Opening of the New Year

Happy new year everyone! I hope you had a good holiday and New Year’s. Seems like 2022 is already going by fast, with already a week into it. I know the last two posts along with this have just been updates. Since I’ve been working on my book, my days spent on my computer have mostly been writing. Although I feel like I have gotten a significant amount of it finished. It just needs organization and structure.

Here’s a little taste of part of a chapter in my book:

    After such a life altering situation, there is a grieving process. As I lost my independence, movement, and personal space after my accident, I realized that to move forward I needed to fully process what happened to me. If I shifted my thinking right away and accepted that my situation was indeed happening. If only I thought to myself, “Even though it’s not the most ideal place to be in, but it's happening.” I believe I was tempted into putting off dealing with the unknown or just pretending that it didn’t exist.

    Over the years, I’ve set numerous goals for myself. They helped me move past painful memories and situations in which are difficult to handle. Going through the different stages afterwards proved to be a process. It was a testament of my faith and own self-healing process. Finding my own path in life, I would realize that things aren’t always how they seem. 

    Our beginning milestones in life are rolling over, crawling, walking, and talking. There are many that we face throughout life like graduating, getting married and working a new job, that we don’t count but are easily important. For me, I began gaining self-awareness, surviving disappointment, and learning a new perspective.

    I was flooded with a vast of new emotions like feelings of loss in the early days following my injury. Like many people, I was stuck wondering “how could such a terrible thing happened to ME?” I started to become paralyzed with fear for what I had underwent and lost in the beginning. To get to the accepting stage, it took not only my mom, but others around me and myself to be able to overcome obstacles that would my way.

    There is an average amount who suffer spinal cord injuries who survive past the first 24 hours. It is often unpredictable what the journey to recovery is like, but it is usually long. Some sufferers of SCI’s simply accept what happened to them right away and for others it may take days, months or even years. The feelings of people who endure grief is widespread across all planes. I realize that there were times when I went through a grieving process of losing my independence and the loss of movement/feeling.

Jenni