Crisis made me look. Curiosity made me explore.

Three people I love were diagnosed with cancer within about a year of each other.

That was the first crack. I’d spent my whole life inside medicine — it’s the family business. Before I ever wore my own badge I worked for my grandfather, my dad, my uncle. Then fifteen years of my own: the ER, wound care, the places where medicine is genuinely at its best. Chest tubes. Strokes. Acute heart failure at two in the morning. I could save someone’s life in that moment — and I’m still proud of that medicine.

But watching cancer arrive in my own family, one diagnosis after another, I noticed what I wasn’t trained to ask. I could treat the crisis. Nobody was asking where it began.

Then the search got personal.

Infertility, first. Then postpartum depression — a spiral into a state I never thought I would be in. I was always the regimented one, the controlled one. Being a physician, having all of that knowledge — and it still felt completely out of my control.

And here is the part I want you to hear, because it might be your part too:

I felt like nobody heard me.

People wanted to put me on Zoloft or tell me to just get through it — “this is what normal motherhood is.” It was not. So I took the bull by the horns and started addressing my own stuff — the stuff modern medicine just didn’t understand.

The further back I looked, the more I found. I’d thought of myself as relatively healthy, but honestly? I had been brutal to my body for years. I overexercised. I white-knuckled through depression, anxiety, perfectionism. I had an eating disorder I assumed was simply the way I was made — a DNA problem, a life sentence.

It wasn’t. When I started exploring yoga — getting closer to my body, understanding it, seeing it differently instead of punishing it — the eating disorder just went away. Not through willpower. Not through discipline. Through reconnection. And that made me deeply curious: if that could change, what else wasn’t actually a life sentence?

That’s the whole story, compressed: crisis made me look at it. Curiosity made me explore it more.

The curiosity is the part that turned me into what I am now. Because once I started asking, I couldn’t stop seeing the question nobody asks. We’re taught: treat the problem, and that’s it. You don’t find out why. Kidneys to the kidney doctor, heart to the heart doctor — but the kidneys and the heart talk to each other. Your body functions as one.

Nobody asked the question: why is the fatigue there?

I want to be careful here, because this is not a story about medicine failing me. The physicians and nurses I’ve worked beside my whole life are doing the best they can with what they have. But what they have is not enough for questions like these — fifteen minutes can name a symptom; it takes longer to understand a person. That’s not a villain. That’s a gap. And a gap is something you can stand in.

So that’s where I stand now. On one side, everything my medical training gave me — the physiology, the anatomy, the intricacies of how a body actually works. On the other, everything the crisis taught me: that “you’re fine” can be true on paper and false in a body, and that the way out starts with better questions.

You don’t see it as a huge shift when it comes. You just wake up feeling better. Your baseline changes — 75 to 90 percent. Energy you stopped expecting. Peace and genuine happiness in the day-to-day, which is what I had always been determined to find. And once you get a taste of that, you stop accepting the old normal.

If you’re where I was — regimented on the outside, running on fumes underneath, told everything looks fine — I’m not going to hand you a label and a pat on the head. I’m going to get curious with you.

Crisis made me look. Curiosity is the part I get to share.