How I Got Here

The story of what I lost, what I built, and why I needed something that wouldn’t break me.

How I Got Here

I was 26 when I got sick. The diagnosis was Ulcerative Colitis. It doesn’t go away. You just manage it.

I was young, so I powered through it. Took the meds, went to work, kept going. I never felt well, but I never really slowed down either. I spent a decade like that, pushing through illness, hiding symptoms, collapsing on weekends just to get through the week.

Eventually I hit a flare so bad it required two surgeries. After that, things got better. Not symptom-free, just manageable. I still had to navigate flare-ups and long-term side effects from the medications, but I felt stable enough again.

That’s when we had our son.

Weekends weren’t quiet anymore. But my body was still unpredictable. The illness never goes away. It just gets quieter in public and louder in private. I used the structure of work to stay functional. Meetings, deadlines, commutes — they gave shape to days that otherwise would have fallen apart.

I Tried Everything

But the cracks showed up anyway.

I was always forgetful but it became more frequent. I would sit down to do something and lose the thought almost immediately. I would get off the phone and walk out the door without the one thing I was asked to pick up. I told myself, if it matters, I’ll remember. I didn’t.

I tried to fix it. Bought journals, moleskins, graph paper anything. Downloaded task managers. Built paper systems. Read all the “productivity” posts. Nothing helped. Everything added pressure. Now I wasn’t just forgetting. I was failing to use the things that were supposed to fix the forgetting.

I felt frantic. Like I was always letting someone down. Like I was one thing away from failing someone or myself. More often than not it was myself.

When I Finally Cracked

My mom died. We didn’t know she had cancer. She never told us.

My dad went into long-term care in 2019 and never came home.

The pandemic hit. Remote work stripped away the structure I had been relying on. My health declined again. More hospital stays. Complications. More CT-Scans. A brain that felt like it had nothing left to give.

Then our house burned down in the Eaton Fire. Everything gone. Papers, computers, everything.

Then I was hospitalized again right after the fire, this time for nine days. I have had surgeries that were easier.

I kept trying to rally. Break down, recover, break down again. Over and over.

Then my ADHD diagnosis. It explained things, but it didn’t make it easier. So cool, this is the reason I feel like this and through this journey I tried to do different things, but it still wasn’t quite right.

Eventually I started a running chat with ChatGPT just to keep track of what was in my head. One day I asked it how often I had checked in. It told me I had asked what I needed to do fifteen to twenty times a day.

That number stuck.

That is how full my brain was.

What I Needed Instead

My instinct wasn’t to build anything.

I just wanted to get through the day. I went back to what I knew. Paper. Notes in my phone. I would write something down, then forget where I put it. I would try to make a list, then lose the thread halfway through. The cycle was endless. Previously I could rally for weeks now I couldn’t even last a day before it fell apart again.

I wasn’t trying to design anything. I was just trying to function.

There was no plan. Just noise. Just pressure. Just the sense that I could not hold anything anymore, no matter how many times I started over.

I kept dropping things. I kept getting back up. But nothing held.

Not yet.

Loops, Not Lines

Using paper I never moved through tasks in order. I didn’t work from top to bottom or follow clean blocks of time. I moved when the energy was there. If I had it, I used it. If I didn’t, I stalled out.

That was always true, but now it was obvious. I could not fake linear anymore. I was working in loops. I would return to something when I could. I would forget something and find it again later. I would drift between things and do what I could.

No system I had ever used made space for that. They wanted time blocks. Priorities. Red flags. Deadlines. I needed a way to mark where I was without forcing what came next.

So I started writing things down differently. Not in a list. Not by urgency. Just by rhythm. Noticing when I could do stuff and it ebbed and flowed in vague blocks (morning, afternoon, evening). Time isn’t an hour or a minute it’s anchored in what I need to do. I’m aware, but I don’t sit down and say I’m doing this at 1 pm. I say I need to do this before I pick up my son.

That rhythm helped. Not because it made me productive, but because it gave the day a shape I could come back to. It asked less of me. It let me start where I was.

It was the first thing that didn’t fall apart when I did.

Not a Fix, a Holding Space

This wasn’t a system. It wasn’t even intentional at first.

But it felt different. I could forget something and still find it later. I didn’t feel punished for skipping a day. I didn’t feel like I had failed if I didn’t finish something. It just sat there. Waiting.

That’s when I started shaping it into something more consistent. Not a solution. Not a fix. Just a place that would hold what I couldn’t. That I could carry with me. For no one else but me.

I didn’t want it to yell at me. I didn’t want it to tell me I was behind. I didn’t want streaks or rewards or anything that made me feel like I was being tracked or optimized.

I wanted one place to put what I could not carry.

That became Re‑Loop.

Not a productivity tool. Not a system to get your life together.

A place to dump everything when your brain is full and your body is failing (in my case).

If This Is You, Too

Maybe you’re tired.
Maybe your brain is full.
Maybe you’ve been trying to hold it all together with whatever thread is left.

Maybe you’ve tried lists. Tools. Systems.
Maybe they helped for a while.
Maybe they didn’t.

If any of this feels familiar, you’re not the only one.

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