Since coming out, I’ve had some great thyroid, and state-of-the-medical-system, and healthy-living conversations. I love hearing other people’s health success stories.
Some friends loaned me a book, called Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, I think should be required reading for every high school and college student (or every 55-year-old looking to make a pivot). Seriously, no one should leave their teen years, or enter a career without spending reflective time with the exercises in those pages.
The other day, the authors talked to me about the difference between a gravity problem and an anchor problem.
A gravity problem is an in-actionable problem, like gravity. It’s an obstacle you cannot move that’s in the way of achieving your goal.
An anchor problem is one that just holds you in place. It’s an obstacle that is holding you back from something you want to achieve, but it is not all-together immovable.
I think too many people think their medical issues are gravity problems when they are really just anchor problems. I think too many people have been told by media and the medical profession that their health issues are incurable (i.e. a gravity problem), when in fact with lifestyle changes they can most certainly affect their health for better (i.e. an anchor problem.)
Someone told me today her friend who has a thyroid thing was told by her doctor there is nothing that can be done to change her situation. I’m not sure the details, but I think my friend’s friend needs another doctor. I was told the same thing. In my mind, until I am completely 100% sold that this lump on my thyroid is a gravity problem, it is an anchor problem.
Anchor problems don’t mean you don’t make compromises. In fact, that’s kind of the idea. If I see this thing as an anchor problem I’m free to investigate options. And I’m free to investigate what I want, then make adjustments and modifications based on what is indeed possible. I have to be very clear on what I really want.
Obviously I don’t want a lump. But more than anything, I want a healthy, vibrant, energetic, full head of hair. If I believed I had a gravity problem, I wouldn’t be taking 24 supplements a day, to impact my gut health, which will impact my gland health, including my thyroid, and hopefully this goiter. But more than anything, I would feel defeated and hopeless. And I don’t want to feel that way. No one does.
