Buckle up, it’s time for something completely different.
This article was written exclusively for Steemit!
The night before Thanksgiving 2013, I was driving home to Los Angeles from a trip to central California while my mind raced recklessly with anxiety and obsessive thoughts, as it had for most of my life.
I was used to this endless chatter — it accompanied me from the moment I woke up in the morning to the moment I drifted off to sleep — so it’s no surprise that in this state that I still managed to start nodding off at the wheel for all of two seconds. I was slowly drifting across the highway, which had no center divider, and when I noticed, I panicked and swerved hard to the right. The last thing i remember was feeling my car start to pull back aggressively and uncontrollably to the left.
Then everything jolted to black.
What happened next I’ve pieced together from about seven blurs of memories:
After coming back from the darkness, I noticed the driver’s side door of my car was open, there were people standing all around, and there was a line of traffic as far up the highway as I could see. It was the same one where James Dean died, called Blood Alley.
I got out of my car and wobbled over to some people who had stopped, including the other driver I had evidently crashed into, openly and apologetically admitting it was my fault.
The people standing around urged me to sit down, and I realized I needed to call my then-boyfriend, who was still in central California. I walked back to my car and went to reach for my purse on the floor of the passenger side. That’s when I realized there was no longer a passenger side.
In its place was the grill of a semi-truck, and I had to maneuver my hands through glass and mangled steel to get to my purse. Forgetting the bystanders’ recommendation that I sit down, I wandered back out of the car as I called my boyfriend and told him I’d been in an accident. I was apparently severely concussed, which explains him asking me to hand the phone to someone else because I was unable to provide any specific information about what had happened. When I handed the phone over, I saw blood smeared on its glowing screen.
I remember the paramedic in the ambulance asking me what I studied in school and not being able to remember my own birthday when the nurse at the hospital asked for it. I remember getting stitches on my right temple and an x-ray on my neck, and I remember two officers showing up at the hospital to check on me and telling me how lucky I was to be alive. I remember my boyfriend showing up after a two hour drive that felt like it had only taken ten minutes, at least to me, and him finding glass in my eye and more open cuts on my scalp. They were filled with metal debris and tiny sprinkles of glass.
Even though the memory of the semi’s grill was burned into my banged up brain, and even though the looks of concern of the cops’ faces were objectively unsettling, I don’t think I realized how bad the accident was until I saw my car at the tow yard that Monday and saw my own blood smeared on the driver’s door. The middle console was pushed up and out to the left so far it was jutting into the driver’s seat.
When I realized that I probably should have died — or at least broken a bone or had something more serious than a stiff neck, concussion, and cut on my temple — something changed. For a week, it felt like the noise in my head that I was never able to clear away — not through yoga, not through exercise, not through even the finest strains of Indica — was quiet.
I felt whole. I felt like my whole life had been the finale of “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles where the orchestra builds and builds into chaos and discord, but now I had entered the the quiet and calm at the end of the song. There was silence in my head, replaced by a deep gratitude for life.
I had learned the value of the human experience, and even though I didn’t have a conscious memory of where “I” might have gone while my brain was knocked around and my spine was snapping back and forth (at least, that’s what my instinctual muscle memory thinks happened), I felt an energetic clearing.
I had a new lease on life, and every time I stared at the pictures of my mangled car, zooming in on the shattered glass and the missing passenger side, I understood the profound clarity so many new age spiritual practitioners seemed to possess. I would never again return to my chaotic mind, my suffering mind — my warring internal self.
I was free. I was so free I made a video about it on my YouTube channel called “I had to get hit by a semi to understand freedom.” I was happy. I was reset.
...until i wasn’t.
Almost five years later, as I remember this experience as if it were a truly different lifetime, that’s my true lesson. Near-death experiences are often associated with bringing people new perspectives, new freedoms, and a new appreciation for life (though I couldn’t recall what happened while I was knocked out, I’m almost certain that about three years later while half asleep on the couch, the memory returned to me, but that will have to be a story for a different post). This new respect for life is something I never stopped rationally remembering.
But our emotions are not so logical. The truth is that the racing thoughts that plagued me right before I almost ended my own life started right back up again when the immediacy of the accident started to fade away. My anxieties returned, my unhealthy, compulsive behaviors popped right back up (and if I’m being really with myself, never really went away), and the deeper pain I often attempted to ignore by jamming myself into endless thought was still trapped in my heart. I wasn’t free. Even if I understood the philosophy of anarchism, I was slave to my own unconscious (and sometimes very conscious) suffering. I made videos about ending war, but I had no peace for myself.
All of this is to say that whether it’s a near-death experience, yoga, meditation, or any other transcendent, intense, consciousness-altering event or series of events, we can’t simply, instantly vanquish our deepest wounds and trauma.
That car accident was certainly a turning point in my life. It pushed me to change parts of my life that I needed to, and for that I am grateful. But after making decisions to change, what did I do? I found myself in new iterations of the exact things I altered, perpetually suffering and unaware of just how deep my trauma went!
This story comes to mind as I’ve spent the last year of my life delving into that pain in a compassionate, curious, and grounded way, allowing it to be there, crying my eyes out in an overwhelming experience of suffering, love, and relief, and learning to care for the hurt parts of me as a lifelong process (I’ll soon be posting my speech from this year’s Porcfest, which goes into a much deeper explanation of this process).
As so many more people nobly strive for inner-healing, including myself, an emerging tendency is to seek a quick fix, a superficial fix, and to use those fixes to avoid (consciously or not) an honest dive into the depths of our hearts. Essential oils, CBD, crystals, yoga, meditation, hypnotherapy, energy healing, and more (I’ve done almost all of these) are trendy, and they can be very wonderfully comforting. But they are still not enough to get to the root of our pain, which for me, was looking me square in the face when I almost died as I ruminated myself to sleep at the wheel.
My run-in with a semi truck while going 65 mph on the highway was nothing less than a defining point in my life that still reminds me of how precious life is and how easily it can slip away. But more than anything, as it becomes an increasingly distant memory, it has taught me the value of long-term healing and our inability to escape its necessity.
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