I see the world through two eyes that no longer agree. Eleven years ago, the sight in my left eye was taken from me, and it never came back. For a long time, that was only a loss — half my vision gone dark. What I understand now took years to arrive: that the loss left me holding the dark and the light at once — one eye for what stands in front of me, and one for what doesn’t. I’ve learned to trust what each of them shows.

I have always lived between. I am intersex, born across a line most people are taught to stand firmly on one side of. I spent a lifetime learning to walk in the space between fixed things, because that space 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. That is not a separate story — it’s the same one. Healing has been my whole working life, and somewhere in it I learned a quiet, almost unspeakable thing. There was a patient most people found difficult — written off as just wanting more medication, the kind of assignment other nurses hoped to avoid. I did the one thing no one had made time for: I sat down and asked her what was actually wrong. Not with her body — with her life. The pain that mattered most had nothing to do with the surgery she’d had, and no dose was ever going to reach it. What she needed was for someone to see the whole of it and not look away. Before she left, she told me that the talking, not the medicine, was what finally let her heal. What it left me with was this: people are almost never healed by being handed the answer. They are moved by being met — by being given a way to feel their situation differently.

I am not religious. Organized religion has never sat easily with me — its certainty, its borrowed authority. But I have never been able to deny that life is extraordinary and fragile and sometimes wholly inexplicable, and that there are doors logic cannot open. The tarot was the first of those doors I learned to use. Never to predict — I have never believed the cards tell the future. I was twenty, living in Tucson, having escaped a home that had no room for who I was. A friend of mine, a drag performer from the club across the street, sat me down in a café on a strangely cold day in the desert and laid out a spread. I kept waiting for a prophecy. None came. What the cards showed me instead were paths — possibilities set side by side — and the plain fact that the life in front of me was mine to choose. I had spent so long being the mediator, keeping everyone else at peace, that I’d forgotten I was allowed to want a life of my own. Sitting there, I let myself see it: I get one life, and I have to live it as myself. The path I chose out of that café led me to school, and into nursing. Used this way, they foretell nothing. They show you what you already half-know, and give you somewhere to stand while you choose.

There is an old figure who has shadowed me my whole life: Tiresias. The blind prophet who lived as both man and woman, who walked between mortal and divine, the living and the dead — transformed, the myth says, by a pair of entwined serpents. The same two serpents that coil the staff every nurse works beneath. When I found him, I felt recognized. He isn’t a costume. He is the closest mirror I’ve ever found to the shape of my own life.

Two decades at the bedside have given and cost me in equal measure, and I’ve reached the point where I’m ready to take what they taught me about how people actually heal and carry it into something new. So here is what I offer. Not prophecy, not snake oil, no promises about what will happen — guidance, for people standing at a hard crossing, stuck, between things, unsure which way the ground falls. I sit with your real question and use these old, symbolic tools to help you see it from the threshold, the way I’ve learned to. The aim is never to tell you what to do. It’s to help you move.

My partner and I — and our two dogs — are making a new home across an ocean. It’s my own crossing, chosen with open eyes. I’m stepping into this work openly, as myself, because walking the threshold — and being who I am — has never been something I needed to hide. If you’re standing at your own crossing, this is an invitation to cross it with company.