Instead of the dynamic new life in a vibrant city I had envisioned, I created instead an involuntary retreat into solitude and self-reflection. My intention was escape: to run from the darkness, as far and as fast as possible, and to somehow exchange my old, broken life for a shiny new one. I dropped out of graduate school, gave away all my furniture, threw away most of my belongings, and moved across the country. So I did something desperate and extreme. If I could be so wrong about something I had felt such certainty about, I thought, then there was nothing that I could possibly be right about. I was tragically flawed and inevitably doomed. The bottom had dropped out of my life, and my sense of self was left shattered. I expressed and released pain, anger, denial, guilt, sadness, and on and on, until I exhausted myself. The pain of it was agonizing, heart-stopping.
One week before my twenty-ninth birthday, the love of my life broke up with me. “I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.” ~Hafiz of Shiraz
