creative maverick

My pituitary gland doesn’t work. When I say that and people ask “What’s a pituitary gland?”, I feel a tinge of sadness because this pea-sized gland has coloured my whole life. The pituitary is a gland at the base of the brain that controls many functions of the body including growth, blood pressure, thyroid gland function, the conversion of food into energy, fluid balance and temperature. So kind of a big deal.

As a result I have to take several tablets throughout the day and inject every evening in order to stay alive and healthy. And actually, that’s not that bad. Plenty of diabetics manage a much more delicate balance.

What had a much larger impact on my life was the journey to get here - the decades lived in a sub-optimal state due to incorrect replacement of my endocrine hormones; years of unhappiness and fatigue, some extreme illnesses due to low cortisol levels, gaining three stone in weight on an excessive cortisol dose. On top of this, my treatment in the hands of doctors from the age of 4 was traumatising. As I entered my teens and beyond, treatment was often invasive, grossly insensitive and on one occasion clearly abusive.

Aside from this, one result of the condition was that I was much shorter and looked younger than others my age which meant that I stood out when what I really wanted to do was blend in. All this led to a kind of learned helplessness and a fair bit of unhappiness.

In my thirties I invested a lot of time, energy and money in my recovery. I now consider myself above average in mental health and enjoy the continuing journey towards unusual levels of happiness and success.

My condition is such a large part of me that I came to use the phrase “I am my disease”. Not because I want to carry my story around with me everywhere but because my unusual life experience is important. My experiences have made me unusually open minded having faced illness, death and disease that many others have not yet had to. It’s made me more able to listen to others. It’s contributed to my dark sense of humour. And feeling like an outsider looking in on “normality”, I developed a unique perspective on life and how people live it.

So why tell you all this on my blog? Because it’s the great losses, traumas and challenges in our lives that drive us. I get the biggest thrill from helping people who feel powerless, stuck or unhappy find the quickest route to happiness, creativity and success.

The real tragedy is when we lock away the traumatic events of our lives and the things that make us different, because then we don’t get to integrate the incredible riches we gain from our deepest personal challenges.

Use your experience, use what makes you different, use your disease.