Tell Your Heart To Beat Again



"Yesterday’s a closing door. You don’t live there anymore. Say goodbye to where you've been, and tell your heart to beat again."
- Danny Gokey, "Tell your heart to beat again."
I fell in love with this song three months ago, when I was in a car accident and was wrestling with anxiety, flashbacks, nightmares and other effects of this thing that had smacked me in the face halfway right before finals. When my world was a jumble of visits with specialists, and talking with my counselor, and trying desperately to pass my science class, when reading for more than ten minutes gave me splitting headaches and I couldn’t focus worth anything, when I felt broken and desperately wanted to be whole, music is what spoke to me the most.
I've always been a big reader. For the first time since I was four years old, reading was no longer an option. So I listened to things I couldn’t focus on with my eyes. Music, audio books, episodes of Friends through my Bluetooth speaker were how I spent my time resting, staring at my ceiling willing myself to be stronger and to heal faster. I learned a lot of things in my time of healing. I learned that music is a beautiful gift, and sometimes we need to take our time and really listen to it. I learned something else too. The best friends are the ones who are willing to drive you to specialist appointments and the ER and to help you study, or make a disliked class far more tolerable. Sometimes the best things we can do for a person who is wrestling with something big is to be their comic relief or to let them cry. The best friends are the ones who don’t judge you for needing to rest, and who tell you funny stories, or relate to your experiences, or who just let you be. The friends who just let you be sad or grieving. The friends who understand that there are brighter days ahead, but for right now, we are sad, and that’s okay. Right now we're processing, right now, we can't smile. But we will smile again. Someday, we will dance. Someday, we will run. But right now, it's all we can do to walk.
I'm now coming out of the other side of that time. I couldn’t see it at the time, but I'm there now. I'm smiling again. I'm sleeping without nightmares. I still have the occasional headache, but I'm taking deep breaths and my heart is beating again.

From one standpoint, I’ve done very little this summer. I went back to work, I read a couple books, and I mostly just lived and rested. It was a definite process, this recovering from the car accident. But the process is almost over. Real life is beginning again. And I am better and stronger for the things I’ve been through.
I am alive. My heart kept beating. And still, it beats on. 

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