I recently started a book club. The book I’ve chosen is Martha Beck’s Finding Your Own North Star. Written in 2001, it is a bestselling self-help book designed to help you discover your true life purpose and align your daily actions with your authentic self. Outside of a couple of dated references, it remains timely and relevant today. More importantly, for me, it reflects an ongoing and lifelong yearning to find out who I might be underneath all the stories I’ve learned about who I am and what gives a human life meaning. I’ve read it twice before, this third read happening at least ten years apart from the last, eight years post-perfect storm, and seven years into my brain retraining journey.
At 58, and a few weeks away from 59 as of this writing, I’ve often wondered if I even have a North Star anymore, not having a clue about what authenticity looks like. An avid consumer of self-help material (obsessively so), I have heard many popular aphorisms such as “be unapologetically you,” “live your truth,” and “follow your bliss” — which sound great. But there’s still that inner question of, Yeah, but how?
For me, the road to authenticity has been anything but smooth, the path hardly clear. I find that the deeper I go on the healing journey, the more bits and pieces of me change; ideals falling away, priorities shifting, old interests losing their appeal. While capacity is growing, it is the sprouting fruits of my labor that feel foreign and unrecognizable. I’m operating within the culture but feel quite apart from it at the same time. I have found that healing, like authenticity, might just be the complete undoing of every bit of conditioning that kept me anxious, fearful of rejection, abandonment, criticism, disagreement, and of not being recognizable and acceptable by society. I believe most of this is positive. In fact, I know it is. Yet, I’m still a human being, and in this undefined state, not having any outward roles, there is little I can say about my life situation that lands squarely with others. When my health gave way in 2017, it stripped away much of what I’d identified with, which was primarily my career and my hometown. Now, three relocations later, a demanding stretch of caregiving under my belt, the loss of my husband, and returning having aged, a little more worn but wiser for the experience, I hardly know who I am — or what I am becoming.
And yet, hope is slowly being born.
When I first heard the term limbic system impairment, the term DNRS uses to describe trauma-induced dysregulation where a brain stuck in “fight-or-flight” causes chronic illness, I secretly felt relieved and confused. Having been a hypervigilant Type A personality with tendencies toward workaholism, perfectionism, anxiety, intense reactivity and mood swings in my menstruating years, labeling my symptoms and conditions (PPPD, POTS, and dysautonomia) as being due to an overactive threat detection apparatus in my brain resonated, even if I didn’t quite understand the implications. I understood that it was happening in my brain but didn’t fully grasp what any of that had to do with me, you know, the person I identified as, the qualities I understood to be who I was.
Well, it turns out, it has had everything to do with that “me.”
For the entirety of my life, my brain and nervous system have been trapped in patterns of chronic fight-or-flight, making the idea of a North Star virtually inconceivable. While a small part of me continually yearned for a “best destiny,” as Martha Beck calls it, my nervous system just couldn’t latch on. My survival brain couldn’t have cared less about life purpose; it only cared about staying alive. To a threat detection system that is constantly misfiring, self-help aphorisms about “following your bliss” don’t just feel distant — they can feel like an impossible fairy tale, pie-in-the-sky promises that feel downright insulting. How can you align your authentic self when your body feels like a battleground and the world beyond it that much worse?
But as my brain has begun to retrain and heal, albeit slowly, something strange has been happening. A new version of myself is emerging, although it still feels incredibly shaky. Healing isn’t a straight line, and I have often found myself playing hide-and-seek with hope and optimism, feeling it more one day and completely elusive and absent the next. Lately, though, it has been growing and hanging around just a little bit longer each time it arrives. Even though I feel more grounded and stable on the inside today, this budding version of me doesn’t match the person I used to be before illness struck. It is a disorienting paradox: so much has seemingly been lost — years of time, relationships, financial resources, and my career — and yet, for the first time, the horizon feels filled with actual possibility.
As I read Finding Your Own North Star for the third time, I am moving at a consciously slower pace, more intentional, acutely aware that the unlearning I am doing isn’t quick or easy. Reading the book is an intellectual pursuit. Changing brain patterns associated with safety is another endeavor entirely. The human brain does not surrender its survival patterns easily; they don’t simply vanish; they have to be patiently unlearned. Qualities like hope, optimism, confidence, trust, ease, presence, clarity, calm, and curiosity aren’t just modern mindset shifts; they literally inhabit entirely different architecture in the brain. A limbically impaired brain—one with an overactive threat detection mechanism firing so intensely that it disrupts bodily systems and creates physical illness—isn’t just stressed, it’s fundamentally and structurally altered. It has spent decades firing and reinforcing the neural pathways of threat, an inner alarm of danger constantly going off.
Knowing this, I am aware that as much as I want it, I am not standing triumphantly on the threshold of my North Star, pointing toward a clear destination. I am still actively rewiring, doing the heavy, invisible lifting of changing my brain’s physical landscape day by day. But what has changed on this third read is that the soil is different. My nervous system is open just enough to welcome a glimmer of something new. I am more able to sit in the unknown without all systems bracing for danger. I am slowly experiencing micro-moments where the concept of a North Star doesn’t feel like a fairy tale anymore, but like something real in the distance, a little more visible even if still mostly obscure. And in a brain that has been configured for survival for a lifetime, those tiny micro-moments of belief are immense progress.
