04/12/2026
I was in a terrible motor crash when I was eight. It was violent, sudden, and unforgiving. It took my legs from me. For almost a year, I couldn’t walk. I lived in a wheelchair, dependent, immobile, watching the world move on without me. At that age, when your body is supposed to feel like freedom, mine became something I had to fight just to exist inside. It's a miracle that I walk today.
Back then, though, there was nothing miraculous about it. There was only the stillness, the waiting, the slow, aching reality of a life reduced to what I could reach. I thought the hardest part was the physical loss, not being able to stand, not being able to move, the frustration of being left behind while everything else kept going.
What I didn’t realize then was that I never really processed the accident itself. It happened, and everything immediately became about recovery. There were hospital visits, routines, people helping me physically. I was taken care of in all the visible ways. But no one really sat with me in what had happened. No one slowed down enough to ask, What did that feel like for you? And I didn’t know how to bring it up either. So I didn’t. I just adjusted. I adapted. I kept going.
Years later, when I was finally back on my feet, I thought I had left it all behind me. But there was still an ache I couldn’t explain. Something unresolved that would surface in quiet moments. I wasn’t in pain anymore, not physically. But something in me still felt like it hadn’t moved on.
It was in therapy that it began to make sense. In the middle of trying to explain a feeling I didn’t fully understand, my therapist pointed me to this quote by Gabor Maté. And something clicked.
Because I could finally see it.
It wasn’t just the accident that shaped me. It was the silence that followed it. The way I had to carry the fear, the shock, the confusion on my own. Yes, people helped me heal physically. Yes, I was surrounded. But no one really entered that inner space with me; the part that was trying to make sense of suddenly not being able to walk, of everything changing in an instant. I was alone with it.
And that’s what stayed.
That’s what I had been carrying all those years. Not just the memory of the accident, but the feeling of having to deal with it by myself. Of never quite being given the space to speak it, to feel it fully, to be met in it.
That’s what Gabor Maté means. It’s not just the hurt that leaves a mark — it’s the absence of someone to help you hold it. Because pain, when shared, moves. But pain, when carried alone, settles. It lingers quietly, long after the body has healed.
And maybe that’s why it took so long to understand. Because from the outside, I had recovered. I could walk again. I was “fine.”
But healing isn’t just about getting back on your feet. Sometimes, it’s about finally turning toward the part of you that went through it alone… and letting it be seen.
