Not quite a rebrand

A new direction for my writings moving forward

Tromsø, Norway. My husband’s hometown, and my current home.

I originally started writing this newsletter, The Body Electric, after seeing myself through two life-changing moves that occurred within three years of one another.

In 2020, I left my job working as a biostatistician (I was contracted to work with statistical data for NIH-funded studies on vaccines and antibiotics) in Washington, DC; in order to move to Asheville, NC to study Classical Chinese Medicine (mainly acupuncture and Chinese herbs) at a quirky daoist school. At 34, leaving behind my old job in biomedical research to become an acupuncturist was not just a career-180, but a chance to seriously pursue two threads which called to me outside of my busy life in DC: traditional medicine and permaculture. Health has always been my primary topic of fascination, but there are so many dimensions to health that a mainstream education and career in health research leaves out — particularly the role that our connection with nature and spirituality play in terms of our wellbeing. I felt that I was missing some key things that I had to dig into, and that I might find those things waiting for me in Asheville.

Not only did Asheville have a school for Chinese Medicine, but it is one of the biggest hubs of permaculture in the US and there is a community of people living out there who were very skilled at designing their homes and homesteads around permaculture principles from whom I could learn. Going to a daoist acupuncture school in the mountains of one of the most biodiverse regions in the US, I felt like I was finally on my way to living the dream that I had pined for in DC — one whose outlines I cobbled together from a crunchy aesthetic probably borrowed more from a fantasy than reality that I was willing to admit. Sometimes we make choices to go down certain paths thinking we know where we’re going, and then the path turns on us and spits us out somewhere new. Sometimes our dreams are fuzzy and vague, and only contain a seed of the truth, and we don’t find out what will bloom until after we’ve already made an irreversible commitment to them. Sometimes the truth has to hollow us out before we have room to receive it.

It turns out Asheville was a very nice place, perhaps one of my favorite cities in the US, but it was not where I was destined to stay if I wanted to continue to the follow the threads that I had initially set out to follow. A central theme I like to explore in The Body Electric is our relationship to place, that while reciprocal, usually changes us more than we change it. Asheville certainly changed me, just not in the way that I predicted it would. I did not transform from a DC young professional into a hippie homesteader overnight in the way that I envisioned; the changes my move brought were much deeper and richer than they were aesthetic.

Asheville was my Rivendale, but not my Valinor — a temporary place where I could be revived and reconnect with myself, not my final resting place. Living in western North Carolina, outside the hustle and bustle of DC, I was given more space to nourish myself in ways I had previously been inattentive to. I experimented with a home garden, took long walks in the forest to study the local botany, and by working with plants, found some of my defenses and fears dropping. I think this nourishing setting helped primed me to have the courage to take a chance and meet up with a man whom I am had been having really lovely conversations with online during the pandemic.

Maybe meeting someone you first connect with online isn’t considered so risky or unusual these days, but there was a big catch with this one: he lived over 4,000 miles away in Norway, and not just any part of Norway, but northern Norway (he lovingly refers to it as “the hick part of Norway”), which is 350 km above the arctic circle where the sun doesn’t rise for two months out of every year. So when we did finally meet in person, and both knew and affirmed that the special connection we were feeling was mutual, we had a lot of logistical hoops to jump through before we could both live together. Eight months later he proposed, and we jointly made the decision that if we wanted to get married and start a family together, it would be easier for me to move to Norway and temporarily stop studying and working than for him to move to the US. So, having thought that I had finally make the leap to start my “dream life” in Asheville, my entire life’s trajectory was upended once again only a few years later.

I started to realize that living a life more authentically aligned with my values was not just about hitting a reset button and designing a new life based on some fantasy idea of what a perfect life looked like on the outside, but by following both truth and love as guiding principles and then working within the new boundaries that they naturally set for me. Ironically, when I fell in love my options concerning where I could live and work became a lot more limited, but I traded that outer freedom for the inner freedom to build a life based on relationship, not just on entertaining a plethora of different lifestyle options. At 37, a perennial wanderer and an intellectual loner from a broken family, I was finally starting to grow my roots, but starting with people, instead of place. In many ways, honoring relationship is more in line with the philosophy of permaculture than whether or not I owned my own permaculture farm.

Deep and positive change, I found, is not an aesthetic rebrand, but a change in how we relate to things. Still, it has taken some time for this lesson to really sink in, and might take me some time yet before it fully does. When I first started writing The Body Electric, I assumed writing would be a temporary pastime for me as I waited for everything to fall in place to allow me move to gain a residence in Norway (this ended up taking 18 months!), after which I would hit the ground running, and finish my education in acupuncture, and then start my dream career in my new home. What I didn’t realize was that I couldn’t just import my life from the United States into a new country, and writing would most likely be my only outwardly facing endeavor for years to come.

Moving to a new country, particularly one that has a lot of national pride and is both economically and culturally protectionist, has humbled and limited me in ways I could never have foresaw. There are far less job opportunities for me here than there are back in the States, and a hope of any job at all is probably not likely until I speak fluent Norwegian. So I have decided to take at least the next several years of my life to learn Norwegian, havie babies, stay home with the babies until they are old enough for school, and figure out if Norway is something my husband and I can make work for us logistically in the long term. Anything I do with eastern traditional medicine will be in my own home and with my own family, not in a professional context.

Norway, at least as it currently operates, resists changing itself to outsiders more aggressively than other places in Europe currently do (it is actually one of the few European countries that has not joined the EU). There is no way that Norway will open its arms to make space for my Americanness, I must find a way to make my Americanness compatible with Norway. Hopefully I can do this integrity, and still hold on to the American values, like a belief in the sanctity of the individual, which I will never let go of; while questioning some of my American cultural baggage that I can live without.

Probably the most popular meme that most American expats in Norway like to share with those wondering how they can move to Norway after reading the listicle of some travel writer listing it as top 10 countries to move to

Even for those who are not recent immigrants, I think we can all feel that the western world is going through a giant upheaval and we will all have to make adjustments. Expanding outward into a bigger theme, this tension between (little c) conservatism and (little p) progressivism interests me — can this tension become a healthy dialectic or its it fated to fall into irreconcilable polarities that will eventually tear us all apart? As the world changes, we are forced to change with it, so what remains eternal and what no longer fits? What traditions and institutions do we bring with us, and what must be built from the ground up? I wish to take my time exploring what that means, not on the grand political scale, but in my ordinary life. Yet I do not wish to serve any kind of hasty answer about what we should do or how we should think in my writing. This is because the answers, borne from your individual circumstances and limitations, undoubtedly look a bit different from mine.

I initially wanted to write about why I found eastern traditional medicine so valuable, and why I believe the mainstream medicine should take it more seriously. I also wanted to teach others about the philosophy behind eastern medicine, and resurrect its reputation as a series of wellness hacks that are painted as either the answer to everything or complete pseudoscience depending on whom you ask. But I am getting tired of wearing my expert hat, and tired of trying to be intellectually persuasive. Who am I to persuade anyone about anything anyway?

I am more interested now in how I can navigate my changing life and these changing times with integrity, not only using the principles I learned from eastern medicine and philosophy, but also incorporating the western values which I hold just as dearly. I also want to write more about the place that I currently habit. In eastern traditional medicine, the four directions are important archetypes, and I want to write about life in the North, both archetypically and ecologically. I feel many days that the arctic, who is going through her own process of ecological change, longs to be witnessed.

While I intend to broaden the range of what I write about in my newsletter, I want to emphasize that the theme, the interplay between ecology and health, is not really changing on the outside, so much as my relationship to writing about that theme is. I’m not currently on Substack to produce anything or to become a writer professionally, so much as I am here to explore questions and topics of interest, and to be a reader of works that continue to intellectually challenge me.

Thank you for following my work so far!