Journey to Here

Ibelieve that each human being has certain purposes in life. This belief crystallized for me when I held my father's hand at his bedside every day as he went through the dying process after a long and arduous battle with cancer. This experience laid the foundation for continued learning and growth and affirmed what I wanted to do with my life; if anything because of the simple knowledge of the difference it made that he did not have to die alone. His death came on the tail end of working in hospitals with individuals I did not know who were declining in functioning, and seeing the divine humanness offered within a simple smile, or if they wished, becoming a guardian of their experience through story sharing and telling. The challenges present in the suffering of chronic illness drew me to the realms of palliative and end-of-life care. As I see it, in these realms, superficialities are largely stripped away—leaving what I feel is at the core of humanity. Values, the things we find important, make us feel vital, bring us joy, the things we love to love. The passion I have for psycho-oncology, palliative, and psychosocial care transcends a job or career. I am called to do this work. My evolution has come full circle in this way, as a professional and human being. It took my father's death for me to be reborn into this phase of my life as a helper and gave me the courage to travel the path of acquiring the skills required of such. It has felt increasingly like an ultimate decision to trust my inner compass, never so much being a choice but a collective honing of a skill, of listening to my intuition. A rediscovering of some thing(s) I have always known, a trusting in inherent roots of compassion cultivated during my own rise in resilience.

Resilience is deeply ingrained in human life and the ability to heal is an inherent human capacity historically recounted throughout many cultures. The natural human ability to eclipse hardship lies at the core of tales of Odysseus, to biblical Joseph, to the lives of individuals such as Helen Keller, Nelson Mandela, and Stephen Hawking (to name very few). Some consider resilience a virtue and a form of wisdom, portraying its importance as a core human process and contributor to life and well-being. ¹ Resilience transcends the return to normalcy after stress, being more than the psychological capacity to adapt and thrive in the face of adversity.^2,3 Resilience actually facilitates readjustment and movement forward despite challenge, encapsulating a crusade into positive personal transformation and propensity for growth that perhaps had not had an opportunity to emerge before the process of suffering. ¹ It is an enduring collision of beneficial and detrimental forces rather than the sum of individual coping factors that determine resilience simultaneously. It dynamically changes over time because of this balance of influences.^2,4

From the position of bearing witness to others' rising into resilience, combined with my own rising and the experience of following my own inner compass into this work, I wonder: what if we as helpers are vessels of a type of soul transition, having a unique opportunity to facilitate resilience using tools such as presence, intuition, and our innate and common humanness? Our own willingness and understanding of resilience being an emotional stethoscope through which we can hold the suffering from others gently and assist in the recognition (through guided self-discovery) of forgotten or undiscovered reserves of strength within others?

Being a vessel of this transition requires an acceptance of the wholeness that is a person, a wholeness that encompasses both light and dark and a granting of permission to experience the darkness together, darkness not being wrong because of its existence. Through holding space we make intimate contact with vulnerabilities, unprocessed experiences, and rawness. We need presence to find a way out of fear of this darkness and being unwhole and to infuse another's inner blueprint of emotion, minute or profound, with validation. Presence is not fixing and we are all “never not broken.” We are deserving of presence because of this brokenness, because of the nondiscriminatory nature of darkness, injury, and pain. All of us go through this layering and unlayering on the journey, that is the common humanity of it.

Reflectively, I find my patients to be vessels of my own resilience (and soul), too. In sharing space with them I am fortunate enough to experience lessons of existence learned in real time. As a helper I am allowed to witness this process of coming full circle for others. I witness living definitions of resilience, deep in the trenches of their own battles with chronic illness, cancer, and challenges every day. The independent woman who fiercely guards her autonomy being forced by the sadness and disability caused by her cancer to ask for help, the most poignant of our sessions involving sitting with her on the floor while she cries tears of fear and grief. The intellectual, older gentleman (a doctor himself), possessing so many existential fears that he is not ready to ask or have answered, despite a long life he considers well-lived. These are raw moments. Moments that grow my own soul; I believe there is great privilege in bearing witness to suffering and innocent intimacy. I feel a deep gratitude in the parallel processing of my own full circle experience while also witnessing the humble cycling of others on their own journey. As such, I have learned that humans are not exempt from bending and breaking. May we continue to help each other build on resilience built in our bones, bones made of the same elements the stars are made of, through becoming guardians of lived experience. For we are also beautifully able to burn, break apart, repair, and grow strong in the most broken of places, holding the capacity to heal from the darkest of personal tragedy.