Why I built this

Sometime around 2016, something changed. I couldn't tell you exactly when because it didn't announce itself. One day the world felt slightly wrong, and then it stayed that way.

At its worst: I couldn't drive for months. I wore sunglasses indoors because fluorescent light felt like a physical assault. I had anxiety attacks severe enough that I genuinely believed, more than once, that I was having a stroke. I went to the emergency room for it. Multiple times. I was not having a stroke.

Nobody could tell me what was happening. The working theory was blood pressure. My blood pressure was indeed going wild, but that turned out to be effect, not cause: the anxiety from not understanding what was happening to my own body was driving it up, which made the BP readings look like the culprit. A neurologist prescribed Topiramate. If you've been on it, you know: the cognitive fog, the word-finding failures, the feeling of a tight headband around your skull that doesn't come off. In some ways it was worse than what it was meant to treat. An SSRI was added somewhere in there, more or less as a gesture toward the anxiety component. It helped, though not for the reason anyone intended. I'd figure out why years later.

So I started reading. When the medical system can't explain what's wrong you go looking yourself. Clinical papers, patient forums, specialist review articles. You build a translation layer in your head: the descriptions that open clinical doors versus the ones that get you sent home. “Spinning” means something specific and narrow. “Swimmy” means nothing to most doctors. “Like the ground is moving” gets you referred to cardiology. You learn which words route you correctly and which ones don't.

In 2019 a workup at Hopkins finally gave me a framework for what had been happening. From there the path forward was what I'd describe as forcing the problem: vestibular physical therapy, deliberately putting myself into the uncomfortable situations until my brain stopped treating them as emergencies. It's slow. It took a while.

I still feel it occasionally. That probably won't change. But it's no longer a full time job just to function, which for a long time it was.

Here's what I kept coming back to through all of it: I was not an unusual case. The misrouting, the wrong treatments, the years of uncertainty, those are the standard experience for vestibular patients. Not because these conditions are untreatable. Because the intake system has no way to translate what patients describe into language that gets them to the right place. I spent years building that translation in my head out of necessity. Most patients don't have years, and shouldn't have to.

Bearings is that translation layer, built properly.