Take Back Your Life

Jonathan often talks to me about missing his life and wanting it back. For him that means that he wants to have the same function he had in his 20s: He wants to be able to get out, socialize; he wants the same cognitive ability; he wants to be able to read, to direct movies on set, go to school. His illness has taken a lot from him, and he wants at least some of it back.

I have always understood this and empathized with him. For the past seven years or so, I’ve always been grappling with “missing my life.” And what does that even mean? I’m not mentally ill, so I have not lost cognitive function. I have not lost the ability to work. I can write. I can edit. I can teach. I’m well.

And yet something has been tugging at me.

For a while I thought it was because I’d lost my dreams of what I’d be in the future. And age will do that. I’ll be 60 in April, and by the time you hit 60, most of your life is behind you, not in front of you. Besides, I’m already the person I’d wanted to be in the future: I’m a writer. I’m an editor. And, no, I haven’t had the success of a Stephen King, a J.K. Rowling, or my favorite John Irving, but I fulfilled the goal I’d set for myself. Actually I’ve fulfilled most of my goals: I got my B.A., my M.A., did some work on a doctoral program.

In short, I’ve done what I set out to do a little more than 20 years ago. Getting where I am today has frequently been very hard.

Getting my B.A. when I was a single mother of two young kids was not easy, but I had help. I had incredible friends. One day when both kids were sick and I had a final, a friend came and stayed with them. If I hadn’t had friends along the way, I’d never had gotten where I now am.

And in 2010, when Jonathan and I got back together and he was in such dire shape, my goal was to get him as stabilized as I could and set up his environment so that it would be conducive to his getting well. And I’ve done that. And it’s been hard.

But the thing is–that’s what I like. I like things to be hard. I’ve told my therapist that if I were not human, I’d be a salmon–swimming upstream until the day I die. She told me I might think about changing my mojo.

Yeah. Maybe.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe swimming upstream is what I do. It’s what I’m good at, what I like. The harder the challenge, the greater the satisfaction.

So…

On Thursday, I was in an incredibly pissy mood. One of the dogs here — a little brat of a dog, Sasha — attacked one of the most docile dogs in the world: Triscuit. And because this is not the first time that Sasha has gone after one of the dogs–and she is vicious when she does–I decided she needed to be put down. (I have since decided to first try Prozac, a muzzle, and training.)

So when I picked up Jonathan from his psychiatrist, I was kind of foul. Still, we decided to go out for dinner, and I vented. I vented about Sasha and how I didn’t want to put her down but didn’t know what else to do. And I vented about self-actualization. That I wanted to be sure, before I died, that I’d done all that I’d wanted or needed in order to reach my own potential.

On Thursday, I kept thinking, okay, so does that mean I need to write a best seller, resume teaching? Exactly, what does it mean to self-actualize? (Damn that Maslow anyway.)

And then last night — Saturday night — I saw Emilio Estevez’s The Way, a movie about making a pilgrimage along el Camino del Santiago from France to Spain. It’s an 800 km walk. And it’s hard and challenging and introspective — both the movie and the hike. It is life changing, life affirming.

Then I got it: What’s lacking in my life right now is a concrete challenge. One I can meet and overcome. And that’s what I need. That’s what feeds my soul, what makes me grow, what ultimately brings me joy and satisfaction: a concrete challenge.

So today I am heading over to REI to try on walking shoes, a day pack, and any other hiking paraphernalia I can find, so I can start walking, start training, with the ultimate goal being a trek from France to Spain along el Camino del Santiago.

We’ll see how I do.