An Exploration of Sorts

 When I was young, I adored Shel Silverstein's poem, "Where the Sidewalk Ends" because it felt hopeful and whimsical. I felt like the "end" and "before" places "there" and "there" and "there" revealed some hidden liminal space where possibilities were endless and hope abounded where we would "walk a walk that was measured and slow". Who knows what surprises lingered in those shadows of transition?

I find myself now, at the ripe age of 47, looking around the corners of my life and wondering what exists next where my current sidewalk ends. And the suspended feeling of anticipation and curiosity hangs in the balance. You see, I am no longer in that fervent stage of career entropy where there existed no room for breathing, let alone discovery; and though I fell headlong into illness replacing one chaos for another, I find I am also no longer wedged in the throes of trauma every moment of every day. 

As a teacher, my days were so strictly meted out--lesson plans demarcating the hours of the school days, marking loads that shuffled endlessly from place to place, blurring the line from work and home, conversations with colleagues that spurred late night think sessions, bureaucratic to-do lists that slayed the last vestiges of time in wads of red tape. It could be exhilarating, it was more often draining, it was always all-consuming but I was always clear in who I was: a teacher.

The downhill slide out of my work identity was fast and furious. Somehow I found myself gasping for breath in the turmoil of illness--mental states churning brain fog so thick it was unnavigable, physically I was wrested from reality to some hallucinating parody of life. No, there was no quarter given. I was embroiled headlong into a space I didn't recognize nor see any way out of. I was so sick it consumed all of me, leaving the teacher in me behind in a cloud of dust. Who was I without my work?

Over weeks I leaned into the medical system, over months, I floundered into psychiatric wards, mental health diagnoses and somatic symptoms. I cried my way through intensive therapy, like the peeling back of layers of trauma only to reveal more trauma and more dismay. I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into the morass of the tattered remnants of myself.  I was tired. And so I slept the uneasy unrestful sleep of depression and fibromyalgia. Over years I slept unknowing when I would rise again from that darkness. Who was I now?  I suffered immensely but there were so many questions about who I could connect myself to beyond everything that happened to me. Surely I was more than that? I was disabled, I was mentally ill.

It has been 6 years now, of deep therapy and learning to see the complexities of my childhood traumas. I have worked hard to bridge the gaps of my automatic actions and dissociated thought processes, have come to terms with the anger that rages inside of me, have built a myriad of strategies for overcoming difficulties. I have found the thin rays of light in absolute despair and can see my way out of the hollowness of illness. My energy is returning in spurts and spouts and now it appears I have reached a crossroads where the sidewalk ends...but Who am I now?