Each of us has things from our past. Ones we wish hadn’t happened but having endured and triumphed over them forged us stronger than before. I’m not so very different. There are many things about my childhood I wish could have been better. Events I wish hadn’t happened. Things I was exposed to that no child should ever have to withstand.
For me, I’ve spent a good part of my life putting to rest the demons my childhood created. Not forgetting what happened, but rather taking a hard look at those events, processing them through to their tiniest nuances, gleaning what knowledge I could from them and then blessing the rest and letting it go.
As much as I’ve release the hold my past has had on me, every once in a while, something comes along that triggers a past occurrence, instantly transporting me back through time and space to when the event(s) took place.
That happened to me just recently when I suffered a blow to my lower back, not on, but right beside a spinal injury I sustained that almost left me paralyzed from the waist down at age fourteen. The second the impact took place, I was unable to process it, and so it did that weird Twilight Zone thing where I was zapped back to the exact moment in time when I was originally injured.
My hand flew to my lower back in a feeble attempt to protect it. I had a devil of a time fighting back the waves of vomit that threatened to spew from my mouth. Swallowing repeatedly, I managed to drop to the ground where I rolled in a fetal position. From there, a nonsensical stream of dialogue, half referring to the blow that had just occurred while the other half teetered on a stream of comments driven by the deepest emotional outburst I can ever recall experiencing.
When I was a teen, a hit-and-run driver slammed into me on my bike after running a stop sign. My left shin collided with the bumper of the car, and I was tossed, ragdoll fashion, over the hood of the car. The only thing that stopped me was when my lower spine smashed into the support beam between the windshield and driver’s side window, cracking backwards in the process. In that moment, there was a blinding pain, the likes of which I’ve never felt before or since, not even when I delivered all four of my children completely natural.
At the time, and in the subsequent months and years that followed, I didn’t have time or the energy required to process, from an emotional standpoint, what had happened. Instead, I was too consumed being fitted for steel bar reinforced ego-skeletal back braces and having to relearn how to function over the course of the next four years. Couple that with having to battle the powerful family of the girl who caused my injury in a lengthy litigation along with trying to maintain a normal life by attending school, and there just wasn’t a chance for me to adequately work things through.
So I didn’t. Instead, I compartmentalized what had happened. And when the blinding moments of shooting pains occurred, the ones that felt like a lead pipe was being smashed into my lower back, causing me to fall to my knees, gasping for air due to my injury, I didn’t stop to think about how I felt. Oh, no, I was far too concerned with overcoming my injury and reclaiming a physically active life.
If you tune in to tomorrow’s blog, I’ll continue on with what happened….
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