July 12, 2019

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          THE MOMENT MY LIFE CHANGED - THIS IS MY STORY

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I was a pedestrian walking on the sidewalk when I was struck by a vehicle traveling nearly 60 miles an hour.

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I suffered catastrophic injuries, including a traumatic brain injury, and would endure ten surgeries over the next five years.

I survived..... But surviving and living are two very different things.

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Before that day, I was a successful executive—a Vice President, a mother, a grandmother, fiercely independent and always moving. I knew who I was and where I belonged in the world. Then suddenly, I was learning to live inside a body and brain I no longer recognized. For a long time, I believed recovery meant getting her back—the woman I was before the accident. I kept looking backward, measuring myself against everything I had lost. Until I began asking a different question:

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Maybe healing wasn’t about finding my way back to who I was or maybe it was about discovering who I could become.

So I stopped trying to rewrite the chapters that had already been written. I turned the page. And, quite literally, I began writing the next ones. Today, those chapters have brought me back through the doors of hospitals like Penn and Jefferson—not only as a patient, but as a mentor, coach, advocate, and voice for survivors of trauma and brain injury and the families and caregivers who walk beside them. Through art, speaking, advocacy, and my work within the brain injury and trauma communities, I try to help people feel seen, heard, valued, included, and understood. Somewhere along the way, I discovered something I never expected trauma to give me: PURPOSE! That purpose eventually became Finding a New Way to Soar.

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Although inspired by my journey, this story isn’t only for trauma survivors. It’s for anyone whose life has been divided into a before and an after—through disability, illness, loss, grief, divorce, or simply a life that turned out differently than they imagined.

My accident will always be part of my story. But it does not get to be the ending.

I stopped asking, “How do I get back?” and began asking, “Where can I go from here?”

I turned the page. I began writing new chapters. And somewhere along the way, I discovered that I didn’t need my old wings to soar. I just needed to find a New Way to Soar…

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And if my story helps even one person believe there are still blank pages waiting for them, then what happened to me can become something more. It can become hope for someone else. Your story is not over because life changed the plot.
Turn the page.

 

                          There are still chapters waiting to be written...