Every once in a while, I freak out.  Why in the world am I putting all this personal stuff about my life online?

I woke up this morning feeling like I needed to update my blogging “Mission Statement.”  I wasn’t sure if I was going to share it or not, but now I feel like it belongs here.  So, here are the reasons why I write:

To share what I’ve learned.

To prepare for my future career and crystallize my thoughts.

I’ve had to learn so much and go pretty in-depth on certain topics just to heal myself.  Now, I think it’s pretty clear what my future specialties will be as a PT, and I want to make sure I remember exactly where I’m coming from and what motivates me.

I don’t believe the traditional (insurance-based) physical therapy model is the best.

Honestly, in an ideal world, I wouldn’t have had to learn all this stuff.  Sure, I’m interested in it, but I also had to learn to take things into my own hands.

Even the times I found someone to really help me, it was never quite enough.  They were always under pressure from insurance companies, or company they worked for, to get results and demonstrate that I was progressing by certain markable bench lines each week.

In real life things are not always that clear, especially when you are dealing with a chronic condition.  People have setbacks– it doesn’t necessarily mean that their treatment isn’t helping.  It’s just the way things go.  External factors occur in our lives; our individual health fluctuates.

I recognize there are gaps in our current system, and I see how those gaps have failed me.  

I am putting this information out there so other people don’t have to spend the same amount of time looking for it that I did.

There is no good reason why things took me this long.  Honestly.  It took me years –and appointments with more medical professionals than I care to recall right now– to find the answers I needed, both for chronic pain and my SI joints.

There was no real reason, other than the first few doctors/PT’s I saw didn’t know what they didn’t know, so to speak.  So they left me with the impression nothing more could be done, when that was far from the case.

So now, I put my answers out there, for anyone who is desperately Googling the same things I used to.  

I don’t want it to take you that long.  It’s the best way for me to fight against that sense of pointlessness; to think that at least, maybe my experience can spare someone else what I went through.

I want to turn my experiences into something good.  

For a while, I tried to block out the enormity of my experience, and not acknowledge the big picture of how much things sucked at times.  It was the only way I could get through it at the time; to tell myself things weren’t that bad, to block some of it out.  To ignore how much I was missing out on.

But now that I’m a little bit older and wiser, my outlook has changed.  I try to accept what’s happened, and even try to find the good in it; the lessons learned.

There is good in it.

Luckily, through all of this, I discovered I truly do love learning about the human body.  I had never really thought of myself as much of a science person when I was younger.  In school, I gravitated towards the humanities and social sciences because I felt so passionately about social issues (and I still do).  And when you’re that age, I think you sometimes feel pressure to put yourself into a certain category.  I was a “humanities” person– I didn’t know I could also be a science person.

Educating myself– and others– on the science of the human body allows me to see how far I’ve come.

I haven’t written much about this yet, but when I was younger I put my body through the ringer.  I had an eating disorder and I exercised way too much.  Refusing to listen to my body caused me to develop the injuries that set off this spiral of chronic pain.  So it’s fulfilling for me now– almost meditative– to learn about the body from a scientific perspective, and to help other people find their way to a healthier life.

So I write:

To gather and clarify my thoughts;

To record the useful information I’ve already learned;

To share things that you might find helpful, some of which took me years to find;

and to let others know that, despite all of what I’ve been through, it’s actually possible to come out on the other side.

I hope what I write is helpful for you.