[S]piritual evolution does not proceed in a linear fashion. It uses the polarities of light and dark to create dynamics and change. … Each of us is a sacred being who lies forever, and any moment, even that moment we consider darkest, can serve as the catalyst that propels the soul to new and greater heights along the spiral of evolution.
—Robert Schwartz, Your Soul’s Gift

In this life, many demolitions are actually renovations.  —Rumi

The power of God is with you at all times; through the activities of mind, senses, breathing, and emotions; and is constantly doing all the work using you as a mere instrument.  —Bhagavad Gita

 

 

In 2009, my life took a dramatic turn. At the time, I thought it had ended. Certainly, it fell apart. Over the following year, I began to piece it back together, rather like a jigsaw puzzle with some missing pieces. I thought I would have everything back together within a year. Instead, I began building a stronger life, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Now, generally speaking, I am happier with my life than I was before 2009. I am less stressed, and I am happier and more content than ever, excepting possibly my early childhood.

What I have discovered across this journey is what so many before me have recognized: that destruction is often required to properly rebuild.

 

This week, I once again felt compelled to share my story in depth. The original compulsion (in 2009) was to write a book entitled Year of Shadow and Light, telling the story of my very sudden loss of vision and of what I expected would be my year of recovery until my sight was fully restored. Because things change and rarely go as we expect, the book has not yet been published, but this new urging is for me to share the story now rather than wait until some shadowy date in the future when the story can be published in book form.

In this week’s blog post, I share a recording in which I explain this and read the introduction and the first chapter of the book. Over the next few weeks, I will continue to share my story in depth.

You can watch my YouTube video (link below), or read those sections of the manuscript (provided below the video in this post). You are essentially my beta readers, my “test audience” for the manuscript, so please tell me what you think after you have listened/read.

 

Introduction

In the late summer and early autumn of 2009, in a matter of about 2 weeks, I lost nearly all of my vision while I and several doctors thought I was having a migraine resulting from a miscarriage. I was diagnosed with a disease called ideopathic intracranial hypertension (IIH), sometimes known as pseudotumor cerebri (PTC), a disease in which too much cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is created and builds up in the nervous system, putting pressure on the brain, spine, optic nerve, etc.–essentially, any part of the nervous system that is surrounded by and “protected” by CSF. I had to undergo optic nerve sheath fenestration (ONSF) on both eyes to relieve the excess pressure. As a result of getting the disease under control and having the ONSF done, my visual acuity is nearly as good as it was before, but I have lost basically all of my peripheral vision and have what are called transient visual obscurations–basically, “clouds” in my vision. (Did you ever play that “game” as a kid where you sat down and sat staring at something and nearly closed your eyes, getting them as closed as you could and still actually see something, filtered as it was by your eyelashes and maybe some eye crusties? That’s what having visual obscurations is like, at least for me. Or like getting really close to the screen on a screen door and trying to look through it, where you can’t really make out the individual lines of the screen weave, but everything’s a little darker, and if anything is stuck in the screen, it gets in the way of you seeing what’s beyond. That’s a bit like it, too. The only difference is that my obscurations are—well, sort of blank…I think because my brain can’t figure out exactly what goes in that hole, it fills in that missing piece of image with a vague blur of nearly the right shade of color—kind of like when you draw a picture in Microsoft Paint and then accidentally delete a section and you zoom in REALLY close to fill in the three pixels that are missing, but you can’t find the right color, so when you zoom back out, the image is just a TEENSY bit off. Yeah, it’s like that, but the images have a lot more “blurs” of color there. Those are transient visual obscurations as I know and really don’t love them.)

 

Although this book is titled Year of Shadow and Light, that has become a bit misleading. When I set out to write this book, I intended to write only about the year from roughly September 2009 to September 2010. The more I wrote, however, the more I decided that was not really helpful. I tend to see connections and patterns in things that other people don’t see. I ruminate a lot on those connections in my brain as I live my life, and I discuss them with those who are willing to hear me out and challenge my thoughts or agree with me or add more. Because I see those connections, I love explaining them to others.

 

Because of this tendency of mine, I couldn’t simply write about my year of shadow and light—not meaningfully, anyway—and that’s really what I wanted to write—a meaningful book. If it’s not meaningful, I figured, why write it? Quite apart from wondering who would buy my book, because I’m a “nobody,” I wondered who would want to buy a book that wasn’t meaningful.

I start with giving a brief (as brief as I can be) summary of the most important times and influential people of my first 29 years. Darkness and Shadow cover the time of upheaval, when my world got turned upside-down. These two parts will have a very different voice from the others because with my narrative, written, in some cases, more than a year after the original event, I will be using a lot of my journal entries from that time. I have kept a journal since I was in grade school and have found it to be incredibly cathartic because I can admit feelings to the page that I can’t yet admit to family and friends, and, well, the page doesn’t get tired, frustrated, and short-tempered with me pouring out the same frustrations and heartache over and over again. I also turn to the journal because I’m used to people around me being very busy, and I hate to call and disturb them at all hours of day and night. Thankfully, you won’t have to read all my journal entries. They would make a volume or two of their own. Basically, these two parts of the book use my journal entries to say what I cannot, because things happened so quickly that they are still a blur to me, and because they are so emotional that if I wrote about them now, it would be with a detached coolness that I have had to cultivate to endure, but what is most important to understanding the spiritual aspect of my journey overall, I think, is that people understand just how terrifying or exuberant or confusing these months were, and the journal entries capture that because they were written in the peak of all those emotions.

As I mentioned earlier, the last part of the book, Light, covers important events that have happened since September 2010 and overall discussions of my life—the reasons I think this happened (or, if you prefer, the meaning I am choosing to assign to them) and how I am trying to make this time of my life be of value to myself and others.

 

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen

—Prayer of St. Francis

I. Prelude

1980–Summer 2009

Gratitude helps us to savor the gifts of devotion. It allows us to enjoy the beauty and blessings of daily living, to see the ordinary with awe and appreciation, and to find joy in unexpected places. It inspires us to respond with generosity to the gifts of kindness we receive every day.  —Linda Prince Jones, Devoted Love

The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.  —Robert Louis Stevenson

 

1. The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA

 

We humans are social beings. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others’ activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.   —His Holiness the Dalai Lama

 

I grew up as a pretty happy girl. I loved my parents and my parents’ friends, and I loved my extended blood family and “adopted” family. I loved school, and I did well at school. I have mostly good, happy memories of my childhood, with a few sad memories thrown in, those mostly relating to loss of loved ones and general breakup of friendships. But I grew and formed new relationships with new friends. Although I would never call myself a social butterfly, I certainly had learned, by being my parents’ child, to mostly be polite to people, and I had learned how to work my way through a crowd, doing my duty to see and speak to everyone who wanted to see me and speak to me and follow up with me about my life—I lived in a pretty small community and was always much more likely to spend time with adults than other kids, given the lack of kids my age and my general personality.

I went to college and “overachieved,” having only 1 summer free of classes, during which I worked the job I’d worked for the previous 2 summers. After that, my coursework kept me up to the max on course credits in classes through summer sessions until I graduated. Some semesters, I even had to audit certain courses that I simply wanted to take but couldn’t take for credit because they would have cost so much. In the last two years of my college career, I was also working several jobs so I was working 36–40 hours a week in addition to my full-plus course load. I had student loans to cover everything, so it wasn’t like I was working to support myself. I just liked to stay busy. My parents were always on the go, so I had learned it from them. I figured the little bit of money I made from my jobs was great for spending money and allowed me to go on a couple of spring break trips and to go out with my friends occasionally on the weekends—and fund my book and music habit.

I graduated college and immediately started working full-time for the publishing company I had been interning with. Within a few months, however, I realized that the money just wasn’t going to cut it, even though I was sharing an apartment with three other girls, so I started looking at grad school so I could get a better-paying job (this was when most publishing companies in the city where I lived were consolidating, cutting back, etc…there were a glut of people from publishing on the market, and I knew it). So one night, I wrote a letter to my boss telling her that I was looking at going to grad school again (an earlier plan had fallen through) but that I really wanted to stay with the company but couldn’t afford to. Next thing I knew, I was offered a salaried position. Well, color me surprised (and apprehensive)! I doubted my ability to do this new job, but my supervisor was confident in me. She was still confident in me a couple of weeks later when I lost a longstanding client and broke down in tears in her office. It wasn’t my fault, she told me—the client had been looking for a way to get out because our company had let go of the salesperson whom the client had been used to working with—my performance had been only a shabby excuse for their hasty retreat. I guess she was right, because I never had any problem like that again, nor have I since.

As I look back now, I realize that I was being led down my path. I was being groomed for everything that was to come, prepared for dealing with the events in my year of shadow and light and helping me come through with the mission to write this book. I excelled at the job, and I loved it. I wasn’t editing as I had always hoped to, but I was managing projects and interacting with clients and staff. It was fantastic!

Eventually, the people who ran the company decided to let some more people go. And then some more. And then some more. I decided to look for other jobs but stay at this company as long as they would keep me, because it was small and I was learning a lot and working with some really fun and interesting folks. So when I was finally told that they were “letting me go” and I should go home, but I could come back the next day to get my things, I wasn’t surprised. I drove home and THEN started to freak out.I had only been barely paying my bills, as my roommates and I had all gone our separate ways a few months before and I was now living alone. Hell, I had even borrowed some money from my parents to pay my bills. I couldn’t really break the lease on my apartment, because I had only just moved in. I considered moving back in with my parents, several hours away, but I didn’t know if I could find a job if I did that—a waste of an education. I started trying to figure out how to apply for unemployment.

The next day, I went back in to gather my things and was told that they had decided to keep me after all. I was one of 6 or 7 people who would be staying at the company (the number had been closer to 50 when I had hired on 2 1/2 years before). I could keep my salary, but I would be expected to do a few more things. That wasn’t a problem for me—I’d done at least a little bit of nearly everything in the time I’d been there, and I always liked adding new skills to my repertoire.

Not long after that, I met Mike.

***

Thank you for joining me on this recounting of the beginning of my journey, and please let me know via comments here what you think so far and if you want to hear/read more of my story.

 

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