On my ACL

I continue to be amazed by how one moment can change your entire life, without you ever predicting it or being able to go back. I'm not even necessarily talking about words heard or uttered, but rather about injuries.

I think back to my life before I tore my ACL and there is a before and an after. Literally in the moments leading up to my fall, my future included an amazing summer internship at NBC, a starting spot on the JV lacrosse team, and a ballroom competition with a wonderful partner. In one second and one "pop," all of those things vanished.

I often wish I could go back to being the person I was before. I miss the athlete in me, and I wonder if many other challenges, like my heart problems and the difficulty I had memorizing lines, came from that moment. Would I still be talking to the friends I lost during surgery and my recovery? Even now, I am still struggling with injuries that came from that one second in the billions of seconds that will make up my life. And I am still ashamed and embarrassed that I am and will be forced to chronically struggle with something so simple and from such a small time point in time.

In the days after the accident, I kept wishing I could go back and do it over and change that second. I kept wanting to take it back. It's four years later, and I still have the same thought.