On surviving, pretending, and not knowing when it gets better.
I’ve been staring at the blinking cursor on my screen for what feels like hours but has probably only been two minutes. Nearly eight months have passed since the accident, but still, it’s the only thing I know how to talk about.
During this time, I’ve been wondering what I should write about. The subject seems so obvious. It’s the only thing I post about on social media, like a digital parrot stuck in a loop or a doll exercising the tenuous limits of its mechanical voicebox. My friends and acquaintances message to ask me how I am, how I’m recovering, do I need anything. My lawyer calls to discuss proceedings. The cop assigned to my case emails me with updates. My mom asks for details and how I’m doing each day. My work colleagues ask if I’m still in my wheelchair and how I’m getting around.
I feel like I am talking about the accident all the time, it doesn’t feel good. Because even though they are asking how I’m doing, what it feels like they really are asking is, “When is this finally going to be over for you so we can move on?” It feels like everyone is waiting for me to wrap this up; like my grief should have come with an assigned timeline. Like it should have an end in sight.
How do you pretend the most impactful thing in your life has run its course? How do you ignore the feeling that everyone around you is tired of hearing about it? And knowing this, how can you dare to continue to talk about it for another six months – another year, the rest of your life – as you continue to heal from it? I keep asking myself: when does this stop being the thing that defines me? And more imminently, am I allowed to keep talking about it, even if everyone else is ready to move on?
Something magical happened to me in my late twenties and roundly blossomed into my thirties. The confidence that I had been in desperate search of my entire life just sortof appeared out of nowhere and affixed itself to me as if it had been there all along. Before this time, I had spent many years faking an air of confidence and telling myself that this is what being self-assured looked like, and I was very wrong, because I continued to listen to the voice in my head. Self-assurance is a wonderful little charm you can cast upon yourself and the people around you, and the way that charm works is by hog-tying and gagging that combative voice that sounds like you (you know the one) and tells you that the things you do and say are bad and you should stop and give up and go home. The day I learned this was the day I didn’t have to fake it any longer. It felt like I had discovered a secret I wasn’t supposed to know.
One of the reasons I have spent the last few years being so self-assured is because I believed that I had been through many of the worst things in life already, and that there was nothing really left that could surprise me. This, of course, is ridiculous and untrue, but telling myself this mantra helped me behave more confidently. If you were to put a gun to my head, I’d probably tell you that it’s nothing more than a survival tactic. To not show weakness in the face of pain, self-doubt, or crippling depression. To not flinch, so that others don’t see that you are a heartbeat away from running; or worse, crying. To not cower, lest it be considered an invitation to be kicked.
But confidence can be a fragile thing, and even the strongest charm has its limits. When the other car crossed two lanes of traffic to slam into my tiny Ford Fiesta head-on and spin it like a top across the asphalt, every glass surface in my car shattered, along with the self-assurance I had worked so hard to cultivate throughout my unstable childhood and chaotic twenties. Confidence leaked out of me much like the blood that was pumping out of my foot and onto the floor of my vehicle after the collision, and I didn’t realize it was gone until much later after my steady diet of grief and morphine had cleared. Without it, I realized that I don’t know who I am after nearly dying, and that made me feel like dying.
When you survive a traumatic experience, it doesn’t just take from you once. It continues to take as much as it wants from you, over and over and over. It consumes you, and then has the audacity to ask for more. The appetite is a bottomless pit, and it asks you to climb inside and go farther and farther and farther down, until you’re certain there couldn’t be any farther to go, but it keeps asking. Begging. Insisting. Demanding.
There is no timeline for the trauma you experience. Well, there is, but it’s not one that you can control; you’re on its time, not the other way around. It’s like looking at a clock that you can hear ticking from, but the hands are missing, and you have no idea how much time is left. Left until what? Until you feel better? Until you can relive the moment without losing your breath, having a panic attack, or sobbing? Until you’re healed? Don’t be ridiculous. You have no idea what you are waiting for, or how long you’re going to have to wait, and you’re just going to have to continue waiting to find out the answer to both of those things. And the honest to god truth is that you’ll probably find some other things while you’re waiting, too, and that might not be so bad.
I don’t know how to get self-assurance back after its been lost. It’s something I’ve been wrestling with for nearly eight months, and I wish I had the answer. I wish I had a lot of answers to a lot of things that I just don’t right now, and I don’t know if I ever will. I want to believe that I’ve made peace with that, but if I think too hard about it, I probably haven’t. I don’t know when this timeline for my trauma and my healing will end, because for me, there is still no end in sight. All I know is that I’m still moving toward it.
Although I don’t have the self-assurance of my old self from my old life, I do still have one thing that survived with me from the wreckage: I remember how to fake it. And just like my ability to walk, I hope that it comes back in time with some effort and a little charm.
And for anyone else who is on their own healing journey who has lost something or had something taken from you, I hope in time that you find what you are missing, too. Keep going. One day the end will be in sight.