My last full day in New Zealand finds me walking past the venue of my first job out of law school. I was working as a junior editor for a legal publishing company. Here, for nearly a year, I waded through mountains of legal material - mostly appellate judicial decisions - and condensed them into short four-or-five sentence summaries. The experience turned me into a writer skilled in breaking down complex technical issues. Not long after, I took this skill into financial journalism.
Years later, the skills I picked up as a junior legal editor in New Zealand would be the key to my recovery back in the States. It was early 1999. I was new to my diagnosis. I knew nothing about my illness. Nevertheless, I began reading articles in psychiatric journals, then summarized them into digests that I published in the form of an email newsletter.
I had a long learning curve ahead of me, but I was playing to my strength. I was making a new career for myself, but one paradoxically based on my very first editorial job, here in a faraway land in a faraway time.
It was time to say goodbye to Emily and her new husband. The past and the future don’t matter. She is here right now, in the present. There will be many more good times together.
My neurons are snapping back into re-alignment. The infundibulum is receding. I learned what I needed to learn for right now: Many truths exist, and each truth is true. You can’t change the ones you don’t like. You can’t create ones that don’t exist. But you can own up to what is real. There is pain in truth, but there is also reconciliation and release. We live, we learn, we find new meaning, new truth.
What is truth? What works for me right now is making peace with my past, living in the present, and having the courage to face the future. The here and now beckons. Time to answer the call ...
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