The Silent Moments

People in my life have opinions about my recovery. Strong ones. About my lack of compliance. About the direction I’ve taken. About whether I’m pushing too hard, too fast.

What’s important to understand is this: those opinions are formed from fleeting moments. From snapshots I choose to show. They are not formed from the full reality of my days.

My family in Minnesota, for example: they have no choice but to build their understanding of me from what I tell them. They don’t see what happens at two o’clock in the morning, when I’m wide awake, obsessively digging through hospital records, trying to reclaim a glimpse of a stretch of my life where memory simply doesn’t exist. They don’t see that.

Even my local friends don’t see it. They see me every few days, maybe every week or two. They see me at my best, when I’m upright, when I’m moving, when I’m showing them how far I’ve come. And I have come far. Physically, absolutely. I’d challenge any medical professional to say otherwise.

But that’s not the whole picture.

What they don’t see is me sitting from midnight until four in the morning, staring at a blank document, trying to articulate something I don’t yet fully understand. I don’t do this for the few people who read my blog. I do this for myself. I do this to figure out where and who I am in relation to this recovery.

And those moments matter.

The silent ones. The ones where the earth is still. Where tears fall quietly in the dark as feelings try to reconcile with medical records, with timelines, with facts. As emotion tries to square itself with reality.

Even today, I found myself downloading the rest of my medical records and feeding them into ChatGPT, asking an AI to help me analyze the events from every possible angle. Trying to understand what I went through. What I survived. Where I almost didn’t.

And I sat here and I cried.

I cried over events I don’t consciously remember, and yet somehow my body does. Or some deep recess of my brain does. Maybe not as lived memories, but as felt ones. And trying to fill those gaps pulls those feelings to the surface.

Maybe that’s what’s happening. I don’t fucking know.

What I do know is this: these silent moments aren’t rare. They’re not minutes stolen here and there. They are hours, every day and night, spent trying to reconcile mind, body, and spirit. Spent trying to understand who I was, who I am, and who I’m becoming.

Because this changed me. Fundamentally.

And that’s the part people closest to me don’t see (and can’t see) because I don’t let them. That isn’t blame. It’s just reality.

So when you see me riding my bike two months after surviving an almost deadly motorcycle crash, understand what you’re actually looking at. You’re not seeing recklessness. You’re not seeing denial. You’re not seeing someone who hasn’t thought this through.

You’re seeing someone who has spent countless hours sitting with her injuries and the stories they tell. Someone who has examined them, learned from them, and allowed them to inform the next version of herself.

You are seeing only a small glimpse of a much larger transformation.

So don’t read into it. Just sit with it. Alongside me.

Please.