What do I do with myself? A haunting question when you’ve abandoned the path you were on.

I had purpose, proficiency. Those feel quite far now. It used to be: Make life better for other people. That’s your sole purpose, your sole drive, what you pour all your energy and time and dreams into. It gives you a reason to be here, something to orient around.

And now?
I don’t know how to exist if I’m not doing that. You’d think I’d have learned by now, another guiding way, after being six years into the breakdown. Six years of saying, I can’t do this; this is not how I want to exist; it’s not right, it never was. And trying to rest, trying to choose things just because they brought me joy. Trying to say it’s okay if I do this even if it’s just for me. Learning to set down the old contract of sacrificing myself.

Am I still wrestling with it, that joy is reason enough to exist? The craving for purpose, usefulness…I suppose we all want to be needed. To add to the beauty, to have it matter that we were here. That we contributed something.

I haven’t been able to contribute as much lately. I’ve been collapsed in grief. But I think maybe more of us are in that place at any one given time than we think – feeling, unraveling, metabolizing what it is to be human to a degree that we can’t produce in the way capitalism would like us to, or even in the way we would like to. As I’ve sat here empty handed, with nothing left to give, many have come alongside me just to be with me in that place. It isn’t lost on me how hard of a place to be, to join me there, for even just a few moments. But the presence of others has carried me. I’m beginning to wonder if all we actually have to give is presence.

Presence comes in many vessels; a meal, or a cup of coffee. A walk. Being on the other end of the phone when my tears visit, even if there is nothing to say. The “You’re on my heart today” text, the “this tea shop made me think of you” message. I don’t know that the form matters as much as the being with, not being ahead of me or behind me but being with me and all the hope or sorrow that is present in this moment.

I wonder if the beauty I can add to most are the bonds between us. And whether they were – are – life giving. Do we honor each others sovereignty? Each others magic? Each others autonomy? Each others dreams, and becoming? Do I wish for you to thrive? Do I sit with you in the suffering? Do I stay with you until it passes? Do I cherish your joy? It all goes awry when I use you, or keep you where I want you to be; when you constrict me, or control me; when you move me like a pawn on your board, all out of the need to not be lonely. The need to be loved and the fear that we won’t be.

It’s human, the need to be loved; and it’s not wrong – we need love. It’s not a shameful thing, to need people. But I see that it’s the desperate grasp at control, the fearful taking it into my own hands and squeezing eyes shut and clenching my fists with an iron grip so that nothing changes, so that this security I’ve found never leaves me – it chokes it. It suffocates it.

It’s terrifying to let that grip go. Probably the most terrifying thing we ever do as humans, especially if you’ve had seasons or years where you did not have the love and protection you needed.

As I’ve lost the person I hold most dear, there is really only one thing that gives me enough strength to let go: I love him. Knowing that he need this, to take space and follow his path, and no matter what I may want or need, how this terrifies me and rips me in half and leaves me shattered and left to pick up the pieces somehow- I love him. And love doesn’t hold on to you for my sake. It wants you to follow your joy, even if I wish that was life beside me.

So…what now?

My instruction booklet is small, and it won’t grant me access to chapters too far ahead. The inclination is to define myself, scramble for a hold. To figure myself out like a puzzle. To look for the clues about what I’m going to do next: Oh, I love color and expression and writing, so I’ll be a journalist. I investigate things to the root, I love the outdoors, having a home to retreat to is important for me, I’m prone to overwhelm, and I really like coffee shops. There. That’s who I am, so that’ll give me the blueprint to follow. I can create a five step plan that guarantees contentment and purpose and fulfillment. And even more, belonging and love.

But what if I treated myself more like a good story I don’t know the ending to yet? Where I’m so curious to turn the page, but you really can only turn one page at a time.

I want the guarantee of the ending; I want to see the blueprint before I begin, so I can trust the process. Does it turn out well? Am I happy and surrounded by love, in the end? Will I be hurt like that again? Does it get better from here?

I suppose the end of our story is already known: I will lose everything and everyone I have ever loved. That’s the end of our blueprint here on earth, anyway. A final goodbye, a letting go, before what comes Beyond. I wouldn’t think I’d like a story that ends like that. But what if I can’t judge a book by its last page anymore than by its cover? What if the pages in between end up being my favorite book, sorrowful parts included, and I’d never know if I didn’t read it?

To some degree here, I’m talking about faith. A concept that gets truncated by religion, and shattered by trauma. Or at least, for me it did.

Religion told me to have faith that it would all be okay, and ignored when it wasn’t. Minimized people’s pain and suffering, said there was a “reason for everything.” But my sensitive soul paid attention: it wasn’t always okay. Thousands die in genocide. Gifted people spend their lives in survival mode working three minimum wage jobs because of classism and discrimination. Nobody protected me when my dad molested me. It didn’t actually always turn out okay.

But faith is coming to mean something different to me. I’m not sure yet, exactly what, but it has to do with the fact that there is always love somewhere close by. That there is a Deeper Current no one can extinguish. It’s not enough to keep me from suffering. It doesn’t always intervene in time to prevent the harm. But it’s here.
In my friends phone calls.
In the way I learn to be more gentle with myself.
In the $1000 check my cousins sent me.
In my moms “you’ll always have me”.

There is dark, but there is also light. I think denying either one shrivels us. We have to name the dark, when it’s here. And we have to name the light, when it’s here.
Sometimes, it’s more one than the other. Right now, I’m missing a particular light in my life; it used to be here everyday, brightening what it felt like to be alive. It got really dark, in his absence. But others came with a candle, and helped me look at the dark corners, take inventory of the parts of me that had been waiting, trembling, buried in those corners.

I’m not saying that my partner leaving was a good thing; that would deny the pain and suffering. But I also can’t call it a bad thing; that would deny the love that has found me even in this dark place, that reached parts of me I wasn’t seeing in the light. I can only say what is true:
This is so painful. Most days I don’t want to be awake. I lost the person who is home.
This is changing me. I have more self compassion for the version of me that lived without rest and joy for so long. I’m learning to loosen my fearful grip on control. I’m allowing myself to need people, facing the terror of not being impenetrable, the terror of hurting, the terror of not being able to make it through my days without support. I feel my vulnerability, something I buried quickly and thoroughly at age seven; something that might be okay to beckon back into the light now.

I’m not going to say I’m glad this happened so I could grow in this way. That’s weighing my evolving against the presence of the person I love most deeply and asking me which I value more; I won’t answer that, because it’s an impossible choice. I will only say I’m growing, and I miss him. His absence is planet sized.

I guess what I’m saying is, faith doesn’t protect me. I have suffered, and I will suffer more. Faith is just seeing that the Deeper Current is always there, too.

For now, this is what I have; an instruction booklet of my own making, one that I chose. It is far emptier than its predecessor, but I am learning to be less afraid of that and more open hearted to the colors and textures that have started to appear. And maybe it’s more of a story, than instruction. A story of a Deeper Current.