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When I decide to go back to school to become a social worker, I am mid-career as a professor in an English Department at a university in California. Big decision, big change. The first semester in the MSW program, I’m suddenly aware of loss: I no longer have relevant expertise; I have no status. I am an ignorant student and old enough to be the mother of my classmates. Luckily, I have enough experience as a student and a teacher to know that’s OK: Eventually I’ll attain some mastery, though it feels pretty hard at first.
What have I done? My catastrophic voice chimes. Who am I? My wobbly identity frets. I don’t like this! My little-girl fear hollers in my head.
One day, my mentor finds me close to tears at the lunch break. Jim is teaching my favorite courses, I know he reads poetry, he finds some literary theory enthralling—as I do.
“What’s up?” he asks.
“I can’t believe I closed the door on my life,” I say, finally letting the doubt, fear, grief, and frustration pour out of me as my tears fall.
His reply surprises me: He knows exactly what I’m talking about, and I realize that he has been through this too. And he has been observing me cope with the challenges of radical change, the challenges that everyone experiences in the midst of changing careers—or marital status, gender, religion, country.
“Your career, you mean?”
“Yes, and all it entailed.”
“Your identity?”
“Yes, but also literature, teaching, writing, language.”
Even as I’m saying this, I realize I’m wrong. Jim stays quiet a moment, letting me make the discovery.
“Well, maybe not quite all that,” I admit.
“Maybe not any of that,” he says at last.
“I’m not reading Shakespeare anymore,” I say. “I’m not writing about poetic form, or dramatic irony or the way a story conveys emotion with a few seemingly simple actions.”
He smiles. “Do your clients at your internship have life stories?” he asks.
I think about Mrs. Ginger, a woman whose marriage has ended, leaving her drinking alone. Her life story reminds me of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and I have had to be careful not to call her Martha.
Then there’s Mr. India, whose solitary battles in his oppressive apartment have reminded me repeatedly of Jonah in the belly of the whale.
I look at Jim and nod, “Yes. And they are gritty, full of despair and sometimes redemption.”
Jim nods at the final word, its overtones of spirit as well as narrative arc, “I don’t see that you have closed a door, Elizabeth. I just think you have entered another room, opened up the space in your life.”
Whenever I feel overwhelmed by my clients’ situations—their poverty, loneliness, fear, anger, and uncertainty—I remember Jim’s words, remember that I am in an open space, a place where narrative has the potential to lead to insight, if the client and I can together adjust the interpretation of the elements of the life story just enough to shift away from despair and toward resilience. Jonah gets out of the belly of the whale, remember.
Some of the stories I’ve heard from clients have been fearsome, but they have all had elements of strength, sometimes hidden under many layers of failure, trauma, loss. I want to write a series of them in blog posts. They bear revisiting when I myself am feeling vulnerable, because they do, in fact, open up the space in my life.
