Time for an Upgrade

If you’ve been following me for a while, you may have noticed a subtle yet intentional shift in my name from “ShadowFox Wellness” to “ShadowFox Healing Arts” (website domain name change to follow in the future after this current domain subscription runs out... I'm a poor medical student, mmkay)

This page represents my public face to the world and it shifts as I shift. It began as a dream to just be an anonymous source of inspiration and authentic humanism on the internet back in 2016. It didn’t become a reality until 2020, though, after being urged by a myriad of friends and strangers alike to open up a business based around my knowledge and experience with the brain, health, and healing. Thus, “ShadowFox Wellness Consulting” (shortened to "ShadowFox Wellness") was born. My reasoning at inception was that our society as a whole seems so fixated on illness and quick fixes and I wanted my brand to represent the opposite of all of that--“true wellness,” as I thought… and though this intention was well-meaning and valid in its time, I recently realized I’d outgrown the name and it started to feel incomplete.

This incompleteness was compounded by the shift in utility of my account as well. At the inception of this page, I was a certified brain injury specialist actively working in clinic as a neurobehavioral and life skills counselor and a wellness industry entrepreneur with ample time for carefully considered content creation and had programs, collaborations, and packages to market and sell… but now I am on to the next chapter of my life, pursuing my dream of becoming a physician. It is bittersweet to watch the changing of seasons in life in real time as I fully recognize that I am moving away from the productive harvest season I was in when I started this page to a more passive season in which I am hibernating, percolating, learning, and absorbing more than anything else. So what does that mean for this page—my public persona?

I contemplated this question deeply all of last semester and throughout my winter break. I fumbled through words and strange feelings and thoughts that don’t even directly conjugate to language, and what I concluded was this:

The most impactful way to help others is to lead by example—walk the talk. So I have decided to unapologetically divulge all sides of myself on my professional page because I fully believe we cannot learn and grow from one another if we're only portraying super-egoic projections of ourselves or only offering wisdom sterilized of the messy life stories we had to live to unearth it. It is possible to heal others just by being yourself. It is possible to heal others just by being transparent about your own thoughts, emotions, and struggles. I know this because I’ve gained so much from just watching the people around me and listening to their stories and what they have to say. Life lessons don’t need to be neatly packaged into 280 character count Twitter posts because people don’t learn deep, visceral, life-altering lessons that way anyways… we learn through our own blood, sweat, and tears and we watch how those holy secretions seep into the dirt, atmosphere, and beings around us. We learn through the magnetism we feel for other people and their own narrative identities and experiences that we witness, absorb, and weave back into ourselves. Though I do believe that the programs and work I was doing before moving into this bigger role in medicine were worthwhile and can create an incubator for people to process, reframe, and integrate what wellness means to them on a personal level, wellness is not something you can synthesize on demand. It's not some static holy beacon to orient and then perpetually and obsessively pilgrimage towards until one “arrives,” and it certainly is not a product that can be sold—and yet I have had to come to terms with the fact that this is what “wellness” has come to mean to millions of people in the modern world, especially in what has come to be known as the “wellness industry.” The name “ShadowFox Wellness” started to feel misleading. I don’t want you to come to my page expecting only “wellness" because that simply does not exist within any human being in isolation.

Moving forward means calling all parts home. Wellness is inextricably linked with illness and what the world needs right now is more transparency into how these binaries render and interact with each other in 3D reality. As much as we try to box medicine into a science, it embodies the simultaneous essence of art. “ShadowFox Healing Arts” feels more whole, like I am embodying my whole and my true self, the part of me that is unapologetically authentic about the healing process; not another lost soul attempting a caricature of a sterilized wellness severed from it’s dark and writhing roots of dirt, grit, and metallic nutrients. I strive to cultivate the tone of this page to be humble and authentic, inducing of belly laughs but also soulfully powerful and even raw and uncomfortable at times. I don’t want you to come to me looking for answers, I want you to leave with more questions than you came with.

Thank you for walking alongside me on this journey.