It became clear to me, eventually, that maybe I had been my biggest fan.

Not in the self-important way that sentence can sound. In a much more uncomfortable way.

I had assumed other people’s opinions of me were better than they were. Stronger than they were. I had assumed I had more reputational equity in certain places than I actually did.

And I had been oblivious to how many other versions of me existed in other people’s minds.

Some of those versions were unfair.

Some were incomplete.

Some were built from other people’s projections, needs, fears, or experiences.

And some of them were built from mistakes I had actually made.

That part matters.

I had spent years accumulating reputational consequences I did not fully understand because I was busy doing something else entirely:

Trying to adapt to a world I never quite fit into.

I did not understand how much energy that had required until much later.

And strangely, of all the conditions I have dealt with, vestibular migraine has given me one of the clearest ways to understand it.

Because when your vestibular system is compromised, orientation itself becomes unreliable.

Balance.

Equilibrium.

Your relationship to the ground.

Your sense of where your body is in space.

Things most people get to take for granted become active work.

You compensate.

You adjust.

You build strategies.

You avoid things.

You brace.

You push through.

You become exceptionally good at functioning around something without necessarily understanding what the something is.

And then, if you are fortunate enough to eventually get an answer—and some degree of relief—you look backward with information you did not have before.

That is when you begin to see it.

Wow.

I really did spend a significant portion of my life adapting and coping in ways other people did not.

They didn’t need to.

I did.

For years, I thought there were so many things wrong with me.

What I had not understood was how many of those things were adaptations—different responses to the same underlying problem with orientation.

For somebody with a background in yoga who spent a lifetime practicing balance, suddenly discovering that I had almost none to speak of was a particularly strange kind of irony.

If you have never experienced a vestibular migraine, this may not make much sense.

But when the ground starts moving and you do not know which way is up—when you are no longer certain what to do with your own body because you cannot predict what is going to happen next—it is difficult to describe how violent that loss of orientation feels.

Everything goes wonky.

Everything becomes unstable.

Everything makes me sick.

And in some ways, that is exactly what happened psychologically when I finally began looking backward at decades of coping with better information.

The ground moved.

Things I had understood one way suddenly looked different.

Relationships looked different.

Choices looked different.

My own behavior looked different.

There were moments when I realized how incredibly close I had been to an answer over the years.

I had even taken medications that are sometimes used in treating migraine and overlapping conditions, prescribed at different points for different symptoms.

But once enough symptoms accumulate, differentiating them becomes difficult.

Head pain.

Dizziness.

Fatigue.

Stress.

Cognitive fog.

Nausea.

Pain elsewhere in the body.

Eventually it all goes into one bucket.

The it sucks bucket.

The fucking bury it and do what you have to do next to get through this life bucket.

The I cannot think about me because I have other mouths to feed bucket.

The problem with that bucket is that it does not have infinite capacity.

Eventually it fills.

Then it overfills.

And then it spills into all the other buckets you have been working so hard to protect.

Your work.

Your marriage.

Your friendships.

Your family.

Your reputation.

Your ability to think.

Your ability to solve the very problem now sitting in front of you.

And suddenly you have a situation on your hands while being highly handicapped in your ability to solve it.

That is why I no longer think sweeping problems under the rug is strength.

But blaming everybody else is not strength either.

There is a legitimate point in problem solving where responsibility has to be identified.

This person was responsible for this.

That was their role.

This was the reasonable expectation attached to that role.

Take friendship as a simple example.

There are baseline expectations associated with calling someone a friend. If you are trying to understand what happened in a relationship, asking whether someone met those expectations can be useful.

Did they show up?

Were they trustworthy?

Did they behave with care?

Did they repeatedly violate the basic terms of the relationship?

That analysis can give us context.

It can tell us what happened.

It can help us identify a failure mode.

What it cannot tell us is who we are independent of what somebody else did.

That requires another conversation.

The questions I have had to ask myself are different:

What was my role in this?

What should I reasonably have expected?

What should I have been able to take for granted?

What should I have anticipated?

What actually happened?

And what existed in the gap between those things?

That conversation matters.

Have it.

But understand that it is one conversation in a series of thousands.

And this is where one of the core tenets of The Cardinal Rule comes in.

Grief is like a swamp.

It is a place we go to extract new nutrients.

It is not a place where we pitch the tent.

You can enter it.

You can observe it.

You can learn from it.

You can gather what it has to teach.

But it is not home.

Do not build your house there.

Especially if you ruminate.

If you replay conversations over and over…

If one sentence can stay lodged in your nervous system for days…

If incidents chain themselves together until they become one enormous traumatic memory you cannot seem to unhitch yourself from…

I am talking to you more than anybody else.

Because life does not have to become an endless investigation into everything that has gone badly.

You do not have to spend your days hyperfixated on failures, injuries, betrayals, mistakes, and other people’s opinions of who you are.

There is plenty of advice that says:

Other people’s opinions of you are none of your business.

There is also plenty of legitimate work that says certain people’s perceptions of you are absolutely your business.

Both are correct.

The skill is learning the difference.

Most people?

I do not care what you think about me.

I am not talking to you.

If what I do is not for you, great.

That does not invalidate my experience.

It does not erase the value of my work.

It does not mean what I am saying or building fails to create enormous value for the people it is designed to serve.

It means:

Not you. Not now.

Move along.

I will too.

That is what mature adults do.

If you approach me with the problem, we are already in the work.

Whether you are ready to engage me is a different question.

Sometimes the next right step is not consulting.

Sometimes it is a book, a conversation, or simply leaving with a better question than the one you brought in.

Because one of the most interesting things I have learned is that people who react very strongly to me are sometimes encountering something in themselves.

I know that phenomenon because I have experienced it from the other side.

My great-grandmother was the matriarch of our family.

She could bring down a sledgehammer.

For years, I said I wanted to be nothing like her.

Then I got older and started hearing her come out of my own mouth.

At some point, you have to own that.

I do not know that you become somebody like me without a foundation like that.

And there are parts of it I now recognize clearly.

Yes.

I can be harsh.

I am extremely strict when I believe serious wrongdoing is occurring and everybody around it has decided to look away.

I become rigid.

Adamant.

Defiant.

The moment I hear groupthink taking over a room while an important decision is being made from only one perspective—usually the perspective most convenient to the people sitting at the table—something in me activates immediately.

Early in my career, I was known for saying:

I will push an envelope off the damn table if nobody can tell me why it is sitting there in the first place.

For a long time, I understood the value in that instinct.

It took considerably longer to understand the cost.

I knew, intellectually, that I could sometimes deliver things differently.

Change the tone.

Soften the wording.

Make myself more palatable.

But there is a difference between developing communication skill and simply masking the underlying mechanism.

Once you understand where a reaction comes from, surface-level correction is no longer enough.

Because if you only address the surface, the problem comes back wearing different clothes.

It follows you.

Different workplace.

Different relationship.

Different conflict.

Different decade.

Same mechanism.

Root-cause analysis works that way.

Eventually, if you want the failure mode to stop recurring, you have to get underneath it.

And what does that work look like?

Therapy?

Yes.

Coaching?

Sometimes.

Mentorship?

Absolutely.

Professional help?

When appropriate.

Reflection at home?

Yes.

Breathing.

Meditation.

Yoga.

Exercise.

Running.

Cardio.

Strength training.

Professional development.

Personal development.

Journaling.

Creative expression.

Scientific skill building.

Learning how your body works.

Learning how your mind works.

Learning how systems work.

Learning how relationships work.

Learning to distinguish between something that belongs to you and something that does not.

Learning to repair what does.

Learning to release what does not.

So which one is the answer?

Yes.

All of the above.

And so much more.

Because orientation is not a single act.

Neither is balance.

We are constantly making small corrections.

That is what a body does when it stands upright.

That is what a healthy system does when conditions change.

And that is what a human being can learn to do once they stop treating every correction as evidence that something is wrong with them.

Maybe the goal was never to remain perfectly still.

Maybe the goal is to become better at knowing where you are when the ground moves.

And doesn’t that sound a whole lot better than rumination?