08. Honesty Hour: The Duality of Recovery, Making "Right" Choices, & Trusting Yourself

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to a chat with Uma, with me, your host, Uma R. Chatterjee. On this podcast, I bring together all of my roles as a neuroscientist, researcher, board certified mental health peer specialist, mental health advocate, community builder, and a survivor with lived experience to bring you honest and unfiltered conversations exploring our true human experiences in their fullest form. Every week, I'm bringing you conversations bridging the gap on all things neuroscience, psychology, mental health, lived experience, advocacy, psychedelics, and more. This is a space for raw unfiltered truth to truly explore ourselves for who we are and how we are. I cannot wait to connect with you, answer all of your questions and co-create this with you. Welcome to a chat with Uma. Hello, my friends. Welcome back to another episode of a chat with Uma. And I just wanna say that first and foremost, I'm so grateful that you're here and you are sharing another time of your life with me today. I want to acknowledge that there was a week gap in podcasts from the last episode I put out to today, and I'm really sorry about that. It was really unexpected and was a culmination of a lot of pretty stressful life events and family emergencies, the culmination of which was one of my parents having a very bad accident and me being the primary caregiver for them through their immediate and more long-term recovery. So I had to make a decision to take a week and really prioritize all those on my plate and it was really hard to do because of my commitment to showing up every week. And I just had to live with doing things imperfectly and doing the best that I can. And it feels really hard and also really right to do it that way because that's all I would wish for anyone here, for all of you, to allow yourself the grace and flexibility of taking the time you need and pushing forward and doing what you need to do without the rigidity of standards and rules that don't make sense and are limiting and constructing while at the same time honoring your commitment and working through discipline and kind of trusting yourself to toggle between the two and allow yourself to make decisions and be okay with them not always being perfect and sometimes getting it wrong. I do think that was the right decision for me but all that to say, life has been pretty wild lately. I mean life has just generally wild to my lately. There's been a lot and that's actually why I'm going off plan from what I thought this next episode would be. I have a whole plan of everything I'm putting out and I decided to be flexible and bring this episode instead and let all the goodness of what was planned come down the pipeline because I am so committed through this podcast and through everything I do to show up as honestly and openly and truthfully as I know how and that includes just bringing my full self to the table as I feel comfortable and safe to do so. And all the research, all of the education, all of that's there and that can come anytime. But what's really top of mind for me right now is just a nature of what life looks like and all of the things that I'm personally navigating all at once, all the things I'm holding and working through and experiencing and how that co-exist with the perception of my life and things that are also objectively very true, the outside perception of all the things I'm doing and where I'm at in life and if nothing else I'm committed to just painting a very full and honest picture of the reality of existence as a human by being an example of someone who talks about it all so that we all feel safe to acknowledge our fullest experiences and be seen and heard and held and just feel allowed to be ourselves. So much is suppressed in the way that we exist and I, if nothing else, believe in changing that by example and creating the space for others to do so. So this is the first of many what will be called on the podcast where I'm starting to call it at least honesty hours. I can't promise it will only be an hour long. We shall see how long this plays out but you get the idea. Honesty hour is just me coming on here and talking through life, different things coming up because I sure as hell know that the things I'm going to be talking about, I am not the only one going through them, whether they be the exact circumstance or at least the mindset or general feelings and common human experiences we all hold. So if they're not the exact same, then I know that we on a more metal level have and continue to deal with similar things. So if I can just be your safe space to feel seen through those and just we can grow and heal through honesty and allowance and just feeling validated, then I'm doing what I want to in the world. (upbeat music) So welcome to honesty hour today and I'm just going to be talking about all of the things that are going on so that I can at least conceptualize or coming up for me right now and how that's playing into the very nuanced experience that is life and how so many things can coexist and be sure at once and kind of the beauty and confusion and clusterfuck of it all, all while of course the enormity of existing, also the burden but the enormity of existing to be able to experience all of this in the first place. So with that, I guess I'm gonna just paint a picture of where I am right now and what I was playing into my existence and of course you can get super nitty-gritty and meta with this and of course the caveats of like everything from life plays into your current state of being in your existence and all of that. We've covered most of my life or a great amount of it. But what's really happening right now is, I guess if I had to sum it up, I'm in a state of transition and choice, so many choices and confusion and you know, Kismitly, Starrantypedicly, Coincidentally, whatever you want to call it, life is giving me so many situations to really reflect the enormity of the choices in front of me and really give me opportunities to choose differently and also just experiencing the nuance, the coexistence of deliberation from new choices and also all that is left to be grieved or mourned or experienced through choosing differently and it not being this binary, everything goes really well when you make a correct or right quote unquote choice versus just the actual reality of things happening differently. And also just, I'm in a place where a lot of those choices, I mean, I know on a logical level that there isn't necessarily a right or perfect choice ever, but in the reality of living in a mind and a body of someone who's very consumed by doing things the quote unquote right way and also just even outside of my own unique extremes and pathologies, just as humans in general, like the illusion or the motivation to do things as best as we can, and ideally be okay with whatever happens and learn the lessons and continue to move on, but still feeling the pressure of making the best decision we can and just sometimes getting caught in the web of all of the logic and conflicting oftentimes coexisting lines of thinking, it's just a lot. That whole rant I guess is to just say that human being is hard, I also should say, that I am going into this completely without a plan with no notes, with no organization, for better or for worse. So this is just whatever you're hearing is coming straight from the heart and I hope it ends up being a cohesive space that makes sense and if not then we'll see. But okay where do I begin? Like I said I am in a state of confusion and having so many decisions that feel so enormous and I guess I should also say that being in this place it's really conflicting because I have this tendency to you know of course have gratitude and but really lean into gratitude in a way of subverting and overriding any other feelings I have almost like toxic gratitude toxic positivity in that I feel like how dare I feel anything negative about the place I'm in and all of the pressure and all of the choices because I should just be so grateful that I'm in this position to begin with that I even have these opportunities to choose from that I am functional and healthy enough to be able to be in this place to make these decisions and of course all of that is true and I would never invalidate anyone's experiences on the flip side of that or the spectrum of feelings that come outside of just gratitude of things still being valid and heart especially when you know for me I feel so grateful that I'm in this position because it's such a new thing for me because like I just said I've I'm in the most functional and healthy space I've ever been while I have so much room to grow as you all know from hearing my past episodes and the reality of where I'm at because I'm in the best place I've ever been that also means that I've never been in this place before to be well-versed in making decisions of this magnitude and for me it feels like my life has been on this of course like beautiful I'm so grateful it's not linear but upward trajectory generally it also has felt like it's been on this rocket ship trajectory where things have just happened so fast and have changed so fast for me after just such a long time of general just being dead inside and being so ill and so stagnant well there's a full life lived there but there it was generally just so slow and dead and you know like plateaued is the word I'm looking for and now in the past few years things have just moved so quickly and pivoted so much and have just gone so fast I almost don't know that I've caught up to it or have learned how to adapt and you know I think there's an illusion that people ever feel ready for anything like I heard endlessly from anyone and everyone that people generally don't feel ready for things they just do them and I get that but I also feel like with I just have not had the experience or preparation to be in the place I am right now and so on top of just having really big decisions to make I also feel like I have no experience doing so relatively I was working with such a limited framework and capacity of what life was like for so long that it's really interesting to be calibrating to such a bigger scope of life and navigating all of the fear of uncertainty and the intrusive thoughts about not being the person who can live this life because I've just never done it before and the simple answer is of course like you don't know until you can until you do it and you just have to take the leap and try but really getting yourself to do that is so brave and so hard and I'm right there so let me give you some actual details on the context of all of this so as you'll have heard and if you haven't then please check out my full story and my mental health journey episodes to really get context of the very windy long path and trajectory of my non-traditional life I really just gained so much functionality in the last few years and have went back to school and pivoted from psychology to neuroscience and kind of just like on a rocket ship took off with my neuroscience interests and research and career and for anyone who's not in academia the context of when I say rocket ship like the the the quickness of my experiences it really is that because most traditional students are people who have who who follow like the more traditional general path of research and academia are doing this for a really long time like there's some people who start research like when they're 12 or 13 years old like taking their summer break and working at research institutions in labs at like the really big schools when they're 13 years old and they know that they want to do it and if not at 13 then definitely during their undergraduate career when they start working as undergraduate research assistants and start really prepping for either you know med school or grad school more importantly for me you know a PhD program they start planning for this and preparing for this very early on in their academic career like freck there's a freshman in my lab right now who joined like incoming freshman and she is incredible and kicking ass and I'm just in awe of her and the other freshman I'm around because I was I mean I'm probably an extreme case but like I was so broken and confused and like also didn't have any support like I didn't even know what research was when I first attempted college at 18 as an undergrad I didn't know other people were doing that because I was so you know trying to stay alive that didn't even see other people doing that probably was surrounding myself with people doing it either and this is not at all a ranger judgment of productivity or people being overachievers or anything like that like I would never ever encourage anyone to do anything like that for the sake of being performative or you know just being in the rat race of academia I'm also just saying for people who are inclined to what to do research and are you know passionate about a topic like they generally start somewhere and of course they pivot and change within their field different techniques different research questions but it's sometimes even you know different fields or subfields like you know biochemistry to neurobiology or something like that there's so much that goes into it and so for context with me like I long story short of course please listen to the episodes for the full context but like I went to school for two years 18 to 20 was super super super sick and didn't know why and left with a 1.83 GPA long twisted winding path later after a lot of treatment and uncovered things came back to my psychology degree finished it did a little bit of undergraduate research then because I finally learned about it and it was during COVID though so it was very very virtual and it was psychology but I realized I was gonna go into neuroscience but I continue neuroscience research virtually because you have to like sit at a lab and I mean neurobiology research and on a bench the term is you know bench research or working on a bench that means like doing research with your hands like literally having to do actual experiments with your hands and working with you know animals or cells or whatever and anyway you can't really do that virtually so I wasn't in a place to start and I was also a psychology major and only taken one or a science class and so all of that was I I'd only known about psychology research then in August of 2021 I started my masters in neuroscience pretty ignorantly but thank goodness I did and from my classes just realized really quickly on that first semester that I was so so passionate about neurobiology and understanding the mechanisms driving behavior and thought and symptoms and psychiatry and all of those things and memory and consciousness and all of that from a molecular and cellular and systems level approach and so because of that I decided I needed to join a lab also because I was in grad school and I was around a lot more people who were actively in labs because I was a master student so at least at my institution master students and PhD students take the exact same classes basically my master's degree is the first two years of a PhD so we have we take the same classes and in fact master students take a little bit more to actually get the master's degree but effectively I'm in the classes with PhD students so I had to hear about their rotations and their research and you know starting to learn from professors who run their own labs and realizing that that's the thing people do like in an actual lab in an actual wet lab settings and then I joined the lab that I'm in now the Colbert lab in January of 2022 and I didn't join that first semester from like August to December of 2021 because I was also going through my supervised internship at that time for my full mental health peer specialist, like board certification. So I was like really consumed with that. So I was like, I want to finish that by December and then start in the lab. So I started my, you know, what lab true neurobiology research experience in January of 2022. And just for context, you're listening to this episode, at least it's coming out March of 2023. So it's been a year and a few months. And in that time, so much has happened. Like I came into that lab knowing hardly anything to be honest, like to be super, super honest, like hardly anything about actual neuroscience and neurobiology. I had a semester of grad school under my belt. And I should also, when we backtrack, even beyond that, being in my psychology degree, which had nothing to do with neuroscience other than the class I took and loved, I mean, I was not versed in like all the nuances and full-blown neurobiological concepts and systems and different like the ways neurons worked on a cellular level and how they all interplayed. Like I didn't have any of that. And then coming into a master's program, of course, I got really lucky that I was able to do a master's neuroscience with the psychology undergrad, but I was coming in with like not the knowledge that pretty much everyone around me had. And so everything that people assumed or, you know, professors assumed in my classes that I already knew from my undergrad that they were just building upon and making a far more complex and nuanced and intense education around. I didn't even have that basic understanding. So my classes were spent like my time, spent me just having to catch myself up, which is so terrifying. Luckily, I'm able to catch myself up in the sense that because I'm following the curriculum of what they're teaching, I'm able to then know what to go look up to then learn the basics of the things. Like pretty much every time they said, so I know you already know this. So we're gonna talk about this. Like that thing they said that I know you already know about this. I have to go learn. So for example, my professor would always say we already know that you've covered G protein coupled receptors. I'm like what the fuck is that? And I had to go teach myself that or at least go solicit information from people around me. So that's how I came into the master's program. Then I join this lab and I am the one person who doesn't have a neuroscience undergrad or some sort of biological science undergrad. I am like completely lost and confused and to my boss's credit, my P.I.s credit. He did know that and he was just so enthusiastic about giving me a chance and definitely saw a promise and could see where my interest came from and definitely like just took me under his wing. Yet I still didn't know anything and I had so much to learn and I caught myself up and I worked super super super hard and faced a lot of my fears endlessly about that I could retain this information that I could learn. It was like endless exposures for me in terms of my OCD and my memory issues and all of it. And that was beautiful. And then to cap that off on top of my whole year of research plus you know everything leading up until now, I say the year because that's when I applied to PhD programs. So that's kind of like where I'm going to. I had that year but then also I came up with this idea for an independent project which we'll be talking about soon on the podcast. But this independent project it was very neurobiology based but it was also very interdisciplinary and took on a lot of different disciplines to answer a question I had including pharmacology, neuroscience, psychology, clinical trial, research, design, neuro pharmacology, their phenomenology just so so much. And I just kind of like went through this bootcamp of like having to understand or solicit information of what I didn't know to be able to answer this question which greatly expedited my knowledge in general but then also just threw me into the deep end on all things basically just like science, communication and engagement and sharing my research. And so I started doing things that I had no experience doing that people in my position literally did not do. Like I was a single author on a project that doesn't even happen unless you're basically you have a PhD you've done a post doc you run your own lab. Like unless you're a senior investigator. Usually aren't a single author on a major project that's being presented. And I started you know submitting articles to you know scientific papers and I got accepted and started presenting my research at actual scientific conferences being accepted to do so like completely on my own for like in a very weird way. Winning so many awards and just like building up my CV which is like the academic long standing resume and just having this CV and experience that looks like I have so much time and expertise under my belt. And I'm not saying that the expertise is not true like you know maybe I feel like it's not but it you know objectively looks like it is true but the time period in which that all happened in the condensed nature of it all it was like this warp of a bootcamp that like it doesn't even make sense. It's I will explain more of this like in my project when I share that on the podcast but like to sum it up it just doesn't make sense and like literal people who are you know principal investigators at universities have supplying to that we're coming to my posters. I conference was like we've never seen a single author poster before I was like I know like I don't know how this happened but here we are and all that to say that in and of itself was so intensive and wild and like confusing and sped up and I didn't I was just like surviving and holding on and it was amazing and exhilarating to get me wrong but also just completely terrifying and I just didn't know what I was doing and somehow it worked and took all of that and I mean I knew that I am so passionate about this this is what I want to do with my life and I want to be a researcher I want to understand and answer questions that are not being asked about the conditions I care about from approaches that have not been looked at yet and I took all of that and applied to PhD programs for neuroscience and what you need to know about that is coming full circle with everything I was talking about like general people's trajectories versus my trajectory like the the competitive nature of neuroscience PhD programs is so wild that like I wouldn't wish it upon anybody it I mean the people I was applying against or with I hate pitting ourselves against each other that's what the system perpetuates but I'm gonna say with the people I was applying with were those people who were doing research they were 13 years old at Harvard or Johns Hopkins or like schools like that and have had like years and years and years of research experience who have been the top of their class who've published papers which is a huge thing in academia like publishing papers like scientific papers and if you're a first author which means that you did the bulk of the work or you were like really the spearheader of the project like that's you know chef's kiss people like with all of that experience are the ones applying to programs where there's like 600 a thousand applicants and they offer spots to like 10 people total like you apply with everybody in December and then you if you make it to a shortlist of interviews then there could be a range of like it depends per school and per program I'm talking generally about neuroscience programs just to clarify but even within that there's so much variability but generally just like hundreds and hundreds of people and then you make it to a shortlist of about maybe like 20 to 40 people and from that you do interviews you go through like a whole interview weekend and you're really really assessed on if you're a good fit for the school and all of that and from there you end up either making it or not making it into like the roughly 10 spots and that's I mean you can hear the competitive nature that's like a 1 to 3% acceptance rate oftentimes and going into this cycle it was also like kind of known by everybody that this is going to be by far the most competitive like like cutthroat cycle because there had been such a backlog of people who weren't able to apply during the pandemic and they had just gained and gained more research experience got back to school whatever and were now applying so the odds were just really really really low right and yet somehow some freaking way whatever have done in the last year plus of course you know just my very interdisciplinary and our traditional background and the work I have done in many different fields that inform my interests and my capabilities somehow got me into PhD programs and it's there is an element of me just being in shock in all the imposter syndrome and all of the negative feelings that are shared by people and also super pathological for me because I just kind of like doubt reality and really really have really horrible low self esteem and shame and all of that right? That being aside, just like objectively outside of my pathology being a regular human, looking at all of that, the people around me even, it's like they really believed in me and they're preparing me for how competitive and difficult this was going to be and how most people don't get in on their first or even second cycles. People who are far more "qualified" or have had far more experience on this very topic, doing the very traditional path than the me having objectively publications and way more lab experience and getting recommendation letters from several research mentors, rather than just professors, like there's so many things people had more than me and of course like Reddit and the general internet and everybody sharing their statistics and their resume basically like of what they're applying as like really illuminated the just discrepancy between me and everybody else and yet somehow somehow with my independence, my creativity and taking my story and it making sense as to why I'm doing this and I guess the maturity and the non-traditional path that can be looked at either very poorly or very well depending on how they view you. It worked for me and that's beautiful and amazing and I'm still in shock and still confused as hell. I have that happen. That being said though, like that is a perfect illustration of this catapult shotgun like things happen so quickly and I frankly was not expecting anything to work out the cycle. It was kind of like, "Love you just apply. It'll probably not work out and then I'll just go work in another lab or take an industry position to figure out my life and this won't be an option." But it is an option now and so I just have yet to have like caught up with the reality of this and it sounds so surface that that's one part of the many things going on for me that I am in a program and I'm like, "I don't know what I'm going to pick or I'm going to do it." Because it, you know, how lucky am I that I got in, right? Yet also it's so much deeper than that. It's the nature of dedicating an indefinite amount of time and years of my life in the future to doing this if I do complete it. So neuroscience PhD programs depending on your research and your experiments and your mentor and all the things. I mean there's no like hard, vast amount of time it takes. It's usually at minimum of four years but most people around six years, oftentimes eight years. It's a long time and it's a huge commitment and it's like getting married to your advisor who basically funds you after you try a few advisors in the beginning and like taking classes like the majority of it is you working under your advisor on your own project from start to finish and it's just so intensive and nuanced. So making that decision is really scary for me for so many reasons because I'm in a different place in my life than most people who have applied and are just like easily deciding to do it because if you get it and it's like not even a question that one would do it because it's so hard to get in, right? But I have lived so much life and like I said before, I've struggled for so long at such a deep level and I've barely been alive that now that I'm starting to be alive and to have time and space and I'm recovered enough to continue to recover, to be able to experience things for the first time and to be present enough to live and grow and try new things and just literally like catching up on being present. It's such a gift and it's really interesting aligning that or overlaying that onto potentially going down the PhD route because on one hand, it obviously I if you can't tell or I'm so deeply passionate about research and about the questions I have and I would be doing that because I want to and I love it and that is a version of being alive and stimulated and excited in a way that I have never been before because that's why I'm so hooked on research. It's not because I want to be a researcher or because I want to do a thing. It's because I want to answer a question and because it's so so simulating to me. So that's why I'm here going through all of the extremely hard exposures and just parts of it that are just I could choose this off your easier life and I want a part of me really wants that and yet why I've stuck it out so far even when I like cry every day and I question everything and I struggle so deeply as this being the hardest path of choice that I could go down hardest in terms of the most difficult even though it's aligned with my values I think that's part of my question really. That's I mean that's why I'm here and yet overling that same mentality of just living life to the fullest right now and taking advantage of the functionality and presence I have and continuing to create space for more recovery because I desperately need that. I don't know if that aligns with doing a program. I genuinely don't know because of it I mean it's multiple things it's like I said so simulating and engaging and exciting and it's also so intensive it's such a commitment. It is you know bestieped in the very archaic abusive generally speaking environment of academia where PhD students have some of the worst health outcomes of all populations especially with mental health even for the most generally healthy of people because of the nature of how not just intensive like people are afraid of hard work but like oftentimes abusive and scary and unfair circumstances that students are subjected to and I'm going in knowing that also not accepting it as a foregone conclusion because there is room to do things differently and advocate for yourself and I'm coming in with a different mentality that I have more choices and I'm maybe less willing to tolerate the circumstances although I have historically been I have historically tolerated certain businesses so there's that tension of do I want to subject myself to those risks and just trust that I will choose what's right for me even by trying versus do I trust myself enough to not fall to those expectations and just be a people pleaser and suffer silently which is what I historically have done like does awareness of my tendencies really equate to me doing things differently and having a trust in myself and of course I cannot answer that question that's the theme of a lot of things I'm going to talk about I can't know for sure but just even thinking about the possibility is very scary so there's that element and also just feeling like I have been in some sort of shotgun rocket ship type catapulting situation of trajectory and momentum that I could just go with it and just try things and not overthink I mean is that even possible like try not to overthink and just you know try it and you know give myself the flexibility of if it doesn't feel resonant and whatever then I try and I could just leave and try something else there's also the tension of like being mindful and really taking a step back and taking time to really consider all of my options which there are I'm so lucky to have so many options I mean there are companies that I really align with their mission and vision who I could work in a research and science capacity while also bringing my other strengths to the table and living in a far more supportive way of life and having more balance and more space to live my life and engage in things outside of my work which of course if I did do a program my goal would be to bring as much balance as possible and enforce those boundaries and forge that life so that it's doing things differently for myself but it's a lot harder to do that versus being in an environment where there's so much more space and support to do so and then there's also so many things that I can move forth with that I could do on my own, like going full-fledged with my mental health peer support practice, which I have had in as much of a capacity as I can, while holding all of my other responsibilities. And there's so much room for that to grow. And so many ideas and visions I have of ways I can serve more people and just making it more accessible. And that could be something that took over my whole life if I wanted to and just all of the opportunities I have for advocacy and creation and science communication and this podcast and, you know, so many things feeling like I have so much resources and support to be able to grow so many different things and yet they're all kind of just like waiting for me to water them and grow because I'm so busy putting water into so many different things and feeling like I can do it all, but I can't do it all, pulley. And the most obviously that gets attention for me is right now my education, my degree, my research, and of course, I mean beyond that, my little family and myself and my relationship and just trying to be functional. I mean, I say that am I actually doing that? I'm probably not. No, I'm not giving myself as much time as I should, but I'm trying. So anyway, there's just so many options you with the idea. And so this isn't meant to just be about like a detailed analysis of my whole life and my particular circumstances. I mostly wanted to paint that part of a picture for you to just show you the general tension of what the awareness is we have as we grow and learn and heal through whatever days we're experiencing, because I imagine if you're listening to this podcast, you are on a journey of whether it's with your mental health or just your wellbeing and questioning things and really constructing your life from a place of choice rather than conditioning and obligation and shame. In that whole transition, it's not just beautiful and exciting and liberating. There's also so much uncertainty and confusion and nuance and taking the same mindset and not knowing in what direction to apply it or if it's what's the right way to apply it and what the right decision is even though again, logically, we can maybe see that there is not a right decision, but it's so hard to integrate that into our being and fully embody the lack of a right decision and just moving forward and decisions, just paving our path, right? And so an example of that confusion is, you know, are my values to live the most full life? And if so, does that mean doing the hardest things all the time or does that mean allowing the space to not do the hardest things and not be performative and give up things that are harder for the sake of a softer, more, you know, safe and comforting and supportive, beautiful life? I mean, I don't know the answer to that because there's parts of me that feel like I want to live as much and be as stimulated and create and pursue as much that interest me and at the same time, like I also want to be free or at least become more free from that mentality of needing to perform for my worth and to need to do things in order to fill my time, constantly rather than just learning how to exist and feel full and well as a person who just is being, like there's like all of those answers are true and it's like what direction do I go with parsing that out and figuring out what's more true? And if nothing is more true than how the hell do I decide between all of that? That's just one tiny example. And, you know, deciding is the hard thing for me to do hard things or is a hard thing for me to not do hard things because my MO has been to do the hard thing over and over and over just 'cause I can, 'cause I feel like I have to to challenge all of my limiting beliefs and is that extreme? I don't know. I don't know. And, you know, there's that. That's believe it or not. I just spent how much of a time I did talking about that part of my decision making, but really that's not, that's one of many things going on. And that's part of my point. Like life is not linear and is not just one facet, one thing and so holding all the things at once and the unique way that they'll intersect is just a lot and I just want to be real about that. So there's that. There's just like the flux of what the hell am I doing with my life and I kind of have a deadline to decide this because you have to submit legally your PhD choice by April 15th. So I've got a little less than a month also taking into consideration my husband and what his life looks like wherever we live and he is so supportive and so flexible and so open and frankly just really ready to get the hell out of Texas 'cause we've been wanting to for such a long time for our values and way of life. But just like the different opportunities and, you know, pursuing his own experiences and what my choices look like for our life and of course they're not like dependent on or like shaped by him and by any means. It's just considering that objectively for our life together. So there's that, right? And then there's something that's been really hard, things that have been really hard, why this podcast is coming a weekly and kind of actually what has really spearheaded me to do this podcast this week instead of going about my regularly really scheduled programming which is my parents are both really sick. And I'm going to refer to them as like one parent or another parent in order to protect their individual privacy the same time though, like their parents and like it's my experience too. So it's really just figuring out how to be honest without you know them not consenting to being talked about and also just very sensitive information. That's the reality for me and I'm sharing 'cause it's my truth but also you know, they have their experiences too. So both my parents are very old, like they had me in their late 30s or early 40s. I'm 26 right now so you do the math and they also came here from a different country and we don't have other family here and they're divorced. So they both live alone, one is more isolated than the other but they are very isolated and don't really have anybody in their life to take care of them or be with them. And that's really not great for anyone socially and just like being healthy in general but then when you put into the bucket of circumstances also that they're really old and in pretty poor health it makes things far more complicated and of course you've heard are probably familiar with my very long twisted story of abuse and trauma and neglect and of course understanding of why they are the way they are and compassion but also like the reality of my upbringing and my very complicated and painful experiences with them and my relationships with them. It's a pretty interesting dynamic to be in when they start getting sick. So one of them has been diagnosed with cancer and that's really hard especially because I am a cancer survivor too and live with cancer and so there's so much that's tapped into with that of course wanting to support and protect my parents as much as I can and also the boundaries and distance I have built kind of by choice and not by choice 'cause there's nuance to this but like being minimized and melting away out of primal and moral and human obligation to support them through this is their alone and all that is coming forth with that I've been going through that for the last actually like year really 'cause it's been a very slow process of my parents actually allowing themselves to get diagnosed and like properly emotionally moving through that process that I've had to take on to navigate with them 'cause you know, I have talked about before I very much like my parents' parents so there was that and that's been pretty hard and luckily it's starting to become more better, more better, starting to become better and in the sense that we're finally finding more proper care and plans are slowly unfolding and it's bad but not extreme so it's just a lot though. It's so much and then my other parent is in pretty bad health and pretty bad shape and a little less isolated than parent one so I guess parent one is the one with cancer right parent two is who's in the hospital. I'm talking about now. Parent 2 is not as isolated, but still lives alone, and still is very isolated generally speaking, and has a lot of struggles on their own. Health-wise and otherwise have had really severe blood pressure, borderline heart attack issues the past few months. And I have been the person to be checking on them, making sure that they're actually taking medication and getting the medical care that they need, because they've been very, very. in denial of needing that. And also, what happened this past week is that this parent threw up in the lost consciousness and fell and cracked their skull open and blood one night when they gained consciousness, came back to bed, and then just like slept. And then the next day, in the late afternoon, early evening, I by coincidence called them for something completely unrelated and found out that that happened, and they sounded very, very, very sick, and refusing to get medical care. And me and my husband, like, forced her away there and convinced them to get medical care, taken to the ER, figured out what happened, found out that their skull was cracked, and likely a concussion. Luckily, it was not so severe that there was anything permanent, brain damage-wise as we know, and it didn't require surgery, but it very well could have. And there was a lot of recovery needed to be had, and my parent was just in really bad shape. And so my husband and I brought parent too over to our place and to care of them for a while to, make sure they were okay and nurse them back to health, and are now keeping a very close eye on them. And all of those experiences are really rough for so many reasons. There's so much coming up because, of course, there's the just natural stress and fear and pain of your parents being sick and alone and suffering, right? And then it gets so much more complicated because the natural response as someone who cares is to take care of them. Yet there's so much baggage. And I've worked really hard to create space and boundaries, different, it looks different with each parent, but space and boundaries because of all of the things that I am working through and the dynamics that have or have not changed and constantly navigating what it looks like to be in healthy relationship if at all with them individually while also doing for the first time what's maybe better for me and not just completely sacrificing myself, but that gets really hard when maintaining those very strict boundaries admittedly becomes very hard when things like this happen. And it's also so complicated because things like this happening do not preclude all of those abusive and painful dynamics coming right back. And so I'm like actively choosing to reengage with that for the sake of being there for my parents in their own unique ways. And it feels sometimes like self betrayal, it also feels morally what's right for me and holding all that together, especially with a parent staying in my home and being constantly here after building so much space with them, it's a lot. It's a lot. And also just the circumstances that my parents each find themselves in for various reasons of being alone and not having community and people supporting them or family, largely because of the dynamics they've inflicted upon the people around them and them being alone because people have left them alone. It's so difficult because they created those circumstances and all that's left is me and my sibling. And that's a lot to carry because it's by choice that there wasn't more there to support them. And it's also just really difficult culturally because I come from a very collectivist culture by nature. I'm Indian, South Asian, and I'm a second generation immigrant. So my parents moved here in their mid-20s and they left their culture, came to America. And then I was raised at the intersection of both the internal part of my culture that was within my home and all the values that my parents came from, from their culture and then also the outside worlds of living in America and all the values very conflicting and the nature of how people live here and just the vast difference. And so it's very, very in a reduction of sense collectivist in India and very individualist here. And so here when people are 18, they tend to move out of their homes and go to school and become independent or at least get a job and go live their own life and parents are generally, you know, they get old and they go to retirement homes or you know, active living communities or, you know, hospitalization of DB if those circumstances arise. And there's the general, of course, this is overly generalizing, but there's a very, like there's a separation and this independence of children and their parents. But in the collectivist culture I come from, it's quite the opposite. Parents and children live together for a very long time. Daughters in particular tend to live with their parents until they get married and then go live with the parents of the husband in a typical Indian culturally accepted relationship. There's also arranged marriages and like a whole for them to go down with that. But I guess what I'm saying is there's such a deep amount of relational dependence and, you know, people just being together. And staying together and it's not even a question if people are gonna move or leave. And children take care of their parents till their last-eyed breath and their parents take care of the grandkids, like live in the same house. And that's the culture that my parents come from. Yet that was not modeled to me in the slightest because we had no family here. And we were very disconnected from our, I mean, I say very because my parents in particular, like I said, have isolated themselves and have engaged in dynamics that tend to make people transient and the community not being super secure or strong, like changing friends all the time and whatever. So like I wasn't even modeled that familial coherence at all. Like it's not like we just transplanted here and continued that collective as cycle here. Yet that's also what they still value one parent or the other and expect of me and my sibling. And there's just so much guilt and shame that I feel an experience because of the expectations of me when that was not modeled, I was completely raised in a different culture. And even if I was raised in a different culture, like maybe one could argue that my family might have continued that and so I would follow suit, but that didn't happen. Like I met my grandparents like on both sides one to three times each and then they passed away pretty early but like they lived in India and I am just very disconnected from for various reasons my extended family. And so like I just, that's not what I saw, but there's still an expectation of engaging in that caretaking role to like an eighth degree. And it's hard because it's very hard to say this out loud because I'm judging myself for saying it. As if how could I not just override all that and engage in what's needed and take care of them and be like the most benevolent kind person. And you know, push comes to shove. I mean like I did, I did do that. I have been doing that against my boundaries and my distance and all the healing logic of, you know, reconciling and accepting reality. I still have done it because it's not binary and yet for one of the first times I'm allowing myself the nuance of acknowledging that confusion and resentment and anger that comes with actively allowing that abuse and those dynamics straight back into my life because I am filling that role. And I have to say that this is also amplified by the fact that I am a daughter, a slash I am a woman because particularly in my culture but then also on the grand scale of looking at humans, women are generally treated very differently than men and particularly men. culture, women are supposed to take on all the roles of being completely, you know, selfless and giving up any needs or desires, but so ever for the greater good of elders and husbands and everyone around them, children, all of that. And I'm obviously building a different life for myself and also working to embody more of the wholeness that is being an equal in a society, I mean, building towards being an equal in a society in America and, you know, as the world becomes more cohesive perhaps the world in general. And yet, push comes to shove. It's definitely on me, both as the older child and as the daughter that's expected of me and then I jump into that role. And that's not to say that my sibling has not been involved. He, my brother, he has grown and evolved so much and he's younger. So it's he's obviously like younger and more behind in all of this and has his own experience that I won't speak for him with, but I will say that it's just expected differently for him because he's a boy, even though we are both objectively busy and I have a lot more on my plate, it's just expected to be different because I'm the daughter. It's just internalized expectations. So again, the circumstances, I know they generalize to a lot of people with their older parents and the complications of relationships and, you know, autonomy and boundaries and all of that. It's also specific in maybe my culture perhaps or the unique, you know, isolation of my parents and of course the unique abuse and trauma that I experience that other people have their own version of maybe or maybe not. But I think on a more zoomed out level, just the complication of multiple things co-existing and this theme I'm realizing of what I'm going through of feeling paralyzed by what the right decision is because there's so many traits of logic and thought. And even if you come down to like the heart level of values, if I have a value of being someone who is in integrity with my boundaries and like what are my boundaries? My boundaries seem to be not hard steadfast and what causes the most, you know, joy or despair in my life. Like being fully autonomous and boundaries and separated and then feeling that shame and guilt and, you know, God forbid me to be extreme like my parents immensely suffering because I'm not doing my part to take care of them or self-patrial in the sense of going down the other route of, you know, engaging the desires I have to take care of my parents and be there for them because they're humans and because they're my parents and because I'm attached to them and I love them while also subjecting myself to so much abuse and just so much baggage and dynamics I've worked so hard to heal from and continue to have a long road of healing from and free myself from and building my own life outside of these dynamics and engaging in self-patrial but, you know, feeling like I'm doing what I feel is right to do. Like there's so much nuance and it, you know, maybe with more hindsight and more reflection and more just doing. There could be more clarity around that but I am really not here right now to talk from a place of clarity like I felt like I need to constantly. That's been kind of my job in so many ways of being a mental health peer specialist and being an advocate and, of course, being even more in a concrete way, being a researcher, speaking from a more distanced, evolved, analyzed, processed approach for the sake of being in service of other people. But there's to me the thing that I most seek out of humans, like I've learned all the things and continue to learn all the things, it's endless learning for me, right, of all the perspectives and whatnot and I quite honestly am very, very easy for me to go into like the rational, logical, way of thinking, at the very like pretty bow tied up, it's all said and done, side of processing. But what I look forward from people, what's most supportive to me personally is to hear people in the nuance and the thought processes and the acknowledgement of the truth, their experience and feel like I can relate to their tangled mess even if they untangle it and it becomes a very organized, unique ball of yarn with different threads that are untangled and neatly put to, you know, parallel. I find the most connection and understanding and freedom and liberation and compassion for myself and for other people when I get to hear them from the tangled place of the yarn and just know that I'm not the only one and just hear their perspectives as they untangle that yarn rather than when they untangled all the yarn and it's just said and done and they're telling me how they untangled the yarn from the other side, there's value not to, don't get me wrong, but I have felt most called to people talking as they untangle their yarn, even if it never gets untangled because let's be real life is not fully untangled ever and so there's so much to just share in being in the thick of life because I don't know that I'm getting to the other side ever of life. I mean until I'm dead. There's these things and more than I'm going through and then when I get through them there will, you know, new level, new problems, quantum quotes, it's like obviously not necessarily a new level and not a new problem literally, but it's just that phrase of like you think you're going to get through something in life is going to be smooth and linear and that's just not life. There's just new things to uncover and experience and move through if you're actively engaging in life at least and if not then that's maybe something to work through itself. So there is that, there's the family and another huge part overlaying all of this and it's also its own topic, its own section of my life is my physical and mental health and where on earth I am with all of that and how that plays into how I navigate choices and the confusion of how I continue to move forward in my life and the commitments I make and also like the framework and mindset from which I'm making those decisions to begin with and not necessarily knowing if I can trust myself which I know is such a common experience for anyone navigating their, you know, mental illnesses or physical illnesses and making decisions from being afraid that they might be making decisions from their pathology from their symptoms from their reality right now versus being able to take that layer off and just make decisions from their values and acknowledge how those illnesses might influence the way they think things and few things and making decisions from that. So for me in particular what that looks like is, I mean this is covered in large depth with my previous episodes, my full story, my mental health journeys, episodes one through three, my psychedelics and ketamine episodes, all of this really over views and details where I am now with my mental health which is better than ever before and also still in the weeds of struggle, not just like life struggle like life is suffering but in my illnesses and my pathology like still oftentimes taking the passenger seat even though I am able to recognize that and switch with them and work with them more. So in particular I'm at a place where I'm at a sandstone kind of with my OCD and PTSD treatment like I have been able to engage with OCD treatment for most of my symptoms with OCD that were very severe but were specifically just OCD like classic obsessions and compulsions that were not rooted in actual post-traumatic stress disorder life-threatening events but the parts which are a lot that are intertwined with my PTSD, I for many reasons, long story short lack of access to a provider and the lack of resources to be able to get the very specialized treatment I need, I am just out of standstill and that's really hard because a lot of my decisions right now will influence being able to get access hopefully to a provider that can give me what I need both like location wise and access wise financially and also like having the time to be able to actually engage in that intensive treatment which can very likely look like an intensive outpatient several hours. hours a day every day for multiple week scenario if not something even more escalated. And that potential comes from comprehensive psychological cognitive evaluations and the opinions of different clinicians who have evaluated me and have realized that what my functioning looks like on the outside is about 5% of what I'm capable of and I will only keep going down most likely because of how strong my illnesses are and I don't say that to sound like I'm a victim or I'm like, "Oh, pity me, our life is so hard, I can't do anything about it." It's really not that. It's just the actual, like actually I have pathologically gone the opposite direction and it works so hard to be as motivated and unaffected by these outwardly and inwardly as possible to the degree of ignoring and denying the level of distress I live with. And I go into very, very detailed depth about all of those results and those conclusions and my mental health journey part 3 so I would listen to that for more context with this but really just I'm, I really can't go on this way and or I should, you know, maybe shouldn't go on this way, I probably can but it'll be very, there'll be a lot of consequences and life is not worth going on in the way I'm going and in terms of how my illnesses play a role in my daily life and the amount. It still wields over my cognition and my thought processes which is really hard to see and I'm really good at hiding it but it's there and I'm being honest about that. There's that and of course apparently I always neglect to mention major depression and having generalizing anxiety as its own thing outside of OCD but mainly just like even taking away the labels just the fact that my state of being is the best it's ever been, I'm the most functional I've ever been even physically with all of my chronic illnesses and cancer. It's up and down but it's more managed than it has been I'm able to do far more than I have and yet I basically, I just need more time in space and recovery and treatment and processing and all of those things and yet I have a really hard time with the idea that I would slow down the gift I have of life to hinge myself on the hope that maybe I can get better when maybe I can't and I'm really afraid of facing that possibility and that's just the honest truth because I have been faced with so much disappointment with diagnosis and incorrect treatment. I just need misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment and I am so afraid of giving myself that time and space and it "not working" and I know that that's from a logical standpoint not exactly what's happening and it's still moving forward and figuring out where I need but frankly I'm tired and I feel like I have just come alive in the last few years especially in last year, more than I have been alive in all of my 23-24 years combined before that. I was a zombie and was so just broken for so long that the life I do have now, the functionality I do have, the engagement I do have as poor as it still is and as much as I still unnecessarily suffer like it's still more than I have ever had and the idea of pausing that, pausing the trajectory of the things I'm so passionate about that give me so much life and also serve as a distraction from my healing and the time and feed into my productivity addiction and avoiding myself like it's so complex and nuanced is what I'm trying to say and it's so hard and I'd love to be the person that that could just tell you that I am dropping everything and I am going full-blown treatment right now but it's really hard to do that when I feel like I should just be okay with what I have and that's so hard to say out loud but that's the truth and I would hope and believe that I have it in me to sit with that in honor all of that and make healthy conscious choices for myself and don't get me wrong. I definitely have treatment in my future. In fact, a part of what direction and program I choose is where I have access to specialists who can treat me and there's one particular place that seems to have more promise than anywhere else and it also happens to be a program that I am so passionate about and might probably be where I end up choosing. I don't know but treatment is a factor in that and I also want to acknowledge that that is a factor for people making decisions in their lives especially when they navigate chronic illnesses, psychiatric, physical, mental, like whatever, like having to factor in access and the capability of having access to treatment especially when it's sometimes lifelong or at least long-standing and needs to be intensive. That's a of course privilege that we get to do that like that's a furgon conclusion. It's also a burden and something that people don't talk about enough needing health insurance in the United States and needing to be in proximity to people who can treat you and that you can afford to engage in this treatment. That's such a consideration and that's also a burden to be able to have to navigate. It's exhausting and so the idea of moving all of my providers for all of my physical illnesses like you have heard in my story the amount of misdiagnosis I have dealt with with cancer and my autoimmune diseases and how many times I could have died until like if I had not advocated for myself for gotten proper care and finally building some level of the team of practitioners and doctors and experts who for the most part work together and I trust more than I've ever trusted people as much as I can trust people giving all that up in the comfort of where I am now even though I hate it here to go start over somewhere else and reinstate all my treatments elsewhere and make sure everyone's on the same page and vet people like you know of course I'm judging myself and hearing the privilege and the ability to even do that being in a country in a place and having the faculties to be able to do so not necessarily financially but every other way and figuring it out financially but also it's just so exhausting and so overwhelming and there's not a solution to that entire thing I just said other than just sharing that that's something that's weighing on me deeply and I don't think it's going to limit me from moving and living towards my values of getting out of here and expanding my life and becoming more okay with change and transition for the life I've wanted for so long that I didn't know as possible and now as possible but it's also I mean and really is a word not but and it's also terrifying and difficult and I can't I wish I could tell you that I'm experiencing all of that and I'm just living anyway and not letting it dictate my experience now because that's going to be a quote-unquote problem or you know opportunity that I deal with one the time comes when I move which will probably be the end of July because that's when our lease is up and whatever I start with start in August I wish I could say that like you know I'll deal with it then but no I'm dealing with it now and it's what keeps me awake at night all of these things keep me awake at night and I have yet to figure out how to be more fully present in life right now than to be in the weeds of rumination and also maybe productive thinking but mostly maladaptive rumination of all this transition and change and choices and fear and all the things happening at once and not knowing what to do and that's on top of also having a tendency to just say yes to every opportunity and start every project and do everything that I do. I mean, I can't even name all the roles that I have right now and all the things I do. I'll try, I guess, just for a thought exercise. I am a full-time master student in my final semester. That's intensive enough in neuroscience. I am gonna graduate this May, I think, UNIS. I am a graduate research assistant. I'm basically doing full-time research in my lab in very, very intensive experiments and participating in data collection and working on very huge, important and scary projects. That's a full-time job, those two are already more than a full-time job on its own. I also am on the board of directors of three into collegiate psychedelics network. I'm the director of media and I manage their media team, work with the board of directors and kind of, like, together we uplift and create and facilitate everything that our organization does. And that's a huge role that I do not take lightly. I am an advocate for the International OCD Foundation and also just a mental health advocate general do so many things. I have so many speaking engagements coming up, so many conferences, both for research and for advocacy that I am presenting at in really big capacities, which is so exciting and I have so much to share without that, but that's so much down the pipeline. I am doing this podcast, which is a huge passion to find and takes so much time and effort to do on my own in the scrappy grassroots stages of the show. And I'm really lucky that some support is coming in with different partners for the show that I'm so excited to share soon. That being said, it's still me doing everything and wanting to show up as presently and with as much support as I can because it's something so value-driven for me. And I'm a mental health peer specialist and I am the founder and facilitator of the Cancer Thrive Collective and I'm very involved with the Cancer Community, the young adult cancer community and supporting people through their treatments and diagnoses and all of the mental health issues that come with navigating cancer. And I am constantly engaging in presentations and advocacy for so many topics, like I said, which is honestly it's own full-time job too. And I just don't, I just, I'm so excited about everything that I say yes to all of it. And that's on top of being married and having a home and being like managing life and being the pretty much primary caregiver for both of my elderly and sick parents and being someone myself with so much going on with mental health, physical health, so many treatments I'm in. So much that goes into keeping me alive, honestly. And I honestly am missing like 30 other things but those are the things that came to mind. It's just there's so much and I'm so good at just taking a lot of things and being on more things. And obviously being sarcastic and being so good at, like I just, I take on so many things and I heard this analogy of the idea of juggling. I think it was from my friend Kimberly Fiyock, soon to be Dr. Kimberly Fiyock of the path PhD on Instagram. She's an amazing neuropathologist. She talked about this analogy of having, like if you're juggling, if you're a person, you're juggling balls and the idea that you're juggling balls and some balls are plastic, like bouncy balls and then some of them are class balls. And so obviously if you drop a glass ball, it's kind of shatter and if you drop a plastic bouncy ball, it's gonna bounce and it'll be okay. And so like a large amount of life and being involved and just having a full life and being so busy and having so many roles is having all these balls and then deciding when to drop, like just, I guess first decide what is a glass ball and what is a plastic ball, like which things are, things that would shatter and break and be really, you know, consequential if you did drop them versus things that you would not like to drop, but if you do drop it'll be okay. So deciding what they are and then also, like deciding when it's okay to, or when you need to drop a glass ball because even though things are consequential, sometimes it's just too much and it's worth dropping for the other balls you are juggling or even for a plastic ball that would be more resilient but still deserves attention. So in that analogy, that framework, I hope that made sense and I didn't butcher it. I have a problem with number one being really, like really struggling with deciding what is a plastic ball and what is a glass ball because to me, everything feels like a glass ball and I treated it such and it just takes up my bandwidth and my energy and whatnot that way and then on top of that, like being able to drop a ball and not keep on taking more balls is like where I'm at right now and I just keep taking on more balls because I guess in this analogy, I am so grateful to even have hands and the capability to juggle because I used to not have functionality in my hands and I did not have the capability of juggling or doing anything with balls. (laughs) This analogy and my use of balls just keeps going. Okay, stop being a five year old for a second, you know. Okay, the point is, on top of all of this, just have not been the best at setting boundaries and being okay with letting go of things that are very value driven and, you know, putting a pause on things or delaying things because in favor of myself and my well-being and my priorities, I prioritizing is such a foreign concept to me. So I'm navigating that too. And there's hardly no way to, in a matter of way, like tie up this podcast with a pretty bow and conclude it. To me, these three or four things, I mean, let's be honest, I actually don't know how many concepts I shared with you and parts of my life I did, but the parts I did share really capture a lot of just the more meta parts of being in the process of life and in the thick of existence and in the part of the yarn ball that is still super intertwined and tied up and not unraveled. And just the complexity and nuance and spectrum and coexistence of so many parts of recovery and growth and healing and existing all at the same time because it's so easy to tell ourselves that because we have awareness and because we have recovered or healed in a certain way or we're on that path that things will be linear and things will be easy and you can make hard choices, but on the other side of those hard choices is everything good and so just take the leap of faith. It's really easy to have all those platitudes, it's simplistically reduce life to those concepts and those are true and the process of the intersectionality of our life and our existence and bringing those concepts to how we actually exist and integrate them and embody them is so much more complex and it's great to learn from the insights of people and situations that are on the other side of struggle as if life is a linear journey, which it's not, but there's to me just so much more integrity for me as a person at least and how I feel like I can be supportive and also how I am supported by others in just honesty and processing and acknowledgement of all that goes into even taking those insights and applying them to thought processes and the complicated duality of multiple parts of thinking co-existing and the reality that choices might feel more right or less right but they're not inherently right or wrong, they just are and the fear and shame that might come from feeling like there is a wrong decision to be made. So I just want to bring so much more of honesty, unfiltered truth, whatever this truth is to the world, to all of you so that you can feel empowered to see yourselves in my experience and see yourselves in your own experiences again, whether or not the circumstances are exactly the same whether the details resident or not, it's more so the more transcendent idea that we are all complicated and have the best intentions and also can be really confused and stalled by so much and overwhelm is a real thing and that's okay and so is not knowing. That's also okay. And considering many things and not having a clean, linear answer and making choices just based on having to make a choice is also okay. And feeling confused and not entirely certain and not feeling fully there and well and all the good feelings, gratitude and belief and all of that, that's also okay. You are okay, even when you're not okay, you're okay and it's okay not to be okay. So I am so grateful for this space to keep coming back and this is the first of many honesty hours. And I just really look forward to sharing the coexistence of this, all of this mess, all of this entangled ball of yarn in coexistence and conjunction with the very real parts of my life and experiences and education and awareness that I bring with my science and my advocacy and my belief and recovery. And the more polished and linear conversations that exist here and everything you see about me outwardly because they all exist together and that and more comprises the entirety of me and that and more comprises the entirety of you and you are worthy of being seen and existing in your fullest form and I will leave you with that. So I don't ramble for another hour of honesty hour. Thank you so much for spending this honesty hour with me. I am sending you so much love and I'm here for you. I would love to hear from you on if you relate, if there's anything you want me to talk more about with this line of thinking or any questions you have where I am and how I'm navigating these choices of your experiences going through the complexity and duality and messy nature of life. And if it's supported for you to hear through the process of existing and being in complication and if you love the show and this resonates with you, it would mean the world if you could take just a second on whatever platform you're listening to this on to subscribe so that you receive the episodes as soon as they come out and to leave a rating and review. That would make the biggest difference because it would support the show and being able to be a safe place for other people to come here to and it just infinitely helps the show and me. So if you could leave a five star review and rating for me, that would mean the world. And if you can share this episode or any episode, anyone who you think it resonates with sharing is the greatest way to help support the show with an outside of a rating and review. It just brings more people into our beautiful community and in strength and numbers of us be vulnerable and compassionate and honest is how we can create the world we want to live in. So you mean the world if you can share this episode on social media, overtaxed, however you can communicate and can't wait to see you next time with maybe a more linear way of talking. I love y'all endlessly. I'm sending you so much love and I hope you have a beautiful week ahead. See you on the next episode of a chat with Emma.