There’s an expression that I’ve always loved, originating in the 1500s or 1600s (1) and then made famous more recently by Alexander Graham Bell. Most of us are familiar with the first part of this saying, but I’ve found that very few people have ever heard the last part of the phrase. Which famous expression am I talking about – can you guess? It’s this one:
When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.”
It might be because I’m an optimist, but I’ve always seen the ending of one thing as being the beginning of another. One exception – the one that proves the rule, so to speak – was when I had to step away from a career that I adored because of the ‘mild cognitive impairment’ (MCI) caused by my rare disease at the end of 2018. It was hard to see past my grief at that point, not only for the loss of my career.
Developing these cognitive issues also signaled the end of one of my life-long dreams; I’d planned to go back to school after I retired, or maybe while working part-time in a pre-retirement phase of my life, to get a PhD. Ever since I was child, I’d wanted to someday be ‘Dr. Woods’. Not a medical doctor, but the academic PhD title of ‘doctor.
The more practical aspect of this would have been to allow me to do bioethics consulting well into my retirement. With a new doctorate, and decades of experience in the field of healthcare, I’d planned to continue my work in bioethics for as long as I lived.
So the grief I experienced when my doctors convinced me to step away from my career, to leave my dream job in healthcare philanthropy, was compounded by the loss of my future plans as well. I went through a really difficult period of not knowing who I was anymore, after having been slowly working towards my PhD and retirement goals for most of my life.
Added to that was the guilt that I felt, for several reasons. First off, over abandoning my job at a horrible time for my employer – right in the middle of our fiscal or financial year-end planning. Over all the tasks that I’d left undone at work, being put on medical leave the day before the office would be shutting down for the winter holidays. The idea that I’d be ruining these holidays for my boss and for other members of our team.
There was my almost-crushing guilt for waking up every day and not going to work. For feeling as though I was shirking my responsibilities, that I was letting people down, and leaving promised unfulfilled. It’s long been a point of pride with me that I do what I say I will do, that I keep the promises that I’ve made. That’s one of the reasons for which I’ve never promised more than what I truly thought I could deliver. I considered myself to be a trustworthy person, yet here I was breaking that trust – because of this sudden onset of a cognitive impairment.
Most importantly, I felt guilt over letting my husband down. To be clear, he never made me feel that way – not even once, not for an instant. But it was my innate sense that I’d broken a kind of trust with him, in what our lives would be. Perhaps even in the kind of person that I was.
That was perhaps the crux of it; I didn’t feel like ‘me’ anymore. I was no longer the person that I had been; I could no longer hold the same dreams as possibilities for my future – for our future together. And there was an underlying fear, of course. Would these cognitive issues worsen with time? Was my new condition going to be progressive? What would happen in the next few months, the next year, the next decades?
As you may have guessed by now, my ‘mild cognitive impairment’ doesn’t seem to have gotten any worse since the end of 2018, about three years now. I don’t know whether that’s in part because of the research-based actions that I take to avoid further cognitive decline, but I like to think that they help. Many of the same actions are recommended as tools for dealing with chronic pain, another outcome of my rare disease, so there’s a kind of dual effect potentially at play here.
What kind of actions do I take? First off, I try to eat a mostly anti-inflammatory diet. Luckily for me, that can include dark chocolate! I do have trouble limiting my sugar intake, because I have a sweet tooth, but we stick to mostly home-made treats rather than hyper-processed store-bought desserts. I also exercise, do puzzles, and play some brain-challenging games.
And, starting a bit less than a year ago, I’m learning to paint. It challenges my brain to learn new skills, and another one of my retirement plans had been to learn to paint – with watercolours. So in a way I’m reclaiming one of the dreams that I’d thought I’d have to abandon for good. I may not be able to work in bioethics anymore, or to get a PhD, but I can – it seems – learn to paint.
Which brings me back to the quotation with which I began this post: “When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.” (1)
Once I was able to stop looking back at the closed door of my career, once I’d finished grieving for that lost part of my life and plans, I was able to go looking for other doors to open. At this time last year I’d never even picked up a paint brush, maybe apart from arts and crafts projects in primary school that were so long ago that I couldn’t remember even if I didn’t have cognitive issues!
In less than a year, I’ve had my paintings appear in five different virtual or online art exhibitions – with another two already accepted for virtual art events next month. And another four of my paintings have been displayed in live or gallery shows, with a fifth due to open next week.
The photo I’ve posted is one I took today, of the stunning and historic Trestler House (2), built in the 1790s. Perched on the edge of the picturesque Lake of Two Mountains, near Montréal, this community museum and gallery space will be hosting the live “Entre Nous 2022” art exhibition from January 18 to March 13, 2022.
I was there this afternoon to drop off one of my watercolour paintings, which will be included in this upcoming art show. Stay tuned for some photos from this exhibition, once it officially opens. I’ll also post information about the two upcoming virtual art shows, soon.
The message that I’m hoping to get across, in today’s post, is that you never know what’s around the corner for you. But sometimes you have to accept the rough situations before you can see that there other – new – possibilities for you. That’s what happened for me, after a mild cognitive impairment developed as a result of my rare disease; Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, or CRPS.
I’m not saying it was easy to get past the grief and guilt that CRPS has caused, because it was really hard to do that. And I still live with constant and severe pain, high-impact chronic or persistent pain. Sometimes it’s debilitating, along with the many other symptoms of this autoimmune and neuro-inflammatory disease.
But most days I can still paint a bit, or even look at paintings in magazines and books for ideas. No matter what your journey has been so far, whether you suffer from illness or pain or other struggles, I hope that you reach a point where you feel that you have found something you can do that brings you joy.
That’s what learning to paint has done for me, and what I hope it will continue to do. As always, thanks so much for stopping by. Feel free to drop a comment over on my Instagram or Twitter feeds; I’ve had to disable the comments section of the blog because it got to be too much for me to manage, because of my cognitive challenges. But I do love to hear from you!
References
(1) Garson O’Toole. “When One Door Closes Another Opens, But Often We Look So Long Upon the Closed Door That We Do Not See the Open Door”. Quote Investigator (Website). 03 Dec 2018. Accessed 14 Jan 2022. Online:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/12/03/open-door/
(2) Trestler House. Welcome to the Trestler House. Website. 2021. Accessed 14 Jan 2022. Online:
https://www.trestler.qc.ca