I Left My Beloved New York to Find Freedom
Six years later, my writing showed me the way
“I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.” -C.S. Lewis
Disconnection lies at the root of all suffering, said all wise humans, throughout all time. What they meant — when we disconnect from our emotions and people, or neglect our passions and needs, we fall into despair. Inside this prison of separation, we become isolated. Isolated long enough, we suffer.
There is but only one way out.
I was young, fresh out of my master’s program at New York University with razor sharp focus and a plan when the first major chapter of my life began. For fifteen years I worked as a psychotherapist. I had fears, about launching my own practice and being of help to people double my age. But they felt paper thin compared to the fire moving inside me, one I would only be able to define when I launched my second business seven years later, a co-working space for mental health professionals in mid-town Manhattan.
My psychotherapy gig, at once a passion, morphed over the years into a massive burden. Even so and only afterwards could I see how it brought me a deeper understanding of human complexity, the power of intuition, and how in knowing myself I was becoming the creator and shaper of my destiny. Because I’d spent many years in therapy facing my shadows and expanding my mind, I was able to do what I did next.
I left everything.
With no clue as to what would come next, yet certain of where I needed to be, following a call so revelatory it felt as if I’d found the cure for cancer, I arrived in Berlin, Germany. Within a year and a half, I launched my career as an artist, a vocation I’d never imagined before. I made headway as a painter, but six years later I put that work on the back-burner to dive deeper into my love for words, writing being the one thread I can trace back to my early-teens when I discovered the power of journaling, now asking, thirty years later at forty-three, for my full attention. Only do I understand now why it’s the one thing I won’t ever give up.
I write for the same reason I left New York and the two successful businesses I spent most of my twenties and thirties creating, from a yearning that made me work my ass off all those years, and the fire that helped launch my second business to free me from the first, the weight of my psychotherapy work something I no longer wanted to hold.
Writing is the bridge back to myself, it’s how I reclaim my disconnected parts.
The fourteen year long love affair with my favorite city on the planet had ended. Even at the top of my game, being a psychotherapist no longer felt like me. The disconnect between the life I was living and an amorphous truth nagging inside me waiting to be opened, uncovered in an act of faith, in the scary commitment to “the finding through the doing”, was too much to bear. A part of me felt missing, who that me was, I did not know.
I don’t think we always know what we need. When I was working as a therapist, I wasn’t ignoring a call to be an artist or writer. That impulse hadn’t yet emerged in a compelling or decipherable way. What had, was the unrelenting feeling that something was amiss and while there were hints as to the direction I would take next (I had interior designed a space, I started to publish in online Indie journals), the future me about to be born woke the present me up with only a feeling, the punch of a command which morphed into a deep knowing, to leave everything plus the location as to where I would start next.
If there’s one thing I can name that was missing from my work, it was playfulness. Not that being a psychotherapist isn’t playful, it just wasn’t that for me. By the end it felt like a vampire sucking the life out of me. Vacation after vacation, the relentless attempts to find my disconnected parts in travel adventures, were bandaids that no longer could mask the enormity of an ache that had started to consume me.
Writing gives me the permission to play.
Not only that, it’s where my playful spirit naturally emerges and it’s where, more crucially, I’m learning to play more. It’s only when I dare to do that — play with words, imagery and feeling, with myself — that I get a real grip on my experiences. That which is pestering, confusing and holding me prisoner, I alchemize into something meaningful and decipherable.
Pain is inevitable, suffering is (ultimately) a choice, all wise humans also said. Writing transforms my pain before all goes to hell inside the prison. I’ve been called a wordsmith, but the act of writing also feels shamanic, an act of ritual magic where I use my words to manifest my reality, my sword cutting out what no longer serves, my hands molding the unknown into something I often haven’t imagined before.
I am the mid-wife to a new perspective, a perspective which takes on a life of its own, generating a force, healing as it reveals and unravels my inner chaos, the dark in me that wants to self-destruct, and opening a new door, an alternate reality that liberates. I am casting a spell with my words.
To discover something new about myself, to be taken by surprise by an insight that gets formed, only on paper, through the play (and the struggle) with words even if the most difficult place for me to be is the unknown is the main point of writing for me. The rest are mere exercises, many of which I’ve done, in mental masturbation. When I’m at my best, I am writing myself alive.
That paradox, the excitement and fear of the unknown which simultaneously arises as I find my way through the dark, is what makes writing so intimate. It’s an act of self love where I hold space for my opposites, the conflicting truths, the good, the bad and the ugly. In that dynamic brew, I find answers, I feel centered.
As I connect back to myself and all my lost parts, I find freedom. Connection is the remedy for suffering, the only way out of the prison.
It doesn’t, however, need to be connection forged through writing or art. It’s about finding a link, establishing a re-connection through engaging in something, anything you love or discovering something new, these actions, no matter the form, becoming the trans-former and alchemizer of that darkness which devours, the separation that isolates, those ideas unconsciously or intentionally created that destroy.
Connection could be spending time with people you love and baring your soul, risking your vulnerability. It might entail the grueling job of working through a past trauma, looking, one by one, at all the ghosts in your closet. We all have at least one.
Writing, like any craft, takes time to develop. In large part, it’s about voice, finding the way towards authenticity, how we naturally, by being ourselves and using our creative magic, stamp the world with our expression. In writing, we shine light on who we already are — our flaws, strengths and quirks. But what’s most promising and exciting for me, it’s the place where I discover new ways of being and relating, a discovery with the potential to ripple and animate every aspect of my life, how I show up for myself, for others and whatever gets thrown at me.
I’m almost forty-six years old. My wizard wand is out. My hands are free, my sword is sharpened. I am ready for anything.
Beauty, youth, good fortune, even love itself, cannot keep care and pain, loss and sorrow, from the most blessed for...into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and sad and dreary.” —Louisa May Alcott
