Rewinding a little, I need to speak about my faith a little. It's the only thing that has gotten me through all of this, wheter I knew it at the time or not.
After my depression was somewhat under control, I had to face the facts that I was 23 years old and would more than likely NEVER get any better, in fact, it would only spread and get worse. I had to come to grips with the fact that the pain would be a part of my life forever. How do you do that? When you can barely make it through the day, how do you think ahead to say 50 years from now? I had heard of people with whole body RSD. Every inch of their body was in agony all the time. That is a nasty little habit of RSD. It starts out in one area, but like a grass fire in the wind, it rarely stays put. It spreads and envelopes until you are all burned up. Mine started in my ankle, then spread to the top of my foot, then the arch and toes, into my calf, up my shin then into my knee. This took about a year to go this far and I was scared and eventually I got angry. Angry at healthy people who wasted their lives, angry at people who had headaches and whined and complained, angry at myself for not being the person I used to be and most of all I was angry at God.
After I got hurt, I prayed every day for Him to take it away. I begged him for relief from the pain. I pleaded with him to give me my old life back. Nothing ever changed, except for the worse.
I got mad, I mean ugly mad. I would scream and yell and feel so far away from God and I knew that I had messed up things so badly that even God didn't want anything to do with me. He, much like most everyone else had given up on me, and I guess I deserved it, For a long time, I figured if He didn't want me, then I didn't need him. That is when I started self-medicating. We all know how that worked.
How dare He take my life away. I was young. I was supposed to be going out and having fun and enjoying life. Instead, I was barely surviving. WHY??? Why are you punishing me? As usual, no answer, so I walked away. I didn't go to church, and when my parents made me go, I just sat in the last pew and ignored what was going on. God didn't love me, so I didn't need him.
As we all know, anger is one of the stages of grief, along with denial, bargaining, and on and on. I did all those. I was greiving the death of my old life and of my health. Little did I know that when I finally let go and embraced my "new" life, it was so much better.
One day, I was having a particularly bad day and I decided to bargain with God. I said, ok, if you don't want to fix me, then at least give me the strength to make it through today. Guess what? He did. And He has ever since.
My path at that time wasn't to be healed, it was to learn to lean on him and not myself. I had strayed so far from the path that I know God wanted me on that I couldn't have found it, even if I had wanted.
I tell all my post accident friends that they wouldn't have liked me before I got hurt. I was not a nice person. Heck, I didn't even like myself, so how could anyone else.
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