I see the world in two different lights. One eye is blind, and one sees clearly. I used to see it as a disability. Now I understand it as an ability — to stand at the threshold holding the dark and the light at once.

I have always occupied the space “in between”. I am intersex; straddling a line most people dare not cross. I’ve spent a lifetime learning to navigate uncertain territory, because that was the only ground I was ever given. It turns out to be useful ground. From the threshold, you can see into both rooms.

For nearly twenty years, I have been a nurse. And, the work taught me how people actually heal; almost never by being handed the answer, but by being seen authentically. I learned this from a patient everyone found difficult. They were written off as just seeking medication. However, I decided to take a different approach. I sat down with them and asked what was actually wrong; not with their body but with their life. The pain that mattered had nothing to do with their surgery. And, no dose of medication was going to fix it. They needed someone to see the whole of their situation and not look away. Later, they told me it was the conversation, not the medicine that let them heal.

I am not religious. But, I have never been able to deny that there are doors logic cannot open. The tarot was the first instrument of “seeing” I learned to use. I was twenty and living in Tucson, Arizona. I’d left a home that had no room for who I was. One strangely cold desert afternoon, a friend laid out a tarot spread in a café. I kept waiting for a prophecy. None came. What the cards showed me instead were potential paths; and the plain fact that the story of my life was mine to write. Used this way, the cards predicted nothing. But more powerfully, they revealed truth that I was unable or unwilling to see.

There is an old figure who walked a road much like mine: Tiresias. They were a blind prophet who lived as both man and woman. They moved between mortal and divine. The myth says they were transformed by a pair of entwined serpents; the same serpent coil representing the nursing profession. When I found them, I felt recognized. Tiresias is not a costume. They are a reflection I see in troubled waters.

So here is what I offer: not prophecy, not snake oil, and no promises about what will happen. I offer guidance for people standing at a hard crossing. I offer an opportunity for those feeling stuck and unsure of where the ground falls. I will sit with your question and use these old, symbolic tools to help you see it from the threshold. The aim is never to tell you what to do. It’s to help you move.

Me, my spouse, and our two dogs are in the process of making a new home across an ocean. This is my own crossing, chosen with open eyes. If you’re standing at yours, this is an invitation to cross it with company.