I feel like the most important lesson I learned after having open-heart surgery was that what happened might suck, it might put you behind where you wanted to be. But the most important thing you can do is let go of where you “wanted” to be, or where you were “supposed” to be, or where you “would be if life were fair;” and embrace where you are, and get better from there.
I know this. I lived this. I think I’ve said before that there was the turnaround for me – letting go of my ideas of what was “supposed” to be, and just working from where I was.
I talked about how (after open heart surgery and all that time in the hospital), I used to go to the gym and get so angry, and stop the treadmill, and give up… After all, “I used to be able to jog an entire half marathon! This is ridiculous!”
And then I thought about how even though it felt like a couple of years of my life were a lot to have “wasted” or a lot to “be behind,” that I had so much life in front of me. And that it wasn’t worth throwing away decades just because a year, or two, or something wasn’t good.
And it’s exactly the same way here.
It feels like I have been reaching so hard to get the sort of life I wanted. And I took a GIANT step in the right direction. Imagine me getting to hug this gorgeous trophy. (That trophy is BMI, and moving to New York, and everything I thought it would be.) And then, someone throws me in the ocean.
And that trophy is so heavy (with expectations, I guess). And it just’s like, “You are drowning! You cannot breathe. You have to let it go. You can come up to the surface, get some air, come back to land, and you can work for an even bigger and better trophy! BMI is not the end goal. A whole media empire is the end goal. And BMI may or may not be a part of that. That’s not the end trophy. You may have to take a different path to get to where you want to ultimately go. And after all is said and done, it won’t matter how you got there.
The only important part right now is that you can’t get anywhere if you’re drowning. And if you refuse to let these ideas of what this was “supposed” to be go, they will weigh you down, and they will drown you.
The trophy was beautiful. And it is totally exceptionally devastating that you didn’t get to hold it for longer. But you just have to hope (and work) with everything you have, that there’s another one even better, and that you can earn it (and find it) in this life.
[This is part of the series on sexual assault.]