Wreck Reflections

On October 16th 2011, I was in a car accident on the interstate. I had just graduated from college, I was frantically searching for jobs, and I was on a my way back to Louisiana from a whirlwind trip to Pensacola to get a scuba diving certification that was required for a job I wanted. I didn't know any of the other divers because I had taken all of my courses and trainings one-on-one at the last minute, instead of doing the traditional class group class. However, over the course of the weekend I made friends with a few of the women around my age and I found myself riding back home with them.

When the woman in a banged up truck came from the shoulder on the right side of the interstate, perpendicular to traffic, in the apparent attempt to cross over the grassy median (despite the fence running through the middle of it), I was cross-legged behind the driver, leaning forward and texting a friend. I suddenly heard the driver gasp, the woman in the passenger seat scream, and when I looked up it was to see us driving directly into the side of the cab of the truck.

I lost consciousness. When I came to all I could think about was the awful pain in my stomach. I have had broken bones in the past, I've had surgery around ten times, I've bitten completely through my bottom lip, and I've done several week-long hiking trips and trained for a triathlon, so I knew what all kinds of pains were like. This pain felt like all of my organs had burst.

Through my fog I heard the girl next to me start to whimper, so I heaved myself onto my hands and knees to crawl towards her, and that's when blood started gushing onto my hands and splattering off of my knees. I couldn't feel my face at that point, but I assumed that I had broken my nose from slamming my head into the back of the driver's seat. I didn't even have much time to think about that, however, before someone opened my door, grabbed me around the waist, and yanked me backwards from the car.

A man sat me against the tire and asked me repeatedly what my name was. I blacked out again and reawakened to the the truck-driver screaming "It wasn't my fault!" over and over again as they loaded me into an ambulance.

Luckily, we had crashed right near a hospital and all four cars that stopped to aid us were either doctors or nurses. The driver suffered no serious injuries, the front passenger had some severe whip lash, the woman next to me had a cracked rib and a punctured lung, and I had a sprained ankle, a stomach full of hematomas (but no burst organs!), and a laceration that would change the way I thought of myself and the world.

I had never truly realized before this incident how much your face determines about who you are, how very integral your face is to how you interact in the world in every situation. I "knew" all of that stuff about better-looking people having better lives, more opportunities, etc. etc. I "knew" the emphasis our world puts on looks. But I wasn't prepared for how the idea of my face never again being the same as I had come to know it, would change my personality and outlook in subtle and overt ways.

I was also not prepared for how other people would react to my injury. The driver of my car was a beauty pageant participant and almost as soon as the blood had dried, one of our dive instructors cheerfully told me, "at least this didn't happen to Mariah, she's a beauty queen!" Someone else I knew approached me a few days after the incident and said, "Well we had hoped that this might knock you down a few pegs, but no such luck!" Even after the scar had started to heal and I was feeling like it might actually not be noticeable in time, strangers seemed to have absolutely zero qualms about approaching me in public and asking, "What happened to your face?!" Strangers still do not have a problem with that, but thankfully I've learned not to care.

There came a point in the healing process where I spent so much time sub-consciously picturing my face as this haggard conglomeration of scars and wrinkles that every glance in the mirror was a jolt to my system: "Who is that young person?!" My therapist muttered, "hm...that's weird..." when I told him that.

Today I barely ever even think about my scar, unless one of the aforementioned strangers kindly points it out, or if I go to scratch my forehead and suddenly remember I still don't have much feeling there. but I think it definitely changed my outlook on life for the better. This scar, more than any of the other nine major surgery and accident scars sprinkled throughout my body, made me realize how much I had invested in my vanity, how much we all have invested in our vanity, but also that looks and life are fleeting, so live it, document it, and don't let anyone stop you.

Here are my reflections on the first three anniversaries of the wreck. My injuries were so minor compared to so much else that has happened, is happening, and will happen to others around the world, but if my thought process on the situation helps even one person who finds themselves in a similar place, I will be happy.

October 16th 2012: After October 16th last year I couldn't eat solid food for days, I couldn't do anything that required the use of my stomach muscles for weeks, and I couldn't put full weight on my ankle for months. For a while I couldn't sit up, lie down, or walk by myself, and I had resigned myself to being slightly disfigured. Nonetheless, due to the nature of the accident, I was ultimately, truly, just thankful to not be more grievously injured than I was, and frankly, to be alive.

So here we are a year later! Every day I still see a scar in the mirror, but every day that scar serves to remind me to be eternally grateful for modern medicine and the plastic surgeon who sewed me up, perpetually in awe of the wonders of the human body and its capacity to heal, and blissfully happy to have the life that I have. I can’t believe it’s only been a year and I can’t believe how lucky I am. So, though I had considered that this day might forever be cursed for me, and that I should maybe just stay home and hide, I've decided that that’s some Grade-A bullshit. From now on this date is not just the anniversary of my wreck. It is the anniversary of my lucky day, punks, because I survived. Celebrate your life!

October 16th 2013: Well here I am, two years after the wreck that really, really checked me, and also added lucky number nine to my list of major scars. There were moments of the healing process depicted here, during which I was very depressed. Days and weeks even. There was even a point when I resigned myself to just dying my hair black and taking up the fashion of Frida, since she is the only person in the history of ever to make a unibrow sexy.

However, I am sad to say that even as my scar, bruises, and sprain were healing slowly but miraculously, others things got worse. Only a few short months after my accident I experienced a suicide that afforded me the greatest heartbreak I have ever known, and much more recently a quiet but life altering divorce. Fissures in splits in cracks in a wobbly, unfinished foundation. So needless to say over these past two years I’ve had a heavy dose of the reminder that life is fragile and things irrevocably change. At times it has felt like the world was just hacking away at me, first taking pieces of my physical body and then taking pieces of my metaphysical heart.

But along with these reminders also came the greatest gift I have ever received: knee-weakening gratitude to be alive, and especially to be living the life that I am. Bad things, terrible, unthinkable things, happen to people 100 times better than me every minute of every day, in every corner of the world. Compared to what some of my fellow humans have experienced in their devastatingly short or long lives, I have been laying on a bed of roses being fed grapes for my entire existence.

No matter what you believe, we are all born of this earth and we all struggle to survive in it. We are substances of this world just like wood, clay, and stone, and as such we are just as subject to erosion as anything else. Life chisels away at us: steadily and predictably at times, violently and greedily at others. Life knocks off bad things (phew!), and good things you would have really liked to keep. It even knocks off things you think you cannot live without, and this is when it can particularly seem just too indiscriminate and unfair. And sometimes it really, really is. But other times you find that under that good stuff you were sorrowful to lose, might be something even better that you wouldn't otherwise have known was there. What’s left after life is done with you might just be the very beauty that all artists are constantly striving to immortalize.

So, every year on this day I like to pause and publicly remind myself and anyone else who might be currently questioning it, that though it can be brutal, life is the most precious thing any of us have, and if nothing else, we are all connected in that. Life hacks away at you physically and emotionally. None of us get away unscarred. Are you going to regretfully pore over your lost pieces for the rest of your existence, or are you going to look at your new form every day and realize that you are, and until your last breath will be, a masterpiece in progress?

October 16th 2014: A few days ago I posted about a woman who asked her interviewer before an interview: "So, today are we going to explore my heart or my wounds?" Oral history interviews are generally supposed to be about a person’s entire life history, and I originally liked the idea of this question, but I've been mulling it over ever since then and based on my own experiences it no longer sits right with me.

Let me start off by saying today is the third anniversary of my wreck. I don't want to beat a dead horse into the ground so I wasn't going to post anything this year, but this quote got me thinking, so I want to say something on the subject.

I'm no stranger to wounds, physical or emotional, and I have actual, substantial scars on almost every part of my body. Sometimes I hate them, especially the one from three years ago today, but other times I'm proud of that evidence that I've gotten my butt out of a chair before (even if it was just to fall out of said chair). That wreck not only changed my face, but it also changed a lot about the way I see the world and myself.

Not all of those changes were bad ones though, and in fact I would say a lot of them have turned out to be very good for my personal growth. So, on this third anniversary of the event before which I obviously didn’t check myself, I just wanted to address the above quote for what I see as its dismissal of the role of our hurts in developing our personhood.

Is there a choice to fully explore someone's heart without also examining his or her wounds? I don't think so, and I also don’t think that is something to be lamented. Our wounds should be explored, because they themselves are the evidence of our exploration of this world. Of course people should not dwell on the bad that has happened to them when there is nothing left to be wrung out of those memories but pain, but in my mind the acts of exploring one's heart and one's wounds are inextricably linked; two parts of one story. What draws a line on your skin adds a sentence, paragraph, or chapter to your life, and we all know it's the heart that holds the ink.

The fact that anyone is around to explore the wounds they've suffered, physical and emotional, is the result of their heart's refusal to give up, and so in that way exploring one’s wounds is exploring their heart. Your wounds are the story of your heart's perseverance, stubbornness, and dedication to survival under any and every possible circumstance. The heart is always the last thing to call it quits, the final and most ferocious stand against any threat. Only when it succumbs is the game really over, and for this reason it sustains the very worst wounds of all. But even more amazing than that, it does all this without ever skipping more than a few beats.

On this day three years ago I was physically and emotionally wounded, scarred on the outside and the inside. But rather than succumbing to trauma, my heart kept on chugging and my wounds changed my life rather than halting it. So today I thank my heart for looking those wounds right in the face and saying, "Welcome to the story, boys. It's taken a different direction than I was expecting, but if you think you're the ending of this one you're in for a long, twisty road. You are supporting characters in this story, a little spice to the plot line, and if I have anything to do with it we have a long way to go and a lot more character development before my satisfying and final ‘bum-bum’.”

There have been other, deeper, emotional wounds since then that I actually thought my heart might not get over. The sudden loss of one of my very dear loved-ones was a particular wound that may never be sewn completely together. But in the face of that gaping lesion what did my heart do? My heart lay down and let the grief devour it like a swarm of ants, and then it waited, quietly, to become dirt, and then grass, and then a tree; a tree dedicated to him. My heart is now an entirely different being because of what it has suffered, so the very idea that you can explore someone’s heart without also carefully tracing their scars seems entirely obtuse to me.

Scars heal but they almost never disappear entirely. My wounds are not by any means everything I am, but you can’t separate them from me anymore than you can wipe a scar from my skin. In my mind, the exploration of my wounds is the exploration of the diligent penmanship of my heart, and I'm proud to have the story, right here in my chest, of how every one of my deepest wounds delivered a devastating blow, yet ultimately emboldened my bravest soldier, giving it the experience in battle to make it an ever increasingly confident warrior. The wounds that you survive make your heart a bigger and more remarkable place to explore, and they enlarge its word bank for the story it tells.

So, we don’t need to rejoice in our misfortunes, but we should also not be ashamed of, or reluctant to, share the things that have hurt us with others. Don't shy away from telling interested parties about the things that have brought you to where and who you currently are. No matter how insignificant we are in the universal view of things, no matter how small our sentient blip actually is on the timeline, how your heart deals with the blows its been dealt adds a line to your story, the story of the entirety of humanity, and ultimately the story of the world. Your continued existence in the face of past pains is the evidence of the strength of your heart, and just like soldiers in battle, our hearts make other hearts stronger by their example. If you don't have wounds you haven't let your heart jump into the melee of life, and that is the only thing of which to be regretful.