Healing A Cracked Sacrum, A Fractured Heart, And A Broken Head

Someone once told me that God speaks to us in two ways.  He either yells loudly (often with pain), or He softly whispers.  And that He prefers to whisper because that means we are leaning in close to Him.  If He has to yell, we've gotten pretty far off track.  You may or may not believe in that but it makes perfect sense to me.  My sacral fracture?  I was most definitely getting yelled at.  Like "you need to do some work on yourself and fix what's broken and until then, I'm taking away all your crutches."  Dang.  Guess I better get to work.

So for the past 8 weeks I've been on a little bit of a mission.  Actually, for the past FIVE-ish weeks I've been on a mission.  For the 3 weeks before that I was busy digging a hole to one of my deepest, darkest places.  I don't want to gloss over that fact.  Because I think it's good to be honest and tell it like it is.  Every time I'm injured, I go to a dark place.  Some injuries, the places are darker than others.  This injury the place was particularly dark.  Part of me feels a little ridiculous for talking about going to a dark place over a silly sports injury.  I mean come on, PERSPECTIVE!  But then part of me thinks "nope, you do not apologize for how you feel and for what is reality to you."  And then the last part of me reminds me that there's probably someone reading this that wants to know that they aren't the ONLY one that struggles and gets pretty down.  So yes, for 3-ish weeks I tried not to slip down into the muddy pit, but I did.  Then, as usual, something snapped me out of it (this time around it was some close friends - love you girls!) and I set some goals and made a plan and got motivated to fix myself.  REALLY fix myself.  As my friend told me, might as well fix your heart and your head while you're waiting for your back to heal.

I've never really spent time on improving myself (outside of swimming, biking, and running faster...I've spent COPIOUS amounts of time on that).  Finding what makes me happy, learning how to let go of the rest, learning to forgive myself (hard for anyone, let alone someone who has thrived on being extremely hard on themselves), learning to tune out all the "noise" and hone in on the still small voice inside of me.  That's hard stuff (so hard in fact, that I needed to bring in some professional help).  And it's not really fun stuff.  But, I will say, it's worthwhile stuff.  And so although I really wished I never cracked my sacrum, I guess it's good that I did.  Otherwise I wouldn't be doing this important stuff now.  It's a work in progress for sure, but I dove in head first this time.  Because I had to.  The dark places were getting darker and darker, and I didn't want to get to the point where it was so dark that I couldn't find my way back out.  It is my hope that I can make myself a whole person again, in addition to making my sacral bone fracture-free.  It's going to take a while but luckily I'm annoyingly persistent.  Here's to stubbornness like none other!

But enough of that "deep" talk!  Now I shall post pictures that will hopefully make you laugh and smile.  Because that is an important part of the healing process too.

Thankful for awesome friends who send me goodies when I'm down, including color books and nail polish and pictures and slippers and ICE CREAM (you know, for the calcium, obviously...).

And ALSO thankful for friends who invite me over and play Settler's of Catan with me!  One of my favorites.

Then there was the time we tried to play trivia & failed miserably.  I'm a JV trivia player at best.  But we laughed a lot?  :) 

House of Blues near Fenway Park.  Awesome venue.

You know it's going to be a good day when your roommate's toast smiles at you!  

Hockey game at Harvard.  Did you know that Harvard's "mascot" is a color (crimson)?  I can't get behind that.

This past weekend it was 55 degrees in February in New England.  So naturally I rode my bike.

And then the next day it was still (kinda) warm so I rode my  jazzy new road bike outside!  #goodforthesoul

Except it wasn't really THAT warm when I rode my new road bike so I was glad to have the Coeur winter cycling jacket.  Get it.  It's awesome.  And when you have it, you can ride outside in 30 degree temps no problem!

When flowers show up with your name on them, just cause.