My Story
A few of the experiences that shaped my life
I have been fortunate to live a life that has taught me quite a lot about change.
Some of those lessons came gently. Others came through experiences I would not have chosen, but for which I have learned to be grateful in ways I could not have understood at the time.
I do not share these things because I believe hardship makes someone exceptional. Everyone carries something, and many people carry far more than we ever know.
I share them because these experiences changed the questions I ask about being human. They made me curious about behavior and habit, about the relationship between mind and body, about our ability to adapt, and about how much of the person we become may still be within our influence.
What I’ve Lived Through
Some of the chapters along the way
The Story
What those experiences taught me
The earlier years
Long before cancer became part of my life, I had already become interested in the relationship between the mind and body.
In 2012, I developed panic disorder. Anxiety could change how my body felt, what I paid attention to, how I interpreted sensations, and how I behaved in response to them.
Over time, I began recognizing how some of the things I did to avoid anxiety could unintentionally keep the cycle alive. The experience left me deeply interested in the relationship between thought, attention, behavior, and physiological experience.
Digestive problems were another long-running part of my life. At times, IBS and related symptoms became disruptive enough to significantly affect everyday life.
Years later, chronic bloating, brain fog, reflux-like symptoms, reduced appetite, and persistent digestive distress increasingly left me feeling unwell.
Eventually, changes in the way I ate brought significant improvement to my digestive health.
That experience taught me something simple that I still try to remember: the mind matters enormously, but we are also physical beings, and caring for the body matters too.
Cancer
In 2016, in my mid twenties, I was diagnosed with pulmonary carcinoid cancer in my right lung.
I underwent surgery to remove the middle and lower lobes of that lung.
I recovered, returned to my life, and eventually thought very little about cancer. I had been told there was no expectation that it would return, and I was grateful to move forward.
Nearly ten years later, it did.
In 2025, while investigating worsening digestive symptoms, doctors discovered a recurrence in what remained of my right lung.
This time, the lung could not be preserved.
In October 2025, I underwent a completion right pneumonectomy and woke up with only my left lung.
There was certainly grief in that experience. But there was also an enormous amount to be grateful for.
I was alive.
I could breathe.
I could walk.
And, little by little, I began discovering how much I could still do.
One lung, and a new life
Recovery taught me not to decide too quickly what a changed body is capable of.
I began by walking. Then I walked farther. Within months, I was training again and rebuilding my strength.
I do not believe this means limitations are not real. They are. Nor do I believe every circumstance can be changed through mindset alone.
What I came to appreciate was something quieter:
What is true today does not necessarily tell us everything about what will be possible tomorrow.
The body adapts. The mind adapts. Life reorganizes itself around circumstances we once could not imagine living through.
And sometimes we do too.
I am profoundly grateful for the life I have now. Not because everything has been easy, but because I am here to experience it.
What it gave me
These experiences did not give me answers so much as better questions.
Why do certain behaviors become automatic?
How much can the nervous system change?
How does perception shape the experience of our lives?
What helps us adapt when circumstances cannot be undone?
And can we become so different internally that, over time, our external lives begin to change as well?
Those questions are part of what eventually became Thought Loops.
I write about them not as someone who has figured life out, but as someone who remains deeply curious about it.
There is still an extraordinary amount I do not know.
And perhaps more than anything, everything I have been through has made me grateful that I still have the opportunity to keep finding out.