Every Day A New Begining

This is the first day of my 39th year, a year I have determined will change the rest of my life. Naturally, you can say that about any year, any day, for that matter. But these changes will be, as much as possible, by choice. This is the year I will learn, or relearn, how my brain and body work.

In March of 2007 I was working in New Jersey and having completely my work for the day, decided to drive home to Pennsylvania a day early to meet my boyfriend for dinner. On the way home, less than five miles from my house, my car was struck by a truck driven by a drunk driver. He ran a red light and tried to beat me across the intersection. My Element was pushed up over the highway divider where it sheared off a sign, then skidded across two lanes of opposing traffic and into a parking lot where it came to rest in a planter against a sign for a printing company.

I suffered what I later learned was a Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, back, neck and shoulder injuries and a knee injury.

Up until that point I knew nothing about brain injuries. I thought you either scrambled your brains and became "retarded" or you healed. What I learned was that there is an enormous continuum of "Mild" brain injuries - alterations in thought, emotion, perception, feeling, motion and control that, although pervasive and disabling, are not considered "Severe".

For the past two years I have been fighting this condition, trying to "get over it" and "get well" and return to what my life was like before March 27, 2007.

This is the day that I stop trying.

This year will be my great experiment. This year I will begin a journey of, for lack of a better term, "Radical Acceptance." The task I propose for myself is one of exploration. Although I desperately wish it were otherwise, I cannot become what I was before this accident, this injury. My task during this year will be to explore the person I am NOW - to determine her strengths and weaknesses, and to try to embrace this person without wasting any more of my precious energy mourning what I used to be.

There will be changes. In order to truly become effective in this new incarnation, I need to find new ways of doing almost everything - cooking, cleaning, paying bills, working, making art, having relationships, etc.

Throughout my life I've always loved beginnings. Each new year, new semester, new project, offered the chance to begin again. This time I'm being forced to change. My own brain and body are demanding a completely new way of being. If I am to succeed and re-establish a workable and satisfying life, I need to restructure almost everything "from the ground up" so to speak.

In the coming year I will be changing my surroundings, adapting my home and workspace to my new requirements. I will be changing my relationships, and learning new ways to exist with my family, my friends, and myself. I will be changing the way I eat and exercise and care for myself. Hopefully, while making these more concrete changes I will also change the way I think and feel. That, I think is inevitable. I may even learn something before I'm done, and that, perhaps will make all the rest worthwhile.