I haven’t written in six months. Not because I didn’t have words — I had too many, all of them stuck.
After the five-country tour in late 2025, something broke in a way I didn’t know how to name. I came home. I went to bed. And I stayed there longer than I have in years.
Not metaphorically. Actually.
Here’s what they don’t tell you about speaking professionally with POTS: the tour isn’t the problem. The after is. You spend three weeks moving between airports, stages, hotel rooms — your nervous system in constant activation, your spoons being counted in flights instead of hours. You’re running on adrenaline and the particular high of being heard. Your body is screaming. You ignore it because the work matters, because people are waiting, because this is what you do.
Then you land.
The adrenaline stops. Your body collects what it’s owed. Post-exertional malaise doesn’t arrive gently. It arrives like a debt collector with paperwork — and all the paperwork is written in pain, fatigue, cognitive fog so thick you can’t read your own email.
I stopped posting because I couldn’t write honestly about being in crisis while also maintaining the persona of someone who has it figured out. The cognitive dissonance would have killed me faster than the illness.
So I chose silence.
But here’s what happened in the silence: doubt moved in.
Not small doubt. The kind that questions whether any of this was real. Whether the workshops actually land. Whether the Room is as transformative as I think it is, or whether I was just high on attention and mistook it for impact. Whether I’m sustainable. Whether I should keep doing this at all.
I watched other speakers — people who tour 200 days a year, who have teams, who make it look easy — and thought: I cannot be them. My body will not permit this. So maybe I’m not actually a speaker. Maybe I’m someone who got lucky twice and is now pretending.
The doubt wasn’t wrong, exactly. It was just incomplete.
What was actually true: I cannot tour like I used to. I cannot do five countries back-to-back without a six-month crash. I cannot ignore my nervous system and expect it to ignore me. That’s not a failure. That’s data.
The data said: different model.
And here’s where I am now, writing this from a half-good day in Vienna, with about two hours of usable energy left:
I need the workshops. I need the keynotes. But not at the pace that broke me.
The Room — that half-day, 10 people, testimony-based presence, no slides — that’s where I felt most myself during the crash. That’s where the work didn’t cost more than I had. That’s where I could show up fully without paying for it for three months afterward.
I’m rebuilding toward that.
One or two keynotes per quarter instead of five countries in six weeks. The workshops as the actual work, not the side-gig. Teaching at the schools I’ve applied to as the grounding, not the goal.
It’s moderate. It’s honest. It’s the only model where I survive AND the work survives AND my daughter gets a parent who isn’t locked in a cycle of boom-crash-boom-crash.
But here’s the part I’m saying quietly: I need your help to make this sustainable.
Not money, necessarily — though if you’ve benefited from the work and want to fund it, there’s a way. But also: amplification. If the Room works for you, tell someone. If a keynote landed, send the link to an event organiser who might book something smaller-scale. If you know a school in Vienna that’s hiring workshops specialists, I’m listening.
I’m also listening if you’ve been in this place — the professional crisis where the thing that was supposed to make you is slowly unmanning you. Where you have to choose between the pace everyone expects and the pace your body permits. Where the doubt is so loud you can’t hear your own voice anymore.
Send a note. Let me know I’m not alone in this.
I’m coming back to writing. Not on a schedule — I tried that. But weekly-ish, when the energy allows. More honest. Less performed. More from the 2am thinking than the 2pm thinking.
There’s a word for what happened after those five countries. It’s called the cost.
And I’m finally willing to name it.
Roi
Vienna, June 2026
You are a speaker and a teacher and a healer, even from bed, especially from bed, because you are the living truth of what it’s actually like to meet chronic illness on a daily basis. You are brave. Thank you from my own bedridden weary heart today because my body is also paying some debts from the energy expended this week. Do this at whatever pace your body needs with time allowed to step away. No apologies ever. 💕
I’ve had to write for the past 5+ years in exactly the way you speak to here…the 2am thinking over the 2pm.
I’ve always wondered how the hell you do it.
The only way I’ve seen is the one you speak to here…the one that comes at a cost. A great one.
The only way I’ve been able to navigate in the past 8 years is to start with where i am and work with what I’ve got.
As depleted and life limiting as that’s been, it’s a way in which I’ve seen year on year improvement. Alongside dark periods, relapse and monthly periods of burn out.
I no longer burn out. No more severe days.
I haven’t felt depressed since December 2022.
I can do a lot more in my days in the last 2 years than I used to be able to do in a week or a month.
But I still couldn’t travel to 5 countries in quick succession. Not if I wanted to come out the other side with anything left.
So it’s not that you’re not a speaker. It’s that you’re no longer a speaker who is willing to sacrifice his needs, his health, his life and his family all in the name of perceived success or what we’ve been told success means or should look like.
And that is wherein, the difference lies 🩵