FTC Disclosure: Delicious Obsessions may receive comissions from purchases made through links in this article. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.Read our full terms and conditions here.
Hey everyone! Thank you so much for reading today. This blog post and video have been a long time in the making. So many of you have kept asking me when I’d be publishing it, and I apologize that it’s taken me so long to write it and record a video about it.
Quite honestly, I’ve been wanting to write an update on my health journey for a couple of years now. I get requests all the time for updates, and after a few more recent requests, I decided it was finally time to hop on here and tell you guys why I no longer write about my healing journey.
2012 – The Start of My Healing Journey
For those of you who have been following my site for a long time, in 2012 (a few years after I started blogging in 2009), I started getting really serious about my health. I consider 2012 to be the start of my healing journey and I’ve referred to it as such since then. That’s when I started getting the appropriate lab work done and working with new practitioners about improving my health and creating future goals around it.
I started writing about my journey with autoimmune issues on my blog because I really wanted to help people. I wanted to share what was working for me, the types of things I was doing, and offer them some inspiration and motivation and their own healing journey. My website has a lot of readers who are also dealing with chronic illness and I knew that sharing the information that I was learning might be really helpful to at least a few people. So I began writing a series called Let’s Get Personal.
Over the next couple of years, I shared a lot of in-depth information about my health, including different doctors and practitioners I was working with, different labs I was getting (as well as screenshots of my lab results), different strategies I was applying to my health, etc. In looking back on those old posts, I really was sharing a lot of very intimate information about my health. I really wanted to help people because chronic illness can be so isolating at times, as well as overwhelming.
Starting to Feel Heavy
After a couple of years, the Let’s Get Personal series started to feel really heavy. I decided to take a break from writing them because I started to get so exhausted at the thought of being vulnerable and sharing new updates each month or so. Whenever something starts to feel heavy and overwhelming to me, I know it’s time to reassess whether or not that specific project is serving my highest good.
I wrote a few blog posts here and there after that break, but since about 2016, I have stopped writing the Let’s Get Personal series and sharing the nitty-gritty details about my health, the practitioners I’m working with, and the things that I am trying. There was a lot that went into this decision to stop writing the series, but really it boils down to three main things. I discuss why I stopped writing this series and my healing journey in the video below.
3 Reasons Why I Stopped Writing About My Healing Journey
One thing that I have learned in my healing journey is the importance of boundaries. This was a really good example of an area where I did not establish clear boundaries up front and I let a lot of people into an intimate space of my life who really didn’t need to be there. Boundaries are one of the most important things we can do to preserve our health and our sanity. Once I started realizing how important boundaries were going to be to Healing my mind body and soul, I began to realize that this was an area that I really needed to focus on.
Reason #1 – Sharing Intimate Details Became Too Much
The first reason that I stopped sharing such intimate details about my health was because the process of sharing this information became too much for me.
I started to feel really overwhelmed when I would sit down to write the blog post and it would feel uncomfortable and like a burden to share this kind of private information. Like I mentioned above, I’ve learned that whenever I encounter these types of feelings around a project I really have to assess whether this project is something that I need to spend time on.
We don’t often to take into account the emotional drain that certain activities can have on our energy. And seeing that I deal with an energy deficit much of the time, I have to be really careful about preserving that energy so I have it available to use for the things that really fire me up. Ultimately, it just did it feel right to be sharing these intimate details in public.
Reason #2 – Personal Data Privacy and Safety Concerns
The second reason that I decided to stop sharing so openly about my healing journey is is that we live in an online world that is really quite chaotic and unsafe.
There’s a lot of uncertainty here in the United States about our government and our healthcare system. Every day you seem to hear about new hackers and data breaches. Our personal information is at the fingertips of anybody who wants it. Some of the stuff is easy to find, some of the other stuff you have to dig a little bit. But there is very little about our lives that doesn’t seem to be available to the person that wants it.
Because of this, I realized that talking about the specifics of my health in such a public forum was probably not a wise idea. Especially with all of the drama and insanity when it comes to health insurance and getting coverage for preexisting conditions. Who knows how this information could possibly be used against me in the future.
While my desire to help people was very well-intentioned, I realized that sharing all this information might be setting me up for problems down the road. We never know what’s going to be done with our information or who might be watching what we are talking about. So for my own safety and security, and that of my family in the future, I decided that it would be wise for me to stop sharing so intimately about my health.
Also for my protection standpoint, those of us who are health bloggers have to be really careful about the things that we say on our blogs. As many of you know, alternative medicine is not highly regarded by the FDA and other governing health agencies in the U.S. Anytime you speak about alternative health, supplements, or any practice that is outside of the mainstream Western medicine school of thought, you open yourself up to scrutiny.
As bloggers, we can also open ourselves up to legal issues if we start saying things that the FDA could deem as health claims or medical advice. Though I have always been very cautious about this and have always done my very best to stay within the guidelines set forth by these agencies, there is still always some concern whenever a new health or nutrition post is published. I know of bloggers who have been targeted by the FDA and other governing health agencies and it is never an easy or fun experience.
Reason # – Dealing with Trolls + Well-Intentioned Health Advice
The third reason that I decided to stop caring about my health journey has two parts.
First, whenever you share something in a public forum, you open yourself up to scrutiny. There are always going to be people that disagree with you or think that you’re a quack. And there are a lot of people who have no issue with telling you that (we call them trolls). These are the people who have no issue with sending you really nasty emails or messages about what a terrible person you are or why what you were doing with your life is absolutely wrong.
For as thick of a skin as I feel like I’ve grown over the last decade of blogging publicly, it still hurts when you receive those types of emails and comments. Anybody who says that it doesn’t is lying. Granted we all have the ability to move on from it quickly and not let it completely crush us, but it can also be quite emotionally exhausting to deal with.
At times, it can feel overwhelming to get those types of messages and unknowingly absorb the negative energy that they are sending. This has been another great lesson for me in establishing boundaries and learning so not let other people’s energy get sucked into my own body. Even though I am worlds better than I was years ago, there still is plenty of work to do in this area. Ultimately, dealing with this type of feedback became too much for me to deal with it and was definitely something I had to step away from in order to preserve my own health.
Second, in addition to the negative comments, I also received a lot of suggestions from people about my health. So many of these emails and comments would be very well-intentioned and many times seemed like they were coming from a place of genuine concern and care. It was nice to know that people were looking out for me, but it was also not all that helpful for my own journey, especially when some of the people would present themselves as experts in how I should run my life and health.
I’ve received a lot of emails about how if only I would do X, Y, or Z, I would be completely cured. Or if I just saw this one practitioner, all of my questions would be answered. While I am a firm believer that there are many different strategies for healing our bodies, I also believe that there is no one strategy that works well for every single person.
So is well-intentioned as these comments and suggestions would be, it became too much to read and respond to on a regular basis and was yet another energy drain for me. Again, I will emphasize that I know most of the people who were sending this advice were very well-intentioned in their emails and meant no harm. But again, this comes back to setting those boundaries for who exactly needs to be in your intimate space.
I Still Share About My Health Journey…Just Not as Intimately
I do still share about chronic illness, and my own healing journey, but I do it in a much more neutral and less intimate way. I have established those boundaries around what I feel comfortable sharing and what I need to keep close to the chest. I have found a way to share the things I’m going through in a way that makes me feel safe and helpful at the same time.
I think it is important for us to share our stories because we learned so much from one another and you never know when your story is going to be just what someone needs at a certain period in their life. I know this has happened to me on countless occasions. I’ll stumble across something from someone else that is exactly what I needed at that moment. So I haven’t completely stopped sharing about the things I’m going through, but I’m just not sharing as detailed information as I once was.
If I could offer you one single takeaway from today’s post and video, it would be the importance of establishing clear boundaries in your life. We, as women, are not taught how to do this. Yet, it is one of the most important things we can ever do for our health, our career, our finances, and everything else in our lives.
When we get really clear about what we will and will not tolerate, and who we will and will not allow into our private space, we are able to live more congruently with our values. This will absolutely preserve our health and our sanity in the long run and improve our relationships and social impact. Boundaries are so unbelievably important that I actually have a separate blog post coming about them very soon, so stay tuned for that.
Thank you for reading and watching. I hope this was helpful, especially for all of you who have been waiting for me to write an update. I am going to leave all of my past posts in the Let’s Get Personal series on my site, so if you do want to read those, you can read the full archive here.
I also have a larger archive of my health journey posts that I have shared outside of the specific Let’s Get Personal series. You can find that full archive here.
I share a lot of stuff about health and chronic illness over on Instagram so I would love to connect with you there. Of all the social media sites, Instagram is the place that I find most enjoyable to hang out on. Won’t you come hang out with me? It’s a lot of fun! 🙂
If you have questions or comments, I’d love to hear from you! Just leave a comment below, or if you’d like to email me privately, you can do that here.
2 Comments