"You don't need hope to persevere."
Reasons Not To Quit #1, with Rachel Manija Brown
This post provides the TRANSCRIPT for Reasons Not To Quit #1. For the PODCAST, with transcript in the show notes, CLICK HERE or on the photo below.
TRANSCRIPT
Hanne Blank Boyd: Welcome to Reasons Not To Quit, a podcast about people and the reasons they find not to quit when the going gets rough.
I'm your host, Hanne Blank Boyd, and if you, like me, have ever felt like you weren't sure how you were going to keep going, you're in the right place. Every week, we're going to talk to somebody who has been in that place and who's going to talk with us about what helped them keep going when they needed a reason not to quit.
This week's guest is Rachel Manija Brown, who is a writer and a Californian. Welcome to Reasons Not To Quit, Rachel!
Rachel Manija Brown: Hi! I'm glad to be here!
Hanne Blank Boyd:This is wonderful. So I'd love to invite you to tell us a little bit about yourself. What would you like the listeners to know about you?
Rachel Manija Brown: Well, I'm a writer. I write under my own name, Rachel Manija Brown, and I also write under some pen names, including Zoe Chant.I have an MA in clinical psychology, and I worked as a PTSD therapist for a number of years. I'm currently working as a life coach and I live in a little house in California in the mountains with two cats and six chickens.
Hanne Blank Boyd: How do the chickens feel about the cats?
Rachel Manija Brown: The chickens are in their own area outside and the cats are in the house inside and never the twain shall interact.
Hanne Blank Boyd:That sounds like an excellent plan. So, I'd like to start out by asking you if there's ever been a time in your life when you really wanted to quit, whatever that meant to you at the time. What happened, and what did you do?
Rachel Manija Brown: Yes, so there have actually been a number of times in my life like that. But the one I'd like to talk about is one that happened from about 2015 to 2018, which was that I got a very serious illness that was a mystery illness and I don't want to go into too many gross details, but I will just say that it involved excruciating, disabling pain, to a level where I couldn't really work or function.
And it also involved extreme unwanted weight loss. I started at I think about 125 pounds, and by the end of it I was down to 80 pounds. I looked like I'd been through a concentration camp. And you would think this would be something that doctors would take seriously, but it was not. So, I ended up in this position where I would go into doctor's offices and say that I was in a lot of pain, and they'd say, well, you don't look like you're in a lot of pain.
Hanne Blank Boyd: So helpful.
Rachel Manija Brown: Yes. And that's just because I'm kind of stoic. And then I would try going in and crying to kind of try and show that I was in pain. And then they'd say that I clearly was anxious and I needed to see a psychiatrist.
Now, yes, now I actually had a psychiatrist at the time because I have depression. And I went to the psychiatrist and told him, and he said I needed to see a medical doctor because clearly I was depressed and anxious, but that was because I had a serious illness that was undiagnosed and untreated.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Oh, wow.
Rachel Manija Brown: So, at that point, I was losing a lot of weight, so I went into doctors and I said, Hey, I'm losing a lot of weight. I'm really concerned. And they said, "Are you deliberately making yourself throw up? Are you deliberately starving yourself?" Now, I'm actually also a therapist. So, I have I studied eating disorders in graduate school and I can tell you that one way to rule out anorexia is that a person with anorexia is never going to voluntarily go into a doctor's office and say, "I've lost a lot of weight. I don't want this. I want to gain weight. I hate losing all this weight." If someone says that, you can literally just rule out anorexia. They're not anorexic.
So, this kind of continued with me becoming more and more disabled, and more and more despairing as I couldn't get anyone to invest, to really investigate this, or take it seriously, and doctors would get more and more angry with me because I was coming in, and I think they felt being pushy over my illness, which they didn't believe existed. So basically, doctors would tell me that it was all in my head, that it was because I was anxious, it was because I was depressed I should see a psychiatrist. I had one doctor tell me to my face, direct quote, "You're a liar and I want nothing to do with you."
Hanne Blank Boyd: Wow!
Rachel Manija Brown: Yeah.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Yikes!
Rachel Manija Brown: Yeah. And I resorted to all sorts of things, which in retrospect seemed kind of nuts, but I was getting really desperate. Because I'm single, I realized that one of the issues was I was a woman showing up, and doctors don't take women seriously. So I tried showing up with men in tow.
Which would work, they would take me more seriously, but then as soon as the men went away, they would revert. At one point, I didn't have a spare man, so I got a female platonic friend to show up and claim to be my fiancée in the hopes that the prejudice against single women was greater than homophobia.
And this actually kind of worked.
But unfortunately, then I couldn't always have her around and at one point I got so spacey because of being so sick and so much time had passed that I forgot that I told this particular doctor that I had a fiancée and even showed up with the fiancée and she asked me how, how my fiancé was and I said, what fiancée?
Hanne Blank Boyd: Oh no!
Rachel Manija Brown: So this was all... Really horrible. And also, you'll recall that I was in intense pain 24/ 7. It was just unbearable. I would sit there and I'd think, you know, if I could only have one hour when I'm not in pain. If I could only have half an hour. If I could only have five minutes. And so I started thinking about suicide because there just seemed to be no way out of this.
So that was the point ,where I was really ready to quit. And the other point even apart from suicide, is I was just so exhausted by trying going from doctor to doctor and coming up with eventually elaborate webs of lies like fake fiancées and other doctors who'd taken me seriously when none of them had ever taken me seriously.
Hanne Blank Boyd: And this is also expensive.
Rachel Manija Brown: Yes. And this was also... Unbelievably expensive. And at one point, I'd seen so many doctors that they started taking the fact that I'd seen multiple doctors as a reason that I was just a serial faker. So I then had to do stuff to try and nuke my medical records. And it was just this crazy amount of work when I was kind of incapable of working at all.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Oh my God.
Rachel Manija Brown: And I did have a lot of support from friends, but they weren't all in person, and ultimately, there's kind of a limit to what other people can do when they're up against a medical establishment that is just determined to tell you that there's nothing wrong with you when you're dying. So it was very tempting to quit in the sense of just stop trying, stop seeing doctors, just forget about it.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Which ultimately would have killed you.
Rachel Manija Brown: Yes, I mean, I do believe it ultimately would have killed me because, all else aside, I was steadily losing weight and I was down to a level where I was at the same sort of risk that someone who actually did have anorexia or was starving to death would have. You ultimately have a heart attack and die.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Obviously something ultimately changed. You're still here to tell the story. So what happened?
Rachel Manija Brown: Yes, so what actually happened was that a friend of mine, who I had only known on the internet, had mentioned --we were talking about how I couldn't get doctors to do tests because they just didn't believe that I needed them.
And she mentioned, because she was living in Bulgaria, that if I was in Bulgaria, I could just throw money at them and they'd do whatever tests I wanted.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Wow, okay.
Rachel Manija Brown: And she said, why don't you come to Bulgaria, stay with me, and throw some money at them, they'll do the tests.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Okay.
Rachel Manija Brown: So, at that point, this was just, I, this was the point where I was down to 80 pounds. I was really not capable of doing very much, and the thought of taking an international trip to stay with someone I'd never met for who knows how long in a country that I had kind of barely even heard of, to be honest.
Hanne Blank Boyd: How's your Bulgarian?
Rachel Manija Brown: My Bulgarian, yeah, Dobruden. That is the only Bulgarian I know. It means "hi." I knew nothing about Bulgaria. So I just decided, okay, I guess this is a chance. Maybe. I really didn't believe it would work. But I did. I somehow managed to get it together to go to Bulgaria and I stayed with my friend in her small Soviet block apartment with her wife and the wife's teenage son and several cats.
And I was literally staying in my friend's bedroom in a bed that was, sort of crammed in that we were, like, six inches apart or something. I was supposed to be there for two weeks and I stayed for three months because it turned out that the Bulgarian doctors were also pretty mystified. But I basically, long story short, I did get a bunch of tests done which the Bulgarian doctors found internal bleeding, they found a lot of abnormalities, and then, looking at the pathologist's report, they said, actually, this is all caused by anxiety, you should see a psychiatrist.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Oh!
Rachel Manija Brown: Right! But, however, at that point, I had the data from all their tests, which I gave to a different friend of mine, who is very smart and good at research. And between the two of us, we looked at the data and figured out that what it had to be was some kind of inflammatory bowel disease. And I just started getting medications that I obtained in Various ways that didn't involve a doctor. I won't go into that.) That are intended for Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. And I started taking them and eventually it turned out that one of them worked. And to this day I still take this medication that I don't have a prescription for because doctors still don't believe that there's anything wrong with me, and as long as I take it, I'm fine.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Wow. So you really had to not only self advocate, and go toe to toe with an incredibly abusive bullying system that kept looking at you and saying, "What, skinny lady, you're complaining?"
Rachel Manija Brown: Yeah.
Hanne Blank Boyd: And then you had to obtain pharmaceuticals through non- traditional channels.
Rachel Manija Brown: Yes, correct.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Some of which... I'm going to guess may not be strictly according to code... in order to keep yourself alive.
Rachel Manija Brown: Yes, yes, and in fact I tried telling doctors that I'd taken certain prescription drugs that I claimed other doctors had prescribed to me, and I said they work. You know, so isn't that a sign that maybe I do have an inflammatory bowel disease? What it turned out I actually have is --there's only two recognized inflammatory bowel diseases, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, and they're diagnosed by looking at abnormalities under a biopsy and is it one or the other? If there's abnormalities that are similar to both of them but aren't clearly 100 percent either of them, that is typically not diagnosable as anything. And that's what I have.
Hanne Blank Boyd: But it's still causing horrible problems.
Rachel Manija Brown: Yes, yes, and it is causing clear abnormalities. Like, I had internal bleeding throughout my intestines and things that the pathologist said, this is abnormal, this is abnormal, this is abnormal.
Hanne Blank Boyd: But because it didn't fit the exact criteria of the two that are recognized, they just said, “you don't have it, it's in your head.”
Basically, "your body is too weird for us, and so therefore, we're going to pretend it doesn't exist."
Rachel Manija Brown: Yeah, yeah. So, and then when I told them that, well, I respond to these drugs that are actually intended for Crohn's disease, they said that's the placebo effect.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Yeah. So. You've been through all of this you've come out the other side, miraculously enough, and you know, still hale and hearty and herding cats and chickens.
Rachel Manija Brown: Yes, yes.
So what would you say to somebody who was in that kind of position in their life?
Rachel Manija Brown: Well, what I would say is that you don't need hope to persevere.
Because I pretty early on hit a point where I just had no hope that anything would work because it seemed like I had tried everything and nothing worked. And, you know, I tried crying. I tried not crying. I tried bringing in men. I tried bringing in women. I tried bringing in evidence. I tried pretending I didn't know anything.
And nothing worked.
I was going to different doctors and they all told me I was crazy or lying. And at that point, I really gave up hope. I did not believe at all that I was going to survive this. So for me, the question became, how do you go on without hope?
I decided that I didn't need hope. That I could continue trying, despite the fact that I did not believe that I would succeed. And for me, that was kind of freeing. Like, I think, for many people, they need to cling on to hope, and that is helpful for them. And that's great. I think hoping is definitely better than not hoping. So if you can hope, hope, and that will be your lifeline.
But if you've reached a point where you don't hope, you can go on anyway.
Hanne Blank Boyd: That's an amazing way to look at it. And I think that, you know, so many people, when they get to the end of the hope rope, as it were, they're like, okay, well, there's nothing else. And you're saying, no, actually, there's a lot else, you just don't have to be hopeful about it.
Rachel Manija Brown: Yes. Yes. You can continue doing it without believing that it will succeed. And just, you just do it.
Hanne Blank Boyd: That's such a fantastic thing, a fantastic way to put it. I think that that is going to really resonate with a lot of people. Thank you.
Yeah, because this is unfortunately a very, very common thing to happen to people especially women or people assigned female at birth, and people of color, I'm actually white, and I can't even imagine what this would have been like if I was black.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Yeah, in the United States, that's exactly, that's the reality.
Rachel Manija Brown: Or any person of color, but I think, I think black women are particularly despised by the medical establishment.
Hanne Blank Boyd: 100%.
Rachel Manija Brown: So, what's the best piece of advice that you've ever gotten, and where did you get it?
Okay, so I have two and one of them I remembered to look up, and one of them I actually spaced out and didn't, so I'm going to have to give it to you from memory, and they were both not intended as pieces of advice at all.
One of them was from a book review that was just talking about a book, and the other is from a book. So. The first one, which I did look up, was from a book review by Michael Swanwick, who wrote a book called The Iron Dragon's Daughter that I really love, and it was a review of a book by Ian Banks called The Bridge and talking about the book he wrote "Sometimes the reason life seems difficult is that you're doing difficult and important work," and that was very, very resonant to me.
Hanne Blank Boyd: I really like that.
Rachel Manija Brown: Yeah, I, I really like that too. And that, even though I'm taking it very much out of context, it has really stuck with me. The other one, which I'm going to kind of go from memory on, is also from a book. This is from a short story called "The Golden Key" by George MacDonald, which is a quite old fairy tale.
The fairy tale's pretty allegorical. So in this story, the girl, who's the heroine, is on this quest, and she finally finds herself meeting this wise man who's going to tell her the next step to go on the quest, to find what she wants. And she says, "well, where's the way?" He points to this hole in the floor.
He says, "That's the way." And she looks at it, and it's just this bottomless pit.
She says, "Well, there's no stairs." And he says, "That's the only way." And she says, " How do I get down it? There's no way to get down. There must be some other way."
He says, "There's no other way. You have to throw yourself in. That's the only way."
She stands at the lip of this pit, looking down, and then she throws herself in.
And that, again, is something very powerful to me, that sometimes you don't see a way forward. You only see this vast, terrifying unknown, and the only way... is to throw yourself in.
Hanne Blank Boyd: I love that. Remind us again of where that is from?
Rachel Manija Brown: Yes. So that is from the short story called "The Golden Key" by George McDonald. And I will say that it starts out as kind of a more traditional Victorian fairy tale with morals. Just kind of read it past the beginning: there's a certain point where it becomes this incredibly powerful resonance story, and it really leaves the Victorian morals behind.
Hanne Blank Boyd: That sounds fabulous. I will see if I can hunt it down in an online version. I will link to it in the show notes.
Rachel Manija Brown: Yes, thank you.
Hanne Blank Boyd: So my last question for you is, what keeps you going in your day to day life now?
Rachel Manija Brown: Well, on one level I don't particularly need anything to keep myself going because my life is actually pretty good right now. You know, it's, it's full of I have interesting things. I have clients. I have writing. I have cats. I have chickens. I have a forest. I have hobbies that I'm learning, like hang gliding and pottery making, and I have books. So my life day to day is pretty happy, and of course all those things are what keep me going.
So I'd say the points where I need to have something that keeps me going is that it's very obvious that climate change is on us right now. And it is not something that I can personally do anything about. It is a crisis. We don't know how bad it's going to get other than extremely bad and possibly like extinction level.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Yeah.
Rachel Manija Brown: I can't do anything about it. Nobody I know can do anything about it. Me recycling is honestly, realistically not going to help. So there's this giant train coming at us that the only people in power are basically stoking the engine as fast as they can. So how do I keep going knowing that that's coming?
For me, I think there's two things. One is that our lives are always finite. You know, all of us are going to die no matter what, even if there is no climate change, we are still going to die. So really, my personal life isn't really different given the outside forces. You know, we're still always dealing with our own personal happinesses and kindnesses and so forth. But the other thing. is, well, what do I personally do to grapple with this change? And again, I'm going to give you a quote, which is from Jeff Vandermeer, who's a science fiction writer. He wrote the book Annihilation.
Hanne Blank Boyd: I love his stuff.
Rachel Manija Brown: Yeah, and he's also he's rewilding his land in Florida. He's doing really amazing work doing this. People always ask him, well, you can't stop climate change, so what's the point of fixing your own yard? And he says that the life of a possum or a raccoon in the wild is quite short. You know, it's maybe five or six years. They don't really live that long.
And he said, so he can't fix climate change, but he can maybe make it so three generations of possums can live in his yard and live and die and never notice that climate change exists.
Yeah, so I also have a yard. And I've been kind of slowly rewilding it. Not the entire thing. I'm not going all in the way he is. I also grow vegetables and things like that. But I'm rewilding it as much as I can. I'm planting native wildflowers. And I have a family of raccoons living in my yard. They. live in a tree that's right outside my bedroom window. So if I happen to be in bed and still awake at about 2 a. m. I can see them climbing down. And they are fat and healthy raccoons and they've had babies.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Oh, I love it.
Rachel Manija Brown: And so I like to think that maybe I can create a space for those raccoons and those slugs and the skunk that I haven't seen but I can smell it. And all the little creatures in my yard and the flowers that in here, like me, only have their one life. You know, they're going to live and die regardless. So I can, again like myself, try and make that life a good one for them.
Hanne Blank Boyd: I think that's so important to realize that you can do that in your own micro scale, your own personal scale, that it doesn't have to be you trying to fight Big Oil.
Rachel Manija Brown: Yes, because I'm really not equipped to fight Big Oil, honestly.
Hanne Blank Boyd: That's the point of Big Oil!
Rachel Manija Brown: Yes, I'm not equipped. No one's equipped. I particularly am not the sort of person who blows up a pipeline. I would have no idea how to do it. It's not something that I think I could do even if I decided to. I did actually, while I was really sick, it did occur to me that, well, if I really am dying, which I thought I probably almost certainly was, you know, maybe this is the point where I should blow up a pipeline. But the problem is, when you're sick enough that you're thinking, well, I'm dying anyway, I can blow up a pipeline, you are absolutely not equipped to blow up a pipeline because you can barely get out of your own home.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Right, back in the bad old days of the AIDS crisis, I forget who it was, who wore a jacket that on the back said "When I die, throw my body on the steps of the FDA." [Ed.: This was the late David Wojnarowicz.]
Rachel Manija Brown: Yeah, yes, I would definitely like, I would have really liked to have my emaciated body thrown on the steps of a doctor's office, except unfortunately there were so many of them, it would have had to be cut up first.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Well, that would certainly make an impression!
Rachel Manija Brown: That would make an impression. That would have been pretty awesome.
What I've instead done is, because I am a writer I've remembered the names of many of the asshole doctors, and I've put them in my books as villains.
Hanne Blank Boyd: That's beautiful. Yeah. That's wonderful. Oh, that's so good.
Do you have anything else that you would like to share before we wrap up today? This has been a great conversation, and you've had so many fantastic things to say.
Rachel Manija Brown: Thank you. Well, I think what I'd like to say going back to my original reasons why I wanted to quit and didn't: medical gaslighting is such a huge problem, particularly in the U. S., particularly for women. It's been documented extensively, and yet it doesn't seem to get through to doctors at all. We're told to advocate for ourselves, but as I found out, advocating for yourself often does not get you anywhere.
I advocated for myself in every possible way, and they still just... told me I was crazy.
So I think what I really want to say is just, I have I have solidarity with you. You're not crazy. You know, maybe try and find your community, but basically, don't feel that it's your fault, because doctors will tell you, well, you're not crying, so you're not in pain, and then if you do cry, they'll tell you that that proves that you're anxious and your pain is in your head.
It's not that you're doing something wrong or that you're not sufficiently advocating for yourself. It's because of the system. You know, and I would also...
Hanne Blank Boyd: The system is rigged.
Rachel Manija Brown: Yeah, the system is rigged. And I don't say that to make you hopeless, but just I'm saying that to say, this isn't your fault. This is other people's fault. Try and find solidarity, and also, you know, consider going outside of what is considered acceptable means.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Absolutely.
Rachel Manija Brown: Yeah, and I don't mean go to psychics. I also got a lot of really obnoxious advice from people, like at one point someone sent me a link and really insisted that I go visit some psychic doctor who it turned out was famous for curing AIDS by sticking magnets up people's butts.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Does it every time, I'm sure. God. (chuckles).
Rachel Manija Brown: Right? Yeah, yeah. But only in specific polarities.
So, I'm not saying that. I would also like to give you permission to tell people to fuck off if they do that.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Amen.
Rachel Manija Brown: But I am saying that certain things that may seem really outside of the norm, such as obtaining prescription medications without prescriptions or going to Bulgaria if you have the means, I was obviously very privileged to be able to do that. Or, you know, getting your friends to do research for you, things like that. You know, do it. Because if the system doesn't help you, there are other systems.
Hanne Blank Boyd: I love that. I think that's so important. Especially in the U. S. when we are all educated to believe that the doctors are the ones in authority, they have all the answers. And... sometimes they don't, and sometimes they're really not working in your favor, and when that happens, what are you going to do?
Rachel Manija Brown: Yeah. Oh, and I would also say that speaking is someone with an actual degree in clinical psychology, a GP is not qualified to diagnose anxiety. So if anyone or any mental illness, so if any doctor other than a psychiatrist attempts to diagnose you with a mental illness, particularly if they attempt to diagnose you with a mental illness without actually evaluating you for a mental illness, just know that that's bullshit.
They can't, you know, I mean, they can in the sense of they will do that, but that's not a valid diagnosis. If you walk into an office and look anxious, that's not a reason to get an anxiety diagnosis. If you actually go to a psychiatrist, you will get an actual workup for anxiety. They are actually qualified to diagnose mental illnesses. No other doctors are qualified. I say this as someone who has actual mental illness diagnoses done by actual psychiatrists, they will question you extensively and they may also do some tests. If you don't get that extensive, very specific questioning, then that's not a real diagnosis.
Hanne Blank Boyd: So that's super important because who among us is not sometimes anxious when they go to the doctor?
Rachel Manija Brown: Of course, of course. And someone who walks into a psychiatrist's office and feels anxious and looks anxious, the psychiatrist isn't going to diagnose them with anxiety based on that. I mean, I have diagnosed people with certain mental illnesses that I was qualified to diagnose, and I did it in a very, very specific way.
I did tests, I did interviews, and that's how I came to that diagnosis. If someone attempts to diagnose you with a mental illness without doing an extensive specific interview and often tests then that's not a real diagnosis and they'll write it in your file, but it's not valid.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Thank you so much for that.
Rachel Manija Brown: This is so much, there's so much great stuff in here. This has been wonderful.
Hanne Blank Boyd: I want to thank our guest today, Rachel Manija Brown, and I want to remind our listeners that if they want to know more about you and what they do, they can look for your books, right?
Rachel Manija Brown: Oh, yeah, they can look for my books. Also, my life coach website is RachelMBrown.com. That's my life coaching website. You can also find my books Rachel Manija Brown. I have a book series that I co-wrote with Sherwood Smith called The Change, which has three books out and a fourth book that is forthcoming.
Hanne Blank Boyd: Yay!
Rachel Manija Brown:I also write under the name of Zoe Chant, I write the Protection Inc. and Protection, Inc. Defenders series, which is a fantasy romance adventure with adorable flying kittens. You can find those on Amazon. And as Lia Silver, I write the Werewolf Marines series, which is actually one of my favorites that I've written. It's werewolves. It's fun.
Hanne Blank Boyd: They're a lot of fun! Fabulous.
This has been Reasons Not To Quit, a podcast about people and the reasons they find not to quit when the going gets tough. Images and a transcript from today's podcast, as well as the archive of all our episodes are available at our website reasonsnottoquit.substack.com.
So if you've ever been in a position where you weren't sure how you were going to keep going, you are in the right place. Until next time, I'm your host, Hanne Blank Boyd, and this has been Reasons Not To Quit.
Links and Show Notes
Rachel Manija Brown's life coaching website
Zoe Chant is a pen name shared by a group of author friends and run by Rachel Manija Brown. The Zoe Chant series written by Rachel are:
Protection, Inc. (fantasy romance about shapeshifting bodyguards, prequel to Protection, Inc.: Defenders)
Protection, Inc.: Defenders (fantasy romance/adventure about shapeshifting bodyguards and their flying kittens and other magical pets)
Shifter Vets (fantasy romance about veterinarians who care for magical creatures)
“The Golden Key” by George MacDonald
Do you know someone who has a Reasons Not To Quit story to tell? Let us know at reasonsnottoquit@gmail.com.