I Needed Me When I Was Me
All heart. All ways.
I found a file this week.
Back in 2022 I copied every recommendation anyone had ever written for me into one document. More than fifty of them, from a decade in healthcare. I used to open it on bad days, to remember what it felt like when I still had my edge.
I read it again this week and noticed something I’d missed every other time.
I was good at the numbers. One person in that file mentions missing the fight for the top monthly spot, and I remember those months. I say that I was at the top for nearly the entire time I was there. That person is the reason I have to add the nearly caveat. Still bothers me. But in all of the recommendations, almost nobody leads with the numbers. They barely even mention them.
They wrote about the patients.
Shaun, chiropractic: “An unequaled level of communication and education to our patients and their family regarding what would take place next. Matthew always went above and beyond what others would have so that our patients and their families were fully informed and completely understood all of the aspects of their visit.”
Trey, orthopaedic sales: “Impressed and motivated daily by his passion to provide outstanding care for our patients… many late nights away from his wife and newborn daughter so that our patients and their families were fully informed regarding the surgical process and they were comfortable in all aspects of their visit.”
Kristen, hospital patient advisory: “I remember shadowing him in a consultation appointment with a patient and was amazed at his approach; he epitomized empathy, articulation and urgency.”
Benjamin, healthcare recruiting: “Anytime I had a question, Matt was happy to answer it - but also takes the time to make sure I understand the concepts as to the why behind it all.”
Gabrielle, healthcare leadership: “What set Matt apart from his peers was his unmatched ability to connect with his patients, providing them above and beyond service in every interaction.”
Read them together and they’re all describing the same act, in different words. Not selling. Not closing. Sitting next to somebody who is frightened and facing something medical they don’t understand, and making sure they understand it. Making sure they aren’t alone in the part right before the hard thing happens.
That was the job. The numbers were a side effect of doing it properly.
Then I got sick.
Ten years with an arrhythmia. Procedures. A device in my chest. Shocks. Medications that treated one thing and broke another. Appointment after appointment where the rhythm was the only subject on the table.
The rhythm was the only thing I allowed on the table.
I was seen. I was heard. I have incredible clinicians, and people who loved me and would have carried all of it for me if I had ever set it down in front of them.
I never set it down.
What made me good with frightened patients was never technique. It was that I had already been through enough in my own life to be able to take it from them. I could absorb somebody’s fear - hold it, carry it out of the room - and hand back something they hadn’t walked in with. Hope, usually. That was the trade.
When I see fear in someone’s eyes, I take it from them.
A man who takes fear from others has nowhere to put his own.
I sat in the chair I had spent a decade sitting beside. I was the frightened one now, facing something medical I didn’t understand. And the only person I had ever trusted to carry that kind of weight was me - and I was the one buckling under it.
I needed me when I was me.
That’s the whole thing, really. The one person built for exactly that moment was the person drowning in it.
So I kept fighting.
I masked. I performed being fine at a professional level, because the alternative - saying out loud that I was not fine - felt like confirming the worst thing I’d ever believed about myself. I coped in ways I’m not proud of. There were days I didn’t want to keep going. I got up anyway.
And I never asked for help for the fear within me. I had spent my whole working life making it safe for other people to be scared out loud, and I could not do it for myself.
In December of 2024 the arrhythmia was finally quieted, and I could think clearly for the first time in a very long time. So I wrote about it. Not the procedure - the other part. The invisible part. The bear nobody else can see sitting on your chest while you smile through a meeting.
Here’s what came back.
“I saved your last one you posted in my notes app and it helped me immensely during my last PVC storm a couple weeks ago.”
“I’ve shown this to my wife so she could grasp what we go through with this issue.”
“I have an ablation next month and am sitting here feeling my irregular heart. Your post gave me strength.”
“You write articulately and so truthfully about truths that are hard to explain to anyone who has not fried their nervous system by having to be on constant lookout for the bear.”
“You have seamlessly integrated all of my obsessive research about what we are experiencing into a short, comprehensible article.”
“Thank you for gathering and validating us in a truthful and hopeful place.”
Hundreds of people now, across at least four countries. Somebody one week into their diagnosis. Somebody thirty-seven years in. People told for twenty-five years that it was anxiety. People who stopped telling their families because they’d started to feel like a burden.
Now put those next to the words from my colleagues.
Communication and education to our patients and their family regarding what would take place next - and a man showing my writing to his wife so she’d finally understand what he lives inside.
So that patients and their families were comfortable in all aspects of their visit - and a woman reading it the night before her ablation, hand on her own irregular chest, looking for enough steadiness to get through the morning.
Makes sure I understand the why behind it all - and someone telling me I’d organized their own frantic research into something they could finally hold.
Empathy, articulation and urgency.
Same sentences. Different decade. Different disease. Different people, who have never met each other and never will.
It wasn’t gone. It was dormant. It had been sitting there the entire time I was busy fighting a bear of my own - and the moment I pointed it at something again, it worked exactly the way it always had.
I’m not writing this to say look how good I used to be.
I’m still fighting bears. Several of them, right now, today. Different bears. And I can handle them - that isn’t a theory. I have the receipts. You just read them.
What I don’t have is somewhere to go.
Not a place to talk about how rough the day was, or how frightened I got, or how many extra beats it took to sit through a meeting. Those places exist, and they matter, and they are not the thing I’m missing.
I mean a place where you get to be who you are underneath the diagnosis. Where somebody had a bad day at the office, or got nervous about what’s coming next month, and got through it anyway - and gets recognized for that. Not for being sick. For doing the ordinary thing while carrying something nobody else in the room could see.
The win counts for more because of the bear. And the bear never has to be the subject.
It’s also why there is no downvote in what I’m building, and there never will be.
No DownBeats at OneRhythm. UpBeats only.
You don’t rank people who are already carrying something invisible - everything anyone says in that room can only be lifted.
Hard coded.
— Matthew J. Adams
Ad astra per aspera.
If you’re struggling right now, please talk to your clinician or someone you trust - and if you’re in crisis, call your local emergency number or a crisis line. Peer support is not a substitute for care.