I wrote THRIVE! Don’t Just Survive because my physical therapist, my speech and swallow therapist, and one of my friends told me my healing and my attitude could inspire many people teetering on the edge of hopelessness following major life traumas, especially body and life-altering physical injuries that absolutely impact the mind too.
I thought long and hard about sharing my journey.
Never had I shared what happened the night of June 9, 1996, the night a mentally ill person cornered and attacked me. I never recounted how hard my life was struggling for three years with no short term memory and an inability to use my eyes for seventeen months. I never told anyone how deeply painful it was to drop out of my psychology doctoral program because I no longer comprehended the material, could no longer hold on to it or make connections with the parts of my brain that stored my vocabulary, my organizational and arithmetic skills.
Mostly, no one ever understood the debilitating dizziness and overwhelming exhaustion of processing the four billion bits of information flitting by us in each second – and I was unable to filter out any of them out as human bodies were designed to do.
The main reason I wrote this book is to let people who suffer, people who hurt emotionally and physically and suffer alone that they are not alone. Others know exactly what is going on inside for them because they too feel the loss, the hurt and despair.
Yet it serves no one to dwell in the what-ifs or the pity party. I wrote this book because I discovered it is my life mission to restore hope and instill faith that everything happens for a beautiful and Divine reason.
I want people to know that even when someone in a white coat says, “This is as good as it gets. Learn to live with it.” you can choose to refuse to live in the paradigm of that medical person. You can choose to heal.
And you can understand what healing really means.
My desire also encompasses allowing the people in the world of an injured person to truly understand that a physical injury, one that significantly alters your body and functioning, ALWAYS spontaneously inflicts a deep emotional wound.
I am not saying your reinventing yourself will be easy. I AM telling you, it will be worth it.
Life is a journey to savor in each minute. This is YOUR LIFE! Choose to win it!