Reclaiming MY Normal

Yesterday, I had a really good day.

Not in the Instagram, gratitude journal, look at my latte sense. A real one. The kind that sneaks up on you and reminds you who the hell you are.

I was invited, sort of sideways, like Santa Fe does, to a house-warming party for a colleague who recently moved back into town. We’ve worked together on and off for more than twenty years. Good guy. Solid human. He’s in the department I transferred back into just before the crash, which means I know a lot of people there. A lot of my people.

After spending nearly three months rotating between hospitals and home, it felt so goddamn good to be around people who know me, and who I don’t have to explain myself to. It felt… normal.

Yeah, I said it. Normal. Not society’s version. Not the beige, life-script one. My normal.

Conversations, of course, circled the accident and recovery. That was inevitable, and honestly, fine. None of these folks had seen me since it happened, they just knew I’d vanished and then reappeared, stitched together. I accepted the questions with grace.

And yes, I was self-conscious about the missing chunk of my lip. But either no one cared, or they were extremely good at not staring. Either way, I’ll take it.

I saw people I hadn’t seen in a long damn time. We laughed. We talked shop. We talked life. And for a few hours, I wasn’t “recovering.” I wasn’t “on leave.” I wasn’t a medical narrative. I was just me again.

And that’s when it hit me: I need to get back to work. Back to my life.

My job is a part of me. Not because of money (though let’s be honest, money is nice and more is better), but because I need my brain engaged. I need problems to solve. I need complexity, friction, challenge. That’s how my mind stays healthy.

And here’s the thing people love to miss: my work feeds my writing. Always has. The two are tangled together whether anyone approves of that or not. I can’t amputate one to nourish the other. That’s not growth, that’s survival cannibalism.

That would be like getting lost in the woods, getting hungry, and deciding to eat your own goddamned foot because, hey, protein.

Hard pass. Gross. Also stupid.

What I felt yesterday, that mental stimulation, that sense of belonging, that rightness, that’s something I’ve been starving for. Writing like a maniac has kept me alive during recovery, and I’m grateful for it. But it can’t replace everything.

I want my full life back.

Next week, I go to the doctor for the final boss battle: the “return to work authorization.” The last gate in this liability-obsessed, checkbox-addicted bureaucratic hellscape we all pretend is about safety. (I could rant, but I won’t. Positivity. Focus.)

This isn’t about rushing. It’s about reclamation.

I’m not just healing. I’m coming back.