My truck-versus-pedestrian accident was 10.5 weeks ago — almost two and a half months. One of the most difficult aspects of my recovery, aside from the physical injuries themselves, has been holding space for very different, simultaneous thoughts and feelings about what happened and how to move forward.
One of the most complicated things to navigate in life is experiencing deeply conflicting emotions at the same time.
A few months after my stepmother passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2023, something genuinely funny happened, and my dad and I laughed. He then said he felt as though he shouldn’t be laughing or smiling, because he was “supposed to be sad.” I told him, “We are sad. And that was really funny. The two don’t cancel each other out. They can both be equally true at once.”
But surely, my dad questioned, if he were truly sad and grieving, he wouldn’t even be able to muster a laugh? That isn’t true, I reassured him.
Enter the concept of both/and.
As I wrote about in a previous blog post (So Glad You’re OK), I returned to Burma after a month-long hospitalization in Bangkok right before Christmas. I quickly found myself adjusting to the reality of new—though temporary—limitations, while holding space for my own reactions and those of others.
By then, I’d had more time to understand the facts of what actually happened the day of the accident, get some perspective and distance from the immediate aftermath, and start to reframe the negative feelings about my tour that had descended over our house like a fog. But while hospitalized alone for weeks on end, I hadn’t had to contend with anyone else’s reactions in person, aside from medical professionals — who hadn’t known me before and whose job it was to help me get better.
Seeing everyone at post again was its own kind of shock when I came home, for me and probably for them, too. To see a previously healthy person hobbling around with a walker and a bump on their forehead, and know that they still have six broken bones, leaves a lot of us at a loss for what to say. When people said “You’re lucky,” or “I’m glad you’re okay,” they were naming one truth: I did not die. I am still here. And that matters. And whatever currently is is better than what could have been.
But another truth lives alongside that: I was harmed. Something precious was taken from me. I was forced into pain, dependency, fear, and disruption I never consented to, and which in the grand scheme of things seems completely pointless. Of all people, I hardly needed a lesson in not taking my health for granted.
After trauma—especially a sudden, violent, senseless one like being hit by a truck—the nervous system and the mind do not experience “survival” as an uncomplicated gift. They experience it as loss plus survival. That is what happened to me. Surviving was not a bonus or a plus-up; it was an insufficient way to make someone whole from an existing deficit.
I didn’t just survive my November 15 accident. I also lost my health and the body I had at that time (which it can never be again), my sense of safety, time, plans, ease, and the version of my life that would have existed had the truck never impacted me. Grief belongs in this discussion just as much as gratitude does.
Trauma also creates a moral injury in addition to a physical one. It violates the story of how life is supposed to work: our expectations that if we are careful and responsible, we will be safe. Being angry that this accident occurred is not ingratitude — it is my psyche insisting: This should not have happened!
Regret also makes sense. Even though I was not responsible for the accident, had I not been crossing the street, the driver wouldn’t have hit me as he sped up and swerved into an empty oncoming lane to try and make a green light.
The brain desperately wants a time machine: “If only I had left five minutes later… gone to a restaurant within walking distance that didn’t require a taxi… stayed home that evening…”
But I have come to realize that urge is not actually self-blame. It is the mind trying to restore control in a world that suddenly proved it could take everything away in a second, literally, with no notice and no do-overs. As I discussed my accident with friends and colleagues, I could see the shock and sympathy on their faces, along with an underlying awareness—especially among those in Burma—that something similarly grave could just as easily happen to them.
A small mantra helped to anchor me among the frustratingly paradoxical reality of being grateful and also very angry:
I didn’t choose this. I can be glad I lived and still wish I’d never been hit. Survival doesn’t erase harm.
Or sometimes, with others, in escalating order of how disinclined I was towards performative “okayness”:
I know people are relieved I’m okay, and I am too. I’m just still processing everything that happened — it was a lot.
I’m grateful to be alive, truly. And at the same time, I’m still really angry and sad about what happened and what it took from me. Both of those things are true.
When people say I’m lucky, I get why — but it can feel lonely, because it skips over how much I lost. I didn’t just survive; I was hurt in ways I’m still living with.
I don’t actually need to be reminded how lucky I am. What helps more is having space to be upset about something that never should have happened.
People who are used to being competent, composed, and useful to others often feel extra pressure to “make meaning” quickly after trauma. But I think meaning comes later.
During the past several weeks, what I have been doing — naming the both/and — is already real healing. I have tried to create real space to feel whatever I feel (mentally and physically), understand it is a snapshot in time, and keep moving forward in my recovery.
I can be very angry with the truck driver while also feeling sorry for the particular circumstances in his life that happened before the accident and since. I can honor the weeks I spent suffering in the hospital while also feeling a desire to put it all behind me. I can feel confused about how this could have happened while understanding intellectually that it did happen. And I can feel grateful to my employer for covering my hospital costs up front, while also believing it was deeply unfair to lose thousands of dollars in danger pay for involuntarily being out of post after being the victim of a crime, despite the injury being directly attributable to the conditions the allowance is meant to recognize.
Both angry, and relieved. Both frustrated, and hopeful. Both resentful, and grateful. Both unlucky, and very lucky. Equally.
Collecting Postcards 