Scars

It’s been over two months since I’ve written anything here. There are a variety of reasons for that which I won’t get into, but the short answer is because I haven’t felt like it. I haven’t felt like there has been anything of value for me to say in the last few months. I’m wondering what the future of this website looks like, if there is a future.

But all that aside for the moment, I certainly would be remiss to let Mental Health Awareness Month go by without making at least one post about it.

As readers will well know, I hold no secrets when it comes to my own mental health experiences and I avidly recommend mental health care for anyone and everyone. Every single human being could benefit from a few therapy sessions with a good provider - I stand by that. But recently I’ve been reflecting more on how I talk about mental health care when I recommend it to others.

I talk about therapy like it is a solution to everything, like it is a lifeline that will keep one from drowning. For me, that is true. (Well, it doesn’t solve everything, but it helps me process the things that cannot be solved quite so easily.) As long as I have enough income and a good provider will to work with me, I will continue to go to therapy. While my anxiety and depression and panic attacks are thankfully under control, it never hurts to check in on how my brain is doing while it sloshes around in my skull. Therapy also, as I said, helps me to process what goes on around me and makes me feel more confident in the choices I make for myself.

Some might say I’m weak for relying on therapy. I would suggest they should go to therapy to discuss what it feels like to be so wrong all the time.

That’s a joke. But those who feel therapy is a sign of weakness are wrong. Therapy is hard work; it is a sign of strength to ask for help when it is needed. If it were easy, everyone would do it without complaint because the benefits of working with a good therapist are undeniable.

When I look back at times that I have recommended therapy to people, I realize now that I talked about therapy as if it were a life sentence. I imagine that people heard me say, “you should go to therapy every two weeks for the rest of your life just like me, it’s great!” But let me clarify here that while I believe everyone would benefit from therapy, not everyone needs to be a lifer like me.

I choose to continue therapy because I see the value and impact on my quality of life. That’s my experience. For others, the benefits of therapy may be attainable in just a few months or perhaps a year. Maybe one just needs help getting through a difficult season of life or a big transition. Maybe there is one thing that needles them from the past that they need some help to work through, but once they work through it, they’re good to go.

About eight and a half years ago I was in a car accident. While stopped in traffic on the Garden State Parkway, I was rear ended by a young woman who “failed to observe that traffic had stopped”. (That’s what the police report said. I think that’s code for “was looking at her phone”, but that doesn’t matter now.) The force of the collision pushed my tiny hatchback from the right hand lane across the left hand lane and into the grass on the side of the road. My hair, which had been up in a tight ponytail, was almost completely loose with the hair tie just barely hanging on to the ends of my hair - that is how much the car whipped around with me inside it. My phone, which had been in the center console, wound up on the driver’s seat underneath me. An apple, which had been on the passenger’s seat, somehow landed neatly in a cupholder. The airbags went and the car was without question totaled.

I wasn’t bleeding, but as I stood on the side of the road my side started to hurt more and more. I had already called my dad and told him about the accident and he was on his way to pick me up. When the ambulance showed up, one of the police officers told me that if I had any doubts at all, I should go to the hospital just to get checked out. My side really hurt, so I called my dad back and told him that I was going to the hospital just to be sure. One of the paramedics told me that if I hadn’t been wearing my seatbelt, I would have died. That made me cry. I cried again thinking about how to tell my mom about the accident, knowing that she was 1,200 miles away and teaching at the moment. And I cried again once I had been delivered to the hospital and lay on a bed in a hallway while they found a room for me in their emergency wing. There was no uncontrollable sobbing, just tears from trying to deal with this sudden and violent change to my reality.

In the hospital they took my vitals, did a urine test, took some x-rays to look at my ribs which were my main source of pain. The x-rays were clear; nothing was broken, but they told me that the connective tissue somewhere in there had most likely torn. It would heal, but would take time. There was also a tiny bit of blood in my urine which we determined was because my period had just ended, but that is when I learned that the impact from car accidents such as mine can damage one’s kidneys and cause serious problems. They gave me this plastic thing that looked like a piece of science lab equipment and told me to breath into it, pushing the little plastic needle up to a certain number. I was to do this multiple times a day. Damage to ribs can impede one’s breathing and result in further issues, so I had to do the breathing exercises until my ribs felt better. They discharged me, telling me to come back if I started peeing blood. So, I was okay, but I was well and truly terrified of all the physical harm that I had just barely avoided.

My dad took me home and made me spaghetti for dinner. I slept on the couch that night because once I finally managed to get into a comfortable position, I didn’t want to move. When I woke up the next morning, EVERYTHING hurt, my entire body. But I wasn’t peeing blood and I was breathing fine, so life carried on.

There was a lot of dealing with insurance, getting a rental car, going to get my stuff out of my wrecked car that had been taken to a junk yard in Central Jersey once the insurance company was done examining it. Then there was buying a new car, this time an SUV. I didn’t need an SUV, but I was terrified to get back into another little car. When I went to the junk yard to get my stuff, I was able to fully see all the damage to my old car. Literally the only part of the car not crumpled and damaged was the spot I was sitting in the driver’s seat. I had been so lucky to not be hurt worse than I was.

But I was hurt worse that I realized at the time. I was terrified that another accident was around each corner and that I wouldn’t be so lucky the next time around. This terror manifested itself in many ways, most significantly a fear of driving on the Parkway. I would drive literally hours out of my way to avoid getting on the Parkway at all. When I couldn’t avoid it, I stayed out of the express lanes (where the accident had happened), and hovered in the right lane at around 50 miles per hour. I became that annoying slow driver that we all swear at and wonder aloud what the hell is wrong with them.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, I got over the fear of driving on the Parkway. Mostly out of necessity as the entirety of my commute was the Parkway. I still drove slower than the average bear, but I managed to get to cruising speeds at or slightly above the speed limit and go with the flow of traffic in the right hand lane. I thought I was all better and the accident was behind me.

About three years after the accident my brain exploded into a quivering pile of anxiety and panic and after the hospital and outpatient programs, I started going to therapy again. There was a lot to work through, a lot of thought patterns to change. One of the things I discovered from working with my therapist was that a fair amount of anxiety I was experiencing was still connected to the accident. While I could drive normally without the fear I once had, I still had this overwhelming anxiety related to sudden and unexpected changes. A lot of my panic attacks had been connected to me thinking that I was about to die, suddenly and unexpectedly, just as I could have in the accident. And I had this delightful new fear of flying, which we figured out was most likely connected to the accident as well; I had a lack of control in the car accident, and when you step onto an airplane the first thing you’re giving up is all control of the situation.

The point is that therapy helped me realize that I was more scarred from the car accident experience than I realized. I was still carrying it with me. I had PTSD.

Now, after a lot of work with my therapist, I’m a lot better. There are still some little scars leftover. I still won’t drive in the express lanes on the Parkway. I’m still scared of flying, but slowly building up the courage to get back on a plane. And every now and then I will jump in fright if a car comes out of nowhere. But other than that, I’m fine with driving again. I’m cautious, but I don’t expect death around every corner. The scars that were once big gaping wounds have healed and are now almost invisible, in large part because of the work done in therapy.

I have a teeny tiny scar on the big toe of my left foot. When I was five years old, a friend and I were playing house in the back room of her family’s party store. The helium tanks, there for blowing up balloons, were the stand-ins for our husbands. (I know, it was a terribly heteronormative game, but what do you want from me? It was the early nineties and I was five.) In the first act of betrayal perpetrated against me by a man, my “husband” fell over and landed on my foot, splitting my toe open. There was a lot of blood and a lot of hullabaloo, and eventually we went to the urgent care and I got two stitches. It looked like I had little TV antennas sticking out of the top of my toe. There were crutches and chewable Tylenol and my sister had to walk me to my classroom at school to make sure I got there alright. There was the absolute hideous drama of my toenail falling off in the shower. But another nail grew in it’s place, I got the stitches removed, and the next time I was back at the party store, the helium tanks were chained to the wall. I was healed and I moved on.

But there is still that teeny tiny scar to remind me of the incident. I’ve tried a couple times to show it to friends. No one can see the scar but me. It is that tiny and blends into the rest of my toe. I know it’s there, though, and I remember what happened to put it there, but I’m not scared of helium tanks or anything.

I told you all of that so that I could tell you this: everyone has a wound of some sort. Sometimes wounds heal on their own, leaving only tiny scars that are barely visible to the naked eye. But sometimes they need a little help to heal. Healing takes time and effort, and at the end of it there will most likely still be some kind of scar that leaves you remembering what happened to cause the wound. BUT: it’s better to do the work to make the scars as small as possible, hard to see, barely impacting you at all.

Healing does take time and effort, but it’s not necessarily a life sentence. I don’t continue going to therapy because of the car accident. If that were the only reason I went, I would have stopped going quite a while ago, once I worked through it and healed it as best I could.

All I’m saying is this: tend to your wounds. Consider therapy as a tool to help you do so. Make your scars so tiny that your friends will be like, “what scar? I don’t see anything. I don’t think any giant helium tank ever fell on your toe!”

It did, though. It just got better.