(Trigger warning: suicide)

I inherited my propensity for intense and vivid dreaming from my mother. We would often regale each other with stories from our previous night’s escapades, and it was typically a draw to determine who had the most outlandish dream. 

Like the time I dreamt I used the little salt packets I stole from a hotdog cart vendor on the streets of NYC to subdue the acid-spitting-slug-people that were causing chaos in the streets. 

Or the time my mother dreamt of watching an itty-bitty polar bear family, wearing snowshoes, making their way across the frozen tundra of the kitchen floor linoleum. 

My dreams can also be scary and disturbing. 

The dreams I hate above all others are my flying dreams. I know lots of people that love their flying dreams, finding them invigorating and freeing. They’re able to cast off their daily worries and soar high to great vistas without any effort at all. How I envy such flying dreams.   

My flying dreams are exceedingly arduous. The only reason I ever fly in a dream is because I am in great peril. Someone or something is chasing me and if they catch me, I’ll end up dead. I expend an inordinate amount of energy just to gain a few feet of altitude and I can never get much higher than the rooftops. Before long, I can’t sustain what little height I gained for my efforts and I come flopping back to the ground in an ungraceful heap.

I was talking with some friends recently about how I’m doing right now. An unpredictable question these days as most of us can no longer give a simple response of “I’m good, how about you?” 

How am I doing, you ask?

I’ve just quit my job in order to live the life of my dreams. In theory, I should be skipping through my days with nary a care in the world. But that state of being has yet to manifest itself. Instead, I find myself in limbo. Stuck in a “no man’s land” between what is and what could have been. 

Nothing is going according to plan or how I hoped and dreamed it would be at this point. For example, at this very moment I am supposed to be on a plane with Glenn headed to Kenya and Tanzania for a three-week walking safari…but, COVID-19 put a stop to that. 

I had planned to be spending my new-found free time focusing on regaining some of my health and fitness through lots of running and hiking…but, I’ve come down with plantar fasciitis and just taking a single step is quite painful. 

I had planned to have the freedom to pack up the car at a moment’s notice and set off to explore new sites and experiences like a multi-day alpaca-supported hike through the Wallowa Mountains…but, I need to stay close to home in order to provide almost daily care for a dear elderly friend that is nearing the end of his life.

I had planned to spend several days in wine country with Glenn “glamping” on a farm in a fancy platform tent and playing with a yard full of frolicking goats…but, a huge windstorm came through blowing down trees, knocking out power and starting big fires that precipitated the evacuation of the area we were supposed to be spending our nights.  

I had planned to spend my birthday lounging on the deck of a vacation rental overlooking a tranquil bay in the San Juan Islands…but, the choking wildfire smoke and hazardous air quality meant zero visibility to take in the beautiful view, even if it had been safe to go outside and breathe. 

Disappointment, after disappointment, after disappointment.

This sense of disappointment is exacerbated by a foreboding dread of the stressful, horrible, unthinkable thing that is waiting around the next corner. It seems that every day I wake up to news about something bad happening to our country, or to my community, or to the environment, or to people I’m acquainted with, or to people I deeply love and adore. 

One of the primary reasons that Glenn and I decided to take a break from working right now was to prioritize those things in our life we wanted most (especially international travel) with the knowledge that if we waited too long – waited for the perfect time or waited until we were of retirement age – those opportunities might no longer be available to us.

We’re both now free from the confines of work, but other more powerful forces are keeping us from living out our dreams. I feel stuck and can’t find any traction. I find myself becoming frantic about the time that is passing, as though each week is a missed opportunity when I could be – I should be – out doing and seeing the things I had been planning on doing and seeing for so long.

The longer I find myself in this limbo, the more I’m sure something catastrophic is lurking around the bend. That the floor is about to drop out on me. Let’s face it, 2020 has been a shit-year for almost all of us and “the floor” is already wearing thin. It reminds me of the rusted-out floorboard of the VW bug I used to drive in college where I could watch the road whizzing past through the holes at my feet. It feels like one more bump in the road and the whole thing is going to disintegrate in an instant.  

Even moments of joy are slipping through my fingers.

I’m struggling to find joy right now because of guilt. Feeling like it isn’t appropriate to experience joy when so many others are suffering so much. This is especially true for me when it comes to racial justice. My white skin enables me to make a choice to turn toward or turn away from seeing and doing something about the impacts of racism that play out for people of color every day. Black and Brown folks don’t have such a choice. 

I find myself having an internal debate about if I should be allowed to find joy in these moments when, by contrast, Black, Brown and Indigenous joy is so precious and hard-won right now. I know the answer is that everyone deserves joy, most especially right now, including me…but that doesn’t mean I don’t subconsciously pull back from my own joy a bit, regardless.

I’m also struggling to find joy right now because the universe seems determined to rip it right out of my hands. My last week of work was a rollercoaster of emotions. I was excited to be transitioning into a new phase in my life that I had been working hard to achieve. 

My co-workers, many of whom I have worked with for over 15 years, were doing a lovely job of sending me off in style – even with the restrictions of a COVID-19 reality. I was given thoughtful and creative gifts, lovely speeches and email messages. People made me goodbye videos and recorded their thoughts about how I impacted their life in a big poster. We had a joyous virtual going away party filled with smiling faces in the Zoom grid, fun stories and clever games. 

Yet, much of my joy in that moment was dampened because that same week was filled with tragedy. 

To begin, I suffered the sudden loss of my beloved and adorable dog Linus. One minute he was living life to the fullest (as was his way), and in the next minute he was bleeding to death from an undetected tumor that had burst inside his liver. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to him; in the blink of an eye he was just gone. Losing his spark, exuberance and zestful happiness has left a huge hole in my life and has taken away one of my weapons to battle back the sense of foreboding that seems to have settled around my heart because of the times we are in. 

Compounding that loss was the news that a friend and beloved co-worker had committed suicide. It was heart-wrenching to learn that at about the same time as my virtual going away party – where so many of my friends and co-workers were complaining about how our cheeks were hurting because we hadn’t laughed that much in a long time – our colleague Tony had made the decision to take his own life. He was a bright-light and steadfast leader within the Black community, and although young in his career he had already made such a positive difference in the world. I’m still working to process his loss, which at times still feels beyond comprehension.

I was talking with some friends earlier this week and expressed some of what I’ve been experiencing to them. This sense of being stuck in limbo. Of being weighed down by everything that is happening that feels so far beyond my control…while at the same time feeling unmoored, as though I’m drifting away from the dock of my hopes and dreams and I can’t seem to find a way to re-secure the ropes. 

One of my friends described something similar, as though being stuck in a dream that you can’t wake up from that keeps having all of these crazy twists and turns. At any point you are sure you are going to wake up and learn it wasn’t real…yet day after day one more unimaginable thing comes along and the nightmare continues. 

Her description immediately made me think of my damn flying dreams. 

In many ways, I feel like I’m living the manifestation of those dreams. No matter how hard I try or how much energy I expend, I just can’t quite get up high enough to get over the things that are standing in the way of my hopes and dreams for what my life was going to be like after I quit my job.

In reality, I suspect that even without COVID-19 and the various catastrophes that seem to be emblematic of the dumpster fire that is 2020, I probably would have still found myself in some version of this psychological reality. 

Significant transitions are always challenging. 

So much of my identity is/was tied up in my work. It helped give my life structure and purpose. It gave me a direct avenue to make a difference in the world and in the lives of many of those around me. I had planned to fill that void (or more likely distract myself from that void) by traveling the world and setting off on grand adventures.

I’m mourning now the loss of that opportunity to travel, however temporary it may be, and am trying to start to focus on what can happen instead. Starting to envision a new dream. Starting to uncover what my new post-working identity is meant to be.

Last night Glenn and I were watching a movie called Garnet’s Gold. It’s a documentary about a quirky middle-aged man named Garnet who seemingly hasn’t done much with his life. Garnet dreams of returning to the Scottish Highlands in search of a long-lost legendary chest of buried gold. He believes he may have stumbled upon the hiding place of the gold 30 years prior while lost in the heather and the film follows his journey to return to that spot.

Garnet’s 90-year-old bed-ridden mother, whom he still lives with, waves goodbye as he sets off for the highlands telling the camera “I hope he finds something, whatever it is. If it’s not gold, it’s his heart’s desire.”

At one point in the film Garnet’s mother is talking about his fixation with finding the gold and she says “gold isn’t just stuff that you find in the ground or in a box marked X on a map. Your life consists a lot of the time in thinking about the past and your place in it, the friends you had. You gather up fragments of gold from those – gold dust.” 

As though she was some wisened oracle speaking directly to me through the screen, I thought her words were so profound. 

Her sentiments helped me to see that I’ve been so focused on one version of the dream of what a post-work/early-retirement/sabbatical life would look like that I’m having trouble re-imagining that dream given the reality I am now living within. 

I’ve been detoured by the perceived loss of my buried chest of gold (in the form of traveling and adventuring when and where the fancy struck) and I’ve been looking right past all of the gold dust that can be found all around me. The thing about gold dust is it can’t be easily seen or picked up by hand. It takes time and attention to sift out and collect…but it is precious none-the-less.

I think that is maybe the task before me now – to loosening my grip on my long-held dream for what this phase of my life was going to be like at this point. Instead, I need to shift my focus toward actively sifting through all of the small fragments of my hopes, dreams, experiences, challenges, losses, loves and gratitude to find the gold dust.

For example, the weight and responsibility of caring for my elderly friend Doug feels untenable at times. He’s not family, yet I hold his life is in my hands. I often resent that I can’t leave town because he needs my constant help. However, he lights up and sheds tears of joy when I come to visit. He wants to hold my hand for comfort when I take him to visit the doctor. Those precious and intimate moments with Doug are golden.

My life is full of gold dust and if I can find a way to begin collecting it, I think I’ll be able to imagine an even better dream for what this next phase of my life should look like. Then, when I am free to travel and adventure, those experiences will almost certainly be more profound because I’ll be able to see and appreciate the little day to day things.

Maybe then I’ll be able to dream of flying higher than the rooftops without much effort at all.

*~*~*~*~*~*

We can all help to prevent suicide. In the U.S., free support and resources are available for you or your loved ones through the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Similar lifelines and resources are available in many other countries around the world, a listing for other countries is available here.