It’s been just over two years since I visited Italy for the first time. We were one week into a three week opus-style family holiday. I found myself frantically scouring the narrow cobblestone foot paths of Venezia for a journal.

The trip was planned around a work conference that I was attending in Milano. I decided to take advantage of the business expense to have our first true family vacation. We were finally going to visit the country of my family’s origin. I also decided to bring my mom along, as it only felt natural that I would bring her on such a trip.

Immediately before Venezia, we in were Milano for the conference. But even before arriving there, we had already visited the fantastical Duomo in Firenze and beheld the sparkling Ligurian sea from the cliffs of the quaint Cinque Terre villages. The three days we spent traveling northward up the Stiletto Peninsula to arrive at the conference had already primed me for a disaster: Fantastic days punctuated by treacherous climbs in an oversized VW van so that we could stay in impossibly perched mountainside towns.

The calm before the storm

While in Milano, the energy shifted. I was pulled out of my Holiday mode far too quickly and with too much thrust. Unceremoniously and without warning, I was right back into my reality. I felt overwhelmed and I was new to practice. I felt lost after training during a pandemic and never having been to a conference like that before. I wandered around the biggest European conference in my field of medicine, virtually alone.

I resisted the visceral urge to leave mid-presentation. But the moment the final slide projected on the screen, I got up. I all but ran away from the conference. Within an hour, the grey VW mini-bus was packed with all our suitcases. The six of us were on the autostrada with Milano in the rear-view mirror. 

We arrived in Venezia later that same evening and I remained engulfed within the clouds of overwhelm. This is where I found myself wandering narrow streets, desperately in search of a journal. I hoped the act of writing would help make sense of what felt like an acute mental breakdown. That night I christened the first page with the following words:

“I haven’t been myself lately, and I need to re-discover who I really am.  Perhaps that part of me – the real me – is trying to make her way out of whatever dark recess in which she’s been hiding.”

I filled that journal furiously over the remaining two weeks of our holiday. I have never gone back to read what I wrote (the truth is that I’m scared of what I’ll find). Regardless, the trip was beautiful and filled with enough stories to regale ourselves with for years to come. The truth was that I didn’t want it to end.

I assumed that the haphazard juxtaposition of the conference among the family holiday in Italia was the breaking point. I must be having a crisis related to my work-life balance. When I returned home, I worked hard to understand the meaning that came from this oddly timed crisis.

I didn’t want to be in crisis. I wanted to be Arrived and Settled.

In an attempt to be not in crisis, I reminded myself of Brene Brown’s admission of her own crisis. In her book Gifts of Imperfection, she affectionately labels her midlife crisis a spiritual awakening. I decided I would steal this tactic. I wanted to invert my feeling of being in crisis and instead, believe that I was in the process of awakening a part of me that was sleeping.

I realize now, more than two years later, that I wasn’t truly in a crisis then. Nor was I living in an awakened state. Rather, a crisis was brewing because something had awakened inside of me. Perhaps you could spin it as the awakening of my spirit. The truth back then, though, was that the crisis itself was just awakening.

Back on Solid Ground

Landing back in Canada after that first visit to Italia seemed to spark the embers of a fire that was just barely under control before I left. I fell into a different kind of mood. One that found me passionately dreaming of a life that (felt like it) took place in Italy. I often asked myself what reality brought me more dissatisfaction. Was it a realization of the life I was living? Or was it that of the life I wasn’t living?

I felt awash in shame and selfishness given where I found myself.  I was in the career I set out to achieve. I loved and admired my medical practice and my day to day work with patients and staff in my clinic. I was finally making money. I was living in a new house in a beautiful part of the world. My family was happy and healthy. Yet all I wanted to do was plan a (long-term) way out.  The problem was that I didn’t even know what I wanted out of.

Even at that time, I recognized that an escape from everything was impossible. However, I also felt that going back to the way things were before was equally impossible.  The most pressing question I wanted to explore was, “What is wrong with me? Why am I falling apart when I’m supposed to be at the height of my life? I finally have everything going for me.” 

Objects are closer than they appear

In retrospect, It all fits together.
Never would I have believed that a crisis take two years to fully erupt from a tiny spark that ignited its core. It’s humbling to realize that what I’m doing now is still part of the process of completing the cycle of a mid-life crisis.

With the events of the past few months behind me, I am confident that I have traversed the deeply cravassed summit pass of this life crisis. Coming down the otherside of the mountain, however awakened I feel, remains disconcerting. The sun is coming from a different angle. The vegetation is not quite the same. For the first time in my life, I am walking downstream instead of hiking up. I am following the creek to its river, to its widest point, and maybe even to its Delta. Regardless of where this path leads, I am confounded by the shift in direction: The change in momentum. Even the pull of gravity leaves me hanging just a little bit more precariously.

Now here I sit, precariously perched in awakeness and with a modicum of clarity. Clarity about what’s been going on for the past two years. Clarity on the next steps to take. Clarity on how to finally talk about everything that I’ve learned about myself in these past two years.

Consider this the forward to the real story – the one that will come out slowly as I take the time to explore everything with just a bit more detail.