The Crash
A drive to gymnastics. A red light. A single moment that changed the life I thought I was building.
Chapter Header Image · The CrashThe Truth About a New Beginning
We often think our new life begins with the win.
The celebration. The moment when everything finally works out.
What I've learned is that it begins somewhere else entirely.
It begins when everything falls apart.
Funny enough, my new life started with a bang.
The Morning
It was not an ordinary Saturday.
The planets were aligned. Los Angeles was unseasonably hot for winter. That morning, my daughter had won the lottery into the school I had been hoping to get her into.
Life felt like it was opening.
I was on my way to bring her to gymnastics class.
Then, at the corner of Western Avenue and Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, everything changed.
One moment, I was sitting at a red light.
The next, the car filled with smoke. The airbags deployed. My body went into shock. And from the backseat, I heard my daughter crying.
"Before I could understand what had happened to me, all I could think was: Is she okay?"
The Impact
A few strangers came over to check on us. As they helped calm my daughter down, I was already somewhere else.
There is a moment that happens during extreme shifts.
You leave yourself.
You go somewhere else, still present, still moving, but not quite there.
I entered fixer mode almost immediately.
It is my default survival mode. And that day, it showed up before I had even finished understanding what had just happened to me.
Once I knew my daughter was not seriously hurt, I began to cry, because I knew my future had changed forever.
In between tears, I did the thing I never wanted to have to do.
I called my ex-husband and asked him to come pick her up.
And then, before I had finished crying, I started making calls.
In the ambulance, with my left hand because I could not use my dominant one, I filed the insurance claim. I canceled the visual album shoot in Joshua Tree that was supposed to happen the following week because I knew I no longer had a car. I canceled the practitioner who was scheduled for the Joshua Tree shoot. I informed my cinematographer of what had happened.
All while my mind was spinning. My body was aching. And my nervous system was completely overwhelmed.
But I kept moving.
Because that is what I had always known how to do.
We often think of survival mode as fight, flight, or fawn. I'd like to add another F. Fix. Because for many of us, control is how we feel safe. Sometimes fixing is not empowerment. It is the nervous system doing the only thing it knows how to do.
Fixer Mode
The ambulance brought me to the hospital. I sat there for six hours waiting to be seen.
When I finally got home, the house was empty.
While I waited for my daughter to return, for the first time that day, there was nothing left to do.
And that is when reality finally hit me.
I didn't have a plan.
Not having a plan had always been one of my greatest fears. Because having a plan meant having control.
And now my life was out of my control.
I no longer felt safe.
I thought I could move quickly: take the next step, make the next call, keep going, and things would resolve themselves.
When we are inside difficult seasons, it is natural to want to rush through them. Discomfort makes us reach for control. We look for the answer, the plan, the certainty, anything that makes us feel safe again.
But what if the invitation is different?
What if the work is not to rush?
What if the work is to be still long enough to feel what has happened?
To stay present.
To let life unfold without trying to control what comes next.
This is where the story begins.