Please journey with me as I attempt to wake you up and skew your world view. I am that person who is a little too happy, the one you’re sure just doesn’t get it. I must have a few screws loose to still be smiling. Perhaps I’m too daft to know better. It could be that…or, mayhap, I have figured out something you just haven’t thought of yet. Maybe I know something you don’t know.
Hopefully, my joy and good-nature will make you uncomfortable in your misery. I, myself, was very comfortable in my misery for many decades. The truth of the matter is that, like you, I did not have a parent from birth informing me that my emotions could be a choice and not a roller coaster. Nobody told me that chemicals release from those emotions and linger in my body, like a hand pushing my head under water as I swam towards happiness.
And what about those voices in my head? Nobody warned me about those nasties. They weren’t really all mine. What exactly are we navigating in this life and why am I qualified to inform you about it? I’m just a bag of water like everyone else. But I’m awake. I’ll be the first to tell you I’m wearing this bag of water like I wore Thursday’s blue jeans.
I am a Christian. I am a Christian that believes in ghosts, demons, and angels. I am a Christian that knows I’m navigating this world in a body, 70% water, and that I can also navigate this world without it.
Here’s how I know: I was in college, only nineteen years old, when it happened. I’d been running close to zero, studying too hard to not disappoint my proud family, dating too much, and working too much. It was overload and a disaster waiting to happen on that harsh winter night. I rolled down the window of my little Datsun 280z. I could see the hill that I lived at the top of. I was literally less than three minutes away from home when, despite the rolled-down window, the below freezing temperatures leaking into the car, and the blaring radio, I lost the fight to stay awake and dozed off.
There are two stories here. The one that I usually tell is me coming to, hanging upside down by my seatbelt (in the 90’s seatbelts were a new trendy habit — thanks be to God), and sticky wet with blood, lots of blood. The radio, a dependable Blaupunkt detachable, was still blaring music. And, for some reason, the very first thing I did was reach out to turn it off. I was wearing a leather jacket so squeezing out the too small space that was left where the driver side window once was, wasn’t hard on my arms. Getting my thin hips through the crevice was tricky.
I couldn’t feel the pain yet. I was firmly in numbing shock when I stumbled up to the first door on the street where my car had landed and knocked weakly. No answer. I trudged across the lawn to the neighbor’s and exactly when I was unable to put another foot forward and started my decent to the ground, strong arms caught me. “Were you in that car?” he asked. In his defense, though there were street lights, he couldn’t see my bloody face immediately. It was a fair question. I knew it was bad when I looked up at him and he blanched at the carnage that was my face. I couldn’t feel pain yet. The sirens arrived in no time at all; a glimpse of my mother arriving and frantically trying to see around the emergency workers that pushed me into the ambulance, faces hovering above me, and me trying to act cool, like I was okay, making them laugh.
The other story is the one that I told to the officer taking the report. I’d watched the whole accident. I told him where my wheel well caught on the stubby fence that divided a trailer court from the main road. I told him how it flipped my car end to end and I told him how the car then rolled to land, facing the wrong direction and upside down, in front of the tidy little row of attractive mobile homes. It matched exactly what he could see; my upside down car facing east instead of west. I didn’t tell him that I’d watched to whole thing from the side of the road, across the street, standing in front of the golf course… outside of my body.
Back to my comfortable misery. I was emerging out of a morose and tedious teenagehood into a morose and tedious adulthood and was often suicidal. So, as they plucked glass from my forehead, as I went into shock-shock — the kind where all the feeling comes back at once and you convulse and shake as they place you on the metal gurney for imaging and you wince from the florescent lighting in the ceiling above — as I learned to walk well again, as I relearned math so I could retake the advanced economics classes that I no longer understood, as I stuttered, and limped, waiting for my reverse mohawk to grow back and my black eyes to go away, as I came to terms with the fact that I wasn’t “smart” anymore because I’d cracked my skull and post concussion syndrome was a real monster, as all of that happened, I had one burning question. Why couldn’t I have just died?
Why did God pull me from my body? The hospital ER doctor told me I would have died instantly if I’d be conscious at all. I must have been in an amazingly deep sleep he said. In coming days I would stand in the driveway and lift the blue tarp that was draped over my crunched 280z and look at the roof. My blood was still caked on the rim of the windshield frame. The roof was caved in where I’d been sitting and there was a bump where the top of the headrest had kept my body safe-ish. Not safe enough to be smart anymore. But safe enough to be breathing in and out; still in my miserable, morose life. I wanted to go home to wherever it was that I lived before I came to live in this water-bag of a body.
Me being firmly outside of my body and observing that car accident was one of the first clues that I was not this body. I was something more. We are, all of us, something MORE.
*SPOILER ALERT:
Life changed for me the very next year and I’ve spent my existence grateful for the time I spent standing beside the golf course, and for the waking up, upside down, in the car across the street. I’ve lived a truly good life. I thank God often for taking me out of my body for that short time that night. I couldn’t see it then, but it was exactly what I needed to be able to go on and enjoy living.
All of us pass through trials. Many have had more difficult trials than the one I’ve highlighted today. I feel that the clues we need to live joyfully are found on the side of the road in front of the golf course. The clues are tucked away in our true identity as beings that are so much more than sacks of water with rampaging thoughts that take us on a merry ride of emotions that color our days good, bad, and ugly. These concepts are what I will be writing about in this account. We could call it Life 101, or Life by Design, or we could, simply, Pollute the Darkness and visit a little.
— Sheryl CS Johnson
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