I was late to work the day my truck decided to add part time roller coaster to its resume. My day started monotonously similar to any other. Rushing to find small shoes discarded through the house and pray I’ll have time to put my hair up as I rush out the front door. Dropped my kiddo off for the day, switched from a song about milk to Taylor Swift.
In a matter of three seconds I hit a patch of black ice and spun to the opposite side of the road (narrowly missing a semi.) Before I even have the time to realize I’m no longer on the road- I’m being held in place by just my seat belt.
“There is happiness, past the blood and bruise. Past the curses and cries. Beyond the terrors in the nightfall, haunted by the look in my eye.” -Taylor Swift, Happiness
Plays through my speaker and it’s all I can focus on until a stranger is climbing up the side of my overturned truck to my window.
Days later while I’m painting, the song came up on my playlist. Now that I am past the crazed week (that I am still trying to wrap my brain around) I can sit and appreciate those lyrics differently. I am someone who firmly stands on two thought processes to get through my days. One, everything happens for a reason. Secondly, recovery in all its forms is a lifelong process, regardless of what happens.
More often than not these two lines of thought battle it out in my head. “Why do things just keep happening? No matter what I do it is always something.” On the worst of days I flirt with an age old temptation to numb my brain and stop feeling everything so deeply. In the back of my head soft whispers tell me, “There is a reason, just look a little harder.”
I can scream at the sky all I want about how unfair it is to continuously take hit after hit. I could focus on the fact that I lost my truck in that accident. (And anyone who knows me can tell you how much I loved my girl Dorothea.) I could sit painfully and bicker about how inconvenient a fractured tailbone is.
For my own sanity, for my own path of recovery, I will focus on how fortunate it is that my truck spun across the road when it did, and not three seconds earlier. I will honor the fact that because I feel so deeply, I can more easily empathize with those I cross paths with.
I will spend a little longer at the end of really cruddy days, reading bedtime stories and singing lullabies. Maybe I’ll even put the small shoes together by the door before going to bed.
“There is happiness past the blood and the bruise, past the curses and cries.” -Taylor Swift, Happiness
Everything happens for a reason, and at the very least even when I cannot find those reasons, there are moments of happiness. Small moments throughout the day I can appreciate and focus on that act as an umbrella over the storms that will simply always exist to one degree or another.
Listen to the soft whisper that tells you to look deeper, there is reason. There is happiness.
Be safe,
Claira
1 Comment