Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

“Why did the chicken cross the road?” is commonly met with the answer “to get to the other side.” The other side of what I often wonder?

I sometimes feel like I’m going through my life lost while also simultaneously dreaming of what’s possibly on the other side. My heart longs for and desperately hopes for a different side…one as far away as possible and vastly different from the one I’m on. 

Sometimes I don’t feel as though I know what exactly I wish to exist on the other side of the road.  I am aware that the home I’ve built on my side of the road has a foundation that is faulty. What I’ve come to call home can’t withstand the rain and other elements. It can’t withstand the weight of everything it’s been asked to hold.

I take my medicine to try to get to the other side, where there isn’t depression or anxiety. I go outside, I hydrate, I walk. All in the name of stability…in the name of getting better. Sometimes I wonder how long it will take to truly get better. To get to a different place where there isn’t a dark cloud of depression looming over me and constant fear growing in my heart. I wonder how much time it will take to truly learn how to let people in again and to learn to trust again. 

 I think what I hope will be on the other side in life is complicated. I’ve felt insurmountable joy and passion for life at times. I’ve reached heights and happiness that are difficult to fathom let alone describe. The aftermath shattered me and led to many years of depression. It led to complete and total self-abandonment and reduced me to hopelessness.

The side of the road that I’m on is difficult to navigate. There is no roadmap. No signal available for gps.  No escape within this extravagant maze. I crawl around in the dirt and grass. I am often lost and trapped. There are some roses. A few signs of life left there, mostly remnants of past hope. There are few people left on my side. Many have traveled elsewhere because I have remained on this side too long according to them and their timeline of recovery. 

Those that have remained have served as an anchor for my troubles but somehow I still bleed endlessly and bruise at the slightest unexpected touch, no matter how gentle. Everything is deeply raveled in shame, hurt and guilt. I clench the past with my hands, afraid to let it go. I sometimes do not know who I am in the present because I am caged in the past. It consumes me. I try to wrestle my regret and shame to try to escape and get to the other side. I am too weak to put up much of a fight. 

Cars speed down the road further separating the two sides that already feel worlds apart. I am afraid of crossing. I have tried to run across this very road before. I am terrified of getting hurt again. If I do manage to cross to the other side will my sorrow and sadness come with me to the other side? Will they notice I’ve left and hunt me down? They are old enemies. They have been with me since I was a child. My heart knows them well. I also have a lot of baggage. Luggage full of ‘what if’ and ‘what should have been’ and anticipatory grief. What I’m carrying is unbearably heavy. I stumble on the asphalt. The past and future were too heavy to carry. Something in me shatters. I collapse and faint from the pain. 

I imagine that it is sunnier on the other side. That there aren’t shattered glass pieces of a broken life scattered. There is community. There is art, invention, peace as well as beauty and majesty there. The other side is where bravery lives. It is where self-forgiveness and self-compassion live. It is where I want to relocate someday.

There are moments—brief, quiet ones—where the noise softens. Where the road doesn’t seem as threatening and the distance between the two sides doesn’t feel quite as impossible. In those moments, I can almost believe that the other side isn’t a different place at all, but something I build slowly within myself. Something that grows each time I choose to keep going, even when I am certain I cannot.

I am beginning to wonder if crossing the road isn’t one single, defining act, but a series of small crossings. Small choices. Small acts of defiance against the parts of me that have stayed stuck. Maybe every time I get back up, every time I loosen my grip on the past, every time I allow even a fragment of hope to exist—I am, in some quiet way, already stepping toward the other side.

For now, I must pick myself off the road. I must work on building my life up again. I must give myself time to let go off all weighing me down so I can begin to take the small steps towards healing. I must work on my relationship with regret and shame, my two longest adversaries, so we can finally part ways.  I must learn to tourniquet the bleeding, to stand, and to walk again. I must take one step at a time to weave a new story. A hopeful story. A story of resilience in the present that can withstand the test of time. A story that, someday, might carry me to the other side.