Of magic doors there is this,
you do not see them even
as you are passing through.
-Anonymous
Last year on this day, I fell off the couch. My mom and husband caught me on the floor. They would catch me a number of times before the cute ambulance boys carried me out of the house. The three days that followed are pieced together in my mind like images on a storyboard. They mark the beginning of the rupture, of my uterus, and the stories I had believed true.
I’ve written about the event from a health perspective – that there is life, as we live it, before trauma and there is life, after trauma. It began the moment I woke up on the floor. A confusion mixed with a deep sense of knowing that things in my life were going to be invariably altered. My whole life shifted this year. From the stories I had clung to about how to live and who to be, to the work I do and the relationships I needed to release, to the permission to create and the exploration of what is possible.
The day I returned home from the hospital I wrote this: Gamechanger. Everything. Period. Along side of those words, words of flashbacks, of emotions, lists of people who suck vs. who don’t suck, what is working right now, what stops now, and promises to myself. And this acknowledgement, not everyone has to recognize how close it was – it’s what I do with that, that matters.
Like the event itself, the moments of this year flip through my memory like a photo album. The album filled with love, with fear, with hope, with doubt, with confidence, with insecurity, with strength, with failure, with family, with friends. The words are harder to find. Six hundred and seventy three images give evidence to the magical doors through which I moved – through which I continue to move.
(Lainey, I’ve always loved your 525,600 photo. Hope you don’t mind I borrowed.)