Seven Degrees Left of Center

Finding North Again

There was a time when my compass spun wild. No matter which way I turned, the arrow trembled, refusing to point anywhere solid. That’s what life felt like after everything changed—after the surgery, the gaps, the days when memory slipped through my fingers like water. I wasn’t sure who I was anymore, or how to find my way back.

So I started to write.

At first, it wasn’t healing. It was survival. The words were my breadcrumbs, scattered across the forest floor of confusion. Some days they led nowhere. Other days, they pointed—just faintly—toward something that felt like north.

Writing became my way of listening to the silence inside me, of mapping the terrain I could no longer trust my mind to remember. Each sentence was a small calibration, a gentle nudge of the compass needle. Slowly, it began to settle. Not perfectly, but enough.

Healing, I’ve learned, isn’t about returning to where you were. It’s about accepting where you are and learning how to navigate from there. My compass still drifts sometimes—it points seven degrees left of center more often than not—but that’s okay. That’s where I live now. That’s where I write from.

Each word I put down is a direction, a choice, a moment of clarity in the fog. I may never find true north again, but maybe the point isn’t to. Maybe it’s to keep walking anyway, pen in hand, trusting that even a crooked compass can still lead you home.