Connecting the Dots, Again
What My Fascia Finally Told Me About Survival Mode and MCAS
In June 2026, I had an anaphylactic reaction while hiking. That morning, I made my usual smoothie with leftover beans, something I’d done many times. An hour later, my throat started to close. Now I carry an EpiPen—something I never imagined needing.
That morning didn’t feel like the start of something new. It felt like the end of not knowing. My body had been trying to tell me something for most of a year, but I didn’t have the words for it yet. I’d spent decades learning to read my body’s signals, which is what my memoir, Hindsight, is about. Still, I needed a near-ambulance moment on a mountain to finally hear this one.
Here’s what I’ve pieced together since then.
In January 2025, I had COVID. In May, after relocating from California to North Carolina, where I didn’t have a doctor, I switched my compounded estradiol to an online version to save time and money. It seemed like a small, reasonable decision, but it was the second hit my system took.
Compounded hormones are made without the fillers and binders that mass-produced ones use. The online version wasn't compounded. Since estrogen already primes mast cells, adding synthetic filler to a body still inflamed from a virus I suspect created the exact conditions where a nervous system that never fully relaxed finally tipped over.
By December, I was reacting to foods I'd eaten my whole life. By June, I reacted so strongly to leftover beans that I needed epinephrine.
Once I had a name for it, the diagnosis was Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, or MCAS for short. Mast cells are the immune system's first responders. They live in your skin, your gut, your airways, and they're supposed to release histamine only when something is actually wrong. Mine had stopped waiting for a real problem. They had started treating almost everything as a threat.
I recognized that sentence the moment I wrote it. It's the sentence I've been writing about my nervous system for years.
In MCAS, those cells can become inappropriately activated, producing symptoms that can seem completely unrelated until you understand what connects them.
My breast cancer diagnosis came in 2015. I’m ten years out now, and I took what most oncologists would call an unconventional road to get here. Much of it is in the book. Back then, and even more now, I don’t think the cancer was random. It showed up in the part of my body I’d never fully lived in, and after decades of my nervous system being on high alert.
I didn’t cause my own cancer. I want to be precise about that because this idea can easily turn into self-blame if you’re not careful. I have come to believe my body was keeping a ledger the whole time, and that illness is sometimes less a betrayal than a message arriving in the only language left available to it.
MCAS feels like the same message, just a decade later and in a different form.
What connects these experiences — and what I keep returning to, always in a spiral, not a straight line — is called survival mode. It’s hypervigilance. It’s how a body braces itself after learning early on that no one was coming, that crying wasn’t safe, and that the best way to handle your needs was to make them disappear.
I didn’t choose to live this way. No one does. It happens deep in the nervous system, in the fascia, the web of connective tissue that wraps every muscle, nerve, and organ from the base of your skull to your feet.
I only learned this year, against my will, that fascia is one of the places where mast cells live. They sit along the collagen, right next to nerve endings, and respond to pressure and stress like a smoke detector responds to smoke.
New research on fascia is starting to explain what survivors have always felt: tissue that stays tense too long becomes dense and loses its healthy, flexible quality. When tissue dries out and tightens, it puts constant pressure on the mast cells inside, which are built to notice pressure and respond with inflammation.
I had noticed this bracing in my body long before I knew the word fascia.
When I started writing with my non-dominant hand — a practice central to my healing and my book — I was surprised not by what my inner child wrote, but by what I felt in my body as I waited.
My shoulders rose, my jaw locked, and I held my breath without realizing it. Once I noticed this, I saw it everywhere: at the grocery store, while driving, eating a meal, even half-asleep in bed. My body was always braced, no matter what I was doing or where I was.
Living with this constant bracing feels like being stuck in a never-ending smoke alarm test. You stop being able to tell if it’s real.
I think about the hot yoga classes I loved before I had a name for any of this. I always left feeling like something inside me had loosened—genuinely better, not just relaxed. I didn’t know why then, but now I do: heat and slow, steady stretching are some of the few things that soften tight fascia, like warm water loosens a knot in a rope. Without knowing it, I was helping my body heal, one class at a time. I can’t use that fix anymore since heat now triggers my mast cells, which is a small, ironic loss.
But I still believe in the process. I’ve just had to find gentler ways to ask my body the same question:
Is it safe to let go now?
I’m not a doctor, and I want to be clear that research on fascia and mast cells is still new. It’s real and published but not yet settled science. Still, I’ve spent most of my adult life learning to trust my body before waiting for studies to confirm what I feel.
This is the pattern I trust: cancer in a place I had never inhabited, MCAS in a body that never learned to relax, both showing up in a nervous system on alert since I was an infant.
The tinnitus that used to feel like my brain physically contracting is quieter now. Not gone — I don't think I get to gone, and I've stopped expecting to — but quieter, the way most of my healing has gone quieter rather than ending.
A spiral, not a straight line.
That's the whole architecture of Hindsight, the book this blog grew out of: not a story about arriving somewhere and being fixed, since it isn't about being fixed.
It's about learning to listen to what my body had been saying the whole time in whatever organ happens to be holding the message that decade.
Mine started in my breast. Lately it's been in my immune system and connective tissue. I suspect it isn't finished teaching me things. I'm still bracing — but I now recognize it, and that's new. Every real change I've ever made in myself started exactly there, in noticing before anything else was possible.
I don't know yet what comes after the noticing, but I would like to find out.
Sources on the fascia–mast cell research referenced above:
Comments