The 8-Week Clock
What 27 Years of IBD Taught Me About Energy, Purpose and What Actually Matters
There’s a moment, a few minutes after injecting myself with my medication, where I actually let out a deep exhale.
It’s not just a physical sigh — it’s a mental one too. A quiet, almost cellular sense of okay, we’re back — let’s do this. And for a window of time, I feel something that people without chronic illness might take entirely for granted: normal.
For those who know me well, and for those who have read some of my earlier posts, you’ll know that I’ve been living with IBD for the past 27 years. Today, I manage this illness with a subcutaneous biologic injection that I self-administer every eight weeks. And every eight weeks, without fail, I become acutely aware of a clock ticking.
But before I tell you about the clock — let me tell you where this story really begins.
Party Like It’s 1999
In the summer of 1999, I was 14 years old. Puberty is awkward for everyone — bodies changing, identities forming, the brutal social landscape of trying to fit in. But I was navigating something else entirely alongside all of that: a body that was turning against itself in ways nobody had a name for yet.
When the doctors finally diagnosed me with Crohn’s Disease, something unexpected happened. My parents and I felt relief. Not devastation — relief. Because knowing what was wrong meant we could finally do something about it.
That lesson — that clarity, even when it’s hard, is always better than uncertainty — has stayed with me ever since.
But IBD doesn’t sit still. Over the years that followed, I had to adjust and adapt constantly. Medications changed. What once worked stopped working. Oral medications came and went. I learned to pay obsessive attention to my diet, mapping what triggered symptoms and what didn’t.
And I lived with a fear that many people with IBD will know intimately but rarely say out loud:
Always knowing where the nearest bathroom is. Always. The quiet, exhausting fear — the way it quietly shapes every decision about where you go, what you agree to, how present you can really allow yourself to be.
For years, that fear lived in the background of everything. It followed me into restaurants, meetings, social gatherings — a constant, invisible companion that most people around me had no idea existed.
In 2016, I had 1.5 feet of my small intestine removed.
It sounds dramatic — because it was. But on the other side of that surgery, combined with the biologic I now take every eight weeks, something shifted profoundly. My quality of life improved in ways I hadn’t dared to hope for. For the first time in years, I began to feel that I could build something. A life. A business. A sense of purpose that wasn’t entirely defined by managing my illness.
That turning point is what led me to coaching. To mindfulness. To helping others navigate their own relationship with energy, productivity, and what it means to live fully inside a body that doesn’t always cooperate.
The Countdown Nobody Talks About
Here’s where I am today and where the 8 week clock comes in.
Every cycle follows a rhythm I know by heart. In the early weeks after a dose, I feel well. Present. Capable. But somewhere around week six or seven, a subtle shift begins. A familiar heaviness. A whisper that the window is narrowing.
By week eight, my body is reminding me — sometimes loudly — that the medication is wearing thin. Symptoms creep back. Energy dips. And I find myself asking, as I always do: Did I make the most of the good weeks?
This is the psychological reality of living with a chronic illness. You don’t just live day to day. You live cycle to cycle. And that changes everything about how you show up.
Over the years, something in me arrived at a fundamental truth: the countdown made me better at living.
Not because chronic illness is some kind of gift to be grateful for — it isn’t always. But because when you know your window of full energy is finite, you stop spending it carelessly. The noise falls away. The low-priority tasks stop feeling urgent. And what genuinely matters comes into sharp, undeniable focus.
In my good weeks, I protect four things above everything else:
• Deep, high-impact work — the kind that moves the needle and actually lights me up
• My health rituals — movement, nutrition, rest — because protecting my body during the good weeks extends them
• My people — quality time with family, fully present, not half-distracted
• My clients — because that work feels meaningful in a way that transcends a good or bad health week
Everything else is negotiable. And learning to truly believe that — not just intellectually, but in how I spend my hours — has been the most important thing IBD ever taught me.
Sometimes the countdown brings urgency, and that’s exactly where I need to be most mindful. But there’s also an enormous amount of gratitude in that time. Gratitude for the days I feel well. Gratitude for a medication that gives me those weeks at all. Gratitude for the clarity that only comes from knowing, in your bones, that time and energy are not infinite.
Most people understand that intellectually. I get to feel it every eight weeks.
Now Let Me Ask You Something
Because this post isn’t really about me. You are the hero of your own story — I’m just someone who has walked a long road and found a few things that work.
So I want to ask you some questions. Sit with them honestly.
When your energy is at its best — what do you actually do with it? Are you pouring it into what truly matters, or into keeping up with a pace that was never designed for your body?
When your illness forces you to slow down, do you rest with intention — or do you spiral into guilt about everything you’re not doing?
If you stripped away the pressure to perform like someone without a chronic condition — what would you actually want your days to look like? What would you build? What would you let go of?
Do you have a clear enough sense of your own energy cycles that you can make purposeful decisions about where your best hours go?
These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re the questions I work through with every client I sit with. Because the answers are where your life actually changes.
And if sitting with them alone feels overwhelming — that’s exactly what I’m here for.
What Working Together Looks Like
I work with people who are tired of burning out trying to keep up with a world built for speed — people living with chronic illness who feel like the game was designed for someone else’s body, and who are ready to stop measuring themselves against a standard that was never theirs to meet.
Together, we build something different:
• Clarity about what your goals actually are — not the ones you think you should have, but the ones that genuinely matter to you
• A real understanding of your energy cycles — and how to work with them rather than against them
• Significantly less overwhelm — and a lot more intention
You already know how to live with your supposed “limitations.” I’m here to help you build a life around your exceptionalism.
Ready to Start?
If any part of this resonated — if you recognized yourself in the boom-and-bust of good weeks and bad, in the exhaustion of trying to keep up — I’d love to talk.
👉 Book a free discovery call and let’s explore what purposeful, sustainable living could look like for you, in your body, with your reality.
And if you’re not quite ready but you know someone — a friend, a colleague, anyone navigating some other kind of chronic condition — who needs to read this, please share it with them. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is let someone know they are not alone.
The clock is always ticking. The question is what you choose to do with the time you have.