Читать книгу Today, She Is - Molly Miltenberger Murray - Страница 5

The summer that I was 15, I was hit by a speedboat. I had a miraculous survival, and I had the next three tenuous, painful years to figure out how far I would recover. That was high school.

During those three years, I would have given anything to talk to someone who had undergone a similar recovery and who had come out the other side. Recovery from a freak accident is lonely enough; experiencing a head injury is intensely isolated. I was trapped inside my head: I empathized with those trapped inside of burning buildings, locked inside the Titanic, or otherwise caught in a cataclysmic and unavoidable turn of fate.

I related to the world through reading and I understood it through writing about it. Although no one that I actually knew seemed to go through any of the same issues, the treasury of literature that I read seemed to catch and express the turbulence and emotion of my experience. Even though I was too exhausted to engage in even the most inactive of activities, I could still pick up a book or listen to a recording, most of the time.

After I balanced enough that I could hide myself away, I intentionally blocked and burned as much as I could: but after college, I was still reeling from flashbacks and after-shock. I knew I had to tell my story to really let it go.

My mom saved a stack of pictures from the flames: I began with these and embarked on a journey through old journals, old letters, old books, any part of myself that I had not literally burned. My old journals, found hidden in a cardboard box in the barn loft, recorded every step of my recovery. The book of quotes that I kept was even more insightful.

I unlocked my lost self by finding and experiencing these sources again. It was an extraordinarily successful and painful process to re-trace my steps and recreate the flashbacks: but as I understood what I went through, the fragments came together and I could finally reconcile with the past. I haven’t had a flashback since.

I did not include many medical details in my endeavor to present an authentic experience. I ignored and avoided them as much I could during high school, and I still think they are distracting. I have yet to meet anyone who has had a speedboat land on their head, but I meet people every place I go that share the experience of mental trauma and the experience of pain.

I’ll just give it away right here and now: the point of this book is to share my experience. This is the book that I wished I had in high school. It’s for people who honestly want to understand some of the issues of recovery and that want to know what it feels like to recover from a life-impacting head injury. And now that it’s down on paper, I can let it go.

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said: Now prepare yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer Me.”1

1. Job 40:6–7.