the problem.
What I want to write about here is the thing I’ve been circling without naming. It’s a prerequisite. And until it’s met, even the most precise work in the world becomes another item in a kit.
What I Mean by Prerequisite
I should be clear: I’m not abandoning the constituent work. I’m doing the opposite. I’m trying to name the condition under which it can do what it’s actually capable of doing.
A precision intervention placed into a body whose owner is ‘in flight’ from herself does not become a precision intervention. It becomes another tool in the same project that produced the suffering in the first place — the project of managing oneself from a distance. The molecule is the same. The receptor is the same. But the relationship has been preserved intact, and the relationship is what was wrong.
This is not a metaphysical claim. It’s a clinical observation, and it took me a long time to make it because I was inside it.
The Cascade
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I responded the way most people do. I treated it. And then, in the years that followed, I treated the things that came after: skin cancer, arthritis, scoliosis, and a bone-on-bone joint in my big toe that required surgery. Each diagnosis arrived as a separate problem with a separate protocol. Each protocol had its own consequence, which produced another problem, requiring new protocols.
I want to be careful here, because I am not saying anything was wrong with the treatments themselves. For some of them, I would make the same choices today. What I am saying is that somewhere in the cascade, without ever deciding to, I stopped being the person who had a body and became the manager of a body that kept presenting problems.
I was treating my body as if it were my next kid to raise — vigilant, responsible, exhausted, and never present.
I was reacting because I was afraid, understandably so. But the fear had the steering wheel, and I was no longer in the car.
This is the period during which I produced most of my research. I am not ashamed of that research; some of it is the best work I’ve done. But I have to be honest about where it came from. It came from a woman who was trying to think her way back to a body she had become estranged from. The thinking was good. It wasn’t enough. You cannot reason your way into a relationship you’ve stopped being available for.
What the Word Honest Actually Means
The English word honest comes from the Latin honestus, which carries the sense of being held in honor, regarded with esteem. ‘To be honest’, in its older meaning, was to be the kind of person worthy of regard — and, by extension, to act in a way that honored what was true.
I have come to understand the word differently in my own life. ‘To be honest’, for me, now means to honor with regard. To extend to something — a body, a feeling, a quiet signal — the recognition that it warrants attention. And the corollary, which I did not want to face for a long time, is that ‘to be dishonest’ is to withhold that regard. To refuse to look at what is asking to be looked at. To override what is asking to be acknowledged.
By that definition, I lived dishonestly for years inside my own body. Not because I lied to anyone. Because I refused to honor my body with regard. I honored the reaction. I honored the protocol. I honored the next thing to do. The body itself — the one actually doing the living — I treated as a problem set.
I use the word dishonest with the greatest care. I am not accusing anyone, least of all you. I am naming something I lived, and naming it accurately, because I think the imprecise words for it — disconnected, out of touch, not listening — have been used so often they no longer register. Dishonest registers. It should. Because what we are doing when we react past our own bodies is a kind of unfaithfulness to the only thing that has been with us the entire time.
Reaction Is Not Response
There is a distinction I want to make precisely, because it has done more work in my own healing than nearly anything else.
A reaction is what the body produces when it is being managed from above. It is fast, defensive, and narrow. It tells you to find the next thing, do the next thing, eliminate the next symptom. It feels like agency but is actually a form of being driven. Most of what we call self-care, in my observation, is reaction dressed in better clothing.
A response is something different. A response requires that you have stayed in contact with the body long enough to know what it is actually telling you. It requires a pause that the appetitive state — that chronic, low-grade seeking I’ve written about elsewhere — does not permit.
The appetitive state cannot pause. It is structurally unable to. It moves from one acquisition to the next, and the acquisitions can be supplements, protocols, diagnoses, or even insights. The form does not matter. The motion is what defines it.
To respond rather than react is to step, even briefly, out of that motion. It is to ask the body what it is doing, rather than what to do about it. The first question regards the body as a self. The second regards it as a problem.
I want to say something that may sound strange coming from someone whose life’s work is the chemistry of plants: the molecules cannot do this for you. They can support the body that is doing it. They can stabilize the physiology that makes it possible. But the act of regard itself — the turning of attention toward what is actually here — is not something a constituent can perform on your behalf. It is the thing you have to bring, and without it, the constituents are working in the dark.
Why the Addiction Readers Heard Me
I understand now why the addiction work reached people, but the rest of the work didn’t ‘land as well’.
Addiction, by the time someone is willing to read about it, has already broken the illusion that the next acquisition will solve the problem. The reader has been forced past the appetitive state into something starker. They have seen, often at terrible cost, that no fix on the outside addresses what is actually missing on the inside. They are ready, in a way most people are not, to consider that the relationship to themselves is the work — and that anything else, including the most beautifully designed therapeutic protocol, is supporting cast.
The reader who comes to the constituent work without having made that recognition is, through no fault of their own, asking the wrong question of the right material. They want to know what to use for hot flashes, for sleep, for inflammation, and for focus. These are not bad questions. They are simply downstream of a question that has not yet been considered: what is my actual relationship to the body that is producing these signals, and am I willing to be in it?
Until that question is on the table, the best solutions cannot take hold. They can be read, even appreciated, but they cannot change anything, because what would have to change is upstream.
The Prerequisite, Plainly
So here is what I have come to, and what kept me awake last night until I wrote it down.
Before the oils. Before the constituents. Before the protocols, the diagnostics, the personalized anything. There is a prior act, and without it, nothing downstream of it can do its real work.
The prior act is the return of regard to the body that has been carrying you. No vigilance over it. Not the management of it. Regard. The willingness to be present to what is actually there, including what is uncomfortable, including what does not yet have a name, including the parts that the cascade of diagnoses has taught you to treat as separate problems, but which are not separate at all.
I am not asking anyone to stop their treatments. I am not asking anyone to abandon the medicine that is keeping them alive.
I am asking something both smaller and harder. I am asking whether, alongside whatever else is happening, the body itself is being honored with regard. Whether the relationship is being tended. Whether the woman or the man inside the protocol is being met by the person responsible for meeting them, which is you.
If the answer is no — and for most of us, most of the time, the honest answer is no — then this is the work that comes first. Not because the science is wrong. Because science was never meant to substitute for the relationship. It was meant to serve it.
When you are ready, the constituent work will be here. It will meet you differently from the other side of this turning. The molecules will not have changed, but you will have, and that is the change that lets them do what they are actually capable of doing.
Until then, I would rather you put down my work than read it as one more thing to acquire. That is not what it is for. It was never what it was for. And the honest thing — in the older sense, the regarding sense — is to say so plainly.
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The article I didn't plan on writing ....
skool.com/midlife-sanctuary-1903
A held space for women in transition — where the nervous system learns it's safe to come home.
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