About a week ago, I was in a pretty intense car accident. My boyfriend and I had been driving back to campus when we hit another car who had stopped for deer all too quickly. The collision was pretty bad and resulted in quite a few injuries between the two of us. We both got concussions and bruises. I also sustained a fractured sternum while he lost his car.
The point of me writing this is not to look for sympathy or condolences, in fact, its quite the opposite. Since the accident, I’ve received an abundance of heartfelt apologies and well wishes. While they have been nice to hear, it’s also been a continuous reminder that it happened.
Since that night, I’ve been continuously thinking about what could have happened, and how grateful I am because it could have been worse.
It’s so easy to forget how fast our lives can be taken from us. In a blink of an eye, all that we wake up to every morning could be stripped from us in some crazy freak accident type of way.
Although I’ve been on bed rest since the accident, there are a couple of things I’ve been able to do to try to remind myself how lucky I am to be feeling the pain that I am. These exercises include mostly listening to my body and feeling at peace within the way it all worked out.
I remind myself how easily my life could have been taken from me. That night, laying in bed, all I could think about was how grateful I was for being alive. Being reminded of my own possible outcomes, It became much easier to completely change and deepen how I look at life, what I’m doing with it, and how I could be doing it better.
For me, this means that I’ve noticed how much more I need to really ground myself in what positive things each day holds. Whether that’s literally as simple as hearing the birds chirp outside my window after a long winter, or as complicated as reevaluating the kinds of things I say to myself and others throughout the day in oblivious ways.
Someone close to me once said, ‘Things are replaceable, but people aren’t.’ This is entirely true. I think it’s fair to say that on a normal basis, I, along with many of my peers, stress ourselves out about the wrong things. We find ourselves sitting in a pool of defeat after realizing we don’t have enough money for our next coffee or shopping trip. The thing is though, coffee and clothes would be nothing without the people using them. If we don’t put our mental and physical health and safety first, we have nothing.