Enough!

What performing my own story taught me about the grief our bodies carry long after we think we’ve moved on.

I’m sitting on a couch onstage with a phone in one hand and a resistance band in the other. A walker is next to me, within arm’s reach, because in this scene I still need help walking as my broken femur heals.

I’m 43 years old today, but in this scene I’m 16.

I’ve just been hit by a car in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

I spent two weeks in a coma and several more weeks in rehab relearning things like walking, talking, reading and writing. When I was discharged from the hospital, I moved back to Florida to live with my dad.

He enrolled me in school over the phone so I could finish 10th grade. He also couldn’t get me health insurance because of my pre-existing conditions—remember 1999?—so once I left the hospital, there wasn’t much support for dealing with the mental, physical, and emotional aftermath of a near-fatal accident.

At the time, people—including me—seemed to believe that once I looked better, I was better.

I wasn’t.

There was a lot going on inside me that nobody could see, and that is what I wanted to show in this scene.

So there I am, trying to talk to my teacher in phone school while also pulling on a resistance band to continue my rehab exercises.

Then the voices begin overhead.

They are the kinds of things I heard, or believed I heard, from friends and strangers after the accident when I looked and behaved differently. Part of my head had been shaved so doctors could place an intracranial pressure monitor in my skull. (Spoiler alert: that hairstyle became cool in the 2010s…I consider myself a trailblazer.)

The voices get louder and start piling on top of one another. “Why isn’t she funny anymore?” “Why is her hair shaved off.” etc. etc.

I pull harder on the resistance band, as if pulling harder might somehow make me get better faster.

I try to dial the number for phone school again because I keep getting it wrong.

I grow more and more frantic.

Finally, I stand up and yell:

Enough!

I had rehearsed this scene many times over the previous few months.

I lived it. I wrote it. I knew exactly what came next.

But as I was saying my lines that night, I had to fight back real tears. That caught me off guard.

There is enough distance between me and what happened that I can stand onstage and perform it now. I can make jokes about it. I can decide how I want to tell it.

But distance doesn’t mean the pain is gone.

Apparently some of it is still very much there.

And when I was 16, I did almost everything I could not to feel it.

I also didn’t have the tools to understand what was happening to me.

I’m still not sure I have the tools to understand everything that has happened to me. But I do know that whatever is still unresolved for me does not prevent me from using what I’ve experienced to help other people.

I’ve thought a lot about why I’m telling this story and why I’m telling it now.

I have answers, but they’re not particularly poetic.

I’m telling it because I think it needs to be told.

I’m telling it now because I can see it more clearly.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t still hurt.

At 43, I can accept things about myself that I absolutely could not accept at 16.

I make mistakes. I get things wrong. I don’t always show up as the person I want to be in a room.

Sometimes I disappoint myself.

I can accept that now.

At 16, I could not.

After the accident, I was unwilling to accept anything less than the person I believed I was supposed to be.

I wanted to be exactly who I had been before.

I wanted my old brain. My old body. My old life.

And I truly believed that if I worked hard enough and refused to accept my limitations, I could get all of it back.

Of course, I know now that I couldn’t.

Even if I could go back now, at 43, with everything I know, I don’t think I could talk that 16-year-old girl into behaving any differently.

I could tell her that accepting her limitations was not the same thing as giving up.

I could tell her that she was still going to have a life and that is was going to be full of love and laughter and sorrow and great achievements and great disappointments.

I could tell her that she did not have to become exactly the person she had been before the accident. I could tell her that she was going to be okay.

And she still wouldn’t listen to me.

I know because I know who she was. She was me.

But I do think about this differently now that I have kids. There are going to be times when I can see them heading toward a mistake. I can warn them. I can give them better information than I had. I can try to protect them. I can tell them what I learned from my own mistakes.

And they are still going to make some of those mistakes anyway.

That is a difficult thing to accept as a parent.

I want to think that if I give them the right tools, I can spare them some of the pain I went through.

Sometimes I probably can. But other times I won’t be able to.

They are their own people. They are going to react to things in ways I wouldn’t choose for them. They are going to insist they know what they’re doing when they absolutely do not.

And someday maybe they’ll look back and understand themselves differently too.

That’s the bittersweet part for me.

I can look back at myself at 16 and know exactly what I wish I had done differently.

I also know that I probably couldn’t have done it differently.

No one could have talked me out of being who I was then.

For a long time, I thought that because I understood the accident better, I had somehow dealt with all of it.

I can explain what happened. I can talk about traumatic brain injury. I can talk about addiction and recovery and the choices I made afterward. I can joke about the shaved head.

I wrote an entire show about it.

But understanding something and no longer feeling it are not the same thing. Grief can stay with us longer than we realize, and people can experience the same kind of event very differently.

I wanted to be mindful of that in making this show. I’ve been grateful to work trauma-informed therapist Dr. Sheela Raja, who contribute a page of mental health and trauma resources to the Playbill and has helped me think more carefully about how I tell this story. I’m looking forward to continuing to work with her as the show develops.

I have two more performances of Condemned To A Life in Chicago before I pack up the puppets and take the show to New York for the United Solo Theatre Festival.

Chicago: August 20 and August 27 at 9 p.m. at Second City’s de Maat Studio Theatre.
https://www.secondcity.com/shows/chicago/condemned-to-a-life-chi

New York: October 21 at 2 p.m. at Theatre Row as part of United Solo.
https://unitedsolo.org/the-21st-annual-united-solo-theatre-festival/condemned-to-a-life/