A Punctuated Path

Written by Alecs Kakon

Photos by Jen Fellegi

Being told what to do, who I am, and what box I fit in are my most basic triggers. They just set me off in a heat of panic. I’ve untangled the web to get to the source, and suffice to say that the misjudgments and misunderstandings suffocate me. Feeling safer around people who ask questions, I maintain a certain jurisdiction over my person (don’t we all?). In turn, I feel more able to open up and explore myself within my set boundaries. Public perception is something I know I can’t control, but just knowing that I have the space to explore myself without the misgivings of the person across from me allows for a more authentic conversation to take place; a more equal playing field. Something happens in my body on a very chemical level when I feel someone is trying to “figure me out,”—it’s visceral, but to articulate with words I would say it’s that basic notion of fight or flight, or in my case freeze. I used to fight, which took shape in rebellion or defense, then, in my later years, I switched to flight, which resembled me ditching out on friendships to save myself the potential discomfort. More recently, I freeze. I feel locked in a situation that feels unsafe, and rather than defend myself against my new judge, or flee the moment to save myself, I simply stare outward as my body begins to heat up, stuck in a state of catatonia. I have yet to learn how to navigate the discomfort, but I have come to a crystallized understanding that I no longer need to explain myself to anyone, I just need to sit in the comfort of knowing myself. Sitting down with Tas, we spoke about rebellion, clearing a space for self-discovery, and relying on instincts to allow the true self to emerge.

Born in Montreal, Tas comes from a Latin American family rooted in both Venezuela and Brazil. Raised in a home with a very clear prescription of what success looks like, Tas was on the fast-track for med school from a very early age. Never stopping to ask questions about whether this was what she in fact wanted, Tas kept her head in the books and knew not to look up. “It was very robotic. I knew who I was supposed to be and I just worked constantly to get there,” Tas explains. With an over-achiever mentality, Tas realized early on that the motivation to succeed was not coming from within her, but rather from the external validation received and, incidentally, had started to resent. “I would get a 98% on an exam and my parents would say, ‘well where is the last 2%.’ I even started to feel like, why didn’t I get 110%?” Tas explains. It was difficult to unsnarl whether the failure to reach beyond her potential came from her or from family expectations. By the end of high school, Tas had decided that she had to break from the pressure and rebelled with a newfound concentration in business school. “This was my big rebellion,” she laughs. “I pushed science away because it felt like I was forced into it, but even though I chose the field I knew my parents would hate the most, it didn’t stop me from still getting straight As. I realized it’s just who I am.” Tas realized that the over-achiever she was growing up wasn’t a role pushed onto her, and try as she might to become someone else, it turned out that her drive to succeed was more resonant with her true self than she had originally thought. Within a few years, Tas was back on course to finish a degree in Health Science in pursuit of a goal she was now more consciously aligned with. Working in pathology and genetic research in hospital labs, Tas had tuned into herself, what she wanted, and ultimately fused her passion with her knowledge base.

Finding harmony between the empirical world and the intuitive realm, Tas’ love for the sciences sought balance in trusting her internal barometer. What was true in her professional path saw inklings of connection in her personal life. Battling Crohn’s disease most of her teenage years, Tas’ overall health took a turn for the worse, and by the age of 25, Tas started to experience aura migraines. “I would vomit from the pain. At one point I was convinced that I had a brain tumor,” Tas explains. Seeking medical advice, Tas was put onto a whole slew of medication, “and I just trusted my doctors blindly. I took the drugs and they would make one thing feel better, but then make another symptom worse.” Wrangling with conflict of proof from what science says to be fact versus her body and how it felt, Tas finally decided to trust her own instincts when one doctor recommended brain Botox as a treatment course for her migraines.

Tas finally threw her hands up and determined that perhaps Western medicine wasn’t the right path for her. “I went home and started researching every single one of the drugs I was on, and I learned that these drugs were both saving me and killing me,” she says. Taking the time to introspect on her body holistically, Tas took a turn inward and realized the medication would never help if she didn’t make some elemental changes. “I think what was really happening to me is that I just didn’t have an outlet for my emotions, I was an over-achiever who bottled everything up. All that pressure and tension… those feelings had to go somewhere, and so they transformed into gastro and other health issues.” Taking inventory of her lifestyle and nutrition, it wasn’t long before Tas adopted a fully plant-based diet and cleared her system of all of her physical ailments. Taking a step back from her role as a geneticist, Tas decided to extend her healthcare advocacy to the general public and now works to help people understand their conditions, their treatments, and the potential alternative options to conventional medicine.

Nature’s limiting polarities has put Tas on a path to decipher the nuances between the two worlds that pull at her. Nourishing her scientific query for most of her life, Tas came into the metaphysical at two punctured points in her road. The true paradox is that her years spent developing her logical-based thinking has only further fostered her intuition that has come to save her time and again. “When I was younger, I grew up with blind faith, I didn’t have choices—I never explored all the different parts of myself. I was told who I was and how to become that person, and that can be really suffocating,” Tas says. Rebelling and resisting, Tas managed to find her way back to herself time and again. The moments when she decided not to just be what she was told to be, or do what she was told to do, were the moments when she was able to truly recognize herself. Who knows what we can become if we had the chance to play in a space that fostered self-exploration, perhaps we would waste less time fighting what we are to prove what we aren’t. All I know is that when confronted with a mirror of misrecognition, we squander time wiping away a reflection that misrepresents us rather than relish in moments that can be used living with the freedom of unconstrained choice.