This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - “You Look Fine”: Chronic Illness, Invisible Symptoms, and Rebuilding Self-Trust with Amy Kurtz | 418

Starting point is 00:00:00 How can working at your local Tims take you further? Sure, you can level up your teamwork skills. You also get a chance to receive a Tim Horton's scholarship award. Ready for what's next? Apply today at careers.timhorins.ca. Every Sunday, we cover the latest tech news on this week in tech. Hi, this is Leo LePort, inviting you to join me. And this week's panel, Gary Rivlin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of AI Valley,

Starting point is 00:00:24 Molly White, Wikipedia editor, and the creator of Web3 is going just great. and car guy Sam, a bull salmon. Sam has some opinions in the brand new fronter, Ferrari Lucie. Molly's mom has some opinions on Google's new search pays, and Gary has some thoughts about the Pope. That and more this week on Twitter. You'll find it at twit.tv and wherever you get your podcasts. Quick pause. We expanded to YouTube because we keep hearing, I needed this 20 years ago. And the next generation shouldn't have to wait. So tell the young women in your world who are scrolling and watching to subscribe to This is Woman's Work. on YouTube. I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. We're together. We're redefining what it means, what it looks and what it feels like to be doing

Starting point is 00:01:17 women's work in the world today. And part of that work, one of the most fundamental, non-negotiable parts is having agency over your own body, trusting it, understanding it, being believed when you tell somebody something is wrong with it. And listen, there are experiences that are so universally female that they need no explanation. Things like keys between your fingers in a dark parking lot or an idea that gets ignored until a man comes along and says the exact same thing 10 minutes later and suddenly it's brilliant, being interrupted, being dismissed.

Starting point is 00:01:48 And then there's one that I didn't have a name for until relatively recently. The one where you walk into a doctor's office knowing, and I mean knowing something is wrong inside this body that you've lived in your whole fucking life. only to walk out with a recommendation to reduce stress, but not to worry because it's just part of getting older. So you either imagined or overreacted about the whole, there's something wrong with my body thing,

Starting point is 00:02:13 which for me was paramedopause, which let's acknowledge affects every woman who's lived long enough to experience it. It's not rare. It's not mysterious. And it's not new. And it still took me well over a decade, a lot of money,

Starting point is 00:02:28 a lot of time in a rotating cast of Western, Eastern, traditional, functional, integrative practitioners to get any real answers. Most of them, I'll be generous, were doing the best they could with the information they had. But the cumulative effect of all of it, it felt like I was being gaslit, repeatedly. By people I was paying to help me,

Starting point is 00:02:49 which led to losing trust in my own body, losing that feeling of agency over something that is fundamentally mine. And again, this was about something as common as paramount. I can't even imagine what it feels like to be a woman navigating autoimmune disease, endometriosis, fibroids, or any of the countless conditions that disproportionately affect women and therefore get under-researched, underfunded, misunderstood, and dismissed. The gaslighting isn't incidental. It's systemic. And it does damage that doesn't just disappear when somebody finally hands you a diagnosis or even a cure.

Starting point is 00:03:27 Here's what doesn't get talked about enough. Getting answers isn't the end of the story. It doesn't magically undo the years of not being believed. It doesn't immediately repair the trust you lost in your own body. The anxiety doesn't stop because the diagnosis arrived. The hypervigilance doesn't quiet down because the treatment worked. The identity you lost somewhere between sick and well doesn't automatically come back because a doctor tells you that you're fine or because you look fine.

Starting point is 00:03:57 You know, because everyone tells you you look fine, which is another universally female thing to be judged by your looks. And if you look fine, you must feel fine, right? But fine isn't the whole story. And it never was. And we're getting into it today. Our guest is Amy Kurtz, certified health coach, patient advocate, author, and speaker whose work has been featured on Oprah Daily, Good Morning America, and many more. Her highly anticipated second book, but you look fine, trapped in. in the hell between sick and well and how to break free is out now and is for every woman who has

Starting point is 00:04:34 been handed a pamphlet but not an answer. So Amy, welcome to the show. And I want to start with the premise that you share in your book that sick and well aren't a dichotomy. They're a spectrum. And that gap in the middle that you call the illness after the illness is where a lot of women are stuck right now. So what's actually happening there that medicine isn't addressing? Thank you so much for having me and for the beautiful intro, and I love you already. Feeling is mutual. For me, when I was writing this book, I was researching that 194 million Americans have at least one chronic health condition. And yet society has this expectation and this dichotomy that you're either sick or you're well and that there's no space in between.

Starting point is 00:05:26 But for anybody who's ever battled an invisible illness, an autoimmune illness, an acute illness, the expectation that you just get back on the horse as soon as it's over is frankly insane and just out of touch. There's literally no way that you could go through a life-altering health condition and act as if, You can just go back to normal because anyone who's ever experienced it knows that there is no going back to normal. Nothing is the same. Everything has changed. You have changed. The whole world has changed. For me, it was decades struggling with late stage Lyme disease and not knowing what I had.

Starting point is 00:06:13 It's impossible to just act as if you're fine when your whole life has changed and the axis of which everything that you functioned on shifted. and the rug was ripped up out from under you. So what I experienced and then what I saw starting with my clients and interviewing a thousand women and multiple physicians is that I found myself better. Like I was physically better, but I was mentally and emotionally not okay. And I didn't even know what I was feeling. I didn't know how to identify it. I didn't know what it was. There was no language for it. I looked everywhere. I couldn't find it

Starting point is 00:06:58 anywhere, which also feels insane. But I was suffering with this debilitating anxiety and hypervigilance and fear that everything would come back as it was before, which I learned through my research is a very universal feeling. This could be a migraine sufferer who had hemipelagic migraines no longer does yet at the onset of an aura is flat on the couch with an Advil waiting for the migraine to emerge. It could be a Lyme patient like me having a joint flare and thinking it's all going to come back, a cancer patient going back for their scan. It's almost as if I was physically better and yet my mind hadn't gotten the memo. And it wasn't until I was out to dinner with my husband that he said to me, Amy, I think

Starting point is 00:07:49 there's a second phase of this. And I was like, what? And he said, I just feel that you've been through so much. It's been so traumatic. And there's a second phase for you to look at. And it made me, my wheels go turning. And I'm like, what? How has no doctor ever mentioned this? I've seen 36 physicians. How has this never been brought up before? But then I started to do a really deep dive into understanding trauma. And I realized that there was no term for people like me. And yet the statistics are outrageously high. There are 25% increase since I wrote kicking sick in 2017. So if almost every single person suffers with some kind of health condition, how are we as a society not acknowledging the aftermath of illness? For me, it was the illness after the illness. When you are

Starting point is 00:08:42 struggling with your health, you're in survival mode because you have to be. And everything, the gaslighting, which 70% of women in a Harvard study, 70% of women were, have reported feeling medically gaslit. That's a huge number. And yet, you're just trying to get physically better. So the invalidation, the gaslighting, the disbelief, the questioning if it's in your head, it gets shelved for later. And for me, and I, I know that I'm not alone in this, but yet not a lot of people talk about it. Once I was physically better, all the things I had put on the shelf came down for the taking. And it was flooding. And so in my research, I couldn't find a term for this. I couldn't find language. I couldn't

Starting point is 00:09:30 find solution. So I called it medical trauma brain or MTB. And the difference between that and post-traumatic stress is post-traumatic stress disorder is from one singular. event. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder is when the event happens over and over and over again. But what I'm proposing in this, and I hope this is case studied after and peer reviewed, is the threat is your body. So you no longer feel safe within yourself. And the threat happened over and over and over again because you felt as if your body was betraying you. So how do you learn to feel safe inside of your body when you've been traumatized from the experience of getting sick, the experience of dealing with a black and white system when you're in the gray,

Starting point is 00:10:21 and the experience of being told that you're just supposed to move forward as if you're fine when you're not. Okay, so there are so many things in there that I'm guessing, I can speak for myself. I can relate to, have experienced, I'm sure every person listening in has some version of what you just talked about. And I think one of the problems that you're really addressing here is that we have this idea or this expectation of what it's, and I put in air quote, it's supposed to look like, right? And it's all very linear and all very forward moving, right? Like we don't feel well. We go to the doctor. We get an answer. We feel relieved. We do something about it. we fix the problem, we're cured, we move on, right?

Starting point is 00:11:07 Like that's the ideal state that we think it's supposed to be like, but yet none of us are actually experiencing or very rarely. And I want to dive into a few parts that you put words on that I have struggled with, and it's the betrayal you use that word. I've used that word too. Like my body is betraying me, the loss of trust for something I cannot escape the body that I live in and shouldn't want to. escape, by the way. And then that feeling like you're fucking bat shit crazy because medical

Starting point is 00:11:41 professionals are people who should know or should be able to can't. So let's talk about that a little like how lonely that feels, how scary it feels when you're in it and then continues on even if you do get a diagnosis or are able to move forward with a solution that does actually work. What would you say knowing what you know today to yourself on doctor number one or number two. Oh, it makes me emotional. I would say trust yourself. Don't let anybody make you feel like you don't know your body the best. And if something is sounding the alarm, there is something wrong no matter what anybody says to you. And maybe don't put up with bullshit. Yeah. And also, and also, Also, I would add, don't beat yourself up.

Starting point is 00:12:38 Yes, totally, 100%. I mean, just so many of the things that you just said resonated with me so deeply because I think there's a real loneliness epidemic in our country right now, and I can't think of anything lonelier than having a complex, chronic or invisible health condition. It is so isolating. And part of what happens is that you go,

Starting point is 00:13:04 to the doctor because you know something is wrong because you trust yourself and you believe that it's telling you like, hey, it's time to pay attention because the body is a miraculous vessel that will do that when you listen to it. And we have a very black and white medical system and people with invisible illnesses that are complex and have multiple problems going on fall into this what I call the gray zone. And it can feel like the land of the lost, which puts even more pressure on you as a patient because you feel like you have to manage it all, that it's totally up to you to make sure that you're getting the right care, that you're seeing all the right people, that you're making sure they're talking. It's a lot. And for me, the loneliness

Starting point is 00:13:49 didn't stop after I was sick. It continued because when I realized I had what I call medical trauma brain, it presented as a feeling that I describe as the shadow lands, which to me was like, I'd be out to dinner with my friends. I'd be there. I'd be at dinner. I'd be having a great time. I'd be laughing. I'd be connected to them. And yet there was a part of me that felt like my brain was somewhere else entirely, like locked in a prison that felt like a sandstorm desert or the upside down world in stranger things, where I just felt like there was a part of me that wasn't there anymore. I didn't know what was happening. And that's a thing. And that's a thing. I'm a lot of the thing. And that's thing that happens over time is let's say you have something invisible or that's been hard to

Starting point is 00:14:38 diagnose and you're being told over and over again do you need a Xanax or you look fine or they didn't catch that or any of these invalidating statements that's not just physicians but loved ones say to you too because there's no language for how to deal with somebody not feeling well nobody teaches anyone how to do any of this and it's so important if further isolates a patient, but it more importantly erodes trust in themselves in their ability to listen to their body's cues. And for me, it started making me think like maybe I don't know best. Maybe something is in my head. Maybe, you know, and I'd never been that type of person. I'd always really had pretty deep self-trust. But the experience of being a patient for so long

Starting point is 00:15:30 made me question myself in a way that was really detrimental to my healing. Because for all of the patients that I've worked with and the many people that I've talked with, agency is absolutely key to recovery. And it is a disempowering medical system. I am the daughter of a doctor. Western medicine saves lives. I'm not knocking it at all. I just am saying that when it comes to complex chronic disease, it's a very disempowering system for a patient that has something invisible that takes many layers to fix. When you're a mid-sized business, you need every competitive advantage you can get. Like an AI solution that works for you, not against you.

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Starting point is 00:16:49 and how they're already being exploited. We'll talk about memory in your chatbots. Is it a privacy issue? and then the end of a fabulous hacker competition thanks to what else, AI. That's security now. You'll find it on our website at twit.tv slash SN or wherever you get your podcasts. 100%. And you already kind of dove into this, but it was going to be my next question is I do think, you know,

Starting point is 00:17:18 for the most part, doctors are well-intentioned and there are a lot of contributing factors to why we may feel dismissed. or why we may not get an answer or why the blame doesn't fall solely on the doctor is what I'm saying here. But I did also want to talk because I don't, just like I think doctors aren't necessarily being trained on some things. We aren't being trained. And one of the hardest experiences for me, even beyond the doctors, were the well-intentioned friends and family. The people with the advice, why don't you just try this or eat that or do more of this or less of that or, you know, it's probably, you know, and it's like, I know. Well-intentioned. Absolutely. And it only served to make me feel more alone, to trust myself less.

Starting point is 00:18:06 My question is, how do we better support the people in our life? Because based on the data you shared, we're going to either be or have somebody close to us, struggle with something chronic. How do we better support people who are going through something like this? Because we want, I know we want to support them. We just. haven't been taught. It's so wild because getting sick shifts the axis so much everything in your life functions. It's almost like a crucible. Like people disappear. People don't know how to treat you. Your life changes so profoundly. I mean, anyone with chronic illness will tell you that the experience of going through it, you get to know yourself so intimately in a way that maybe you wouldn't have. But for me, I was 25. I looked fine and I was so ill. We don't have a way to talk to people about not feeling well.

Starting point is 00:19:11 And it's not only a loss for you as a patient who feels isolated. It's a loss for everyone that loves you that's stuck around that wants to be there for you and doesn't know how to. And there's this real disconnect that happens where it's like, you don't even know how to speak to each other anymore. And how unfortunate is that? Like the people that really stick around and still don't know how to talk to you, that's an awful place to be in. Number one thing I would say is that invalidating statements are detrimental to a patient

Starting point is 00:19:45 and especially to someone you love. This can include, but you look fine. Any better? They didn't catch that? Why don't you just try? Yeah, why don't you try this? Susie's nephew's sister's cousin tried this and it worked, you should try that. Maybe you're not seeing the right doctor.

Starting point is 00:20:02 Just like things like that make the patient go so much more insular into themselves. And what I found is all a patient really wants from someone that they love, even if they don't fully get it, is validation, which looks very different from all of the things that I just said, it looks more like, I'm so sorry that you're suffering, or I feel terrible that you are struggling in this way, or my favorite, how can I support you? What do you need? What do you need for me to feel close to me so that I could be there for you through this? You know, I had lived for so long putting on a mask. I feel so sad thinking about it now, but I would put on this like, I'm fine mask because I think I did it as a protective mechanism to not have to have hurtful conversations with people.

Starting point is 00:20:58 And I'd pretend that things were better than they were because I felt like I had to. And it would be like a good patient mask or I'm 25 years old and I'm out with my friend. So I'll just pretend I'm more okay than I am. I felt so separated from everyone. And the only person that that really hurts the most is me or you who's listening if this resonates. It's a real language issue. Like if you love somebody who's suffering and even if you can't see it, ask them what they need. They will tell you.

Starting point is 00:21:33 They'll be honest because they need support, as I certainly did. Sounds like you didn't do, no cool. Yeah. And I go back to, I'm talking about paramenopause. Like this is, we're not even going into the disease or chronic. I mean, it's just like if I felt. this way and experience this over a decade of my life with something as common as that, like my heart breaks for people like you. I think of like long COVID or things that are

Starting point is 00:22:03 real and happening. But we don't have the understanding of like I think when we hear cancer, we sort of understand that we have empathy. But with things like this where you can't see it and you don't understand it, we have no fucking clue what to do. or how to help people. And it's interesting. One of the things you talk about is how it reshaped your relationship with your body and your sense of trust. I define confidence as firm and bold trust and self. And I've spent the bulk of my adult life working on rebuilding and repairing that trust I have with and for myself. And the physical side of it was often one of the harder parts. And you talked about wanting validation. And it's really interesting.

Starting point is 00:22:51 when you're losing that trust in yourself in that way, how helpful it can be to have somebody see it and acknowledge it. You're not crazy. That leads to my next question is, how do you repair that sense of trust as you go through an experience like this? I feel called to like share this little story before I go there. But my last summer, I was with my family

Starting point is 00:23:19 and we were having a good dinner and my aunt was asking me about Lyme disease and she walked across the room, hugged me, looked me deep in my eyes and said, I'm so sorry that you've been through so much pain. I couldn't have comprehended how much that would mean to me. Just pure presence, pure empathy, and not needing anything back for me. and I just think that's really important to say based on what we were just talking about. So repairing trust, that was a huge thing for me. Like I actually thought I trusted myself still. And my current doctor who has helped me heal and gave me the correct diagnosis, which helps a lot,

Starting point is 00:24:06 said the biggest problem I see is that you don't trust yourself. And that was another moment for me where I was like, wow, how did that happen? Because I was always so strong-willed. I always felt very confident in the feelings that I felt. But it's important to not pave over your pain, you know, putting on a happy mask for the sake of others. There's a mistake to accept that there's this binary of sick and well and it's not black and white. The truth is so many people are suffering in the gray. But what is essential to healing two things is processing the grief of who you want.

Starting point is 00:24:46 were with the dreams of who you'd be thought you'd become and picking a physician who wants you to be an active part of the equation the medical system itself we're taught this growing up with every kind of authority figure it's like doctor knows best and for me for so long I would say I'd throw spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick I would try everything I would be on so many things I didn't even know what was working anymore and I would trust them over myself and over time that erodes your trust in yourself because you value someone else's opinion more than you value your own. I think what I'm trying to say now is that don't do as I did, do as I'm urging you to do, which is understand that any kind of illness creates a traumatic event.

Starting point is 00:25:39 and what I hope will happen is that if I was younger and I was told, hey, this could be really traumatic for you. This is going to be complicated and hard. I would seek out that kind of therapy. You know, the system says that the physical body is separate than the mental and emotional and it's not possible. It's literally not possible. The mind, body, and spirit are one. And if we act as if they're not, it's detrimental to the patient. So for me, Number one was finding a doctor who literally made me meet him in the middle. He was like, you've got to, I'll tell you the treatment, but ultimately the pace and and how you want to do it is up to you. And I was like, what?

Starting point is 00:26:27 Like, I didn't even know how to handle that. I really was like, wait, you mean I can splash in the puddle? Like, I don't, are you sure? It felt like I was a little kid that was just asking for permission to step into my healing experience. And as I said, that was not who I was when this all started. One of the ways that you can start to trust yourself again is to start to really listen to the signals that your body is sending you. This can be in very basic ways. In the book, I talk a lot about starting to listen to your body's basic needs. Like, you can literally just start with peeing. When you have to pee,

Starting point is 00:27:04 you go to the bathroom. When you feel thirsty or hungry, you honor that instinct. You start to really, on a very basic level, say, what are my needs? How am I going to listen to you today? A lot of the other things that helped, which I outlined in the book, are nervous system regulations. Orienting is a huge thing that helped me where sometimes I just shut my eyes and say, what is one thing I feel? What is one thing I see? one thing I hear, what is one thing I smell, and really putting in routines throughout my day that make me feel grounded and settled inside myself. Because so many patients are just struggling in this way where they don't trust themselves. They're so anxious and hypervigilant or disassociated. It could go either way. And I felt like there was a ghost, like I was a ghost. I think you just

Starting point is 00:28:04 answered this, but I'm going to ask it anyway in case you have anything to add, but some small practical ways to calm the nervous system, to reorient yourself, to repair and rebuild trust in those moments where you might start feeling a physical symptom. You mentioned earlier, like if somebody has been treated with migraines, but they start to get a headache, like it triggers trauma. And so when that happens, whatever it is that you're suffering or dealing with, if it's getting better, but the symptoms peaks up again and that response is hypervigilance, fear, are there any things that we can do in those moments that help ground and repair trust? Yes. So I love this question. For me, it's a stop, drop, and roll. Part of reclaiming your agency

Starting point is 00:28:58 is not acting on impulse. So it's learning that if you feel fear or you feel this rush of adrenaline or you feel the need to control everything, you just stop for a second. And here are some of my favorite tools. I like to do diaphragmatic breathing where I'll do shut my eyes, some more quiet, and literally breathe in for four, hold for four, and exhale for six.

Starting point is 00:29:27 and do that 10 times. Another one is what I just said before, which is orienting to the space around you because sometimes that can feel when you're scared, you go right to worst case scenario, but reminding yourself like, hey, I'm here right now and maybe it won't be as bad as it was before,

Starting point is 00:29:48 so let me just settle. I always say I've learned from a beautiful CBT therapist who's featured in my book that you get to know yourself by learning what a sud scale is, and that's a stress spike, and then reevaluating what reality is. She also says a lot, will this be scary in two minutes, two weeks, or two years? And the other thing that I thought was so valuable from her interview was talking about how you can take an hour. Most things can wait an hour. So if you have the urge or the impulse or you feel like you need to do something immediately, just stop for an hour. And that means for me just literally like throwing my phone to the side, walking outside, doing something that I feel calming like those breath exercises. And just before I react, before I go and pop the Advil, before I go and turn all the shades down if I'm a migraine sufferer, I just wait and see. Because the reality is that you always had the ability to handle things.

Starting point is 00:31:02 You knew well enough to get yourself to a doctor. And the reality is if something extremely dangerous is actually happening, you can handle it. But you've lost trust in yourself. You feel like you can't. and there are a million ways to get back in touch with your strength. And that was a real journey for me. Peter Levine, who is an incredible somatic experiencing, I mean, he's the godfather of somatic experiencing,

Starting point is 00:31:38 and he shares some nervous system regulation tools that I've found really helpful. So yeah, I think those are places to start. but when I feel a really intense stress bike, I either say I'm going to take an hour or can this wait a day and I'm going to have a sleep and see what happens. Every Tuesday, we cover the latest Apple News on Mac Break Weekly. Hi, this is Leo Laporte, inviting you to join me this week

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Starting point is 00:33:46 The title of your book is, but you look fine. And I kind of wanted to dive into that a little bit. How much does our focus as women on how we look play a part in this struggle? I think there's this constant never-ending messaging that, you know, we should look healthy and young, right? Like, that's our goal as a woman.

Starting point is 00:34:09 My whole algorithm. Oh, God, it's, yeah. Anti-aging. That's all I'm seeing right now. Yeah. Well, and then the focus becomes, and then we care so much more about how it looks than how it feels. There is so much around this paradox, or I don't even know what the right word is, but the way things look and the way things feel and the struggle that we have with that as women that I think is unique to women. I'm sure other genders have some version of this, too. But I, This feels unique to us as women. I guess my question is, what are your thoughts? What's your experience about that? How much is this expectation of how we're supposed to look playing a part in how we maneuver and how we feel when we're going through any sort of illness?

Starting point is 00:35:02 Yeah. I think that's a great question. It's so multifaceted. I'm also curious what your thoughts are on it. But for me, we are constantly, like I just said about, my algorithm bombarded with chasing youth and looking good and being a specific kind of woman. And that's awful. Like it's awful to put that expectation on a woman. They need to do all of these things so that they never age and that they look beautiful. I mean, that's part of what we're taught

Starting point is 00:35:34 makes us valuable when we're young children. It's part of our programming. And that's horrible because women are the most powerful beings in the universe, in my opinion. So the fact that we're put in these boxes and taught that we have to be, play small, be selfless and look great while we're doing all of it for everyone and ourselves last is detrimental not only to us, but to our children and to the message that we send out to the world. So it feels like entrapment in some way. for me with the title, the title was really important to me that I wanted it to be something that people say that they mean nicely, I think, but that is so ridiculously offensive.

Starting point is 00:36:23 Like if I'm telling you, I have hives all over my body, I can't sleep, I have joint pain everywhere, I can barely get out of bed and you say, but you look fine, or you look good? Well, it's the support of that narrative that as long as we look good, everything else is just secondary. A hundred percent. Infuriating. I'm happy that you, that you asked me that question because nobody's asked me that question yet about the relationship between that and then also the expectation that's put on women. It just as you were talking, again, I have to go back to, I'm talking about paramedopause. I just can't even imagine my empathy is through the roof because if I experienced anything like this with something we all experience. But for me, my number one symptom

Starting point is 00:37:15 that I just knew wasn't making any sense was weight gain. It didn't matter what I did or what I ate or what I, like it literally didn't matter. I just was constantly gaining weight. And for me, it was, you mentioned grief. And that seems like an extreme word, but like I saw myself a certain way. and then I had to reestablish a relationship with myself and my body and like look into the future of what it was going to look like that was totally different than how I had seen myself all the way through my mid-30s. And so that was really disorienting. There was a lot of shame. I felt a lot of judgment, whether it was real or imagined, I felt a lot of judgment that people thought like, oh, you know, she's not disciplined enough or strong enough or, you know, like all of this noise. And that's what I lived with. And then this like, Like, but I'm doing everything and I put in air quotes right and it's not working was the loss of trust. And then I would just add the absolute disappointment I felt in myself for caring as much as I did. I wanted to be a woman who cared more about who I am than how I looked. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:38:23 And the fact that I did care as much was like so disappointing. I was so, I got a lot of judgment of myself for that. still do. And it's something that I am working on shutting. But man, your title, yeah, it completely jumped out to me. And it felt like a little bit of a, let's give the finger to this thing that people are saying with good intentions that is really harmful and hurtful in a lot of ways. Yeah, so much. And thank you for sharing that. I have so much empathy. Like, I had the same thing. and I was told by so many people I had a food intake problem. A food intake problem.

Starting point is 00:39:05 Fuck you. Yeah. Everyone's like, you must be eating too much. Like, are you kidding? And also, why do you have an opinion about how I look and what my size is? You know what I'm saying? Like, it's so offensive. Listen, like, chronic illness might be different than perimenopause,

Starting point is 00:39:24 but in some ways, it's even more atrocious because every single. woman experiences it until and until this last two years, I haven't heard anything about it. Nobody talks about it. So this is something that women who are the bearer of children, they literally create life and give life, there's been no acknowledgement of their health and this change in their body, like literally none. So can you... And we are half the population. Like even if our bodies didn't create life or or many miracles and they absolutely are, we're still half of the population. Half the population and there's no acknowledgement that this is a fundamental change that happens in your body,

Starting point is 00:40:08 which tells a woman you're on your own, figure it out. Instead of saying, here are things that you could do to make yourself feel so much better. That's where the two link together is like as a patient with chronic illness like myself or somebody going through perimenopause, there are so many things you can do to feel better no matter what you are going through that nobody's talking about. And the truth is that 80% of what you do

Starting point is 00:40:40 is outside the doctor's office. I mean, as you were talking, I was thinking about PMS as a young girl or people who struggle to get pregnant, or there's so many things that are so common that are so not talked about throughout our lifetime. And then if you add in chronic illness or mental health or any of those things, we're so used to not getting information, feeling alone, feeling like there's something

Starting point is 00:41:08 wrong with us. Gosh, it's infuriating. And I could not be more grateful for women like you who go public, who say the words, who write the books, who put words on things that we're all experiencing and make us feel seen and heard and less alone. So thank you for that. Oh, thank you so much for saying that I really appreciate it. It's scary to do, but it's necessary. And you're doing this too with your podcast. You know, I would just say like that millions of women are suffering silently and there's an invisible wound that happens through this. Doctors don't diagnose it. No one talks about it. Suffers. Don't admit to it. This is the universal thing between what you're experiencing, what I've gone through and what so many of your listeners are.

Starting point is 00:42:04 It doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be that way. We should be able to talk about all of the things that are happening to us and be believed and have resources and have ways to have agency over our health and be empowered. And I hope that that starts to change. me too. Amy, again, thank you for being here. For you, the listener, the book, again, is called But You Look Fine. Go get it on Amazon or wherever you buy books, but let's keep our local bookstores in business, please. And you can also follow Amy on Instagram at underscore Amy Kurtz. We're going to put that link and every other way to find and follow Amy in show notes. And Amy, again, thank you for being here. Thank you so much. Okay, friend, I'm going to say to you,

Starting point is 00:42:50 what I wish somebody would have said to me, whatever is happening inside of your body is real. And the years of not being believed are real. The loss of trust, the hyper-focused, the knowing your body that gets lost somewhere between all the you look fine, all of that is real. And none of it makes you dramatic, weak or broken. It makes you a woman navigating a system that was not built with you in mind, and that is enraging. And also, if we demand it, it's fix We don't have to stay stuck in the gap between sick and well. There is a way through. And the first step, the one that costs nothing and requires no prescription, is believing yourself.

Starting point is 00:43:33 Because, and I say this as emphatically as I can, having agency over your own body, your own story, and your own health, is abs so fucking glutely woman's work. Spotify, it's Jay Shetty. Are you one of those media strategy people? scrolling through spreadsheets, searching for an audience that pays twice as much attention to your ads than they do on social? Let me introduce you to fans. And they're here with me on Spotify. Trust me, I know fans. They don't skip.

Starting point is 00:44:12 They stay for hours. They don't move on. They manifest. They're not a demographic group. They're fans. Spotify advertising. You're among fans. Every Wednesday we cover Microsoft on Windows Weekly.

Starting point is 00:44:26 Hi, this is Leo Leport from the. the Twit Podcast Network, inviting you to join me, Paul Therod and Richard Campbell this week. It's Week D in Microsoft Land, and that means a lot of new stuff. We'll talk about the Steam Deck back in stock and what it portends for the Steambox. And then Paul's going to share his Linux learnings. What? That can't be right. Windows Weekly.

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This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - “You Look Fine”: Chronic Illness, Invisible Symptoms, and Rebuilding Self-Trust with Amy Kurtz | 418

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