About

Cog and Dog is my brain-child that has been three years in the making.

I began this site back in 2016, when this was my original bio:

I’m creative, inquisitive, and a bit of a Chatty Kathy. I live my life by the Golden Rule, my daily horoscope, and expert advice of my psychic, Linda. I’d like to say I knit scarves or run marathons in my spare time, but if I do have a free moment, I usually just slap on a good pair of leggings and take a nap.
I love what I do, but I’m leaving Corporate America behind and pursuing a path that’s nearer and dearer to my soul and spirit: creative freedom.
April 2016

I had one dream: to escape the shackles of my 9-5 and write.

This isn’t a unique dream. It’s the dream of literally tens of thousands of bloggers, who’ve bravely quit their unfulfilling jobs to pursue their dreams with reckless abandon.

But here’s the thing: I didn’t.

A few months after my first proclamation that I was moving on to feed my soul—answering my call to be an artist—I was provided with an opportunity to work at a big-name company making more money than I ever dreamed I should as a writer.

Add enough zeroes to the end of a paycheck, and the human psyche is capable of doing unthinkable things. Within a few weeks, I was making the trek to my downtown office, swiping my badge and saying things like “what were the key takeaways and learnings in Q3?”

It wasn’t long until my weeks ballooned to 55-60 hours. Each day, I battled a calendar full of meetings, endless open-office distractions, and a book of work that had no end in sight. I started skipping meals. Getting less sleep. Working out less. Any semblance of balance I once had was tossed out the window in the name of getting more done.

And all along, I heard a voice—on my walk into work. Standing in line to get coffee. In the bathroom stall. After everyone else had cleared out for the night, and I was left alone in the dark with my work and my thoughts. It was quiet, but it was persistent:

“Hey! You know this isn’t good for you, right? You’re working too hard. You’re going to burn out. This level of output is unsustainable. This isn’t really your path.”

It was my intuition, warning me to slow down. But I never listened.

I had a host of lies I’d tell myself instead. We need the money! This is a great learning experience! If I work hard enough, I’ll be up for a promotion during the next Annual Review cycle!

Yes, I was unhappy. OK, I was completely miserable. But isn’t this how life was meant to be lived? Wasn’t this just what being an adult and having a job meant—compromising what your heart wants you to do in the name of what society tells you that you should?

How naive I was.

When you ignore your intuition, it starts to act out in more major ways, begging to be heard.

It doesn’t want to cause you harm, mind you. It just demands that you listen. It’s trying to save you from yourself, but you’re usually too distracted with so much doing and succeeding that you don’t bother to listen until it’s too late.

So, that’s where my real story begins: ignoring my intuition for three long years, and the extreme turmoil—and later profound growth—I’ve experienced because of it.

Often, the mind is the first to be attacked.

Your mind is flooded with feelings of anxiety, depression, overwhelm, lack of focus. Dread of life too much to bear? Here, have a Xanax and a beta-blocker. Can’t focus in an overstimulating environment? Try an Adderall. Crippling saddness? Wellbutrin will save the day!

I’ve been diagnosed and re-diagnosed so many times that I’ve lost count, but the general consensus today is that I have ADHD, which looks and feels a lot like depression and anxiety, but which also makes me scattered, forgetful, confused, and a slow worker. I take medication, which helps me work more efficiently, but causes me to forget my emotions almost entirely.

With a little help from Big Pharma, most of us can limp along reasonably well. I did just fine for a while! But the problem continuing to ignore your intuition calling out to you. And because at this point, you’re usually a zombified, drugged-up version of yourself, your intuition has to start making bigger moves if it has any hope of being heard.

So it moves on to give your body a beating.

For me, nausea and bloating were the first to bubble up. Then, it was intense, knife-searing pain radiating throughout my entire abdominal cavity from which I could find no relief, day or night, for months. I went to ER after ER, specialist after specialist, looking for answers.

I was poked and spliced open more times in a year than most people are in a lifetime. I had a colonoscopy. An appendectomy. An ovarian cystectomy. Endometrial ablation. Excision of endometriosis. A pre-sacral neurectomy. But even after three major surgeries and a diagnosis of endometriosis, a lifelong, chronic illnesses for which there is no cure, I soldiered on.

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” said my intuition.

So it sent me a few more ailments to battle. Interstitial cystitis. Anemia. Protein deficiency. A severe hormone imbalance that left my doctor saying, “Huh! I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

And still, I didn’t stop.

Once your intuition has exhausted all other options, it tries one last line of communication: your spirit.

It’s a last-ditch effort that often proves futile, since you’re usually consumed by mental and physical problems by this point that there’s no coming back from the darkness.

Because it’s tired of being ignored but terrified that it’ll lose you entirely, your intuition waits for you to make the first move—unless of course, if doing so would put you in dire danger. It’s a smart strategy, because often the only time people are willing to listen is in their final moments of desperation. They call out for help when they’ve lost all hope.

And so, your intuition waits quietly, waiting for its cue to open up and be heard. To guide. To save. To do all the things it’s been trying to do all along, without success. It waits to be called.

I called out for help this summer, after I nearly lost myself to myself.

My pain had reached next-level magnitudes, with no break in sight. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to battle it any longer.

Please save me, I begged, in what I’ll forever remember as my darkest singular moment on this earth. What can I do to ease this suffering? And my intuition responded:

“Call Linda.”

Linda is my psychic.

Remember her from above?

For eight years, her sage wisdom has seen me through emotionally trying relationships, unfulfilling career choices, some low-grade chemical dependency issues, and a smattering of other earthly challenges.

But mental and physical health? I wasn’t sure how tarot could cure those woes. Still, we set up a time to meet and she called.

Linda has always spoken in rhymes and riddles, but this time, her wisdom was so hidden it was nearly unvisible.

She spoke about “an ancient health system that combines mind-body-spirit wellness” and told me “there is an awakening that will begin to take shape over the next six months to two years that you will be a part of.”

She said to “sample everything, like having a bite of all the offerings at a buffet,” that I would “join a woman’s group,” and that soon “there will be signs everywhere, telling you exactly what to do next.”

Uh, awakening? A women’s group? Are we talking about a cult here? I was convinced she’d lost her marbles. She kept going.

“The thing you should be doing? It has a lot of colors. Keep your eye out for something with a lot of colors. Oh, and numerology! And remember—soon it’ll be everywhere. ”

What in the ACTUAL WHAT?

She left me with one very tangible piece of advice: “There’s a free meditation right now featuring Oprah and Deepak Chopra. Go download the app. This is where your journey begins.”

And then she closed with one final thought:

“And Kathy? You’re going to piece all of this together, like fragments from multiple sources, to tell the story. You have to tell the story.”

I was confused, but I was intrigued. I was also having a total mental breakdown and was desperate to take any help that was offered to me—even it came through a “woo woo” channel that I wasn’t sure that I was quite sure I believed in fully.

So I downloaded the meditation, and everything began to click into place. As Linda predicted almost immediately, signs started to appear—and I followed them.

Meditation led to yoga, which led to ayurveda. Ayurveda led the to chakras, which I slowly realized—after no fewer than 12 major signs, which I’ll detail in the blog at some point— were the “rainbow-colored ancient health systems” I should be keeping an eye for.

This thing, Linda and friends were talking about? The one that would lead me toward my life path and give me relief from the mental and physical pain that has tormented me for years?

I’m pretty sure it was a spiritual awakening.

My intuition is absolutely a-buzz with this discovery.

Each time I make another right turn, doors open and signs appear. But every time I’m tempted to go the way I know deep down won’t serve me, I find delays. Barriers. Disappointments.

My intuition and I are dancing in tandem for the first time, and it feels glorious.

I now recognize that I haven’t yet been able to pursue what I’ve known forever to be my passion—writing—because it wasn’t yet aligned with my purpose.

And I had no goddamn clue what that purpose was until venturing through hell and back to find it. I get it now, along with the timeline of events of living out my true dharma:

Live the trauma
Find help
Heal
Share the story

Why can’t the spirit guides just speak in bullet points? 😉

Now that I know that this three-year detour was all part of the master plan, ultimately pointing me toward the right direction, I feel confident and eager to dive in to all the things I need to do in order to mend my mind/body/spirit.

I know a lot of people are grateful for events or major illnesses that cause them to take a beat and rethink their life direction, and I’m certainly one of them. Continuing to run myself into the ground in pursuit of the wrong things—material success, external validation—would have pushed me over the edge sooner or later.

Make no mistake: I’m far from enlightened.

I have LEAPS of work do to, which I plan to chronicle on here. But I feel like I have a compass pointing me in the right direction: to continue fixing my mind and body by fixing my spirit.

Writing about it helps me keep myself accountable and track my progress. It also soothes my soul.

I’ve decided to share my mind/body/spirit journey and all of my findings with the world rather than in a journal, because I’ve long taken comfort in the words of others whose raw and unfiltered truths consoled me when the people around me could not: SARK, Liz Gilbert, Cheryl Strayed to list a few. Telling their stories were a part of their healing journey, as I believe Cog and Dog is for me.

I hope that others who are hurting—either from mental illness, chronic illness, or just plain emptiness—can find a glimmer of hope from my experiences as I have from others who’ve been kind and brave enough to do the same. There is strength in numbers, and we can heal together.

And if you’re free from those challenges? That’s great, too! Hopefully you’ll find some of my thoughts entertaining or helpful, and learn a few things here and there.

So, to close things out with my original wrap-up from my OG “About Me” page so many moons ago:

I’ve teamed up with Dog to bring you the chronicles of the next chapter of our life. I hope you enjoy.
April 2016

I really do.

With love,
Cog (& Dog)