Alignment

My first chiropractor appointment was awkward. I was expecting a massage.

I’d booked it on a colleague’s recommendation after months of sciatica and mysterious numbness that left me sleepless. She used the word realignment. I heard relaxation, and clung to the idea of slowing down, even briefly.

The clinic was in north Madrid. I took three metros to get there, hoping it would be worth the trip. In the waiting room, I filled out the intake form, marking X after X on the body diagram until it looked almost comical. Fifteen pain points in total.

The doctor was a fellow American living in Madrid, a tall Texas transplant with the kind of friendliness that still feels like home. He asked me to stand, then walk, then bend. Then he pressed his thumbs into points along my spine and neck while I tried not to scream.

“How long have you been like this?” he asked.

“Like what?”

He gestured vaguely at all of me. “Holding.”

I wanted to explain. About building a business straight out of college, filled with self-doubt and imposter syndrome, having never held a “real job.” About doing it in a country that wasn’t mine. About the pressure to be visible, credible, endlessly convincing. About the exhaustion of ambition, the urgency for a grand life, colliding with a body that needed routine and rest.

Instead, I said, “I don’t know. A while.”

What I didn’t yet have language for was this: I had been holding myself so carefully for so long that the tension had become structural. Pain was no longer alarming. It was background noise. My baseline.

And achievement—toward what? For whom? I wish I could trace it cleanly to a demanding parent or a teacher I wanted to prove wrong. But it’s not that simple. The drive is wholly mine. Factory settings. My own worst critic has always been me.

The first adjustment hurt in a way I didn’t expect. Not the cracks themselves—they were brief, almost anticlimactic—but what came after. Sensation rushed back into places that had gone numb. My body flooded me with information I had ignored for years.

I left in a haze, flu-like and foggy, dizzy and exhausted.

I took a taxi home.

Around the same time, my business advisor suggested I take a workplace personality test. The Predictive Index maps who you are in your natural state against how you’re currently showing up.

The results came back in two lines.

On the “natural” line: decisive, directive, comfortable taking charge, quick to move.

On the “current” line: careful, accommodating, slow to assert, always calibrating.

The consultant assured me this gap wasn’t necessarily a problem. Growth can require living outside your natural tendencies. Adaptability is often rewarded.

And in theory, that was me. A chameleon, adjusting myself to whatever I thought the moment required.

But the performance had become exhausting. I wanted to stop. I didn’t know how.

I nodded through the debrief, but one question stayed with me: What is this costing me?

Giuseppe Ar, A Lady Combing, courtesy of Lapis Archive

At the time, I couldn’t connect the assessment to my body. I didn’t yet see that both were pointing to the same thing. That misalignment doesn’t always announce itself dramatically. Often, it looks functional.

And then I got pregnant. After a devastating miscarriage. After the death of my father-in-law.

At my first scan, while spiraling with the realization that I controlled nothing, I saw two heartbeats. My first thought—one I’d never said out loud—was relief that meant I might not lose both.

The excitement I’d felt during my first, innocent pregnancy was gone. Fear and grief took its place. Anxiety grew alongside the babies. I followed my doctor’s instructions with near-religious devotion. I wouldn’t eat a salad prepared by my mother-in-law. I wouldn’t eat anything raw unless I’d washed it myself.

I won’t romanticize this part. Motherhood didn’t arrive as an awakening. It arrived as a dismantling.

At twenty-nine weeks, despite all my efforts to manage every variable, I went into early labor. I was put on complete bed rest in the hospital. No movement. No laptop. No control. My body—trained for years to comply—had its own agenda.

The twins were born eight weeks early, healthy but fragile. And though I could finally move again, I felt clumsy in a life that no longer fit.

Postpartum anxiety followed. Knowing it might didn’t make it easier. Grief. Guilt. Anger. A persistent sense that I no longer recognized myself.

Six months later, I returned to work. I dragged an industrial-grade breast pump to and from the office, heavy with guilt and longing, but also eager to reclaim a familiar identity: builder, creator, worker.

It was March 2020.

Four days later, Spain went into lockdown.

Within weeks, we laid off most of our team. I didn’t leave my apartment for ninety-eight days. The business I had built over a decade began to dissolve in real time.

The months that followed blurred together: sleepless nights, pain, strain on my marriage, a constant low-grade panic. There was no single breaking point—just a hundred small moments when I knew something wasn’t right.

Misalignment doesn’t always arrive as a crisis. It shows up as chronic pain you normalize. As exhaustion you learn to manage. As a widening gap between what matters to you and how you spend your days.

You can live like that for a long time. You can treat symptoms. Professionals can help you function. But the root cause keeps accumulating interest.

Eventually—if you’re lucky—life intensifies in a way that makes misalignment impossible to ignore.

For me, that intensification came as motherhood and a pandemic, back-to-back. Anxiety that nearly cost me my marriage. A demand for presence and decisiveness I hadn’t been practicing. I was forced to face a truth I’d avoided: I had been performing who I thought I needed to be instead of living from what I actually valued.

Realignment, I learned, isn’t a single decision. It isn’t one brave conversation or a clean pivot or a moment where you finally “choose yourself.” It’s slower than that, and less glamorous. A long inventory that asks, honestly: What matters now? Not before. Not in theory. Now—in this body, in this life.

The rebuild didn’t happen all at once. Some weeks, I held boundaries. Other weeks, I softened out of habit. But gradually—so gradually I almost missed it—my body began to release. My jaw unclenched. I slept. I stopped waking up already braced for an emergency.

The strangest part was this: the less energy I spent managing perception, the more effective I became. Not because I transformed into someone new, but because I had capacity again. I could think.

I still see the chiropractor once a month. My body still tightens when I’m stressed. I still catch myself shrinking, performing, holding. But now I notice it sooner. And often, that’s enough to stop.

Alignment isn’t a destination. It’s a sensitivity you develop over time. You drift out. You return. You learn the feel of the gap before it hardens into pain.

Misalignment isn’t a moral failure or a productivity problem. It’s what happens when we live too far from what matters to us for too long—often without language for what’s happening.

And when that language finally arrives, the question becomes simpler, even if the work isn’t:

Will you keep living the way you’ve been living?

Or will you begin the quieter work of finding what fits now?