In 12 days, it will have been six months since my leg was broken. On the 14th of November, 2016, someone decided to dropkick my knee during a practice match of indoor soccer in a moment of anger and malice. My kneecap was kicked into the top of my shin bone, and my tibial plateau collapsed into itself. My posterior cruciate ligament was torn and my kneecap fractured.
Because of how swollen it was right after the injury (I narrowly avoided having to get the blood drained), the x rays were misread, and I missed the necessary window for surgery. On the 3rd of January, I was told the bones had begun to fuse in the shape they were broken, and that I will suffer from chronic pain and arthritis for the rest of my life.
In the last six months, I've endured excruciating pain, long periods of social isolation, crippling depression and anxiety, a battle with addiction and a feeling of having lost my place in the world. I'm currently in more debt than I have ever been, and struggling with the idea of returning to a job I fear will cause me more physical pain than I care to deal with.
I feel like I cut myself off from the world, and closed my heart, in order to contain the physical and emotional pain of my experiences and try to work through them using introspection.
While my body is starting to feel like it's nearly ready for me to go back to my life as it was before I was injured, it has taken a lot longer for my spirit to catch up. A big part of me is still healing, struggling to come to terms with how much my life was changed by a second of madness.
I was confronted by the idea that a large amount of my self confidence was innately tied to my physical capabilities, and after being temporarily stripped of that capability, I lost a lot of faith in my self and my worth as a person.
I am still trying to mentally process my reflections on the last six months into something I can neatly categorise within my own head as past experience.
One thing that has become more prominent in my world view lately is the small actions taken by others to express love, often occurring at times when I have been unable to extend that love to myself.
"You can only connect with others as deeply as you have connected with yourself"
For a long time, I have been repressing any connection with myself so I could hold that pain back to a small part, and try and keep functional in other areas of my mind, my body and my life.
I feel like I have finally begun to untie that knot, and open myself to the flow of the world again.
A reoccurring thought that has given me strength time and again, especially when things have been at their worst, is the idea that I am worth it. I am worth all the pain that I have felt. The pain will fade but I'll still be here. I am worth trying for, even on the days when I've felt the greatest thing I could achieve was the crawl from my bed to the fridge and back. There are days that stretched into months where I've felt like a black hole, but there are days ahead where I will shine like a supernova.
Remember, whatever it is that you're going through, that YOU ARE WORTH IT. If you can feel it, it's because you've earned the right to those emotions, and given time you'll find a way to work the events of your story into one that feels like home.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, a wise man calls the beginning of a butterfly.
Sometimes you literally have to have your entire being ripped apart and dissolved into goo before you can work out how to put the pieces back together with some pretty wings to boot. Give yourself time, patience and grace. There is nothing you can't handle if you allow yourself to fail a few times a long the way.
