Can Someone Tell Me Where I Put my Purpose?

This week has been a tough week and it’s only Wednesday.

Life comes with stressors—things like flat tires, which I experienced over the weekend. It also comes with arguments, which I also had on the weekend with my significant other. And life comes with a total lack of knowing what the heck your purpose should be. And illness has a sneaky way of making knowing your purpose or the color of your parachute to quote the famous career counseling book, even that much more impossible because you are so limited.

Before I became disabled, I was a budding psychotherapist. I had a great job that I loved working as a Dual-Diagnosis program manager—in short I ran a treatment program for men and women suffering from mental illness and addictions. And not a day went by that I didn’t feel I was where I needed to be. I thought this was where God had intended to put me. I was certain of it. Even today, my pain specialist and I talk about the current challenges in the field and he says that I have an obvious love for the population and an expertise. But I can’t work in the field. I can’t get a license where I live because I have epilepsy and have and continue to suffer from strokes.

So... out the window went my job.

Before that I was a playwright. And I was good. I won awards and had my play produced. I went to musical theater workshops at ASCAP in New York and knew a lot of people on Broadway. And then it all went silent. No more stories in my head wanting to be told on stage. No more job in theater. Nothing. And I wasn’t even sick then. My then purpose just stopped, ceased to be, nadda, nothing, zilch.

Oh and I was a professional pianist and singer, but my strokes took that away too.

When I was left with nothing. The only thing I had were college degrees that felt more like very expensive pieces of paper zip-tied to a huge debt. And I had a computer, Internet access, and a bed. So sitting on my bed with a Dummies Guide for HTML coding, I created a graduate school in interreligious studies. It started off with 5 people just after I became totally disabled and has grown to a full-fledged university with hundreds of students in undergraduate and graduate studies—most of who study for free and the rest pay a small—I mean really small fee because I needed help paying for the online services. But it is not my purpose. It is my mission: to make higher education accessible and affordable to people like me: sick or poor. And to put social justice or care of the environment as a universal part of education. Again, not my purpose.

Now this begs the question of what is a purpose. Most would say my college sounds like a purpose, but it doesn’t feel like it. My students would likely tell you what they are studying is their purpose; particularly my religious students who are called to study their faiths and to be leaders in their faith. They have perhaps a mission AND a purpose. But I still feel purposeless.

My illness has created a challenge of tight limits. So the question becomes how do you find out your calling when so many doors are closed? This is the challenge of living with a chronic illness—your body places limits on you that you have to start thinking creatively to feel you still have something to work for.