A World Map

My body is in a pulling match with itself. One foot in one foot out I tell it but my body wants to have both feet in the same place.

I’m not good at this and I never have been. I suppose it’s a safety thing or maybe a hope thing. I always keep one foot extended away from my body in a new open door. If failure happens in the room my body is in I can easily enter into the next door leading with my outstretched foot.

And if sadness enters that room and finds me there, I scuttle quickly through the next open door.

Like a bad dream, I twist knobs and fling open doors running from one room to the next. It’s not a monster that is chasing me though, it’s me who is chasing me.

I cannot ignore my desires. I listen to the advice of cynical others and I try to accept that work doesn’t need to be enjoyable and that I will never feel belonging in a group of people that is not myself.

I cannot believe this though and exit through the next door.

At my job out of college, I did not decorate my office for the first four months. I did my work and bonded with my colleagues but had no connection to the space I spent most of my day in.

One day my boss told me that by not decorating my office I did not look committed to the job.

That scared me because I thought I was committed but his words of my non-commitment felt at home with me. Maybe he knew something more about me than I did.

I threw some pictures of my dog’s nose onto the wooden surface of my desk and hung a map of the world on the wall. I did this not in an effort to fool my boss into thinking I was committed, but to fool myself into thinking I belonged here.

It didn’t work.

I had three directions I could look in that office. I could look at my computer, I could look through the window at the funeral home across the street or I could look at that map.

I choose to look at that map and each time I did I was reminded of all the places my outstretched foot could take me.

I put it into the doorway of India and quit my job. I left the map hanging on the wall so the next person could choose to look at it and not the comings and goings of hursts across the street.

In moments of extreme sadness, I would look at the funeral home and think to myself what if I can’t keep doing this? The answer was harsh. I would end up not in my office but across the street in one of those hursts.

Having one foot out the door is what saved me. Yes, the room I was in at the time was filled with extraordinary sadness and loneliness but I knew the next one would not be.

I am grateful my body engaged in that pulling match because shutting other doors would have meant shutting out hope and on days I wanted to shut everything out my body would not allow it.

These days the game of pull I play with my body is much less high stakes. I am not finding sadness in this room but I am finding steady growth. Through the next door is a more true version of myself and with it some of my greatest goals.

I like this game of pull my body is playing. I am very good at finding my balance on one foot and have no plans of pulling my foot out of any awaiting doorways.

Even if I did though, it wouldn’t be a big deal. I see lots of joy lining the wallpaper of each room and there is no funeral home in sight.