To Make An End Is To Make a Beginning
The End Is Where We Start From
Before I start, the TLDR is that it’s been one week since my startup (blending TCM with advanced labs for holistic health) closed. I’ll post a more “consultant-y” blog about exactly what “went wrong,” but the key as we said in our statement, came down to “the broader market was not yet ready to fully support this vision at scale.” This blog is about my reflection on it, as a “failed founder.”
One thing I believe to be true is that with hardship often comes reward. When you get to my ripe age of 52 (and you know I’m being facetious here since I’m just getting started), you have, ideally, had several phoenix-from-the-ashes moments.
You may have heard of this quote, by T.S. Eliot:
“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.”
Few people have read the entire poem, Little Giddings, that stanza continues with:
“And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.”
But my favorite part is this:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning.”
Rêve Was Created Because It Was What I Needed
When I first read this poem, in a dark room with a long table and 12 chairs and a wall of windows with tudor-gothic lattice and blistery snow, I understood its contextual meaning (written during WW11) and the Christian themes of trial by fire…but it was also quite personal: the knowledge that through suffering and endurance I would prevail.
Somewhere during journeys, we often forget why we began in the first place, but I remember why Rêve was created.
It was to help prevent others from enduring what I went through, with two surgeries that would have been avoided had ANY doctor listened to me for nearly 7 years, and if I had labs run which would have shown high estrogen–not low–in my forties. If I had been properly diagnosed I could have solved my issues holistically, just like so many issues can, IF caught early enough.
Me–holistic to the core, a vegetarian since I was 12 (!), organic everything, refusing to do Botox or fillers and embracing natural aging, the first person I knew who researched EMFs and embraced non-toxic cleaning supplies. The way I live my life–hiking in the woods as my “solve” for feeing lethargic, or taking a day off to read books with my phone shut off, or even the silent retreats with NO digital allowance I have taken-this life I have lived in one at odds with today’s world.
But I was stressed every day, and hadn’t considered its importance to my health. Eventually that stress caught up to me, and I was fatigued, inflamed, with insanely irregular cycles and heavy bleeding.
When I was suffering to the point I could barely walk my dog, I sought out Western care and spent nearly 7 years being gaslit by medical professionals, told I was just getting older, my 20-pound weight gain was “normal” at my age, that my anemia was due to my vegetarian diet as opposed to 65-day long periods.
Hair falling out? Normal.
Nails splitting? Normal.
Fatigue? Have I tried sleeping or sleeping pills?
Anxiety? Have I tried Lexapro.
Every time I sought real answers and real help I was made to feel as if I was the problem, or god forbid that I wanted to still look and feel young and healthy in my 40s.
My favorite phrase I heard repeatedly was that everything was in my head.
It Was NOT Just In My Head
On March 31, 2022, after 8 months of waiting for an OBGYN appointment (if you were in Boston after Covid you know how long it was taking to get non-emergency appointments), and 5 years of bouncing around doctors between San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston without answers, I finally was seeing a specialist at Brigham and Women’s.
But that morning was particularly egregious in terms of symptoms:I was bleeding so heavily I wasn’t sure I could leave the house, and I was so tired 3 cups of coffee was having the opposite effect. It was cold, still wintery although the sun was out, and I remember thinking I just wasn’t feeling well enough to go to the appointment.
It’s a good thing I did because I was actually hemorrhaging, and after an emergency ultrasound, ended up sitting with my doctor while she drew what looked like Mickey Mouse, which in fact was a picture of my uterus with fibroids extending outside the uterine wall, and another one that had decided to birth itself. That was the one causing me to bleed to death.
My Personal Health Mission
I was told my only solution was a hysterectomy.
I was sitting on a towel, looking like a Dexter crime scene and told I’m going to lose an organ, that it was going to happen within a few hours, and if I didn’t have this surgery I would bleed to death.
When I asked if there was ANY other option my doctor (who happens to be a high-risk maternity surgeon) said I could have an immediate surgery that day for the birthing fibroid, and another surgery in the future for the other ones that were huge and causing major symptoms, but not life-threatening ones.
My full story on my surgeries and my quest to get answers documents all the hoops I had to go through to even find alternatives.
Everything could have been resolved holistically if I had known about my fibroids–and the root causes– before the progression.
What We Built Still Matters
Everything about what I went through was awful and unfortunately, not unique.
It turns out more than half a million women every year between the ages of 40 and 50 have hysterectomies that are not medically needed, many for fibroids. We are not told about options, but even if we choose to have a hysterectomy, what kind of messed up system gaslights us for a decade, leaving us with no other options aside from surgery?
And HRT, while incredible for many women, is not the end-all-be-all solution for everyone (in my case had super high estrogen, which, had anyone bothered to run my labs, would have been an initial indicator of issues).
There’s a whole world of women out there who want to age in a different way, and many women–especially in Eastern countries–who are going through perimenopause and post menopause with fewer symptoms.
Women have choices and options for aging well, but we don’t even know where to start.
When we started Rêve, I was 50 years old, just 2 months away from turning 51 and nothing like us was even in the marketplace.
NOW there is this huge perimenopause movement, and there is more awareness of Functional Medicine but there is still nothing out there that helps women in their 40s and 50s find root cause answers and get natural lifestyle recommendations to optimize their health. There is nothing like Rêve because we were the only ones and we didn’t make it.
I will write another blog reflecting on all the reasons I think we did not succeed, but one of the big ones, apart from the market not being ready to embrace our model of care, is that my story became diluted. My why, my voice, and my motivations became pushed aside as we tried to scale and be VC ready…and address the needs of everyone.
The Future of Healthcare Will Be Ancient Wisdom
I’ve been called a visionary before and the biggest issue with how I think and the way I see the world is that, everyone else seems to catch on to my ideas like a decade later.
In the future, I know that East-meets-West healthcare will be the way. In fact I’m convinced ancient wisdom–which of course has community, relationships, and life purpose built into the philosophy of whole-health, will be the leading entry to true health.
I know this, the way that I know big companies will hire actual writers again and the way I know that all travel experiences including airports will have recovery and longevity centers. I know there is a growing movement of women my age who have had it with society telling us what to do and what to look like, or made to feel lesser than for having wrinkles.
But right now? The celebrity longevity leaders are hyping their supplements, RX, and AI chatbots. Even with studies like Harvards T.S. Chan stating that our relationships and social isolation are MORE dangerous than smoking and more than a decade of studies linking life purpose to longevity it still seems to be questioned. Living life with balance, and slowing down to focus on the foundations of health will always be the key.
What we built still matters, and it is needed.
I will continue to live my life in this more balanced way–instead of completely shunning modern science, I will regularly get my labwork, and I will focus on functional medicine providers and TCM providers. I will double down on the knowledge I gained from running Rêve and the lessons I learned.
After all, the irony is when you create something to solve a problem…and then you, yourself stop living the way you teach others to live.
I will, of course, create again, because endings lead to beginnings.
