And then there are days when even I can’t face those obstacles
Throughout this six year journey of trying to find ‘myself’, it has not been without struggle as I find myself coming face to face with this new “other”person I have become. In many ways the obstacles I have faced as an ABI survivor often cause me to feel lost, no longer maintaining that important sense of self worth of who I am and the value I have within society. Those essences of “ME”, easily and quickly disappear when I stumble, trip or am confronted with an obstacle, in this, my life’s journey towards recovery.
In that car accident my life changed in an instant. It didn’t ask my permission, I was not given an alternative option, or an agenda in how it would complicate my life, it happened and so I must learn to live with the consequences. As a result, when obstacles rise up before me, making me fall off kilter, often feeling that I have lost my value as a human being, and a feeling of diminished ability in being a partner to my husband, no longer being able to exercise my previous role as the matriarch of a large extended family, and to have lost that easy going camaraderie I had with so many friends and colleagues and people who were my clients.
Today I was faced with a double sided coin. I had the best news possible, an article I had written will be published in a magazine called HOPE. Then, on the flip side, an hour later, the other proverbial shoe dropped as I learned the Insurer was again requesting another Independent Examination, in my view a misnomer, by denying continuing my Speech Therapy until the need has been reassessed. My experience with these last assessments have been flawed.
I am wallowing in my despair, in my sadness, my continued inability to control my environment. I understand that my different therapy sessions are continually under review and their frequency changed or limited as I progress forward. What I want the people who decide these things to know about “ME” is that I am not a quitter, to please come to understand the value I place on becoming and continuing, in some way, productive and creative in ways to replace what I so unexpectedly lost, my pre-accident quality of life, my love of my job and relationships, travel without having to have a caregiver to make sure I am physically safe. I have lost my freedom to meet life’s challenges head on in a humanizing way.
As I sit here there is a side of me that knows the light will shine once again, I know that, and the pain and anxiety will ease and I can again breathe. But at this moment it is dark out.