I've had ankylosing spondylitis since I was 12. I've been pain-free for over 3 years. Between those two sentences is about 20 years, and this is what happened in the middle.
Nobody diagnosed me as a kid. My spine just started locking up and nobody named it. It wasn't only my spine either. Pain in my pelvis and my SI joints. Pain in my feet so bad they prescribed expensive orthotics and called it plantar fasciitis. That's the thing about AS. It shows up all over your body and gets labelled as a dozen separate problems, so nobody connects the dots.
The onset lined up with a stretch of childhood trauma I was living through, which I didn't understand at the time and wouldn't understand for years. That's not a coincidence. With autoimmune conditions the first flare is often triggered by trauma. Mine was. My body went into fight-or-flight and forgot how to come back out.
Then it took basketball from me, the sport I loved more than anything. I was the fastest kid on the team. Then the summer between freshman and sophomore year, everything fell apart at once. My joints, my breathing, my energy. I showed up to varsity tryouts that fall and I was the slowest kid running drills. I didn't go back for the third day. I just quit. I was 15 and I already knew something was wrong with me that nobody could see.
It got worse in slow motion. After high school I couldn't run. In my early twenties I was working night shifts stocking groceries, some nights nearly unable to finish because my knees hurt that badly.
Then I had to give my puppy away. She needed walks I couldn't give her. After 6-8 months I had to rehome her, because my body wouldn't let me take her outside.
I started an elimination diet. First real thing I ever did for myself. Found out fast that nightshades were wrecking me. That was the first time I had proof that something I did changed how I felt. That proof is the whole method now, but back then it was just one desperate experiment that happened to work.
Around the same time, people stopped believing me. My boss got suspicious I was making it up, because he'd catch me moving quickly on a good day and not understand that AS flares and then backs off. A coworker studying to be a physiotherapist told me she didn't think I was that bad either. If you have AS, you already know that feeling.
I saw doctors. Mostly they didn't know. A few suspected AS or some other arthritic condition, but nobody handed me a plan. I researched biologics myself at 22, understood they suppress symptoms without touching the root cause, and decided they weren't a long-term answer for me. That wasn't a marketing position I adopted later. That was a kid in pain deciding he wanted an actual solution instead of a lifelong prescription.
The real bottom came at 29. I'd become an EMT, running calls on an ambulance, finally making a bit of money. Then I tore my ACL. Surgery. No savings. I moved back in with my mom at 29 and felt like my whole life had run backward.
But while my leg healed I kept researching, and I started making money online writing health articles. When the leg was good again I left Seattle for Southeast Asia, somewhere warm and cheap enough that I could finally put money into my own health.
That's where I figured out the rest. Not all at once. In an order, one habit at a time, only moving to the next once the last one had actually settled in. That order became the 3 steps. The sequencing became the method.
It took over 10 years from that first elimination diet to being pain-free at 35. I'm not going to pretend it was fast. But I did it with a spine that had deformed, a body that had quit on me at 15, and zero help from the people who were supposed to know.
Now I live in Bali and I coach people with the exact condition that almost took my life from me. I do it for a simple reason. I lost years to this. If I can hand what I learned to someone else, built into a system instead of a decade of trial and error, then mine weren't wasted.