Reflections Pt 13: 2 Years of Surviving and Thriving-Adjacent
Reflections Pt 13: Two years of surviving and thriving! Thriving-adjacent resonates more with my experience this year.
This second year of recovery has been harder than the first. With most of my surgeries and big fixes behind me, yet continued and evolving pain and dysfunction throughout my body, financial worries, an ongoing lawsuit, I don’t know where I am now. There’s a significant weight to it—and persistent, never-ending grief.
I feel some nostalgia for what I thought would be the hardest times of this journey: living in the trauma hospital, then the rehabilitation facility, then my mom’s, having family dinners in bed, re-learning to use my body, preparing for and then enduring and recovering from big surgeries. The hardest part, I increasingly realize, is now: the in-between.
In my most optimistic vision, I am a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. In my low times, I am stuck in the mud, being pulled in multiple directions. I try to move forward, and parts of me can, but core parts of me are being pulled backward, stretched thin.
I just want to feel whole, and worthy. Continuing to view myself through the eyes of others—I am constantly under a microscope—and fighting the systems I have to navigate and often don’t fit in, counters this yearn for wholeness, and I resist it every day.
This year I could say survive and drive. In August I did the very drive that nearly killed me. I have driven this road with others many times since, but hadn’t yet done it alone. It felt wonderful to accomplish it and at the same time, confusingly anti-climactic. I’m a bit numb to it all.
It has been a long, winding road these past 2 years. I constantly ponder my identity… I am what happened to me and everything that continues to happen since, and so much more.
I remain in question about many things…
what is an acceptable level of pain and dysfunction to live with?
what do I accept as my new normal and what do I want to continue working to improve?
how to feel whole while working on so many parts of me? how can I find balance in the fine tuning of recovery vs believing there’s something wrong?
how can I take down the wall that protects my heart and open the door to work on my mental/emotional being, my trauma, while staying strong enough to withstand all that I continue to endure?
how does or doesn’t my survival story impact my identity? knowing that it is a big part of me, who else am I?
how can I remember to find—and preserve—the bright spots?
Equanimity arises when I remember to stand up tall in my spine, feel my ankles and knees supporting me, connect to the earth and feel her support too, and even try to give her the muck that I don’t need. When I can’t stand up any longer, I find comfort in laying on the ground in the sun, or sitting and watching the wind blow through foliage…
