Tonda and I had flown to Oakland to see my daughter Carley and her family, and if I am honest, to be near her son, Avi. Our grandson is the joy bringer in our family, the small bright center the rest of us seem to arrange ourselves around, and nothing pulls me across the country faster than the chance to be in a room with him.
We went to bed early. There is a particular tiredness that comes from being a guest inside the full life your child has built, happy and a “job well done” feeling. Tonda was beside me. I was lying on my right side, the way I always do, and I turned over to tell her something. I was sharing a piece of news I had just read. I am not sure what it was.
What I remember is the rip. It began in the front of my shoulder, near the collarbone, and traveled up the back of my neck like a seam giving way. There was no drama to it. I had not fallen or twisted anything. I had turned toward my wife to say something, and before I had any language for what was happening, I knew that something was terribly wrong.
I have spent most of my life being healthy. It was my normal. It was never something I thought about, which is its own kind of privilege. My body did what I asked of it. It carried me through a first marriage and out the other side, through seminary, through years of sitting with the dying, through the slow and frightening work of becoming myself in my fifties. I trusted it the way you trust the floor to be there when you put your foot down.
The Year My Body Stopped Being Reliable
This year the floor is still there. It will not hold still.
It began in February, though I did not understand at first that it was a beginning. I kept getting spasms through my torso, which radiated into my chest, jaw, and down both arms. They would last for at least two minutes. This has started an ongoing mystery search with a gastroenterologist and a cardiologist. It is still not complete. I came down with pneumonia, the real kind, the kind that puts you flat and keeps you there. I had barely found my feet again when it came back a second time, before my lungs had finished healing from the first. This time I was given two antibiotics (which started with IV at the emergency room) and another course of steroids. Soon after I developed an infection from taking all the antibiotics. A month later a stomach virus arrived and emptied me out completely (literally and emotionally), and I remember lying in bed thinking, with something close to disbelief, that I did not recognize this body. It had become a place where things kept going wrong.
The hardest part has not been any single illness. It has been the thing that still has no name. There have been tests and then more tests, different doctors, the quiet we experience on the drive home after an appointment that was supposed to give you an answer and did not. I have learned the vocabulary of waiting. I have learned how it feels to hand your body over to people who are kind and capable and still cannot tell you what is wrong.
So the night in Oakland, when something tore as I turned toward Tonda in the dark, was not the beginning of anything. It was the latest arrival in a year that had already taught me the ground could shift without warning.
The Ground That Will Not Hold Still
What unsettles me most is not that the ground gave way. It is that it will not stop moving. Every time I think I have found my footing, the terrain changes again, another test, another symptom, another appointment that sends me home without an answer.
I am uncomfortable everywhere at once. My body aches in ways it never used to, and cannot tell me why. My spirit keeps reaching for the Universe and coming back unsure of what it is being asked to learn. Underneath both of them my emotions move without warning, from grief to irritation to a tiredness that has settled into my bones.
When Being Smart Is Not Enough
What surprises me is my intellect, which is furious. I have spent my whole life being able to think my way through things. I read, I study, I sit with a problem until it finally opens. It is how I found my way out of a marriage that no longer fit, how I made it into ministry, how I help other women find language for lives they never planned. And this, this thing in my body, will not yield to any of it. I cannot read my way out of it. I cannot reason with it or reframe it into something easier to hold. For the first time I can remember, being smart is not enough, and that part of me that says “I can fix it myself or at least find an answer” is truly dumbfounded.
The Last Time the Ground Moved Was Coming Out
The last time the ground moved like this, I still had a say in where I put my feet.
Coming out did not give me a choice about being gay. That was simply true, not something I decided and not something I could undo. There was nothing to fix and nothing to solve. What I could choose was what I would do with it. Whether I would say it out loud, and to whom, and when. For years I held that timing in my own hands. I could tell one person and not another. I could wait. I could pick the day. The ground was shifting under me then too, but I was the one deciding where to step, and there was a strange comfort in that, even inside the fear.
This gives me none of that. There is no coming out to do this time, no disclosure whose timing belongs to me. My body is deciding, and it has not consulted me. It changes when it wants to and keeps its reasons to itself. The one thing I learned the last time everything came apart, the freedom to choose what I would do next, is the very thing it will not hand me.
Learning to Ask for Help
What I have learned, slowly and not gracefully, is to ask for help. This is not a small thing for me. I am the one who shows up for other people. I sat at deathbeds for a living. I built a whole life around being a steady presence in someone else’s hardest hour. Being the one who needs the steadying is newer, and it does not come naturally, and I have had to practice it the way you practice anything you are bad at and cannot avoid.
But I cannot navigate this alone. I have finally stopped trying. I lean on Tonda in ways I did not used to. I let people know when the day has been hard instead of saying “I’m fine, how are you?” so I can quickly change the subject. I say the true thing out loud, that I am frightened and I do not have an answer, and I let it be heard.
We Were Never Meant to Do This Alone
This is what I keep wanting to bring back to us. So many of us arrived in this community because something we counted on stopped being true, and we had learned, somewhere along the way, to carry the frightening parts by ourselves. I found my own first foothold in a Facebook group, and I will always be grateful for it, but I know now that words on a screen are not the same as being truly accompanied. We were never meant to sit alone in the uncertain middle of things, before the answer comes, if it comes at all. Whatever your body is doing right now, whatever has stopped being reliable, whatever ground is shifting under you, you do not have to stand on it by yourself. Come stand with us. That is the whole reason we are here.
If any of this sounds like where you are right now, standing on ground that will not hold still, I want you to know there is a place to bring it.
I host a clarity experience, a few evenings together on Zoom for women finding their way toward a more honest life. It is not a lecture and it is not a webinar. It is a room. We sit in the uncertain middle of things together and begin to find some footing. You do not have to have it figured out to come. You only have to be willing not to do it alone.
Come as you are, questions and all. https://annemariezanzal.com/3-day-clarity-experience/
We were never meant to do this alone. I would love to have you with us.
