A Map to Hope

By April Joy Mansilla

I said to a student, ‘Yes, we are short, but we have ten feet high personalities,’ and I smiled widely as their sad expression formed a smile. As I walked down the hall I hoped they would one day feel as tall as I do.

We are what we are from where we have been.

Our bodies and brains hold a map that no one else can see, routes carved by memory, some diagnoses, survival, and, oh, that beautiful little sparkly word, hope.

No two maps are the same. Some are straight highways. Others are winding back roads lit by sad songs, hand out the window feeling the air and instinct guiding us. Both get us to where we need to go, but I like the people with a little more grit in their tires.

That is the reason I teach in the place I do.

My map began in a bright room above the city in an acute psychiatric inpatient care, sitting with a pad of paper on my lap. The windows overlooked rooftops and traffic that continued without me. I remember thinking the world was moving forward and I was suspended somewhere between who I had been and who I might become if I survived.

I was an artist and painting was what I loved most, but inside that unit necessity took over love and I began drawing. I learned how to adapt in a world I did not understand or want to be a member of.

I drew in front of other patients because I had to. What had once been solitary became something I did in the lunchroom, the back room, and a four-person bedroom.

My first piece was called The View From Here. In it, people hung by threads over a city with church steeples. One figure dangled outside the confines of protection, suspended, and one leaned forward helping. Even then, even there, hope was already in me, a street I had not yet walked.

A nurse came into the room and said gently, “Oh, I heard you were an artist.”

I wanted to shout, I am an artist. I am still myself.

Instead, I sadly asked, “Can I have my makeup yet?” knowing what the answer would be.

It sounds small but it wasn’t. It was part of myself, my direction forward.

I wanted my red lipstick. I wanted my reflection to resemble the woman I recognized. I wanted to embody the version of myself who stood up straight and spoke clearly and did not feel fragile.

She would have adjusted her messy hair, put on her red lipstick, grown ten feet tall and told that nurse never to say “were” again.

But when I looked at my reflection in the window glass and in the painting, I knew I would never be that version of me again.

The nurse was kind and meant no harm, but that moment formed the beginning of my map, a promise to never lose the parts of myself that made me who I am.

Maps do not always lead us back to where we started. Sometimes they crack us open. Sometimes they resemble kintsugi pottery, fractured then repaired with gold. The gold does not hide the break. It traces it, honours it, and shines like a million stars on those back roads as we forge our way to our new home within.

The lines on my map did not end in that bright hospital room. They kept driving, kept running stop signs and going the wrong way down one-way streets, and somewhere the station changed and the music began to feel like living. I let go of those white-knuckled moments and I let some amazing people keep me company and teach me the way…

And now here I am.

Last week I drove by the first unit I was in, looked up and I smiled while I was waiting at a red light. What I thought was a church steeple mocking me as a patient was actually a weathervane, a direction to a life I had no idea how amazing it would be.

Now I stand in front of rooms around the city teaching art, my path to wellness unfolding in ways I never could have imagined. Art is such a beautiful map to see where you are and where you want to go, and I get to share in that journey with others.

Yesterday I stood at the front of a room of people on the healing journey and I felt every bit of that ten-foot stature I once longed for. I felt it in the laughter and bold colours, in the camaraderie that forms over strength and shared stories, and in watching other people’s maps begin to grow new paths and light their way.

I stood teaching a lesson on strength, not on diagnosis, or life hardships but on, their possibility to drive forward and change their direction.

We all carry invisible maps. Some begin in bright inpatient rooms above the city. Some lead us back to the very places we once felt lost, not as patients this time but as guides.

I will never be the woman before the illness and I do not want to be.

Now I see my map clearly, for myself and others.

I will always be a teacher. I will always wear lipstick. I will always feel ten feet tall. I will never shrink or stay silent about who I am or about the worth of others. I will always be a proud member of the grit club, and I will always thank the woman I was who asked for help, who journaled and created and unknowingly help build the lesson plans I teach today.

So here is to the ones finding their way to Hope Street. I cannot promise it will be easy, but I can promise it will change you. And if you keep walking, you may just find yourself standing ten feet tall, maybe even teaching art.