meta[body dys] morphosis 🦋

Most people would choose deeply flawed sincerity over polished dishonesty. When kindness becomes a performative act, it’s no longer kindness. As a young child, I remember key moments of clarity when I realized I was not going to have a normal life. I learned to disassociate and compartmentalize emotions before I was even old enough to understand what that meant. Everywhere I went, I had a nagging, aching feeling that I was making everybody uncomfortable, just by being there. What little kindness I did receive was obviously fake, from well-intentioned but misguided people—usually adults—who didn’t get it. No one gets it. Clinical definitions don’t capture the extent of the horror growing up with Tourette’s Syndrome. But that’s exactly how I grew up, and I still hate discussing it to this day. But as a coach, it’s important to address these experiences as they relate to physical and emotional fitness, well-being, and growth. There may be something you’re going through—something you can’t just ignore or forget about—that you have no choice but to live with and suffer through right now. You may even be hiding that part of yourself, like I did for so many years. In the interest of openness, honest communication, and vulnerability, I’d like to encourage us all to face and maybe even gently embrace our individual struggles.

Tourette’s is something most people go their entire lives without witnessing firsthand, and that was a realization I carried with me constantly, starting at about the age of seven. There are many forms of tics, but mine were vocal and facial movements. I learned to monitor my body constantly, as if vigilance could somehow help. I became hyper aware of myself in a way that children frankly shouldn’t be. Every classroom, every crush, every sporting event, carried with it the promise of humiliation. I learned to just get through it, focus on the positives, and ignore the many horrible bullies. In school, you would think it would be talking to girls, but actually the worst was taking tests. Sitting silently during an exam while trying desperately not to make twitching movements and audible tics was FUCKING psychological torture nobody deserves. I truly cannot express it to you. The harder I tried to suppress the tics, the worse they became. Every sound felt amplified in the otherwise silent room. Every movement felt exposed. I could sense the distraction and irritation of my classmates and friends around me, and with each passing second the anxiety would tighten further, feeding the cycle until the urges became impossible to bear.

I became keenly aware of who I could trust. Some people are kind, but most just feel sorry for you, which is not real kindness. It’s a new level of frustration when you can’t even GIVE your love away, except sometimes to other misfits. For a type-A person who wants to work hard and earn his own way, this was miserable. But like a fish in water, I didn’t know any different. I fixated on playing guitar for a few years, which was a very powerful outlet. But nothing could prepare me for discovering my true calling in life: Fitness. For years, fitness and exercise became my primary refuge, and on the surface it looked like a positive outlet. Exercise gave me structure, purpose, and a temporary sense of control over my body. I could channel the relentless internal energy into momentum, intensity, discipline, and physical exertion. The gym became one of the first places where my body seemed to obey me. If I wanted to move the weight, I could. If I trained hard enough, I could become stronger. There were rules, and unlike the unpredictability of Tourette’s, those rules felt fair. Progress was measurable. Effort mattered. For the first time, I was starting to like my body. Even if I could not control it in every respect, at least within the gym I could shape it, discipline it, and push it toward becoming something better. The physical suffering felt cleansing because it transformed helplessness into action. Every rep became proof that I was not powerless. In those moments, training hard felt cathartic, almost liberating. But I realized no matter how hard I trained, the anxiety, inner tension, and neurological compulsion always returned. Ironically, all this did was create a whole new problem for me: body dysmorphia. The vocalizations came back. The facial movements returned. The same internal war resurfaced again and again. I could temporarily exhaust my body, but I could not outrun myself.

When the nervous system is trapped in a constant state of stress, anxiety, hypervigilance, or internal conflict, we also become physiologically trapped. Poor sleep, chronic stress, unresolved trauma, toxic relationships, social isolation, lack of meaning, emotional repression—these things accumulate quietly over time, and the body keeps score. Eventually they cloud judgment, distort self-perception, and fundamentally alter behavior. A person can still act like themself because, in many ways, they’re neurologically following a script. I was operating as someone else—namely, the person I wanted to be seen as. Great body, good grades, hard worker, all qualities I thought could potentially offset my one major downside. But I never addressed any of the root problems. Looking back, I’ll never fully know how much of my Tourette’s was unavoidable neurological wiring and how much was intensified by a chronically-dysregulated internal state that lacked the emotional tools needed for self-acceptance and peace. This struggle became the foundation for the work I now care deeply about. As a coach and future clinician, I’ve seen countless people genuinely try to improve their lives through fitness. They work out consistently. They eat relatively well. They follow a plan. Yet their bodies resist lasting change. For a long time, I believed this was a matter of inconsistency, or maybe genetics. Now I know the answer is far more complicated.

The body does not exist separately from the nervous system. No radical transformation can occur while stuck in survival mode. Chronic dysregulation affects sleep, hormones, recovery, inflammation, motivation, impulse control, and emotional resilience. You cannot shame or force a nervous system into healing. Human metamorphosis requires more than physical exertion; it requires safety, regulation, connection, purpose, self-acceptance, and the gradual dismantling of the internal wars we carry quietly within ourselves. That understanding has become central to my philosophy surrounding both fitness and patient care. I no longer view exercise merely as a way to sculpt the body. I see it as one component of a much larger process of healing and integration. People are not machines to be optimized. We are deeply complex systems carrying histories, fears, insecurities, grief, and invisible battles that can and do manifest physically. Sometimes what appears to be laziness is burnout. Sometimes what appears to be lack of discipline is unresolved, competing, or conflicting desires. Sometimes what appears broken is actually a nervous system fighting with everything it has, just to survive. For much of my life, I viewed my Tourette’s as the thing that separated me from everyone else. Now, I increasingly see it as a force to understand suffering, adaptation, and resilience at a depth I otherwise would’ve never reached. The condition that once made me feel so fractured, undesirable, and bitter transformed me and cultivated empathy, self-awareness, and the courage to communicate rather than repress. I still do not have perfect peace with it. There are days when my body feels like a malformed flesh-prison I wish I could escape. But freedom isn’t the absence of struggle, it’s something much quieter than that. It’s about acknowledging what has been lost along the way through denial, suppression, emotional avoidance, workaholism, and every other strategy used to outrun discomfort. It’s a gentle but firm assertion of what you feel, what you believe, and what you know to be true, even when it feels incongruent. That’s how you begin to cultivate real, lasting positive change.