The Things I Can Control

Thursday Thoughts

After one full month into my annual rebrand, a month that included staying mostly off-camera and mostly offline, my list of 2024 goals only has two bullet points to show for it:

1. Health

2. Wealth

Both can be cut into a dozen subcategories, and they will, when I have time. When I started planning for October, I imagined a slow saunter into Fall, and not chaos.

I got chaos.

Bad chaos and good chaos.

Good chaos being consult projects, brand work, and corporate contracts that unexpectedly dropped into my inbox (and cut my loiter time in New York short). Bad chaos being everything else.

As much as this early start fosters ambition and appetite, it also supplied the necessary dead time for procrastination, self-doubt, false starts, and wallowing in stagnancy. I planned for those. I didn’t plan for October’s surprise visitor, Ms. Festering Rage. Enough to make you end friendships and walk away from brand deals. Enough to make you not want to get out of bed. All of which I did.

I don’t consider a month spent stewing in grief, emotion, rage, and heartbreak a total loss. It brought a wave of new ethical pivots to my life, business plans, and relationships that I hadn’t considered before. It gave me a new drive to operate more independently than ever. To make my own space, build my community, and minimize my contact and reliance on an industry whose agencies and executives would blacklist me at the drop of a hat. Like it did and tried to do to Maha Dakhil, David Velasco, Jackson Frank, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, and so many more.

All of that future planning is still hanging out in the daydream section of my brain. I don’t have the energy to even add anything else to my two-item list just yet, so I’ll start with the things I can control. I’ll start by chopping.

First up: Health.

I hate all my doctors.

Actually, I love my dentist if that’s a sign of how dire things are.

Everyone is else fired.

Starting with my primary care doc at Cedars Sinai who immediately diagnosed my three thousand piece autoimmune puzzle as “just anxiety.” (Narrator: “It was not"). There was also that time when I told her I thought I was having a mid-nature-walk heart attack. She told me it was probably just the heat. It was 5 weeks after I had Covid. It definitely wasn’t the heat. My insurance actually just dropped her from the coverage network. The one time throughout all of this where I didn’t need to argue with a Cigna decision.

Up next for the chop is my OB-GYN who runs an alleged ‘holistic practice,’ but immediately recommended surgery for an issue that she also said would “go away on its own naturally.” Which one is it? She’s also one of those doctors who won’t share or talk through test results unless it’s in person. No phone, no Teledoc. My last straw was rearranging my schedule for an appointment just to sit there on the table for 45 minutes waiting for her to show up. When she eventually did, she mumbled through my results and the answers to my questions, and full on neglected to mention an ovarian cyst showed up in my ultrasound. You know, something that could probably be the source of the dull pain that I came into the office for. I didn’t find out until I read the results myself in the car.

My dermatologist can stay.

I might also keep my allergist. Honestly an allergist should be the first doctor anyone goes to for anything.

Everyone else is gone.

Look at that. I now have two new things to add to my list.

1. Find new primary care doctor.

2. Find new OB-GYN.

Progress.