Know Your House

Know Your House

Your team can bring expertise.

But you are the one who lives in the house.

I didn’t need to become a doctor, nutritionist or scientist. I needed to understand my own body well enough to learn and critically participate in taking care of it.

That meant paying attention.

What was treatment doing? How was my body responding? What was I eating? How was I sleeping? What helped me feel stronger? What didn’t?

The more I learned, the better my questions became.

And I learned something else.

An answer can deserve another question.

That does not mean distrusting expertise. It means understanding enough to ask why. Does this make sense for my house? What are the alternatives? What don’t we know? Am I asking the right person?

And don’t be afraid to bring your own ideas to the team. Ask what they think. Test your thinking against their expertise. Seek clarification when you don’t understand the answer.

You don’t have to agree with everything immediately.

You do need to understand enough to participate.

If you bring in a plumber and ask how to electrify the upstairs bathroom, don’t be surprised if you end up talking about pipes.

The plumber isn’t wrong.

You may simply be asking the wrong expert the wrong question.

Food became part of this for me.

There are plenty of people willing to tell someone with cancer exactly what to eat. I chose a much simpler starting point:

Eat what you KNOW is healthy and avoid the rest.

Then, with the help of my wellness team, I could learn more about what made sense for my body, my treatment and the environment I was trying to create.

For me, that meant creating an environment centered on wellness rather than disease. I wanted the choices around me to support the body I was living in and the Somewhere I was moving toward.

My house might look similar to someone else’s from the outside. That did not mean the wiring, plumbing or foundations were identical.

So I learned. I asked. I listened. I brought ideas. I questioned. I sought clarification. And when circumstances changed, I adjusted.

The purpose was never to have all the answers.

It was to become sufficiently educated about my own house to critically participate in the decisions being made about it.

The experts could advise me.

But I was still the one living there.

Continue the journey

Next: Never Give Up

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