In an article about someone who lost his leg in a car accident, the gentleman said “you are only as old as your amputation”. I understand what he means, for when your life changes so drastically everything is new. The way you do things is completely altered and although you may not want to believe it, how you feel about yourself and others becomes different and how others perceive you can too. From my own experience I can tell you that I am the same person I was before I woke up without my vision and in the first few weeks, months and even years I clung to that like I was holding on for dear life. Which I was.
But you can’t go through something like this without it turning your world upside down while you struggle to right yourself and find your equilibrium. I picture myself in a dice shaker, violently jerked up and down and side to side, then tossed out: dizzy, hurting and dazed. I have my footing now and I can agree that there is a definitive before and after in my life, and this is not for dramatic effect, but rather an honestly raw admission: my existence as I knew it did cease that morning. My independence was taken from me, my career abruptly halted, my livelihood lost, the way I see the world — literally not well and figuratively in a more thoughtful, introspective and serious way, relationships changed, none more so than the one I have with myself.
It’s true that everyday we have the opportunity to start over. But sometimes something happens that forces you to begin again. I don’t know what it’s like to lose a body part, to have a limb removed. I have imagined it though and have lived my own anatomical destruction. At the age of 47 this type A, ambitious, independent, social, tech geek, traveller, anal retentive, organized woman, wife and bird mom was forever changed. She is still all these things but a newfangled version of herself. And now she is 5.
