Wistfully Waiting: How My Life Changed After A Major Car Accident. My “New Normal.”

A.G.G. — March 17, 2022 (the date of writing this post)

TW // mentions of suicide, death, and depression

I’ve always thought of bad incidents, accidents, and situations as things that are outside of myself. We never want to think about those things happening to us because they rarely do, but when we put situations outside of ourselves, we are faced with post traumatic stress after we do experience these situations. I was a good driver. I am a good driver. I never had trouble keeping control, staying focused, or abiding by traffic guidelines. I never thought I could be involved in a major car accident, not until it happened to me, at least.

On the foggy, rainy, morning of December 29, 2021, on my way back from visiting my best friend from college and on my way to pick up my goddaughter for a day out, I was involved in a major car accident. Recounting specific details is unnecessary, all you truly need to know about the accident is that the car was totaled and I was taken to the nearest hospital via ambulance, placed in surgery, and had a brief hospital stay. I survived, that’s what matters.

This accident has put me out of work for MONTHS. I’m a teacher and I was supposed to start back up at work two days after I was released from my hospital stay. A lot of my life centers around my job. I work five days a week and spend my time outside of work preparing for work. The professional and personal life balance is difficult when you’re instructing for the majority of your day and get roughly an hour of preparation time to do whatever else you have to. In my four years doing this job, I’ve gotten better at the separation, but when you are taking an unexpected leave of absence, there is no preparation, and yet, you’re still expected to work. I was out of the hospital on opioids for pain, unable to walk or stay awake for extended periods of time, and my admin called me to ask if I would be posting lesson plans to Google Classroom.

I was shocked. Not even having processed the fact that I had had a brush with death, and yet, I was expected to work. If there ever was a toxic relationship I have had in my life, it’s with my job. I adore my students. The kids make the job worth it, let’s leave it at that.

—

Here I am, stuck at home with nothing but my mother and my thoughts. Bless my mother, she had to (and still has to) deal with my spiraling mental health and PTSD from this accident. She is a literal angel and I am lucky to have her.

Immediately after the point of impact, my first thought was to call my mother (my phone had other plans), because the only thought that crossed my mind was “I can’t die without talking to my mom.” I still get teary eyed thinking about this moment. It was the most scared I have ever felt in my life (and I’ve had brain surgery).

—

I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety for more than half of my life, I’ve been on countless combinations of antidepressants, and what I’ve felt in the last three months is much worse than it was before my accident.

You think you want to die until you’ve had a brush with it in a way that is completely out of your control. I’ve been suicidal, I’ve been passively suicidal, and I have thought about the countless ways that I could do it, but it’s different when you’re staring down the barrel of a situation where everything is completely out of your control.

It sits with you, in those dissociative moments where you stare off into the distance blissfully unaware that you’re doing so until the reality of the situation chooses to invade your thoughts. It’s there when you’re dreaming of living your life and being free, in that dark moment right when things are going to get good, suddenly you’re in the car, it’s out of control, and you’re seeing the crash coming, but you can do absolutely nothing to stop it. And it doesn’t just happen once, it happens over and over and over again until you don’t even want to close your eyes. You want to do nothing but distract your mind from thinking about anything you don’t want it to.

Unfortunately, our brains are far more complex than we’d like them to be. Your brain is traumatized. It’s trying to still process this moment in time where it was damaged, where it didn’t have control over what happened to you. Your brain just mulls it over and over again, trying to wrap itself around the situation and how to prevent it from happening again in the future. It replays this scenario in any way it possibly can because it wants to be prepared if it happens again. You want to be prepared if it happens again.

My subconscious throws me back into the accident, still, almost three months later. I’ve thought about it so much, I’ve had to learn how to distract myself. Every time I get in a car to go to an appointment or go to the store, I brace myself. I’m looking all around me, I’m hyper aware of the way everyone is driving. I flinch if another car gets too close. I hold my breath when the car jerks in any way. I’m traumatized, but I have to learn how to move forward, that’s what my mom says, what my doctors say, what my therapist tells me, what I tell myself. Life moves on, so I should too. I have to. If I don’t, I’ll be trapped in fear.

I haven’t driven since my accident. I was supposed to go back to work in April, but my injury is taking time to heal. I still can’t walk properly without an assistive device, but I’m working on it with my physical therapist. I don’t take as many pain killers as I used to, but I still need them. If I walk too much, I’m in pain. If I sit wrong, I’m in pain. If I lay on my side, I’m in pain. That’s just a part of my life now. Pain is constant, but I can’t let it get to me. This is easier said than done. I can tell myself not to sulk and think about how much my life sucks all I want, but I have days where I’m feeling down and I don’t want to hear it from anyone, myself included.

So what do I do? What does a day in my life look like now? It’s slow. I wake up, I make my bed as best as I can, eat something for breakfast, talk to my dogs, maybe I do the dishes if they’ve piled up, maybe I put a load of laundry in if there’s enough to not feel like I’m wasting water. I hop onto Twitter, talk about whatever’s on my mind, talk to my friends across the world, maybe I pick up a book and read for a bit, maybe I watch something new or different on Netflix, Hulu, Prime, or whatever streaming service I feel like perusing. Maybe I just sit down and stare off into space, all “no thoughts, head empty.” Each day is much the same and slightly different all at once.

Over the course of the Pandemic and staying home because of COVID-19, I had to learn how to occupy my time and find hobbies that worked for me. I learned how to do embroidery and cross-stitch and I immersed myself into online communities (some of which I have detached myself from by this point), but I made a lot of friends during that time, ones that I’m extremely grateful for, and ones that I talk to nearly every day. Shifting my life to being at home once again was a little bit easier this time, but not much. The physical limitations from my accident stopped me from being able to leave my house. I leave the house more now, but during the first month and a half, I only left my house for appointments.

This post-accident depression has propelled me into distraction mode 5000. I joined Book Twitter, a.k.a. booktwt. I kind of switched over from marveltwt or mcutwt, we’ve been getting less content lately and I periodically get annoyed with people and ended up deactivating that account. Before my switch over, though, I created #marveltwtreads, a Twitter book club with some friends, old and new, from Marvel Twitter. We’re a group of likeminded people who decided to read books together. It seemed like a fun idea at the time and I needed to distract my mind, so I did what I’ve done whenever the going gets tough in life, I used books to escape reality.

I attribute my recent descent into readership to my friends Tammy and Brittney, who would talk about all the cool books they were reading in our WhatsApp group chat and made me want to read them too. The first book I finished this year was Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo and I absolutely loved it. This book follows six teens who have to pull off this impossible heist for a ridiculous amount of money. That’s the most watered down synopsis I could give, but I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole where I make the rest of this writing about this book, so I’ll leave it there and tell you a bit about why it was so impactful to me at the beginning of this shitty situation I’ve been in for the past three months.

One of the crows, Kaz Brekker, is extremely cool and arguably way more accomplished and street smart at 17 years old than I am at 27, but that’s not where I’m going with this. He is a character that I felt connected to in all of the ways that a 27 year old can relate to a 17 year old teenage boy who runs a club and a gang.

Kaz is a character who is disabled. He uses a cane (a really cool one with a crow on it that he got specially made), and he is incredibly badass with it. He is notorious for being one of the harshest people in the Barrel (the bad side of town); people are scared of Kaz. There is this line that I love that’s an exchange between Jesper, another of the crows, and Kaz:

“Who’d deny a poor cripple his cane?”

“If the cripple is you, then any man with sense.”

Kaz uses his cane as a weapon when he needs to and he’ll get rid of it if he needs to in order to get whatever job he’s working, done. He doesn’t allow things to get to him, this is a coping mechanism, he doesn’t want anything to cloud his vision, but he is fueled by revenge. Everyone has their strengths, weaknesses, and flaws, even the most badass of characters. I appreciate that about a character, their dynamics, the things that make them human, that’s what makes them relatable. In some ways, I wish I could be more like Kaz, but in others, I feel like I can understand him. I hold grudges, I don’t want people to get close to me, if they get close, they have the power to hurt me.

Kaz is a character that I love. He’s the first character I fell in love with this year. I love and adore each and every one of the crows, but he is the one that I find on my mind more than the others.

—

As someone who has used reading as escapism since I was a child, it doesn’t surprise me that I have turned to it once more, now that I have nothing but time on my hands. I’ve read about 12 books so far this year, impressive for me, as I haven’t read so much in years. I’m an English teacher, so that news may come as a surprise, but when reading is a part of your job, it tends to lose its luster, that goes for everything, not just reading. If you have to do it, you’re less likely to enjoy it in your spare time. It’s kind of like how I felt about reading when I was going to school, if I had to read it for class (despite it being something that I would enjoy otherwise), I didn’t want to do it. I took a fantasy class in college, and I LOVE fantasy as a genre, it’s arguably my favorite genre to read, but I read half of everything I was required to, and I do mean this literally, I read half of each book I was required to read for class, my friends would fill in the rest of the story for me before the class where we had to have a discussion on that text.

Now, reading is all I do, all I think about. I’ve always loved consuming stories in every form. I own a ridiculous amount of books and I can’t stop myself from buying more, even though I haven’t even finished reading all of the ones that I currently have. It’s an addiction, it’s attributed to my retail therapy coping method (hey, at least it isn’t drugs). I’m mentally ill, I’ve stated this fact several times throughout the course of this piece, this isn’t news.

My book club is full of amazing people who give me great book recommendations and it is probably one of the funnest things I’ve ever done. It’s like having your own little community of people that you can talk to about the things you like and it’s great. We simp for the same book characters, we get annoyed at the same parts, we read the same genres, so we don’t ever have too much trouble choosing our books for every month (heck, we already have April’s pick chosen and we’re only halfway through March). I make graphics for our book club on Canva and Picsart, something I learned how to use more while playing around on stan twitter. I spend all of my time talking about books with those people from around the world that also spend all of their time reading and talking about books. I have a lot of fun with it, it gives me something to do, it occupies my mind, takes it away from those intrusive thoughts that linger from my car accident.

—

Today, my time off of work got extended until the end of June. JUNE. The school year finishes the first week of June.

I don’t know if that excites or terrifies me more. Maybe it’s a bit of both. After April, I will be on unpaid leave. This means I don’t make any money. That’s scary. But, the idea of going back to work also scares me. I haven’t been there for months. Not at all since this semester started. I don’t even know what my classes are doing right now. I have this guilt that sits in the pit of my stomach, I feel bad that I haven’t been working, despite my inability to physically be able to handle my job. I feel bad that this work has fallen on my colleagues, to pick up the slack caused by this accident.

My life got twist-turned upside down by this accident and handling that, coping with that, is difficult. Despite all of the distractions I use to occupy my mind, the lasting effects of what happened are there and they aren’t going away. I won’t be able to escape it, not right now, maybe not for months, it’s my new normal.

I was also cleared to start driving in parking lots today. In my mind, I am transported back to when my dad was first teaching me how to drive, it feels ridiculous. That was over 12 years ago, but now I have to start working my way back up to the confidence that I once had while operating a motor vehicle.

Will I ever feel okay? Will I ever get back to “normal” as I once knew it? Will I be able to stop feeling guilty about how this accident has had a ripple effect on those that I care about?

These are all questions I don’t have any answers to and I’m not sure I ever will, but I suppose taking things one step and one moment at a time is the best way to move forward. It won’t be easy, but I’ll just have to try my best, that’s all I can really do. ⧫