What Nearly Dying Taught Me About Living

We can’t control when life falls apart, but we can choose what we do with the pieces.

The summer I turned 23, I almost died. I was riding in the passenger seat of my friend’s car on an empty stretch of highway between San Antonio and the border. From the opposite direction, a van with worn-down tire treads hydroplaned at 75 miles per hour, slamming into my friend’s Jeep. She was able to climb out with minor injuries, but I was pulled from the wreckage unconscious and lay by the side of the road for the 45 minutes it took the care flight helicopter to arrive.

I was admitted to the ICU, where doctors discovered three broken vertebrae in my neck, along with two collapsed lungs. It would take a few weeks for them to uncover the trauma to my small intestine that would require emergency surgery.

For those of you who have been following my journey for awhile, this might feel like it’s out of left field—I rarely talk about this chapter in my life, not because I’m trying to keep it a secret, but because I came out of the experience with an incredibly strong drive to not let it define me. Once my body healed, I was so focused on moving forward that I didn’t have the energy to look back.

But two decades later, I’ve gotten curious about how that experience changed me. Physically, of course—the body really does keep the score, and it explains a lot about why my neck tenses up at even the smallest hint of stress. But it changed me mentally and spiritually, too. With time, I’m learning that we all see life through our own filter. And that filter is created by the meaning we assign to our experiences.