Sometimes life doesn’t go the way you wanted. A flight gets cancelled, the lights go out just as the telenovela you’re watching reaches its climax. Someone you care about falls ill, and you barely have time to tell them how much you love them before they die. Such things happen all the time, and some of them hit us so hard that not only do they knock us to the ground, but they make us want to never leave the ground again.
After my depression in my teens, I had to relearn to forge true connections with the people around me. For a decade I struggled to establish relationships with my family, my friends and my coworkers. Nothing I did in life felt satisfying enough, be it building a new hobby, getting a new job or moving to a new country. And even though I still managed to make a lot of progress on that front over the last two years, one of the biggest breakthroughs happened in April this year, after I fell off my bike.
It was around midnight. I was coming back from work right then—completely sober, fortunately, but still careless. That’s what you get after taking the same street for months without any incident, I guess. Anyway, as I was coming down a hill I was not holding the handlebar, but rather kept my arms at my sides. The bike gained velocity. Just as I thought that maybe I should be holding the bike after all, the front wheel hit a small pebble and started swerving uncontrollably. That was when I seized the handlebar and slammed the brakes, but it was too late. The bike went off course and I fell onto a bed of dead leaves.
Fortunately it was my shoulder who got the blunt of the impact. I don’t remember anything specifically, but I do remember pain. I stood up. The adrenaline flooded my system, forcing me to pull my bike back up and ride back home, which was a few kilometers away anyhow.
When I arrived, I found dirt inside my ear. That meant I’d also hit the side of my head, but just not enough to cause any damage, thank heavens. I didn’t think it serious enough to run to the hospital in the middle of the night, so I started taking off my clothes. That had just become an ordeal, I realized. I couldn’t lift my arm higher than forty-five degrees. Thoughts started flooding in as I prepared for bed. Things would never be the same. I would never go back to work. I’d have to return to living with my parents in Italy because of this mistake. But I was so exhausted that I managed to sleep anyway.
Two days later I got the x-ray. Diagnosis: fractured acromion (basically the part of the wingbone that sticks out to the curve of the shoulder). The doctors strongly recommended an operation to screw the two pieces back together, and I accepted. Since healthcare is private in the Netherlands, I feared my insurance would not cover the costs. But that turned out to be paranoia. Long story short, the operation went well, without any exorbitant costs.
From then on followed two months of de facto seclusion. I read, watched Netflix, ordered groceries online and started looking forward to meeting the grocery delivery guys. When that became boring I started online dating, struck conversations with strangers for a few days only to see them fizzle out because they were too busy to commit. I watched porn, but that only reminded me of how single and lonely I was. I yearned to go out and do something with somebody, even have just a coffee, but going anywhere was too tiring, and the few friends I had made in Holland had moved abroad on vacation.
I’ve been in the company of my own thoughts for a long time. No matter how much I tried to distract myself or to rationalize things, a voice at the back of my mind kept telling me that everybody else was living their lives while I was stuck in bed, doing nothing, with no possibility of recovery—and this was all my fault. I had chosen to move away from everyone I loved, into a country where I hardly knew anybody.
I could have chosen to go back to my family in Italy for a few months, have them take care of me, but… for some reason I stayed here. Before this experience I’d never felt truly alone in my life, not even during my times as a clinically depressed teenager, and I’d never stopped working during the pandemic. So, in a way, this was my personal quarantine. I did not deserve to stay alone, but I deserved to know how it felt like. I needed to see the demon in the face, if you will.
So I kept going. And then, one day, I was rehabilitated to go back to work. Seeing my colleagues and the clientele felt like fresh air (I work in a restaurant, so you see a lot of new faces everyday). I worked just a couple days the first week, and three days the next. That became my lifeline for socialization.
The memory of being alone is now seared in my mind. I stopped taking a lot of things as accounted for, like talking with my family on the phone. I even like to converse with strangers about the weather, for crying out loud. My friends have returned from their holidays, and I just realize how precious friendship is, not just romantic relationships. As I’m doing physiotherapy, I’m also beginning to realize how precious and powerful my body is, and to what extent it can heal.
One time I heard somebody say, “I’d rather see the glass half full since I can’t drink the half that’s empty.” Taking that to heart, when I look back I prefer to focus on the progress I’ve made and the lessons I’ve learned, rather than on the amount of time I’ve wasted. Because there’s always going to be something that’s out of control and we can’t do anything about. But the first step in accepting what comes to us is in realizing what lessons we can take from it.