Chaos in our lives ALWAYS serves a purpose. Whether it breaks us down, provides us with opportunities we wouldn’t have ever had, puts the right people or the wrong people on our path – we grow… Anyway. This was absolutely true for me, all of it. I was majorly impacted by all of the events in my life, all of the ridiculous bullshit, AKA my childhood. Now it looked like, at age 19, the shit hit the fan yet once again. So, as I am physically rehabilitating, I meet some really cool people, most of whom made me feel incredibly blessed that I ONLY had to learn to walk and use my right arm again ;).
Watching other injured people working on themselves at the rehab center – daily – regaining their functioning, putting their lives back together, learning how to live with less-than-perfect-bodies… really started to open my eyes to the power of the human spirit. The resilience, palpable. Sweating, screaming, yelling, crying, grunting… it was hard work to regain what I once had.
I was physically “less than I’ve ever been. Weak, vulnerable, dependent – all disastrous to the psyche of an abused female.
One afternoon I noticed an older grandfather-type man at the rehab center. Predictably, every time I came in for treatment there he was sitting at the same window-side table in the center. He and his young, pretty therapist would share some words and routinely burst into hysterical laughter. I watched this sequence of events and their laughter was contagious. I finally asked my therapist what the hell was going on with those two. She revealed that the elderly gentleman had suffered a stroke and his speech was severely compromised. He was left with swears and an occasional spontaneous word or two. Aphasia it was called. I watched over a period of weeks and observed him regaining more and more functional communication as time went on. This intrigued the hell out of me. How f’n cool was that?
Doing nothing except recovering and trying to gain some pounds on my skinny 90 lb frame, General Hospital was my drug of choice… every day at 3:00. There was a character, Tanya – who, I think, was either a Nurse or Speech Pathologist. She worked with a patient after he had had a stroke.
Well, things were definitely aligning for my greater good. The Universe was sending me signs and I was receiving them… When I was able to walk without assistance, I enrolled in a different University to begin my Speech Pathology studies. Prior to the accident, I was working at a factory to make enough $ to pay for my college courses. As a result of the accident, the driver’s insurance company awarded me enough $ so I could transfer to another college, live there, study Speech/Language and not have to work to make ends meet.
Things work out just the way they should. Many times, the way it all goes down isn’t pretty. But at least I was moving closer to realizing why I was here, on this earth. For the first time in my life…. I had an idea of the direction I wanted to go in. Most importantly, it wasn’t anything that was suggested by anyone else. It was an idea I came upon by myself, by accident, under horrible circumstances. Something awesome, born out of pain and suffering. I was emerging from my chrysalis. It was time.
A Fish Named Karen 