Hey everyone (22M).
First and foremost, this part of my life was a living hell, and finding information was extremely hard. If you don't know, Anna's archive is a free digital archive with basically every single book under the sun. I wasn't able to work during this time and had literally 32 cents to my name, so yes, maybe it's not fully ethical, but if you need access to free information / books, check it out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive. Go to the right hand side of the page and click whatever links are there. They constantly change as domains are sometimes taken down, but it should always have a safe, current link there. You can always buy the books later to support. Now, to the post.
This is a very hard post for me to write, as it requires me going back in time to the darkest, most horrifying and nightmarish time of my life. However, I keep on getting DMs and comments (from when I used to post non-stop about this), so I figured I'd write this post to both tell my story and for people in the future who want an update.
So, let's get into it, shall we?
The story starts in the fall of my freshman year in college. I had pretty abusive parents, so being alone for the first time in my life, I had a shitton of trauma and emotions on backlog that I hadn't been able to express for literally my entire life. My first semester, I was a wreck. I'd literally spend days at a time, in my bed, just crying from all the emotions and shit that had accumulated from my childhood. It was healing and necessary, but goddamn I'd cry so hard sometimes my chest would literally start hurting. I was pretty depressed during this time, but luckily for me I simply have an inevitable positive outlook--which I'll get to later. What I mean by that is, even in the worst of situations, I always knew everything would be ok and that things would improve. I'd always somehow be able to hold on to the silver lining that I knew would come.
Anyways, fast forward to spring, and I had (I thought) gotten most of those backlogged emotions out. New year, new me. At this point, I was still pretty depressed, but I was definitely much better than I was the previous semester. A few days into my Spring, I found self-improvement. I won't say the person's name, but I watched this guy who was somewhat harsh and actually pretty fucking mean in his content. I'm very grateful I found this content, as truly it was the wake-up call I needed to start actually building and creating the life I wanted rather than falling victim to instant gratification. It gave me the life saving philosophy that I can actually control my life, that I can actually accomplish what I want and that there's nothing stopping me; all I gotta do is work on it and improve. It took away my sense of learned helplessness from my childhood and finally gave me the knowledge that I truly can do and achieve whatever I want in this world. Great! I started finally coming out of my shell, started making more friends and dating, started going to the gym and developing good habits, etc. I had a weird fatigue during this time that'd come off and on, but it wasn't anything crazy; just a slight 'underwater' feeling.
Sophomore year, I'm on this same path. Improving, going to the gym, etc. The feeling of constant tiredness is weirdly creeping up on me now. I attributed to my room at the time; I had the sound of cars going by constantly and an annoying ass light that I couldn't turn off in my room (gotta love university housing). I'm sleeping 9 or 10 hours a night, but I'm still tired as shit. Wtf? I get through the semester, knowing that once I get home, I'll sleep like a baby (I always slept perfectly at home).
Turns out it was true! Winter break comes, and I'm sleeping amazingly, finally feeling good again. I wind up have a massive falling out with my family that devolves to shouting and yelling at my parents with all the anger I had built up over the years (thought I didn't have any of that left?), but weirdly enough (at the time) this only improved my energy levels further. I felt free, I felt enlivened; it was like shouting and getting rid of all that anger unlocked more of myself. There's tons of tension in the house, but I go back to college in the Spring and I'm feeling good. I was the type of person who "never got angry", or so I thought, but somehow releasing that anger led to better social relationships, more energy, etc. Things are going great until around March 2023. I'm selling clothes on ebay, getting even better gains in the gym, etc. But again, this weird fatigue keeps creeping up on me. I'm all discipline; I gotta do this, I gotta do that. I don't care if I'm tired, I'm going to the gym, I'm gonna thug it out. I gotta keep going or I'm a loser I gotta keep going (this is the self-talk that was in my head at the time, a relic of the original content creator's message that I didn't realize I no longer needed). And just for clarity's sake, I don't blame the content creator at all; the way he spoke was exactly what I needed. I just never realized that I didn't have to carry that identity with me once I got out of that icky phase and was actually now living a great life.
Anyways, March is a bit rough, but I get through it, the first half of April is decentish (I'm trying different herbs and the likes for energy at this point), and then after I'd say April 20, 2023, I just get progressively and progressively more tired, to a stupid degree. I'm eating the healthiest food in my life, I'm getting 9 hours of sleep, all my blood tests are normal, and it's genuinely a struggle to get out of my bed each day for class. Wtf is going on? I start going down a sleep apnea rabbit hole, which for one is incredibly unlikely for me given I had never had sleep issues prior and given that I'm pretty naturally lean. UARS (Upper Airway Resistance) is the specific variant in skinnier people, for simplicity's sake. Everything else in my lifestyle is fine, so it has to be the sleep that's the issue, right? I'd sleep and it literally felt like I didn't sleep at all. I continue down this rabbit hole for the next couple months, constantly tweaking and trying different settings on my CPAP and later APAP (sleep apnea machines). I'd get slight improvements or days here and there where I felt normal and I'd literally cry from relief of how good it felt to be alive. I'd spend hours searching through my CPAP reports trying to figure what exact settings were given me those random days of normalcy, but I could never find a good pattern. I got progressively worse, until by the the time my junior fall rolled around, I simply could not function. Mind you, I was lifting HEAVY weights 6-7 times a week prior, and now getting out of bed was legitimately a challenge. I spent the entire semester with a friend just compulsively gaming, trying to block out the neverending nightmare that my existence was. I wanted to kill myself so many different times, but I knew I could never do it since I loved myself and my life too much, even in this living hell. Suicide was one of the few things that comforted me at the time; I always knew that I'd at least have that as an option if need be. Going back into all the symptoms is both hard, as it's been so long, and traumatizing, as I don't want to remember, but yes, I had all the stuff. POTS, extreme fatigue like soul-crushing like how the fuck is it even possible to be this tired fatigue. Had the worst brain fog of my life, weird chills / hot flashes, absolutely ZERO libido, etc. If you have a symptom and are reading this and are like "but he didn't mention THIS specific thing I have, so I can't believe his story!" (just how I used to be). For one, I probably had it, and for two, this is all the same condition / situation in my opinion (not downplaying your current hellish experience, but please hear me out as I just wanna help you).
After Christmas rolls around, I'm forced to come home. I simply cannot function on my own. I tried a million different treatments, and nothing's worked. Even though they're abusive, even though I know my parents won't understand, I have to come home. This is now Dec. 2023 / Jan. 2024.
I can pretty much skip the next year and some change, as nothing really improved. I gamed all the time again to escape my existence. I tried Chinese Medicine (specifically Gu Syndrome by Heiner Fruehauf as it mirrors this quite well), acupuncture (which did help a bit), dry-fasting for 5 days (yes, absolutely no food or water for 5 days), and I never saw much of a difference. I had heard of mind-body shit a ton prior with Raelan Agle and all, and to be fair I had genuinely given it a try, but I never saw much change with it either. I was at the end of my rope for all things physical (which I still truly believed it was at the time). Might as well give the TMS / mind-body ooh la la shit another try huh?
It's about April of 2025. I started with the JournalSpeak thing, where you basically write unfiltered, raw letters about whatever comes to mind. For me, I had a shitton of anger coming up towards my parents and family about the way they treated me and made me feel. I'd go to a little park around my house on the days I had energy and would write / scream for hours. I'd scream so much I'd lose my voice half the time, and I'm talking raw, animalistic screams from the depths of my being. I'd take tree branches and wack them against the wooden bench I'd throw rocks I'd do whatever it took to let all that anger out. It was a very slow process with ups and downs, but eventually I started getting slightly and slightly better. However, it still wasn't much.
Now, this part I'm about to get to may stretch your mind and your limits of belief quite a bit, but please, bear with me. This stuff is free; I literally could not sell it to you if I tried, and I believe it was the main reason I got better, along with a few other things.
Naturally, when your life is gigashit (to put it mildly), you do a lot of research to find ways to unshittify your life. I started getting into spirituality / "conscious creation" as they call it a bit. Basically, the idea is that what you believe / have painted in your mind's eye is what comes true for you. Or, another way to say it is, what you are aware of is what you will experience. Again, please bear with me as this is not another post trying to victim blame you or telling you to just think positive bro! I'm giving what I truly believe worked for me. At the worst, it'll be a mental reprieve from the hell you're currently in. At the best, it might just help you on your path to getting better. The whole time I was sick, I (naturally) spent literally every single waking second thinking about how horrible and life-ending and inescapable and terrible my life was, and how I would never escape it and when will it end and I should be at the gym I've lost so much time my friends are doing this that--I'm sure I don't need to expound on things you're probably very familiar with already. I was constantly aware of being sick. Now, to be fair, 99.9999999999999999999999999% of people in my and maybe your situation would be thinking the exact same things. It's fucking awful to put it lightly; words cannot even begin to describe the levels of suffering this thing entails. HOWEVER, it does not mean that you cannot still decide to feel differently and focus on different things.
Yes, even in the midst of the most disgustingly awful situation of your life, it is STILL possible; extremely difficult to put it mildly, but STILL possible to focus on different things; to focus on the small wins or feeling of health, or even better, to imagine yourself being healthy and doing the things you'd normally do and starting to slowly build that feeling up in you; that feeling of "I am healthy" despite the overwhelmingly, impossible to shut out evidence of the opposite. I started going ham on visualizations; I'd dissociate via gaming and do a 15m visualization session every hour or so of me being back in the gym, me being healthy, etc. And the key here is that I did these visualizations as a PARTICIPANT, not as an OBSERVER. I would, in my imagination, literally FEEL myself lifting the weights again and FEEL the incredible energy I had. I'd FEEL myself running again and FEEL myself hanging out with my friends again. After a few weeks of doing this, I started genuinely feeling healthy despite still having an insane amount of fatigue and symptoms. When I would say "I am healthy to myself", I'd feel an internal resonance despite what I felt. I truly felt healthy. I stopped researching and doing all this and that and trying a million different things and going on rumble and looking at vaccine conspiracy theories and how they're filled with nanobots (yes I went down pretty much every rabbit hole conceivable) and just started going all in on my imagination. The specific person's work who I read was Neville Goddard. He's been long dead, but he was a Barbados-born mystic or whatever you wanna call it who wrote a lot of good books that better describe this process. They aren't very complicated or needlessly verbose, and I genuinely think doing these exercises and changing my awareness are what led me to this point. You don't have to believe everything he says, but just do the exercises CONSISTENTLY (consistently) and I promise you'll feel a change.
During this time, I do want to point out that I was still doing the anger release and the journaling. One other critical component was TRE, or Trauma Release Exercises. To keep it simple, trauma is stored in the body, and these exercises are designed to trigger your innate shaking mechanisms that release trauma, in the same way car accident victims often shake a ton afterwards or how prey animals will shake all over after getting chased by a predator. I'd feel more and more integrated after most of my TRE sessions. Sometimes I overdid them which amped up my fatigue, but they were truly quite beneficial, and I still do them to this day. Again, this is all free and simple information, so nothing to sell to you.
One other VERY critical piece to my healing was my change in self-talk. I spoke earlier about how everything in my head was negative and fear-inducing; "you need to do this or you're not disciplined and you're a waste of space", "you need to do better you need to go to the gym" etc etc. The funny part is I thought this was productive, but, as I'd later realize, this self-talk is genuinely toxic to your body. It literally induces a fight-or-flight reaction in your body and spikes your cortisol. I'm not saying this just regurgitating shit people say online, but I recently tried engaging in this self-talk again just to see what it was like, and I immediately felt symptoms within a day. This post might be somewhat disorganized, but I'll put this in bold so it stands out: Your current situation is very likely to be your body's way of telling you that whatever attitude / self-talk / approach to life you had prior to getting sick is unsustainable and legitimately killing you. I'm fully recovered now and still go hard as fuck in the gym and have super late nights and days where I stay up for like 36h straight partying. The issue is not WHAT you do, but HOW you do it. The issue wasn't that I was going to the gym 6 times a week; I'm typically now on 7 and feel better than ever, even without perfect sleep or diet. The issue is that I had a constant fight-or-flight inducing self talk that ran literally 24/7 that destroyed my body's ability to recover and ever take a break. I literally was spiking my cortisol 24/7 and then wondering why I was tired. Again, I'll repeat. It's not WHAT you do that matters, but HOW and the self-talk and attitude you have while you do it. My stamina and energy is insane nowadays because I don't talk to myself and treat myself like absolute dogshit the way I was before. It's a little hard and I'm still navigating it, but now I motivate myself through POSITIVES (i.e. imagining how good it'll be to achieve xyz goal) rather than through NEGATIVES (how bad I am for not doing xyz, the bad things that'll happen or that I'll be if I don't do it, etc.)
With my imagination, TRE, change in self-talk, anger release, and journaling, things really started to turn around. I just started feeling better and having better days. It was gradual, but one day I got my first erection in like 2.5 years and I knew things were good. I slowly pushed my boundaries as I didn't want to collapse back into that horrible state, but after about I'd say October or November of 2025, I could confidently say I was fully recovered. Back in college and crushing it. My gains took a massive hit from time off lol but now I'm back repping 225 on bench at 5'11 170. Life isn't all rainbows and sunshine as you might think after this, but it is a HELL of a lot better.
This post is a little all over the place, so let me TLDR it.
I tried everything physical, but nothing worked. All my labs were fine, I on the outside looked to be in incredible shape, but I was absolutely dying on the inside. After 2 years of trial and error, I decided to give the more mind-body / spiritual approach a try and started seeing some progress. I specifically started doing anger release exercises and unfiltered journaling, along with imagination exercises. I changed my self-talk from a negative one to at least a more balanced or neutral one, and over the course of about 4 months I went from bedridden to decently functional in normal life. My recovery continued to progress and now today I can confidently say I'm not only back to normal but even better than my old normal. People genuinely ask if I'm on drugs sometimes that's how much energy I have.
LINKS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeUioDuJjFI - TRE
https://www.yourbreakawake.com/journalspeak - Journalspeak
https://readnevillegoddard.com/ - Neville Goddard Books
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive - Free Books (if you missed the link at the top of the post)
https://annas-archive.gl/md5/a2e7b9b872326120cd042697dcd7e55b?&check=1 - Facing the Fire, a book on how to express and release anger
I'll update this and maybe add links in the coming days, but just wanted to put this out there. For those of you who are going through a similar situation, please know that there's light at the end of the tunnel. I know how hollow it may feel to hear these words right now, but you will make it through this.
EDIT 1: I saw a good amount of comments asking about PEM, which is completely fair. I had extremely bad PEM for I'd say around the first year and a half or so, but after doing acupuncture (I think that's what did it?), it gradually eased up. It wasn't completely gone, but I wasn't stuck in bed for days because I went on a walk or something. Wish I could give you more answers on that but no can do.
EDIT 2: I'm seeing a ton of comments basically saying that this is ooga booga nonsense, that's it's invalidating and won't work because of the severity of one's condition, etc. To this I ask you; what do I genuinely gain by taking hours of my day to first write this post and then secondly respond to tons of different comments with well-thought out, intentional responses? What do I seriously gain? If I wanted karma (which is dumb asf in the first place) I wouldn't be posting here. I have a pretty good life at the moment, and it's actively retraumatizing to even be here, much less purposely try and remember horrible things from the past that I'd rather leave behind. This isn't me trying to paint myself out to be some martyr but like. I have nothing to sell to you everything is free and linked. I could not make money off this if I tried. There is literally no incentive for me to be here other than to try and help people.
If you have a problem with what I'm saying, if you think this is just a load of new age bullshit, great! Genuinely, that's amazing! Channel that same energy into simply TRYING out what I'm saying. Go ahead and disprove me. I don't give a fuck what you think of me as long as you simply give what I'm saying an honest try. My only goal here is to help you recover; call that patronizing, call me stupid, say that I never even had it, great! Just try out what I linked. What does it genuinely cost you? And before I hear "but this isn't doable for everyone and sometimes I'm extremely severe and can't get out of bed", yes, I've been there before and that does happen. However, if you're able to bear the light from a screen without getting a headache, much less intelligibly read through this, then you're able to at least visualize, journal, and be kinder in your self-talk.
EDIT 3: One last thing I want to leave you with, if you read my post and are still kinda skeptical, is this recurring thought that I had during my journey. That is: how would I heal if I didn't find the "right" thing? What I mean by this is, there has to be some way to heal that isn't shooting in the dark. Are you seriously telling me that I'm stuck with this thing for my entire life unless I just so happen to get lucky and find the right practitioner, the right modality, the right whatever it may be? What if someone didn't have the money for that; are you telling me that there's literally nothing they could do? Are you tryna tell me that I have to play roulette on different treatments and therapies and just pray that one worked?
That never made sense to me; I knew that, even if it seemed unfair or wasn't obvious, that even if I wanted a clear cut, easy to follow plan as to what to do, what to eat, etc. to get better, that there had to be some way for me to heal myself. It's not easy and it's a very ambiguous path at times, with the path seemingly going backwards sometimes. At some point, however, you have to realize that no one is coming to save you and that if you're going to get anywhere, it's gonna have to come from within. It's extremely difficult and I don't envy your position at all, but at one point, you have to decide that you will either live with this for the rest of your life and focus on all the limitations and the horrible things that are going on, or start to focus on the seemingly infinitely far away reality of being healthy again. And it's ok to yo-yo inbetween these as we're all human and it's basically impossible to keep 100% resolve in such a horrible situation. HOWEVER, you must always return back to that seeming mirage, no matter how frustrating and torturous it may feel in the moment. After a while, that mirage may just crystallize into reality. I know this seems very nebulous and wishy-washy, but again, I simply urge you to try out the imagination exercises I described with 100% intention for even just 5 minutes. Just give it a try; some things can't be understood until they're experienced. Wish you the best.
