I Didn’t See It Coming

I’d like to say I never saw that tractor-trailer coming.

I remember the moments after laying on the pavement, my body twisted in impossible directions. I had made it — I wasn’t banking on that.

When I woke up after my accident, days later, I realized how lucky I was to be alive and how fleeting and precious life was. I never wanted to put my family through that kind of mourning and grief. I felt like a miracle. A girl in the hospital room next to me had been hit by a car. I was hit by a semi-truck and only damaged my arms and legs. She died while I lived. I shouldn’t have made it, but I did.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, type 1, at the age of sixteen and had only been on medication for half of those years. I struggled to want to take the medication. At the time of my accident, I had been unmedicated for eight years. I wasn’t necessarily planning to end my life at the time, but my bipolar disorder makes me so impulsive and makes me feel everything so immensely that I just react sometimes.

I struggled to want to be better. High highs and low lows, maybe you know how the story goes. Writing what felt like the next Great American Novel when manic, feeling like I could do or be anything and working to make it possible, while feeling like nothing could stop me. Euphoric, manic. Feeling totally alone in the world, feeling unwanted, and a burden on everyone, analyzing every mistake I had ever made in my entire life at three in the morning while I prayed for sleep to come. Desolate, depressed.

Bipolar disorder led me to make risky and impulsive decisions like using drugs and having unsafe sexual encounters. I didn’t care about myself, I didn’t value myself, and life was a burden. It was hard to see the forest despite the trees. Before my accident, I was just biding my time and waiting for my time to die. I was sure that my life would end at my own hand. I couldn’t bear my own existence.

After my accident, I became determined to not only be alive but to thrive. I realized I had been given a miraculous gift by surviving and refused to let my bipolar disorder hold me back any longer. I realized life is precious and worth living.

I spent two months having surgeries on my limbs, trying to rebuild my bones and grafting muscle from one place on my body to another, where my collision with a truck had decimated them. I spent months and months in a wheelchair, then more months learning to walk again. I had damaged my radial nerve in my left hand and I learned how to use my hand again for simple tasks like holding a cup or passing a ball between both hands. I still wear a leg brace on my right leg and I have a wrist brace on my left hand. I walk with a limp and my scars are clearly visible, especially in the summer when sunbaked skin reveals even the slightest skin imperfection. My right leg is very visibly deformed following the muscle grafts. But in my life now, I live with gratitude because I survived.

I joined my local NAMI group for peer support. NAMI is the National Alliance on Mental Illness. It’s the largest grassroots mental health organization in the United States and has chapters nationwide. My local chapter has free peer-led weekly mental health support groups. They were there for me when I had no other resources—no money, no health insurance.

When I found a therapist, I threw myself fully into treatment. I committed to being better by sticking to my meds, religiously, even when side effects like weight gain made me feel discouraged or depressed for various reasons. I had majored in psychology during college so I knew a lot of coping strategies. While I had always known these strategies, it was a struggle to actually use them. I focused on myself, practiced mindfulness, and meditated on things to strive for instead of focusing on what I thought I had done wrong. All the things I always used to say “don’t work for me” suddenly began working for me. What changed was that I fully committed to being better. I gave myself permission to heal and I worked hard to take charge of my mental health.

Now I’m committed to being the best version of myself. I use every tool in my toolbox and I give everything the good ol’ college try. I’ve removed “I can’t” from my vocabulary and I can finally say I’m happy to be here. I’m glad that truck saw me coming and stopped enough to avoid killing me.

Loving life — I never saw that coming either.