Three Years Later, My Life Looks Completely Different

How disability, trauma recovery, career loss, and rebuilding changed the life I thought I was going to have.

Almost exactly three years ago, in the fall of 2023, my life started changing.

I didn't know then how much was about to happen.

If you knew me a few years ago, you probably knew me as an interior designer. I had spent years building a corporate career I was incredibly proud of. I became NCIDQ certified. I was making good money, raising my daughter, and living a life that, from the outside, probably looked fairly established.

If you know me primarily through social media now, you see something very different.

I use a wheelchair. I live with POTS and dysautonomia, MCAS, hypermobility and chronic pain, and bulging discs in my back. A significant amount of my life now revolves around managing symptoms, conserving energy, attending appointments, adapting my environment, and figuring out what my body is capable of on any given day.

I run Restorative Healing Haven for maybe two or three hours a week.

I talk publicly about disability, trauma, accessibility, Reiki, and what it means to rebuild a life when the one you expected to have no longer exists.

There is a lot that happened between those two versions of my life.

And I've realized that many people who have known me over the years probably only know pieces of it.

So, three years later, I think I'm finally ready to tell that story.

The unraveling started before I knew it was an unraveling

In the fall of 2023, I was beginning to question parts of my life that I had spent years accepting as normal.

By early 2024, I left my first marriage.

What followed wasn't simply a divorce.

I started looking at patterns in my marriage, my family, my childhood, and myself that I had never fully understood before. Eventually, I became estranged from my parents as well.

For a while, it felt like pulling one loose thread and watching an entire sweater come apart.

Things I had spent my life calling normal suddenly didn't look normal anymore.

Things I thought were personality traits started looking more like survival responses.

I began understanding how much of my life had been shaped by staying useful, keeping people happy, anticipating other people's needs, pushing through discomfort, and functioning no matter what was happening inside me.

Later in 2024, I was diagnosed with PTSD.

That diagnosis gave me language for experiences I had been carrying for a very long time.

But while I was learning what had happened to my nervous system psychologically, something else was happening too.

My body was becoming harder and harder to ignore.

My body had been talking for years

Looking backward, I can see signs long before I became visibly disabled.

Pain wasn't new.

Fatigue wasn't new.

Migraines weren't new.

GI problems weren't new.

Joint problems weren't new.

Dizziness wasn't new.

Feeling inexplicably sick, weak, shaky, overheated, nauseated, or exhausted wasn't new.

I had simply spent years treating those things as inconveniences I was supposed to work around.

I was very good at pushing through.

For a long time, being able to push through looked like being capable.

Eventually, my body stopped letting me do it.

Restorative Healing Haven grew in the middle of all of this

One thing I want people to understand is that Restorative Healing Haven wasn't created after I became disabled as some kind of replacement career.

The work behind it had already been part of my life.

I had years of training and experience in trauma-informed support alongside my professional career in design. I became trained in Reiki and sound healing and continued learning about the relationship between trauma, the nervous system, the body, and healing.

At the same time, my corporate career taught me an entirely different set of skills.

As an NCIDQ-certified designer, I spent years solving problems, listening to what people actually needed, navigating complicated systems, coordinating moving pieces, advocating for solutions, and thinking about how environments affect the humans using them.

Those two sides of me were never as separate as they might have appeared.

Restorative Healing Haven became a place where they could meet.

I began offering trauma-informed healing work, Reiki, sound healing, and support for people trying to navigate complicated seasons of their own lives.

For a while, I was building that while still trying to hold onto my corporate career.

Then my health deteriorated enough that holding onto everything stopped being possible.

I thought I would eventually go back to work

By 2025, both my PTSD and my physical health were significantly affecting my ability to function.

I tried to keep working.

I tried accommodations.

I tried intermittent FMLA.

Eventually, I went on short-term disability.

At the time, I didn't think I was walking away from my career forever.

I thought I needed time.

Time to stabilize.

Time to get treatment.

Time to figure out what was happening to me.

Time to get well enough to go back.

Instead, while I was still on approved short-term disability, I lost my job.

I won't name the company here. This isn't really a post about them.

But I do want to be honest about what that loss meant.

I had spent years building that career.

I was good at what I did.

I had earned a national professional certification that mattered tremendously to me.

I had built financial security around that career.

And suddenly, during a period when I was already incredibly vulnerable, it was gone.

At the same time, I was slowly realizing that this wasn't simply a temporary health problem that I could rest through and then return to my old life.

I was becoming disabled.

There wasn't one diagnosis that explained everything

The process of understanding my health has been complicated because there isn't one neat condition responsible for everything my body does.

I live with POTS and dysautonomia.

My autonomic nervous system doesn't regulate basic functions the way it is supposed to. Being upright can make my heart rate change dramatically. Blood pools. I can become dizzy, shaky, nauseated, weak, foggy, overheated, or feel like I'm going to pass out.

Things most people don't have to think about, like standing in a kitchen, taking a shower, walking through a store, or sitting upright for a long period of time, can have a physical cost for me.

I also have MCAS, or Mast Cell Activation Syndrome.

That adds another unpredictable layer to living in my body. My mast cells can release mediators inappropriately, contributing to things like flushing, itching, GI symptoms, swelling, headaches, and other reactions.

Then there is the musculoskeletal side of things.

I have hypermobility and significant chronic pain. I deal with joint instability and pain throughout my body, and I have bulging discs in my back that add another source of pain and physical limitation.

None of these things exist in isolation.

They pile on top of each other.

Pain affects how much energy I have.

Being upright aggravates dysautonomia.

Dysautonomia makes physical activity harder.

MCAS can flare and make everything else more difficult.

My joints and back affect how I move.

And managing all of it requires energy from a body that already has very little energy to spare.

Eventually, I started using a wheelchair

This is probably the most obvious change if you haven't seen me in a few years.

I use a wheelchair now.

And I know that for people who aren't familiar with ambulatory wheelchair users, that can be confusing.

I can move my legs.

I can stand.

I can walk.

Sometimes I can walk farther than other times.

That doesn't mean walking is always safe, sustainable, or worth what it costs my body.

My wheelchair lets me conserve energy that I need for other parts of my life.

It helps when being upright makes me symptomatic.

It gives me somewhere to sit when my body needs it.

It allows me to participate in things I might otherwise have to miss entirely.

It helps me be a mom.

It helps me leave my house.

It helps me exist in the world with the body I actually have instead of constantly demanding that my body perform like the one I wish I still had.

The wheelchair didn't take my independence away.

In many situations, it gives some of it back.

What my life actually looks like now

This is the part social media doesn't always show very well.

I don't work full time.

I don't work part time in the traditional sense either.

Restorative Healing Haven might get two or three hours of my actual working capacity in an average week.

That can mean a client session.

It can mean recording educational videos from my couch.

It can mean writing.

It can mean answering messages, updating my website, working on disability education, or supporting the online community I've created.

Sometimes I have more capacity.

Sometimes I have almost none.

The rest of my time isn't an endless vacation because I'm not at work.

Disability itself takes time.

There are appointments.

There is physical therapy and occupational therapy.

There are medications and symptom management.

There are electrolytes, salt, hydration, mobility equipment, pain management, and planning.

There are days when taking care of my basic needs uses most of what I have.

There is parenting.

There is my marriage and the home and family I've built.

There are things I want to do and cannot do.

There are things I can do, but only if I'm willing to give up something else.

There is a constant calculation happening in the background:

If I do this, what will it cost me?

And do I have enough capacity to pay that cost today?

That is one of the biggest differences between my old life and my life now.

I used to organize my days around time.

Now I organize them around capacity.

Why I still run Restorative Healing Haven

With all of that, someone could reasonably ask why I keep a business at all.

The answer is because I love this work.

I just can't build it the way we're usually told a successful business is supposed to be built.

I don't want twenty clients a week.

I couldn't physically sustain twenty clients a week.

I don't want to recreate the same system that taught me my worth was connected to how much I could produce.

Restorative Healing Haven has to fit inside my life.

My life cannot be sacrificed to keep Restorative Healing Haven alive.

So I keep it intentionally small.

I offer Mind-Body Trauma Healing because I understand that trauma isn't simply something we think about. Our bodies can carry patterns of protection long after the immediate danger has passed.

I offer Reiki because it has been meaningful in my own life and because it can be offered in a way that is incredibly accessible. My distance Reiki clients don't have to drive anywhere, navigate an inaccessible building, get dressed up, or even turn their camera on.

I offer Life Navigation & Support because sometimes people don't need another person telling them to try harder. They need someone who can sit beside them, look at the complicated system in front of them, and help them figure out what the next manageable step actually is.

And I continue talking about disability and accessibility because becoming a wheelchair user has changed the way I see the built environment, too.

I didn't stop being an NCIDQ-certified designer when I became disabled.

If anything, disability gave me another perspective on design.

I notice every entrance I can't use.

Every aisle that isn't wide enough.

Every counter I can't reach.

Every supposedly accessible space that technically checks a box but doesn't actually work very well for the disabled person trying to use it.

The designer is still here.

She just sees the world from a different height now.

I'm still in the messy middle

I wish I could wrap the last three years into a beautiful story where everything happened, I learned the lesson, and now we've reached the inspiring ending.

That's not where I am.

I'm still figuring this out.

I'm still grieving parts of my old life.

I miss working as a designer.

I miss having the financial security my career gave me.

I miss being able to decide I wanted to do something without first having to negotiate with my body.

I don't think acknowledging those losses means I don't appreciate the life I have now.

Both things can be true.

I can love my husband, my daughter, my home, my work, and the community I've built while still grieving things disability and trauma have changed.

I can be grateful for my wheelchair and wish I didn't need one.

I can be proud of Restorative Healing Haven while wishing my body allowed me to do more with it.

I can know myself more deeply than I did three years ago and still wish some of the lessons hadn't been so painful to learn.

That's the messy middle.

Three years later

When I think about the person I was in the fall of 2023, she had absolutely no idea what was coming.

She didn't know how many relationships would change.

She didn't know she would be diagnosed with PTSD.

She didn't know she would start a healing business.

She didn't know her health would deteriorate.

She didn't know she would eventually lose the corporate career she'd spent years building.

She didn't know words like POTS, dysautonomia, or MCAS would eventually become part of her everyday vocabulary.

She definitely didn't know she would become a wheelchair user.

She didn't know how much she would have to grieve.

But she also didn't know what she would build.

Three years later, my life looks completely different.

It is slower.

It requires more support.

It requires mobility aids, medications, accommodations, boundaries, and an enormous amount of listening to my body.

My work happens in small pockets of capacity rather than forty-hour weeks.

My definition of productivity has changed.

My definition of independence has changed.

My understanding of accessibility has changed.

And my understanding of what makes a life valuable has changed.

I'm not going to pretend I have completely made peace with all of it.

I haven't.

But I'm also not spending all of my energy trying to force myself back into the life I had before.

I'm learning how to build a life my body can actually live.

And right now, that looks like raising my daughter, building a life with my husband, taking care of a complicated disabled body, running a very small business that matters deeply to me, writing, creating community, talking about disability and trauma, and continuing to figure out what comes next.

It isn't the life I thought I would have three years ago.

But it is my life.

And I'm finally learning how to build it around the person I actually am now.