Julia Garrahan

My Story

People ask me sometimes if I really get what it's like to feel let down by your own body. I do. I've spent most of my life learning exactly how that feels.

I was a sick kid. In and out of the hospital for asthma, a long list of foods I couldn't eat, and what felt like one infection after another.

At 14 I got an ulcerative colitis diagnosis, with a two-week hospital stay to go with it. At 17 I was put on hormonal birth control for acne and an irregular cycle, and not long after, the panic attacks started. They got bad enough that I ended up on Xanax. Then I came off the birth control, and they just stopped. That was the first time it really hit me that maybe my body was trying to tell me something.

Then freshman year of college, I hit a wall. Not the kind you push through. A fatigue and depression that just flattened me. I spent months bouncing between antidepressants and barely keeping my grades alive before anyone figured out it was Lyme disease, which meant months of antibiotics. And the whole time I was still trying to be an athlete, which felt almost like a joke given how exhausted I was. Then came hypothyroidism. A year later, Babesia, a Lyme co-infection, and yet another round of treatment.

And it kept going. Five more years of it. Periods I couldn't predict, a stomach that was never happy, Epstein-Barr flaring back up, weight I couldn't explain, depression, a chronic fatigue syndrome diagnosis. A stranger in my own body, every day.

Then one morning I woke up and decided I was done living like that.

I'd already seen every doctor and run every lab I could think of. So I did the one thing still in my control. I went back to school and went looking for the answers nobody had been able to give me.

And slowly, things turned around. My energy came back, and then some. My periods are regular for the first time in my life. My stomach finally calmed down. But the change I didn't see coming was the emotional one. I handle stress now in a way I genuinely didn't think I had in me, the sense of humor I'd written off as gone is back, and most days my mood is the kind that rubs off on people.

All of it gave me a real soft spot for whatever you're carrying right now, because odds are I've carried some version of it too. And it gave me the conviction to spend the rest of my career helping other people get there too.