Building a Life That Fits My Energy

I had one of those therapy sessions recently where I walked out feeling like someone had handed me a missing puzzle piece.

Nothing in my life had actually changed. But somehow, everything made a little more sense.

We spent almost the entire session talking about my energy.

If you’ve been here for a while, you probably know this already, but my energy changes a lot from day to day.

Some mornings I wake up feeling like myself. I’m excited to work, chatty, productive, making plans, wanting to see people.

Other mornings I wake up feeling like I’ve been hit by a bus.

Sometimes I know exactly why. I have a rare inflammatory autoimmune disease, and I do a weekly infusion at home. The day after is almost always slower. I’m sure hormones play a role too, although with my IUD it’s almost impossible to know where I am in my cycle.

But sometimes there isn’t a reason.

For years, I thought my anxiety came from trying to figure out why I felt that way.

Is something wrong?

How do I fix this?

My brain always wanted an answer.

But my therapist pointed something out that helped shift the way I was looking at it.

She said, “It’s interesting. You’ve become incredibly accepting of your autoimmune disease... but you haven’t accepted your energy.”

That stopped me in my tracks. Because she was right.

I’ve made peace with the role my disease has played in my life. As strange as that sounds, I genuinely believe it’s given me perspective. It’s taught me gratitude, made the healthy seasons sweeter, and helped me stop sweating the small stuff the way I might have otherwise.

I’ve accepted that illness is part of my story.

I just hadn’t realized I was treating my energy differently.

Somewhere along the way, I decided that the bubbly, energetic version of me was the “real” me. The slower version was the one I was always trying to fix. The one I pushed through. The one I wished would hurry up and go away.

I never really questioned that.

But once my therapist pointed it out, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Then she said something else that’s been stuck in my head.

“Maybe not every low-energy day needs to be solved.”

I’d honestly never thought about it that way before.

But once I started looking at my life through that lens, I realized I’d already been making little adjustments without even noticing.

Without trying, I’ve built a career that works with my energy instead of against it.

People ask me all the time why I don’t have a podcast, and honestly, I think this is part of the reason. I’ve always worried that recording day would land on one of my lower-energy days and I’d have to force something that just wasn’t there.

The beautiful thing about this job is that it gives me flexibility.

On slower days, I can answer emails, write, organize, edit photos, or simply move through my to-do list at a gentler pace.

Then, on the days when I wake up feeling energized, I can film, brainstorm ideas, write for hours, and get an incredible amount done.

It lets me work with the way I naturally operate instead of expecting myself to feel exactly the same every single day.

The more we talked, the more I realized this wasn’t just showing up in my work.

It was showing up in my relationships too.

I’ve always said that I’m an introverted extrovert.

I genuinely love people. I love long lunches, dinners that turn into hours of conversation, hosting friends and family, spontaneous plans, and catching up over coffee.

But I also know that afterward, I need quiet. I need to come home. I need to recharge.

As we kept talking, another pattern started to emerge.