How I Found My Purpose
When I first graduated from college, I wanted to be a childcare worker. I wanted to take care of the most vulnerable youth, referred to as S.E.D. children or “severely emotionally disturbed.” So my career started off at a residential treatment center in San Francisco. This population of children needed more psychiatric care than the foster system could provide. Their short lives had been dominated by trauma. And the treatment center provided an education, a stable environment, and psychiatric care for them. I was hired as a part of the educational team in the middle school on campus.
There was a small chapel across the street from the entrance of the treatment center. I would go to meditate during breaks and to let the stillness cloak my frayed nerves. The heavy smell of incense would crowd out the small terrors I might have witnessed that day. A cloak of silence would settle over me. And this is when I would always hear it. Not hear as in an actual voice, but hear as in become aware of something that I could sense: a knowing. I would know that I’m not doing what I am meant to do. And I can’t articulate the precision of that knowing; it was more of an absence. I knew that something critical was missing, but I didn’t know what.
The emotional toll of the work for me was significant. I didn’t separate myself from the children. I counted myself among them. I had known what it was to be held down against my will. And this formed an indelible bond between us. So much so that the most difficult aspect of the job for me was one I hadn’t anticipated. As childcare counselors, we had to learn how to physically retrain the children if they had a psychotic break and needed to be kept safe from harming themselves or someone else in the classroom.
Typically, another physically stronger counselor would assist me in a restraint if one was ever needed in the course of a day. But one day, after about a year of being a counselor, I was forced to try to restrain a 13-year-old boy on my own. Let’s call him Titanic, because he was obsessed with it. He was beloved to me. And I can’t remember if I ever knew what it was that triggered him that day. I just remember him suddenly climbing up on his desk and screaming a scream that I can still hear today. It was the kind of scream that told his whole story. Hiding under the house from his father, then one abusive foster home after another. It was the kind of scream that comes from a human being who has never felt safe and has never known home.
I was standing by the doorway. I remember bracing myself against the wall at first as he came charging at me. When we were out in the hallway, I forgot all of my training. The head teacher and assistant counselor, consumed with tending to the rest of the classroom, trusted me to keep Titanic safe. But I couldn’t seem to snap out of that miasma of pain his scream had plunged me into. I was frozen. I fumbled through some self-defense. Shielded my face. And then I attempted to begin a restraint by getting hold of his arms behind his back and lowering him to the ground. This only served to enrage him further. And this is the last thing I remember before the searing pain, he said, in nearly a snarl, “This isn’t who you are.” Then he slammed me with all his strength against the wall, right where there happened to be a fixture that hit by spine in just such a way that my L4 disk has never been the same.
For a long while, I had to stay flat on my back. Any movement created electric rivulets of pain that lit up channels in my back like the tiny green veins on the underside of a leaf. And so I read. I read everything I could find about female saints and mystics. From India to France, Norway, and Sweden and then on to Spain. I read about the connection between physical suffering and mystical states of being. And I cried. A lot. I cried at all this wisdom that had been lived and then lost to history. Because the wisdom was lived and written by a female.
And I cried because I felt called out. I felt this deep sense that Titanic identified that lurking restlessness that would meet me when I meditated; I wasn’t being true to who I really am.
Workers' Compensation covered my physical therapy. And in the weeks to come, I began to move without the searing pain. I found yoga. I found acupuncture. I found that my new back demanded I put my body first before all things.
I wasn’t ready to give up on what I saw as a life of service. This is when I found a position as a childcare counselor with pregnant teens. And if Titanic called me out, the teenage girls at St. E’s led me to my calling, to the way I’m meant to live out my purpose of being fully human.
My purpose is who I am not what I do.
Who I am is a fragile human ego and an eternal soul. My purpose is to live out the full expression of them both. What I do is write. What I do is write about god. But if one day, the pain gets too intense for me to sit like this, to write, my purpose remains. I am called to be a true Human being: to be fully human and fully divine. This never changes even as my ability to write inevitably does.
Writing is what I’m meant to do with my purpose. What I mean is if our purpose is to be both fully human and fully divine, I can practice that cocktail of extremes the most exquisitely for myself in writing. Because writing asks me to bring love to where I am most human. I am the most vulnerable, the hardest on myself, the most critical, and the most insecure in my writing. So, the depths of the love that I might be also is called on for me to write.
What is the one thing that demands you love yourself fiercely in order to do it?
With only more love,
M.