Just over a year ago, a phone call made me feel like I couldn’t move my body. It wasn’t a call with terrible news or life-altering information. The interaction was, on paper, rather mundane. And yet, somehow, this final straw in a line of straws twisted the shut-off valve in my brain with a jolt of pressure. I sat frozen as the water built up behind the restricted pipe of seething waves.

It was late morning on a Tuesday, and I was sitting at my desk framed by a cubicle island, sandwiched between cloyingly neon blue-green walls and the promise of sunlight sneaking through doorways of other people’s offices.

The phone call came from a coworker instructing me to do something that I considered to be terribly rude. A contractor we’d pushed around for weeks needed to make another change just days before the event. Sure, that’s shitty, but not huge. Perhaps it was the “you’re just here to do what you’re told” implication that my fiery Irish-Slovakian genes couldn’t take. In any case, it shouldn’t have been a straw in the scheme of the pile, but we never get to determine what wakes us up, do we?

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Nausea rumbled beneath my collar bones and I felt my fists grip the side of my desk for stability, as if on a stormy ship. The space between my breaths cut in half. I was either going to throw up or scream, and while I would always rather do the latter, there was nowhere to do that.

This blog is too sacred a place for me to kvetch about everything that was wrong with that office, but there are film reel clips, like oversaturated faces in a flashback sequence that remind me.

“You’re having another snack?”

“I could never eat something that fatty”

“I don’t even eat fruit because of the sugar”

“You get lunch from there a lot.”

And then there was, “Don’t touch that, that’s mine, people steal things, we earned that, it’s not on your list, that’s not my job, that’s not your job, people don’t like that, make sure you whisper, he’ll hear you, she’ll hear you, people gossip, it’s just gossip, they were ungrateful, they were thieves, they weren’t the right fit, they didn’t appreciate what they had, there are no other jobs so what can you do?”

Distance behind the eyes, exhaustion, slamming doors, shuffling feet, grunting at the copier, whispering behind the door, muttering, coughing, coughing, coughing, “You can’t work from home, even if you’re coughing.”

And then there were the bigger things. The much bigger things. Things I can’t talk about online for fear of small print, but I could tell you over a glass of wine or bottomless diner coffee. It would just be gossip, after all.

The nausea swelled up through my neck and around the back of my head. It surrounded my forehead and blurred my eyesight. A coworker, one of the good ones, appeared behind me. “I think I’m having a panic attack,” I stage whispered.

I grabbed my phone, keys, water bottle, and shoved it into my backpack. Rushing through the maze of blue walls, I made it to the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes were empty. My shoulders dropped forward, giving up on posture or pride. My toes gripped the inside of my shoes.

The next morning, I wrote this in my journal, “I just remembered a dream I had last night. Life moving too quickly and running out of time down the shore. Something about not being in the ocean anymore. Leaving people before I was ready.”

A few days later, I took the train out to Long Island for a work event. The nausea and stress had become so constant that when I made it to the event space, blood came pouring out of my nose. It was mutually decided I should go home.

On the train ride back to Manhattan, a 50-something construction worker–with his Stanley rolling tool suitcase and all–was crying on the train. Outwardly crying. Not on the phone, not trying to hide it, just staring ahead and letting the tears roll down his face and he heaved through heavy sobs. I only saw this because I was headed to the bathroom (nose bleeding again). I grabbed him some extra toilet paper and stopped by him briefly on the way out. The two of us must have looked like quite the pair.

Now, I know that it’s an unspoken rule to let people cry it out on NYC public transportation without being bothered, but this felt different. This was a burly Long Island man, beside himself in a wave of grief. I handed him the tissue paper on my way past and gently said, “I grabbed this for you”, and tried to show with my face that the train cared. He seemed surprised but softened when he took it.

I sat down in my seat, tissues balled up into my nostrils. In the two months prior, two people I knew had died very suddenly. One was a dear friend’s brother, the other a dear friend’s husband. Both with little-to-no warning. I wondered what kind of news the construction worker had gotten.

When I reached Penn Station, every person I passed was someone I wouldn’t have gotten to see if I’d stayed at the work event. The sunlight on the Upper West Side was gentle as July turned to August and I imagined the two versions of NYC fall I might experience depending on my decision. One with nosebleeds, certainly, and one with…well, I didn’t even know. What did leaving look like?

I gave my two week’s notice and only made it one of those weeks. I ended up walking my fifth Camino, a shorter one this time to Finisterre, or the end of the world. I carried a list of names of those who had recently passed away and left it on the cliff where people watch the sun set after walking hundreds of miles to the coast.

It’s been just over a year, and yesterday I caught myself in a dance studio the mirror looking happy. Happy doesn’t seem to be the right word.

Lost in joy.

Savoring gravity.

Thrilled by swung rhythms.

Our dance teacher spoke to the room of over 30 people who ranged in age from late teens to early 70s. When the teacher sprung in the air and clicked their heels together in a syncopated beat to finish the combination, the room cheered. We cheered. For a tap step. There are office kitchens where people are judging each other’s diets and there are rooms of people cheering for the excitement of choreography.

The leap between the work bathroom mirror and the dance studio mirror did not happen with a magical finger snap. I quite literally climbed a mountain and put my feet in the Spanish sea to remind my subconscious mind that I wasn’t going to miss my time in the ocean, as the dream had warned.

If you’ve made it this far in the post, hi. And thank you for sticking around. I miss the slow internet. Writing and reading long things. Making typos. Rambling. Makes little sense and sometimes accidental sense.

Over the past 12 months, I’ve been slowly making my way back to performing, but in a different way this time. As a theatre kid, getting cast gave me worth. Not getting cast meant I needed to work harder to access that joy. I can’t ever allow that to happen again.

That will be the puzzle as I try to get back into an impossible business at nearly 40. The sacrifices needed to unlock the joyful moments cannot be larger than the possible joy. In other words, if “paying my dues” leaves me too emotionally broke to love the life I’ve built, then it will stop being worth the price.

Whatever happens in the long run, it got me here. Sometimes, I get distracted from my dance steps because I’m overwhelmed by how incredible it is that I get to move and that I’m no longer that desk, or the desks that came before that. I’m also not waiting for the day to pass, for a publisher to get back to me, or for some strike of inspiration to come along and tell me that I’m allowed to create again. And the most surprising part? The current batch of people guiding the NYC world of performing is so warm. We’re in a new time, I believe. But that’s another post entirely.

I’m currently sitting in Central Park typing this. Two corgis shapes like Pullman loaves are bumbling across Sheep’s Meadow. There were hundreds of dragonflies just minutes ago, and now they’ve moved on. A small scraggly mutt is now chasing one of the corgis. It’s breezy and I have a lot to write about soon.