So I want to talk about something I've never talked about on the channel before, and it's kind of a biggie.

So when I hadn't asked on the community tab if it was okay if I did an extra long video, that's more than four minutes.

And the resounding answer was yes.

In 2003 or 2004 I started to feel a lot of pain in my intestinal area, and it just kept getting worse.

And there are other bad symptoms of pain.

For me was the big one.

It was a lot.

Some days it was like, Ah, that's a bad like sort of, you know, intestinal cramp.

And some days it was like there's a cactus in me in me.

It kind of ramped up slowly and in the way of a slow ramp.

I kind of maybe put off going to the doctor a little too long.

But I finally did.

I went to the doctor and they had no idea what was wrong with me.

Could have been a bacterial overgrowth.

Or maybe an allergy to something may be on auto immune disorder, maybe colon cancer.

Those things range really widely in severity.

Some can be taken care of in a month.

And you never have to think about it again.

Somewhere with you forever.

Some you might die up.

And this was a really bad time, not just because of the uncertainty, but also because I was experiencing a lot of bad.

Symptom was losing weight.

I knew there was something serious wrong during the months I was undiagnosed.

I spent a lot of time feeling like I was probably just fine and it was gonna get better on its own.

And I spent a lot of time feeling like this was very, very bad.

And then eventually I got my first colonoscopy and I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, which is an autoimmune disorder.

Where you are immune cells attack the lining of your colon, your large intestine, which is the colon, those of the same thing.

It then forms ulcers, which are painful, and it does not do its job well, which is to re absorb water.

So you go to the bathroom a lot.

Sometimes when you least expect that's pretty bad.

It makes it hard to be a normal person.

Also, it really dramatically increases your chances of getting colon cancer is also bad.

The thing is like this diagnosis didn't say like Okay, now we know what your future looks like.

It was just one piece of information and all sort of colitis expresses very different.

A different people.

Different drugs work more or less well for different people.

Some people have to have their Coghlan's removed.

Pretty immediately, some people can live their whole lives with their colon still inside of their body.

So basically I had this one new piece of information, but it opened up all of these other questions, so there wasn't anything certain except I knew one thing, which is that my future definitely was not going to be what I had imagined it would be.

When I was a kid, I was both active and not particularly coordinated.

So I broke a number of bones and I got to know the feeling of what it's like when you break up.

But first there's the actual feeling, which sometimes you're not sure, but sometimes you are.

And then there's another feeling.

There is a sudden realization, especially after the third or fourth broken bone.

When you've been through this before that your life is not gonna be the same anymore, and there is no way to re acquire that sameness.

This is a very particular feeling, and I had a first with broken bones, but I have had it a lot since it might be having a relationship fall apart, or that moment right before you hit the car that's in front of you.

Maybe it's a diagnosis for you or for a loved one.

That's such a specific feeling this moment where you suddenly realize that you don't know what the future holds anymore and the story you've been quietly, silently telling yourself about what the future is going to be like.

That story just falls apart.

It's not there anymore.

It doesn't get replaced with something.

It's just gone.

I wanted to know what this feeling is called because it seems so specific that there should be a name for it.

I've experienced it a bunch of times.

I could not find a word for this in English.

I wrote to Susie Dent, who is my favorite game show linguist, and she actually wrote me back on Twitter.

And here's what she said.

I've been wondering similar for days.

I keep returning to withering a rushing or raging that you're powerless to stop.

Emily Bronte described it as an atmospheric tumble to This isn't quite it, but it's like close enough to it that maybe we can make it it because there isn't a word for it.

I'm also open to other suggestions in the comments.

I've described it as best I can, but I would love for there to be a word.

One of the amazing things about Ah with a ring is that the these moments when you realize that like your expectations aren't going to be met are often the first time you realize you even had these expectations.

Like I didn't realize that I had an expectation that I would always be able to eat popcorn or that I would always have a cold inside of me.

Now, of course, many years later, the reality that I might someday have to have my colon removed is a normal everyday thought.

To me, it was not.

Then the expectation shifted, and I have a new normal.

But that did not happen quickly.

When I first was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, I didn't really know anything about it.

And we also didn't know like me.

And my doctor didn't know how I was going to respond to medications.

And first we start out with the stuff that's been around the longest that is least likely to work, but has the fewest side effects and actually responded really well to it.

I started to gain weight.

I wasn't in as much pain anymore.

I was close to or all the way into what we call remission.

And then when you are out of remission in ulcerative colitis, speak, you're having a flare up.

But anyway, this was my first time into remission after having my initial flair, and I started to think, Okay, maybe I don't actually have all sort of colitis like I feel kind of find now.

Maybe the doctor was wrong about this.

Maybe I don't have to reshape my entire imagining off what my life is gonna be like.

I didn't want the new reality to be really so I was looking for reasons why it wasn't right.

So I went off my medicine and I immediately went right into a flare that was worse than it ever had been.

And it took me a really long time to get that back under control again.

Now, this process of like taking the disease really seriously and like understanding that this is something that I'm gonna have to live with and that I have a new normal now and then reverting to this, you know, gut level hope that maybe it isn't riel that kept going on for, like a surprisingly long time make mistakes along the way.

I wasn't always careful about my health.

Sometimes eight things that I knew might give me a flare up, and sometimes they did.

And now, more than 15 years later, I I have been popcorn abstinent for over a decade, and there are things about my life that are different.

I structure my life around my disease a little bit, and I know that there's a possibility that, like things, they're going to get much worse.

And I try to be clear about that with the people in my life, and I can expect pain, and sometimes it's going to be manageable, and sometimes it's not.

What's gone is the withering that that emptiness ahead, that my previous conception of the future used to inhabit and all of the irrationality and the chaos that comes along with not having anything in that space anymore.

I've had this disease for over 15 years, and now I know what I'm doing with it.

I understand my life better.

It's part of my imagining of my future.

Faster.

You can get to that point the better.

But But like, you can't just do it.

It can't just happen first, because it takes a long time to just understand what the future's gonna be like.

You don't You actually don't know.

Somebody could tell you that that'd be one thing, but they can't because it's different for different people and we don't actually know.

But second, because even if somebody could tell you what normal is like now, you wouldn't believe them.

I mean, I know that I couldn't.

Your mind's gonna be searching for ways to make the story makes sense.

So it's gonna be like swinging around wildly from one extreme to the other, trying to find like the police that that actually meshes with observed reality.

Somedays your mind is gonna find ways to believe that everything is actually the same and that this whole thing is a lie.

Other days you're gonna swing exactly in the other direction, and you're gonna be overwhelmed with frustration and fear and anger that swinging back and forth isn't like a symptom.

It's a strategy.

This is how we find where normal is.

It's like if the ground suddenly started moving underneath you like you have to balance and, like, move from one direction to the other defined.

Find some stability you might even need to, like, drop to one knee, right?

But then, when the ground stops moving, you'll rise.

This process is stressful, it's cognitively tax, and you might be more susceptible to addiction or two negative or unproductive thoughts.

I know that is the case for me, but eventually there is a stability there.

There is a new version of reality that you can place yourself into it.

It just takes time to rebuild that John, if you couldn't tell talking about this today, and I've been thinking about it a lot because it feels like the process of getting diagnosed and coming to terms with a chronic illness feels somewhat similar, too.

That's what's happening right now, just, you know, gestures broad like first, we knew something was wrong.

We didn't know how serious it was, so we're trying to figure that out.

When we understood that it was serious, we understood the problem better.

But that also threw a bunch of unknowns in our faces.

Right now, it feels like we're in the part where you're just day lose with uncertainties.

And that makes the process of sort of like imagining the future really hard.

And that creates inevitable stress and inevitable this this way finding process of like overreaction under reaction and not being sure whether you're doing either at any given moment.

But eventually we do get to a new normal.

There will be a stability out there even when reality reaches something kind of stable state.

It's gonna take us each individually and collectively a long time to sort of figure out exactly what that is to actually understand.

And we're gonna rock back and forth, and we're gonna have moments where we think this isn't a big deal and moments when we are blissfully free of it and moments when were crushed by and it's going to suck.

But we will catch ourselves and we will rise because that's what we do, and at least this time it's going to be something we do together like this isn't gonna be the same for everybody.

It's gonna be much worse for some people than for others that we can go through it together in a way that we can't with most withering times, and we can also learn from each other.

So here's what I learned from my disruption.

First, I needed to not believe my gut feelings, and I needed to believe my doctor, I needed to do things to create stability in my life.

That helped me imagine the future better.

I needed to find routines that were livable and enjoyable inside of my new normal, and I needed to rely on other people and accept their help when I needed it.

I needed to let myself be weak in the moments when I couldn't be strong, and I needed to let myself be strong in the moments when I could.

I hope those learnings air useful to me in the coming months.

But even more, I hope they're useful to other people.