I have seen the face of change, and it's a 19 year old driving a 2004 BMW making an illegal left-hand turn onto Burbank in the world famous San Fernando Valley. You ever need to make a left hand turn and see the light is green, but at the last second realize the green light is actually for the cars going straight and your lane is red? Well, the driver of the BMW that careened into me did that except for the part about realizing that she had a red light. She was only four blocks from her house and just went to get her dog a leash at PetCo about 10 yards from one of my life's most major turning points--her totaling my Dodge Neon.
I've got a million stories about being in physical therapy and all that other stuff, but for now let me just say that I can see how life's challenges change a person. There are people who have been in more serious car accidents, who have had greater challenges, but the way I dealt with this particular challenge really told me about me and what it said was I needed to change.
My whole life I read self-help books and suppressed my emotional pain with what I thought were "positive affirmations." But what I found when I was confronted with actual physical pain, I saw very clearly that my biggest coping mechanism for life was pretending like things were okay when they weren't. Strangely, it was only after I stopped denying the way things were that I realized INDEED everything is always okay. Yes, I still live with the effects of the car accident, but those effects (besides the obvious mobility challenges which have arisen from time to time and a little more so recently) ARE AWESOME.
I've taken an interest in my my health and look at my life differently--because I HAD TO. I learned how I used the great tools for positive thinking as more of tools of denial. I learned how feel pain and let it go. See the key for me to letting things go, is I actually have to hold it for a second, let it actually be in my grasp and then I can let it go. But if I never accept that it exists, it is impossible to let i go. How do you let go of nothing?
This may or may not make any sense. I'm going to upload another vlog thingy and tell you about aquatic therapy at the Bally's on El Centro in Hollywood and how I was actually pretty lucky during the accident. Los Angeles is an odd town for car accidents.
Have you been in a car accident? Didn't the paperwork kind of blow?
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