The Real Work

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

“The Real Work” by Wendell Berry, from Standing by Words. © 1983


I first read these words when my health had completely failed; I didn't know what was wrong and no doctor could tell me. I had been under terrible stress at work for a few years, and I was a Type A personality, who cared a great deal about my work and my responsibilities, in a workplace that had grown unhealthy. My blood pressure started going off the charts, I had fuzzy thinking. (After being the multi-tasker of all time, if the phone rang when I was sharpening a pencil, I didnt know what to do.) I began to make mistakes and find stressful the things I had excelled at. I would get dizzy, almost toppling over in my office. At home, I had a few falls. My legs when walking would turn to sand and collapse beneath me. I was exhausted beyond belief.

My boss was the first to suspect I had chronic fatigue. I didn't want to believe it. The insurance company declined a series of applications for disability, and began a dance of sending me to their doctors to refute the findings of my doctors. All exhausting, all stressful, when I was at my lowest ebb.

They kept sending me back, to totter and flail around my office some more. Then I finally got sent to an internal specialist who, my doctor told me, was a bit unconventional. By now, unconventional was just what I needed, as conventional medicine had misdiagnosed me as depressed, not depressed, "nothing wrong with me", and menopausal. (Oh, the sting!)

Inside the entry, on the bulletin board, was the poem from Wendell Berry. I no longer knew what to do or where to go. A new journey was beginning. I felt peace come over me, as I read these wise words.

The doctor asked me, "Why are you here?"

I said, "I want to know what's wrong with me." I told him about the depressed/not depressed diagnoses, and how I did not feel depressed, but went to a counsellor in case I was without knowing it, and how the counsellor said I wasn't depressed, just exhausted. The doctor smiled. I told him I loved my job but was not functioning.

It took him less than five minutes to test my pressure points and say "You definitely have chronic fatigue. And fibromyalgia."

The insurance company still sent me back to work "to prove" that I truly could not do it. I phoned the doctor and he said I had already proven that. He wrote them a blistering letter, listing all that he had found in my tests and history, which included Guillain -Barre syndrome in my past. This letter turned the tide for me.

They considered my case over several months, and I was eventually approved for long term disability. But they had fought me so long, with no income coming in, that I had to sell my trailer and move away from Tofino (where the rental situation has been terrible for the thirty years of my history with it, and is even worse now).

It was such a huge loss. Pup and I mourned. We mourned for years. We spent the intervening years being a Grandma in Port Alberni, thankfully most of them out in the country, surrounded by trees, and availing ourselves of the many trails and wild places.

Eventually, my soul learned to sing again, in the last place on earth I would have chosen to live. That was the task the universe had set me. That of the impeded stream; the real journey of the soul: to be happy when what you most love has been lost.


for Wild Writing