YOU WILL ALWAYS FIGURE IT OUT

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I help people optimise their lives (ihaveguts.net)
Hey, my name is Mary. I am an ambitious young woman who works and does her university degree all while having a chronic disease. I am always curious to learn about nature - I am keen to learn more about geology and astronomy, and I am passionate about spreading awareness about gut health issues and helping people treat their guts right (e.g. I offer nutritional advice) and those with IBD & IBS. Having an IBD myself, I know how hard it is to juggle personal, work and study lives around, so it requires you to go the extra mile to make things work when your body is limiting you in some ways. This is where I step in with my blog (ihaveguts.net) to help people optimise their lives

What inspired or motivated you to be the person you are today.

Oh my, so many things and people! I’ll name just a few.

Cameron Diaz and her “The Body Book”. It taught me how to love and accept my body the way it is. I stopped torturing myself with fad diets and understood what a complex and beautiful thing a female body is. Now, I’m happy to say that I am proud of my body and my self-esteem is in the right place.
The Stoics. The works Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca made a long-lasting impression on me. Reading them made my mind more resilient and I now realise that I am not the only one who experiences certain dilemmas in life: they’ve existed millenia ago and tend to repeat themselves just as history itself.
My chronic disease. Surprisingly, my disease has opened up a whole new world to me! I learned and am still learning about gut health, alternative medicine such as Ayurveda, mind-gut connection, and so many other things. It’s definitely an adventurous journey that I am on and I am curious as to what it has to offer to me along the way
Financial hardships. I think that because of the financial hardships that my family recently went through, I became financially literate and am no longer a spendthrift I used to be (reading books on the topic proved to make the biggest impact e.g. Smart Women Finish Rich). I learned how to find joy in the little things around me such as little birds singing in the morning outside my home, rather than waiting to experience immediate gratification that comes with a purchase.

My greatest challenge turned out to be my body that at the time seemed to have turned against me: you can read more about it on my blog (ihaveguts.net), but in short, because of my Irritable Bowel Disease (IBD) finishing my Bachelor’s degree (I was studying Physical Geography which is my passion) proved to be the most difficult undertaking in my life. Thankfully, I never give up and it is this attitude that pushed me to find out more about ways to heal myself: first, I started on a Specific Carbohydrate Diet and from there onwards things started to improve. Second, being open about my condition with people around me gave me the support I was so desperately in need of and, third, starting my blog acted like an outlet for me to share my experience with the disease and help people with similar conditions.

So many factors go into play as to why women might not succeed in life such as cultural norms and expectations and absence of paternity leave in some countries so that mothers could keep working, that I wouldn’t point fingers just at this fact alone. Sure, mutual support and recognition of each other’s achievements are important and crucial at times: we should be cheering for each other, but I don’t think that our success or lack thereof rests entirely on this factor. Regardless of your sex or gender, we should be creating supportive networks to help each other and this is what counts.

I don’t quite know the people who have taken the same path as me, but I do know women with chronic health issues who continue to pursue their dreams and live their lives to the fullest. My message would be that it’s okay to feel down and discouraged at times, especially that nowadays it’s so easy to feel like you’re failing when social media is flashing pictures of perfect life at you. So, don’t give up and just keep going, everything is “figureoutable” and everything will work out in the end

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