Reflections Pt 1: Mosaic
Today is my 9-month accident-iversary, a sad and beautiful milestone. I continue to learn and grow more than I ever expected through this experience. My brother’s wisdom, “every day’s a school day” rings truer all the time.
I have re-learned to walk, run, and jump. I have 9 surgeries behind me, with a few more to go. I am getting my life back slowly but surely, while still deeply focusing on healing and all that entails. The journey continues…
I feel inspired to share my learnings, ways of processing, and questions I’m asking myself, and will post these periodically here and on social media as I feel so inspired. I have been journaling and reflecting a lot, so here’s the first of more to come…
I am a mosaic; a tangled web of trauma, grief, frustration, and pain as well as gratitude, joy, optimism, and pride. My survival story is full of miracles. It is full of tender, sweet moments and horrific, tragic ones. A mosaic brings beauty to a mess of broken individual pieces and turns them into something beautiful and whole, something that is nice to look at from afar and not always so nice to see up close. At times it’s as if I’m looking out from within the broken shards. I say all of this while knowing that through challenge comes immense growth and I am doing amazingly well.
My memory is also fractured. I have a detailed understanding of what happened yet no memory of the accident itself or the first 5 days in the ICU. Much of the first 2 weeks is a blur. It is a strange experience to know all the details from the moment of the accident—via anecdotes from those who were there or peripherally involved, to reading the play-by-play from medical reports, to seeing photos. And I know how deeply it has affected me, yet it feels distant.
I honor it all as if I do remember and let it process and integrate through my subconscious and physical being. As I get farther from survival mode, all that has and continues to happen integrates in a deeper way. This looks like letting waves of grief come and pass, letting my limbs shake to release trauma, talking about what happened, and staying close to the experience rather than pushing it away.
I have constant reminders of the way my body feels and looks - my numb middle finger, stiff middle and ring fingers, painful left arm, numb mouth and face, dry eyes, scars, aching legs and ankles, shoulder/back/neck pain. It is a battle to wake up with daily reminders as so many parts of this body don’t feel as I’d like, or even in some cases, like my mouth, don’t feel as if they belong to me. I am reminded when I see myself or use these body parts, and I hold that remembering dearly at the same time that it hurts my heart. In my mosaic, the joy most times overpowers the grief, with overwhelming gratitude in simply being here and surrounded by life and love, while also often stricken with waves of staggering grief that I allow myself to experience and let pass.
