Shifting Landscapes

Shifting Landscapes

In the ever-changing landscape of human experience, there is a powerful gravitational force that pulls us towards the notion of permanence. We are driven by a desperate longing for the static, unchanging, and ever-reliable. The appeal of literature is based on this: a story told once and forever, a fixed narrative. Life is not a sealed document. It is a scroll in perpetual unrolling, susceptible to the stray marks of wandering ink, to the addition of footnotes, appendices, and even whole new chapters. My life is defined by this mutable quality of existence. It is the unsung theme that could have easily been a closed book but instead became a palimpest, each layer richer than the last.

Modern psychiatry would have us believe that humans can be neatly categorized, their complexities distilled into diagnoses and treatment plans. This is a false assumption. I am not going along with that. At fifty-seven, I was diagnosed with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was offered a clinical label and an invitation — a challenging yet profoundly liberating invitation to re-edit the narrative of my existence.

My therapist was not just a clinician; she was also a co-author who handed me the pen, rather than just an assortment of coping mechanisms. This was a transformative shift. I went from existing to living — from being the subject of my life’s story to becoming its narrator. In my later life, the “Worm Moon” concept is a fitting poetic detail, adding lyricism to a life that seemed like a chronicle of…