Work In Progress
March 29, 2020
Will you be the same or different after all of this? Are you using your time wisely? How are you going to change?
I’ve been asked again and again and again over the past near-seven months since my accident. After a prolonged period of duress or following extended self-isolation, like I’ve been navigating from my perch at home on this mountain and we’re all now wildly undergoing together apart, I find that people are (sometimes overly) eager to know “who you’ll be” on the other side. Well, guess what? I’m still me: the same, yet different. I set the rules, I live the reality, and I affirm it can be both. Yes, I have changed in significant ways through the experiences I’ve survived, the choices I’ve reckoned with, the perspective I’ve been forced to gain, the inevitable passage of time. My knowledge of self has deepened profoundly, view of my own being, others and the world shifted decisively, and empathy expanded exponentially. The learnings, skills and tools acquired largely through necessity have shaped me and served me — and will now allow me to better serve others and collective humanity, I can only hope. But great lessons come at great cost. My reality was turned on its head in ways I never thought possible in an instant with a violent, harsh, painful accident that quite literally split me wide open — and throughout the harrowing fallout, intense struggle and tortuous recovery that have persisted for months. When faced with mortality, taken to the depths of darkness, tested far beyond physical and mentality capacity, pushed well over one's limits, you change. I changed. I have fundamentally changed. There's no exact science to metamorphosis, nor clear delineation amid transformation or precise measure of growth, but I know that at my core, I’m also still very much me. And so I say from the work-in-progress version of myself who stands here right now… hello.