The Year That Said No
This was a hard year. A year that asked more of me than I could faithfully give. One that stripped me down to beggar’s clothes; sack cloth and ash. A year that held an ambulatory health crisis with odds that took me closer to death each day. An eighty percent chance that this large blood clot in my brain could let loose at any moment. Eighty percent.
In the midst of this crisis, my mother got into an accident that nearly killed her, but decided to severely maim her instead. While she was in rehab for all of her broken pieces, another family member stalwartly checked into rehab. Not for broken bones, but a broken heart searching for respite in the bottom of a bottle. There was homelessness, then, a new diagnosis for the lesion in my brain. Oh, it’s actually nothing. It’s a funny story, it’s actually a lipoma - a fatty tumor - that is seated against the largest blood supply to the brain, and so it tricked us. I won’t die. There are no terrifyingly risky procedures to be done. There is nothing to do but to re-scan my brain every 6 years, and if the lipoma behaves, it’ll be forgotten. Eighty percent went down to zero within a day. Relief baptized me and then foolishness settled in. How do I have the right to feel relief over something that wasn’t real to begin with? I had a loaded gun pointed at my face and then found out there were no rounds in the chamber. But I didn’t know that. I didn’t know.
The final indignity was that the vertigo I struggle with had also worsened this year. The episodes were more severe; longer lasting with fewer clear days between bouts. So I relish each day that allows me to read and write and play with my kids without debilitating nausea, because those days will come for me again. The days where I come untethered from the world. Free-floating in space with nothing to pull me back and situate me into my life. I was forced into medical leave at work, the job that was paying for me to finally finish my formal education. The snagged thread was pulled and it all came apart.
My life screamed no at every turn. Instead of continuing to push myself into oblivion, I listened. My body gave way, my emotions gave in, and I surrendered to the idea that nothing about this life would be good if I didn’t prioritize my health. I needed a sabbatical from the way that I was living my life. Complete submission. Complete trust. Complete withdraw from life as I knew it. A wise man once said that “Tragedy doesn’t ruin us. Hopelessness does,” and I was nearing the cliff of hopelessness from the multitude of limitations my health was burying me beneath, and the lack of sacred space needed to rest and heal.
As door after door was closed, and my own plans were snuffed out, I had to reassess what life was asking of me. When I sat with this year of no’s, I found a glimmering hope in one thing: resurrection. There is always a whispered promise of resurrection. My life was a dead thing that I was trying to prop up and make alive. Memory and experiences are a kind of architecture that give shape and form to life, and because of this, I had a broken down home. I needed to find out why the windows had blurred, obscuring my view. I needed to fix the stress fractures, and to know which walls I had put my trust in that were not load-bearing.
I made space for grief. Just because I knew this decision was merited, was holy, didn’t mean that it wasn’t hard. It didn’t mean that the work I accomplished to get to this place, where my goal was so close, wasn’t a sacrifice to lay down. So, while I grieve this pause, I also submit myself wholly to it, knowing that resurrection is on the other side.