In mid-2023, I lost my period.

  One month I just stopped getting them. I had never been very emotionally attached to my menstrual cycle in a positive way. Actually, I hated it. I hated that I bled every month, I hated the awful cramps, physical illness, mood disturbances that would come with the bleeding, like clockwork, every 28 days. I felt like a woman cursed by my own body and sex hormones. I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed. I took many sick days in college. When my periods stopped coming one month, and then again no period for the next month, and again the next month —nothing, it felt like a blessing. No start in sight was fine with me, and fertility wasn’t on the top of my mind either.

  I didn’t take it seriously. I mentioned it to various doctors, and none of them took it more seriously, other than “eat more” and <<shrug, next topic>>. Wow, so I didn’t care either. Life went on as usual. Working a lot, traveling a lot, working out a lot, eating a little…

  Life was a fast-paced blur, until it wasn’t. I started feeling (even more) tired all the time. I noticed my hair changing. I felt my body fighting back (fighting against what?). I could feel it shutting down, and angry and inflamed at the same time. My joints started hurting. My spirit was agitated. So many tests were run. So many. What is wrong with me? What can the bloodwork show me? Why does everything hurt?

  My obsessions, fixations, and addictions have shape-shifted many times. My physical pain has shape-shifted many times. My fighting against my body. Trying to control what it does and can’t do.

…

 

  Summer of 2025.  My immune markers have always been low, but now they test to be blatantly off-balance. I scramble. Dumb luck of the universe hit me. A beautiful support system revealed itself to me. Some of whom were people always there, but I didn’t know they were healers. I want to shout their names out on the rooftop, but this is not the format. One person who is in my personal world and who also shares her presence here in the shiny modern demimonde is the gorgeous, makes-my-soul-happy Gabi Ashton. There was a time when seeing various people regularly was necessary in my healing journey. Now I have an inner strength, an inner energy source I can tap into when I am feeling anxious about something.

  In late spring ’25, I spent a week at a farm learning to beekeep. My eyes really opened here. I have spent months of my personal adult life solo-traveling ends of the world, in the most beautiful beaches and serene places you can imagine, through-hiking ancient paths in mountains, but somehow, it is slowing down, and being in my own proverbial American backyard that sprouted and solidified so many inner truths about how to feel better in my body. It was at this farm, where I was guided (by the farm- and bee-caretakers) to this fundamental truth (in relationship to the bees and what a beekeeper’s role is):  the way we see and interact with the natural world is the same way we see and interact with our own selves. (Ignore it? Slap a Band-Aid on it? Build around and on top of it? Spray with pesticides and hope for the best? Ignore it??). Slow down. Breathe. Reconnect. Dance. (I think life is a little better with fairy dust and easiness to it.)

…

  Summer ’25. I learn to belly breathe. I (re)learn where my bladder and large intestine and pelvic floor muscles are. (AP A&P didn’t stick, clearly, and my strict-cultured upbringing didn’t talk about these things). I learn to meditate (again). I (re)learn how to eat. How to take care of myself. My body felt like that of a very old person. My mind felt like I was taking care of an infant from day 1. The world still sees me as a young, hot 20-something. I had stopped seeing it, but I am starting to see it again.

…

  Fall ’25. I finally vow to stop using hot hair dryers, straighteners, and curling irons, which were frying the lengths of my hair. (And for the girls reading along, I also stopped all hair products except organic oils, and I try to minimize really hot showers.) After one month of that, a hair pattern I forgot was even mine re-emerged. I have such beautiful, natural, shiny, bouncy waves. What a joy it is to see my hair so healthy! As if I were 16 again with virgin, untouched hair. Nature is healing!! It is always within you.

  I spend another week at the beekeeping farm.

…

  I throw away every orange pill bottle from my medicine cabinet. I throw away hundreds, maybe thousands, of tiny blue Adderall pills. I had been hoarding them. I have had an unhealthy relationship with this stimulant since it was prescribed to me as a high school teen. I told myself I took them because they helped me focus and get things done and made me feel superhuman. They also helped me not want to eat.

…

  I fumble a lot. If 2023-2024 can be characterized by me operating at a 10, I dialed it back to a 2. I come back to something of my 2022 figure. My heart is heavy and light at the same time.

…

 

  Winter ’25. On the first week of December, December 2025, after 2 1/2 years of nothingness, I got my first period again. I smiled, I laughed, I cried. I texted my best friend, my mom, and my acupuncturist. I was excluded from something that is a universal experience of womanhood, and it felt weird to be floating in limbo for so long. In the present moment, I don’t really know what this return means for me, because my cycles were very challenging to experience each month when I was getting them. But I know it is my body’s returning back to home, where it wants to be. Of femininity, fertility, and rhythm. Of feeling peaks and valleys, and of the deliciousness of experiencing the world with estrogen running through me. My physical body pain is less. My joints don’t ache so much anymore. My energy levels are better, where they used to be. Eating food doesn’t hurt as much. It hits home deeply that fighting myself never worked. Letting go is radical, scary, unknown, but letting go is sustainable and authentic. Only when I allow myself to let go of ideas of who I am, who I was, who I thought I wanted to be, does the dust storm settle, and I can act with more alignment and lightness.

…

  Whoever is reading this, wherever you are in your healing journey (even if you don’t know you are on one yet), I see you. And I believe in your body’s ability to heal itself. I believe in your trust to yourself. I believe in your trust to listen to what you know in your heart is right.

…

  To my clients – there is no one I have ever shared this totality with. I shared tiny pieces of my story with my really core set of clients that I trust and see regularly. The little quips of being tired, of random things hurting, funny attempts of diets, of my solo-travels. Perhaps I checked all my inner jumbo of thoughts very well at the door. I like showing up to dates with full professionalism, with my energy on you. I enjoy that. I am good at that. My non-indulgence shouldn’t, can’t be taken personally. I am so thankful to have been met with support when I have shared. I’ve written this post here, and so you are welcome to talk about it with me during our date if you want to. Or, we don’t have to talk about any of it at all. I’m cool.

 

  If my story helps even one person feel less alone, I am grateful.

 

xx

L