As my gym journey continues onward, I have a goal to work hard to continue to build my confidence in my physical body strength and endurance so I can attempt to do new and exciting activities as I start my new beginnings journey. One of the new activities I do want to get into is riding beginner mountain bike trails with easy technical challenges. I have a simple mountain bike, and I have been riding it around the area and through the nearby university campus which usually covers about 6 to 7 miles in length. I have read that beginner trails are around 8 to 10 miles in length. I do hope this new activity is an appropriate goal for me and I don’t break anything when I do achieve this goal.
Now my therapy sessions are set to start, which is good timing. I can now begin the reconciliation of my thoughts to better deal with the fact that I experienced a major medical event that has a low survival rate. While I am still challenged with this thought of an unexpected ending to my story, I needed to feel that my surviving was something special, and that my survival could be beneficial to others including my daughter’s.
So, my first in person appointment with my therapist is now at hand. It is a morning session so I arrived a little early and found a cute coffee shop to visit before my appointment. In my first session with my therapist there was a continuation of our chat on getting to know each other further in order to facilitate more in-depth conversations for future sessions. It was more of a chit-chat session than a dig into my current and past experiences type of session. I was ok with this since I was a bit unsure of where our conversations would go.
While the getting to know each other part of the first session is important, I did have a fear of having the conversation start with an inquisition of who I am by a definition of spatial existence which is not the best place to begin for me. There is a reason for this fear. I just survived a major health event and I am beginning to readdress my current status in life. Therapy on a personal level is a new experience for me and I do need to listen to my thoughts now more that I have previously done. Why? Because these thoughts are who I am, and they maybe helpful for me in understanding who I might need to become in the future. It was a good conversation and session.
I will say that my initial session was somewhat defensive from my perspective. I think this was because I wasn’t ready to discuss much and to go into any detail. But an important question did emerge in my mind following this session and that was “Who Am I” in the present tense context, along with who will I be tomorrow, and maybe, who I might have been growing up with some of the beautiful, crazy, and dark experiences in my youth. These thoughts began to stir up memories of my early childhood and the thoughts of these experiences. I recognized that some of what was surfacing was of happy memories, and then some were of experiences that maybe shouldn’t have happened. The past cannot be changed, only reconciled.
What was good about all of this activity in my mind was that I could actually begin a process of reconciliation with how I survived my crazy challenging childhood and teenage years. WOW! There are a lot of memories surfacing.
My memories included my younger years in Western North Carolina and in Phoenix. I was also remembering preteen and teenage years in Las Vegas and Los Angeles which will become some of my most challenging memories. I often tell those who I am talking with that my life has been one continuous movie with many subplots including a variety of mini stories. I knew that I didn’t want to forget any of these memories except for one. That memory has been lost over time and that is fine with me.
So, “Who Am I”. I honestly don’t know yet. I thought I did, but recently so much has changed and continues to change that I will have to discover the answer to this question as I move forward with my new beginnings journey. And for my past, this question may reveal that there have been a variety of who I have been given a specific moment in time and where my station in life was at that moment. Also, I think that I have been many offshoots of who I have been based on my experiences growing up and the influence of the places where I have lived.
The one thing that I do know for sure today, I am a Cardiac Survivor…
“Follow my story for new vignette chapters”