Wholeness in Shards: What My Mosaic Looks Like Now
In my last reflection, I shared the advocacy lessons that have kept me afloat. But advocacy is only one thread. The wider story is a mosaic — one I’m still piecing together.
About six months after the accident, I wrote about my life as a mosaic: shattered pieces of myself rearranged into something fragile yet whole. (you can read the first mosaic piece here)
At the time, the image was still jagged—sharp corners, mismatched colors, gaps that made no sense. Now, as I look again, I see more shape and pattern emerging. Not finished, not polished—but undeniably mine.
Full size below “The In-Between”
What this mosaic covers ↓
Grief’s tides still move through my life — sometimes on a rhythm I recognize, sometimes crashing in out of nowhere. But I’ve learned that the tide teaches. It clarifies what I miss, what I value, what I’ve carried forward. It asks me to sit with the whole truth of this experience: that it’s powerful and raw to feel everything I feel.
Grief doesn’t only live in the past; it meets me in the present too. It shows up when my body refuses to do something simple, when a short visit with a friend leaves me wrung out, when I reach for independence and find I still need help. These moments aren’t dramatic, but they carry weight. They remind me that healing is slow, and that I’m still living inside the tension between what I long for and what’s possible right now. They raise questions I can’t yet answer: What will my “new normal” look like? When will I land — and balance — there?
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the years I’ve “missed.” Not because I wasn’t living — I’ve worked harder in these three+ years than at any other time in my life. But I’ve missed the opportunities most people my age are building their lives around.
Your early thirties can be foundational: establishing yourself in work, in community, in passion. Mine have been paused, interrupted, rerouted. Twenty surgeries alone can do that — add a lawsuit, financial anxiety, social services applications, constant appointments… it adds up to a particular kind of loss.
A life lived, but lived differently. A life expanded and narrowed at the same time.
Sometimes I wonder if it would have been easier to disappear from the world entirely — to have been removed from community — instead of going through all of this in plain sight while still trying to participate. The thought isn’t literal; it’s grief-speaking. It’s the part of me that aches with the burden of trying to heal and live at the same time.
All of this is grief.
Even the not knowing who I am becoming, or what life will look like on the other side, carries its own ache.
And yet — I’ve learned that grief can coexist with wonder.
The unexpected place a tiny visitor found me in the summer of 2023 reminded me of that. The morning after Patrick and I got engaged, a hummingbird paused midair and hovered right in front of me, and I felt it: how joy and sorrow can live together in the same breath. That whole story belongs in my book someday, but the seed is here. Love and grief share the same air.
From the outside, I might look “normal-ish.” Inside, the pain shifts daily, sometimes hourly. My face carries changes I didn’t choose. My body and being are stretched and scarred in ways both visible and invisible.
Sometimes the disconnect catches me off guard. Feeling sexy in a new dress — and then a glimpse in the mirror confronts me with the deep scarring and uneven shape of my left thigh. Trying to take a selfie and noticing, again, how my right eyelid falls differently now, how my smile still bears the weight of what happened, how the tiny strip of hair from a skin graft beneath my eye never quite blends. Even fatigue can be a trigger — feeling the sting of what I don’t have energy for, catching my reflection when I’m utterly drained and seeing not just tiredness, but trauma staring back. Boundaries, too: saying no is both self-care and soul-tiring.
The daily maintenance of recovery is its own kind of reckoning. Some days, the long list of care routines — movement practice, eye drops, scar gel, meds, ice, heat, PT exercises — feels like a reminder I wish I didn’t have to carry. I try to care for myself with these rituals, but there are days when the mirror feels like both an invitation and a betrayal. Being seen by others can feel wonderful, even affirming — and at the same time, I want to hide the parts of me I haven’t yet made peace with or don’t fully understand.
People often tell me I look great, or that I seem to be thriving. I know they mean it with love — and I am trying, every day. But the truth is complicated. Looking “good” on the outside or healing well after surgery doesn’t always mean I feel whole inside. Sometimes those words land as encouragement, and sometimes they feel like pressure to match an image I can’t sustain.
Some mornings, I catch myself wondering: Does my survival story define me, or do I define it? The accident didn’t happen only to me — it reverberated outward, touching everyone who loves me. When we see each other, we remember. So the question becomes: how do we honor the shared trauma without letting it consume everything else?
I am still learning to love this new face, this altered body... this life I now live. They are mine, even if they feel unfamiliar. Some days I inch closer, some days I resist. But I’m still here, still living in this body that fought so hard to survive.
And grief lives here, too. Grief for the ease I once knew, for the way my body and face used to feel like home. Grief for the innocence that’s gone — the ability to move through the world without this constant awareness of fragility, pain, and change. Grief for a smile that will never be the same. It’s not always loud grief, but it sits beneath everything, surfacing in waves.
Still, there are bright spots that remind me I am more than what’s been taken. Sitting outside in the sun, watching the birds. Sharing meals Patrick cooks with such care. Losing myself in a good book. Being surprised by laughter with a friend. Finding small independence again in daily routines. These are the threads stitching me back together — reminding me that life is still here, still full.
Healing is rarely just physical — it’s an ongoing dance of grief and gratitude, fear and trust. At times, the walls of recovery feel close around me; other times, clarity opens a window and I rise a little taller.
For now, I’m choosing clarity where it comes, trust in the journey, and gratitude for the sunshine when it breaks through.
Two years ago, I wrote about nostalgia for the hardest times — even the hospital days.
Back then, I thought nothing could feel harder than being acutely broken, living moment to moment in pure survival mode. I know now that it’s all been hard, but the in-between seasons are the hardest of all.
The hospital was brutal, but it had clarity.
When you’re no longer acutely broken but nowhere near “better,” stamina and hope both get tested. This is where I am again: processing the closure of the lawsuit while recovering from two intense hip surgeries on the right, preparing my body and mind to go through the same two surgeries on the left, and learning I may need another facial surgery with even more specialists involved.
In the in-between, what matters most is simple and essential: finding calm, finding breath, allowing myself to escape when I need to, letting grief move through without drowning me, letting courage rise when it can. I keep returning to the image of abundance: energy, resources, love flowing through my system, reminding me I am held and supported even when I don’t feel it.
This season also asks me to pay attention — to notice the difference between the critic in my mind and the voice of my body. How do those voices shift with pain? With PTSD? With the constant negotiation between pushing and resting, doing and being? How do they influence the quiet, painful questions: Am I good enough? Am I doing enough? Am I allowed to take up this much space?
Some days healing is about movement. Some days it’s about stillness. Both are necessary; both matter equally. I continue to struggle with worthiness, with asking for help, with needing more than I want to need. I try to remember what my therapist once told me: receiving help is its own form of giving back.
And still, I often think: Shouldn’t I be past this by now? Past the accident, past the lawsuit? But everything still seems to trace back to that moment, that rupture. That is the nature of trauma — not linear, not logical, not polite. It loops and returns, even as life keeps moving forward.
Milestones that feel seismic to me — and are layered with memory and fear and meaning — barely register for others. Not because they’re uncaring, but because they don’t live in this body with its history. Even when the outcomes are positive, it can feel deeply isolating.
When I got my braces off, it was thrilling… and also jarring. It brought back memories of those early days: being unable to chew, the pain and embarrassment, the way my face looked and felt so foreign. That celebration was mine alone, too tender and complex to share publicly. Sometimes I’m still hit with memories so vivid they feel like the present: the long stretches when I couldn’t chew at all and carried scissors in my purse so I could cut my food. The first two months after the accident when no one told me I could brush my teeth, and I was too afraid to try.
When memories like these surface, I often try to tell someone what’s happening — but somehow, in the telling, I feel even more alone. People try to empathize, and I appreciate it deeply, but the truth is that only I know what these moments felt like inside my body.
It helps to remember that while the memories themselves are mine, the feeling of isolation is something others can understand.
Lately, what makes the in-between bearable are the smallest rituals: waking up with coffee, writing, tending to our home, sitting in the porch sun for ten quiet minutes, staying connected with my inner circle when I can, finding moments of silliness and play, saying no when I need to. None of these fix the in-between, but they give it shape.
Even here — suspended between brokenness and wholeness, between what was and what will be — I can choose to notice the light breaking through.
In the beginning — three years ago, after the crash — support flooded in. Meals, visits, texts, prayers. My family, friends, and even neighbors became part of a safety net I didn’t know was possible. Each surgery since then has brought its own tide: people rallying, showing up, carrying me through the hardest days.
And then, as time passes, the tide recedes — because life moves on. That cycle has repeated itself again and again across these three years. It’s not that support disappears; it just changes form. Sometimes it’s a meal train or someone visiting me in the hospital. Other times it’s a quick text, a flower delivery, or a quiet group chat with no expectation of reply.
This most recent season in Denver brought another flood — Patrick’s nourishing dinners, my mom’s neighbor braiding my hair before surgery, Calvin posting updates when I couldn’t, friends dropping off food and thoughtful gifts, house sitters leaving the house immaculate. That kind of showing up has saved me more times than I can count.
And yet, with each ebb, I sometimes feel unmoored. It’s hard to know where I “stand” when everything keeps shifting — my body, my needs, my capacity, the people around me. Part of the grief is realizing I can’t always accept support even when I long for it; the fatigue of hosting, texting back, or simply being emotionally available is real.
Support is seasonal. Some relationships are here for the long, deep stretch. Others arrived like summer monsoons — sudden, beautiful, and gone too soon. Both matter. Both have carried me through three years I could not have survived alone.
Three years later, I see the tide itself as part of the journey — its floods and ebbs shaping me just as much as the accident and the healing have.
There was a moment when I heard, “You may never be normal again.”
It landed heavy, but strangely, it also freed me. Acceptance doesn’t mean giving up. It means recalibrating hope — wanting better while living fully in the body I have now.
Recovery isn’t only physical; it’s emotional and mental too, a daily practice of acceptance and hope. Some days, the pain feels like an adversary I can’t reason with. Providers have minimized my experience, and I’ve questioned myself: Am I really as strong as people think? Why is this so hard for me? Acceptance, here, has meant naming those fears rather than pushing them away. Hope has come through finding better support, better care, and remembering that my body has already proven its resilience again and again.
The end of the lawsuit brought a different kind of lesson. Relief arrived quickly, but so did uncertainty. What now? Acceptance meant acknowledging that an open horizon can feel just as overwhelming as a closed one. Hope appeared in the shift from daydreaming without possibility to daydreaming with new doors cracked open — each one a little more possible than before.
Even in the smallest rhythms, I’m reminded of this balance. My mantra — pause, breathe, move — started as a way to avoid injury when shifting or standing. Now I see it everywhere. Acceptance lives in the pause, noticing what’s real. Hope lives in the move, however small, however slow. This rhythm steadies me — during a PT exercise, while getting out of bed, or in the heavier hours when fatigue presses in.
And then there are the claustrophobic days, when recovery feels like walls closing in — suffocating, frozen, trapped. Acceptance is naming that suffocation: admitting that I can’t escape living in this body, a body working immensely hard to integrate version after version of itself. My body has changed in structure and makeup so many times over the last three years — infiltrated, reinforced, altered by non-native materials and substances. Over and over again, it has had to re-learn itself.
During a recent energy work session, my provider described what she heard from my body: that she was writing a new blueprint, more accepting and peaceful than she’d ever felt from me before. In the past, the focus was always on integrating the new. Now, somehow, the blueprint is shifting — calmer, clearer, more willing to belong to itself.
There are also days when I feel like my life isn’t mine at all, and I’m doing my best to reclaim it. Sometimes reclaiming looks like collapsing into bed in the middle of the day and staying under the covers for hours. I’m trying to find the balance between honoring that need to hide and rest, and nudging myself back into the world — doing a little more, living a little more, when I can.
Hope is the window that opens, sometimes unexpectedly: a validating appointment, a new PT milestone, or sunlight and birds chirping (or quacking) on the porch. Those moments remind me that the walls are not permanent. The fresh air of clarity and possibility always finds its way back in.
And then there are the tiny tiles that hold the whole mosaic together.
Just like grief, gratitude meets me in the present too. It sneaks in through small but powerful moments — a patch of sunshine on the porch, the laughter of a silly TV show, a meal cooked with care, or the quick flash of wings or color outside my window.
Lately, it has also arrived in bigger waves: sitting in the yard with the puppies, enjoying the new fence and the surprise rainbows; savoring delicious food — and remembering the gift of being able to eat it easily now; tending to flowers and plant babies that remind me how much I value our relationship with nature.
There was the recent night in the park under the stars, breeze on my skin, Nathaniel Rateliff singing And It’s Still Alright while I moved between being held by Patrick and holding my mom. A moment suspended in tenderness and breath.
There’s also the joy of seeing family and friends in this stage — post-settlement, mid-surgeries, mid-returning-to-myself — catching the way their faces light up as they look at me and remember, as I do, the miracle that I am.
When I look back, I can see that pattern stretching far behind me. All the moments when I could finally sit outside (again, again, again). Puppy visits and hummingbirds reminding me of life’s lightness. Shared nourishment and laughter in the early recovery days. And even further back — sunsets at the accident site where I learned to breathe again, the first slow walks outside with my walker, the garden bench where I felt my dad’s presence, the simple gift of surviving each surgery and waking up to another day.
These bright spots have carried me, again and again.
They aren’t small at all; they are stitches in the larger fabric of healing — reminders that joy isn’t waiting at the finish line. It’s here, woven into each day, even in the hardest ones. They are the grout between the broken pieces, the light that makes the glass shimmer.
My mosaic isn’t finished—it never will be. It’s a living artwork, one I keep shaping piece by piece. Some shards I’m still holding back, saving for later. Maybe for the book.
There are days I feel like I’m standing in a mosaic of broken glass—other days I see the sunlight glinting off the whole pattern. I’m still collecting the shards and choosing the colors. For now, it’s enough that the pattern is mine and I’m still shaping it.
