Every January since 2018, I’ve taken the time to slow down, reflect, and write an annual review. (You can read my previous reviews here and here). I’ve found that taking the time to go back through my journals from the year gives me perspective on everything that has happened and clarity on where I want to focus going forward.

As I sat down to write this year’s review, though, I found myself feeling a bit apprehensive. How could I even begin to capture a year filled with such intense grief, but also so much joy? What originally started as a rather goals-oriented list of my achievements has slowly evolved to be a deeply personal account of my year.

At the same time, I know that the evolution of this review process is really a reflection of my own evolution as a person. And that sharing my journey – with all of its ups and downs and lessons learned – is much more important than any work highlights or achievements I could share from 2021. I hope you take something from it that helps you in some way.

This year, my own healing took precedent. I engaged in some deep inner work and processed old wounds. It was one of the hardest periods of my life, despite leading to a great deal of inner peace, growth, and self-awareness.

2021 was also a year of joyful new beginnings. My husband and I became fully location-independent, bought our first house in West Michigan, and are excited to be welcoming a baby boy to the world very soon!

Without further ado, here is my review of the last 12 months.

Slowing down to feel: breaking my addiction to work

In early 2021, I slowed way down. Between reading, journaling, and a timely conversation with a friend, I realized how much I’d been burying my feelings in constantly doing.

For my whole life, I’d pushed away uncomfortable feelings by turning to my work or academics as something that I could control, something that I was good at.

I’d never thought of it as a problem before – maybe because our culture wears busyness, achievement, and hours worked like a badge of honor – or maybe because I had just personally gained so much from all of the time and energy I had poured into my work over the years.

But I realized that in my rush to do all the time, I often lost touch with my true self, and could no longer see why I was doing things or what I really wanted. I was missing the present moment and many of the things that make it worth living.

So, I decided to stop working for a while. I started sitting with every urge to work or feeling of “I should be working”. I just observed the tension that came up and sat quietly with it.

And after a few days, I had a powerful return of presence, a lightness that I’d only felt once before. In that state, I could see clearly that I didn’t need to do anything to be whole.

Opening up: psilocybin, forgiveness, and relationships

A few months passed, and I had the opportunity to try psilocybin in a safe and intentional setting.

For the first time in my life, I let myself feel the full intensity of the feelings I had repressed for so long. And for the first time, there was no sense of needing to hold back or suppress them.

I was able to process a lot during that first journey, and it allowed me to begin to forgive and move forward in new ways.

More than anything though, it helped me see how powerful it is to let ourselves fully feel our emotions and allow them to move through us – something I had never allowed myself to experience before. It opened me up by showing me what was possible.

Returning home to the true self

Over the next few months, I oscillated between periods of deep inner peace and deep pain as I processed years of old emotional wounds. To be frank, it sucked. I felt like a shell of a person. But with each wave of grief and emotional release, I felt relief, as though I was a bit closer to returning to my true self.

During this time, I was fortunate to come across a number of resources that helped me along my healing journey:

The Courage to be Disliked. A great little book that really spoke to me. Written as a dialogue between a student and philosopher, it covers the basics of Adlerian psychology. This book gave me the courage to let go of my past and see how I could begin moving forward in the present.

The Wisdom of Trauma. An incredible documentary detailing the work of trauma and addiction expert Dr. Gabor Mate. This movie, and Dr. Mate’s work in general, highlights how addictive behaviors are really trying to protect us from our deepest pain.

The Body Keeps the Score. A great reference book describing many of the most effective modalities for healing trauma and repatterning the nervous system.

No Bad Parts. This book is a great overview for those new to Internal Family Systems (IFS). This approach that was without a doubt the single most helpful thing in my own healing. The core idea is that we all have a natural multiplicity of our minds — we are all made up of various “parts” – all of which have roles that they play in our inner system.

It’s Not Always Depression. This book is based on the Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) approach. The big takeaway is the idea that anxiety, guilt, shame, and depression are all inhibitory emotions, which attempt to block our core emotions – sadness, anger, or fear. If we can access and release the core emotions, we are no longer destined to be stuck in the inhibitory ones.

The Wisdom of the Enneagram. A book of personal and spiritual growth practices for each of nine personality types. Not hard science to be sure, but this really helped me to see where I tended to lose my true self. (For those familiar with Enneagram, I’m a type 3, closely followed by type 1, 5, and 9.)

The Way of Integrity. An engaging book highlighting the journey back to the true self, explained via the story of Dante’s Inferno. More than anything, this book helped to validate what I was going through and encourage me to explore the things that I found intrinsically meaningful.

One Blade of Grass. A beautiful memoir of Henry Shukman’s journey growing up with severe eczema and healing with Zen meditation. Henry’s initial awakening and the recurrence of his eczema upon returning home closely paralleled my own experience over the last two years and inspired me to reinstate a daily meditation practice.

Moving to West Michigan and starting our family!

After an emotionally intense summer, fall brought several things to be grateful for. The first and most exciting was learning I was pregnant with our first child, a baby boy that will be joining our family in April 2022!! 😊

While I’d always imagined planning out exactly when we’d decide to have our first child, once I let go of all of the things that were “supposed” to happen first, I realized there was truly nothing I wanted more than to start our family and be a mom.

And as luck would have it, several of those “supposed-to-happen-first” things happened anyways! Within weeks, my husband Steven landed a fully remote job, and in late November, we bought our first house in West Michigan.

So far, we’re enjoying the cozy country life, and the company of Steven’s brother, who is staying with us for a while. We’re very grateful to be settled in one place and excitedly planning for a homebirth in April!

Other things to celebrate

Another year of blogging & entrepreneurship! This year marked my second year as a full-time blogger, independent researcher, health consultant, and entrepreneur (I never know what to call myself!). While part of me regrets that I didn’t make bigger strides with the blog this year, I’m grateful to have work that I love that can scale up or back to prioritize my own healing when I need to. My sincere gratitude to all of you who continue to support my work and allow me to do what I love.

1-on-1 health consulting. I was really happy with this in 2021. Though my hope is ultimately to build comprehensive resources that allow anyone to recover their gut health on their own, it’s been amazing to be able to connect with and help people from all over the world, and I’ve witnessed some amazing transformations in recent months. By popular request, I also launched professional consulting services for companies and health practitioners (link to book here, formal landing page coming soon!).

Growing Patreon community. I am so thankful for my growing community of patrons! This year, I moved from my lengthy monthly research digests to sharing more regular, bite-sized posts. I also added new monthly Q&A sessions for patrons, where I answer pre-submitted questions. The first two were a huge hit, and I plan to continue these in 2022!

Paper published in mBio! Thanks to a collaboration with Dr. Jonathan Sholl and Dr. Tommy Wood, our paper on the metabolic flexibility of the human gut (loosely based on my blog article on high-fat and ketogenic diets), was published in the journal mBio, one of the higher-profile journals in the microbiome field! This was such a huge honor and received quite a bit of press. I have a couple of other papers in the works that will be published in 2022, including our long-awaited AIP for eczema & psoriasis study results!

Speaking opportunities. In 2021, I spoke at the Physicians for Ancestral Health virtual retreat and the Ancestral Health Symposium held at UCLA. I also appeared on several podcasts, including Phoenix Helix, The One Thing, Nourish Balance Thrive, Pursuing Health, and the Fundamental Health Podcast.

Travel, family, & friends. It was wonderful to be able to travel a bit more again this year. We went skiing for the first time in Wisconsin with my brother and his girlfriend, spent a week each in Puerto Rico and San Francisco with friends, and made several trips to Michigan for a friend’s wedding, a week-long vacation with family, and my college homecoming. We also enjoyed various road trips to visit my husband’s family in Illinois.

Soccer. One of my intentions for this year was to get back to competitive soccer. In February, I met an agent who thought I might have a chance to play overseas. But I’d missed the window for this year, so I settled for exploring local opportunities. Over the summer, I joined the Bavarians, a new semi-pro team based in Milwaukee. Between late-night practice times and everything I was going through at the time, I was hardly at my best, but it was still quite an enjoyable experience. I even started the last game of the season and despite getting a massive quad contusion, was thrilled to have had the opportunity to play at such a high level. Ultimately though, I’m happy for soccer to be a less significant part of my life for now, and am grateful to have explored this enough to know that I’ll have no regrets taking a break from soccer for a while to start our family.

Camp! This was another unexpected source of joy over the summer. On a whim, I came across a listing for a part-time teaching position at a local kid’s day camp – a job I had absolutely adored back in high school and college. Feeling a bit socially isolated, I decided it’d be a great way to meet a few people in Milwaukee, spend time with kids, and offer some structure to my days. Between field trips to local parks, endless games of capture the flag, and hikes through the school prairie, it was a great experience. During a time that I was processing a lot, it reminded me not to take life so seriously!

Lifebook. I went through this personal development program in February 2021 and found it a really useful way to see where I had limiting beliefs and to think through my life vision for the next few years. It’s something that I’d like to continue to revisit in the coming years.

Reading. I mentioned many of the books I read this year already. A few other favorites this year were The Time Paradox, Stumbling on Happiness, Mindfulness, Effortless, and Home Grown.

Quitting coffee. It was a bit rough while my system reset, but I’m now completely off coffee and enjoying a much calmer nervous system and better sleep for it!

Exercise. Besides soccer and camp, I walked, jogged, and biked quite a bit this year. Early in 2021, I also discovered super-slow strength training, by far one of the most effective and enjoyable approaches to weight training that I’ve tried. Lately, I’ve been enjoying long hikes on the trails near our house, which I plan to continue into early 2022!

What’s next?

As I shared in my last annual review, I’m no longer a fan of long-term goal setting. Instead, I’ll share my overall intentions for 2022, along with a few open questions that I’ll be thinking about in the new year.

My 2022 Intentions

Appreciate this wonderful life & our new home. In 2022, I want to take the time to enjoy our new place, reconnect with nature, and deepen our sense of place here. That will likely mean starting to build a small homestead!

Take time to really be present with our new little one! I will be taking several months off to spend with our son when he arrives. I really want to enjoy this sacred early time with him.

Create more helpful resources for the blog. While I can’t say exactly what the next year will bring for me work-wise, I know that creating more helpful content will be part of it! I’ve already got a number of half-written blog articles and courses that I’d love to get published.

Continue to make space to grow and heal. I’m in a great mental space now, but know this will be an ongoing journey. I’d like to find a therapist/life coach to work with regularly. I also want to make sure I take the time for self-care and continue to give myself permission to slow down and pause when I need to.

Open questions I’m pondering in the new year:

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

I’m realizing that there is a lot I still don’t have figured out. I decided to add this new section to my annual review in the hopes that holding these questions in mind will offer some clarity in time!

1) How can I expand my work and reach, without sacrificing creative output and while maintaining a low-stress lifestyle?

As we start our family and as I continue my own healing journey, it’s super important to me to maintain space for my creative work and an overall low-stress lifestyle. At the same time, I know that I could expand my work and reach to be able to impact a greater number of people.

One thing that I’ve considered on several occasions is bringing people on to create an organization, rather than running a solo ship as I currently do. I really do like the idea of providing opportunities to others who could meaningfully contribute to my mission and provide value to my audience. In grad school, I mentored a team of younger students and found it not only quite rewarding, but also hugely impactful for my overall output and ability to keep up with the demands of research.

On the other hand, bringing on other people now would make it harder for me to scale back or even briefly step away from work when I feel I need to. Growing an organization could also distract from the creative work I love most. And of course, I never want growth to come at the expense of the quality of work I publish, or to compromise the values that I built this blog on in the first place.

2) How can I better monetize my work, while offering value and solutions that are widely accessible to everyone?

From the beginning, I’ve never wanted my blog to feel like a business. I’m fortunate that I don’t have to manage it like a business, and that I’ve been able to spend most of my time on creative work, while still bringing in a modest income. But I would like to be able to have a better approach to monetizing my work that also provides value to the greatest number of people.

Currently, most of my income comes from 1-on-1 health consulting. While rewarding, it’s certainly not scalable or accessible to everyone, and it takes a lot of focus away from deep creative work.

Online courses have proven to be a good middle ground in that they inspire new content and provide some income, but it’s not my preferred medium, particularly for exploring new ideas and concepts.

Writing and sharing unique insights is my highest passion, and infinitely scalable, yet currently generates no income, other than the indirect support I receive through Patreon. I’ve found myself doing less writing than I’d ideally like to do in favor of other things that are more directly monetized.

So, what in terms of solutions here? One thing I’ve considered is establishing a 501(c)3 non-profit research arm that would in part fund my writing. This is something I’d like to explore more in 2022 to learn what would be involved, and if this could be a feasible and sustainable way to support my writing efforts.

3) How can I re-engage with work more substantially and embrace the strengths of my achiever personality without falling into the trap of over-work again?

At times this year, I felt I had to shut the achiever part of my personality down, in order to slow down enough to process things. And to be honest, I’ve been afraid to fully unleash it again, for fear I’ll go back to my old workaholic tendencies, mindlessly doing in the hopes of external validation. Yet at the same time I know that it’s also the part of me that holds the creativity, and the ability to get into deep flow states. And that demonizing that part is as problematic as letting it run rampant.

Thus far, I’ve been slowly dipping my toe back into work. In 2022, I’d really like to re-engage with work more substantially – to let myself disappear into my writing for hours at a time again – without getting caught in old patterns. I’m hopeful that awareness is half the battle here, but I also think it will be important for me to establish certain routines and boundaries around work going forward, and schedule regular time to slow down to check in with myself. Perhaps parenthood will be a natural forcing function in this regard!

4) Is there any benefit to maintaining more regular connection with academia?

In recent years, several of my friends in academic circles have suggested that I keep my options open to return to academia, or otherwise maintain ties to the academic community. And I’ve done this to some extent – I’ve published a paper, advised on research study design, and even hosted a major virtual academic conference.

But the truth is – I really can’t see myself ever going back. What I love most about science, I can get entirely as an independent researcher, without the stress and bureaucracy inherent to academia. (Though I’ll admit, easier access to papers would certainly be nice!)

The only legitimate reason I can see to engage regularly with the scientific community is to be able to influence broader approaches to treating gut health.

This is something I’ll continue to think about in the coming year. One thing that I have been reluctantly considering is re-engaging in Twitter, as this would allow me to get more of my work in front of academics. I may also continue to cross-publish my blog articles in academic journals on occasion, especially if collaboration opportunities arise.

5) How can I live a simple, more sustainable lifestyle that is more connected to nature while supporting our kids and myself as a creative/knowledge worker?

I love the idea of building a homestead here, growing our own produce, raising chickens, and allowing our kids the opportunity to grow up more immersed in nature, knowing where their food comes from.

At the same time, I know that parenting and running a homestead requires a lot of time and effort, and (as I mentioned above), I still want to grow my reach to be able to serve more people with my blog and other creative work.

Much of this next chapter of my life will likely be learning to balance my continued writing and creative endeavors with my new roles as a parent and possibly as an aspiring homesteader. I think establishing systems, and maybe bringing on help will be key to making this all work.

I’ll certainly continue to ponder these questions and share my ongoing experimentation. Thank you all for your ongoing support!! Here’s wishing you a wonderful 2022.