Ronae Jull, photo by aw 2012
Who am I? I call myself an Old Doc in Progress. That’s a part of who I am certainly. I went back to college in my 40s and completed a BS degree, and in the process I discovered that not only was I passionate about science, but also that my brain works perfectly well and I’m not “dumb” as I had always labeled myself. What a life-expanding revelation! So I went on, and am now pursuing a graduate degree and teaching. After this who knows? My dream is yet another degree, but we shall see. I realized that joy does not come from pursuing some eternally changing future goal, but in being fully and joyfully present in the moment. So now, if I’m preparing a lecture or assisting in lab, working on my research, studying for classes or writing my thesis, I am fully present, experiencing precisely what this moment has to offer.
There is more to me than science and academic goals however. I am also a mom of four grown children, grandma of three, daughter, sister, friend. I play several musical instruments and write/play/sing contemporary Christian music. I knit afghans, make cookies and fancy breads and holiday casseroles, and (grudgingly) keep the back flower garden beautiful. I am shaped by my past, and that past has held particularly tough challenges. When I was in my early 20s I was introduced to 12-step recovery programs, and the seeds of my own recovery were sown. However, I did not experience ‘recovery’ as some quick and magical fix for my life’s pain. Coming from what can only be called a profoundly abusive and isolated childhood, most of my energy went into simple survival. For many years I was unemployable. I used to ‘people watch’ incessantly, trying to figure out the secret of living that seemed so obvious to everyone else but so elusive to me. Driven by an intense desire to create a life of safety and peacefulness for my children, I repeatedly fell far short of the goal.
Over the past three decades of my adult life, I have walked away from three deeply abusive relationships and several that were less so, lost a home to fire and nearly lost my life and that of my youngest son, spent more than a year in isolation in what I call my “spiritual retreat”, and dealt with family members who were facing their own intense issues. I agonized over my younger daughter being deployed to Iraq twice, held vigil over my sons various hospital experiences, and chose to break all ties with one parent while practicing healthy boundaries with the other.
I had to consciously learn basics like how to communicate, how to be a friend, what to wear, how to cook, and what I wanted to be/do when I grew up. Even deeper, I spent many years with no idea what I liked (my favorite color is green), or more importantly what I felt. This process of recovery is rather a misnomer – I had nothing to return to, no frame of reference, no reclaiming what was lost – so my recovery has been practiced without the “re”. Lest this all sound discouraging, I do not experience it as such. It is simply my life, where I’ve come from, part of what makes me the intense, driven, eternally optimistic, still overly trusting, creative person that I am.
There is more to who I am, however, than the collection of traumatic and enlightening experiences I’ve had. I am also driven to give. Not in the material sense – I have not been blessed with much in the material sense, which is itself a blessing. I am, instead, driven to give of my experience and lessons learned in the hopes of reaching someone who is lost in the darkness, who cannot find a way through to the joy, who is defeated by guilt and rage and shame, who may be able to use my outstretched hand for a moment. A few key people reached me when I believed I was beyond hope; it is now my privilege to give back.
