Your Second Act by Patricia Heaton

Author:Patricia Heaton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

Q & A

You have a really amazing outlook on life, especially considering all that you’ve been through. How do you think your perspective has affected the quality of your life and general well-being?

Everything plays a role. You can get really distracted with how difficult things are. Working with people in the disability world, you see a lot of bitterness, anger, and sadness—things didn’t go the way they wanted it to. But there are very few people who have the perspective where they realize they’ve been given a second chance. Most people with spinal cord injuries shouldn’t be alive. Between the accident and then contracting spinal meningitis, I escaped death twice. It took me a while to get out of denial and get through the grieving process. It’s so important that we travel through those stages at our own pace. But I think we can speed it along by changing our perspective and looking forward and saying, “Now what do I get to do?” So instead of asking, “Why me?” ask, “What can I do next with everything that has happened to me?”

How did you come to accept what happened and see it as a catalyst to your next season in life?

The more we stop resisting change and the more we embrace it, the more opportunities we will have to learn and grow. We have to have the perspective to say: “Actually, this may just be part of my calling, and this difficulty may be life’s way of waking me up to that.” We can go through struggles with grace if we are looking for the opportunity to grow and learn new and different ways of thinking and meeting new people.

But getting to the place of acceptance after a major tragedy or loss is a process. Grief is a process. Everyone goes through it differently and at their own pace. There’s no right or wrong way to go through it. But for me, what I’ve learned to do now is to set my eyes on what I have to gain on the other side of my pain. When I face struggles I think, What am I going to learn now? How will this serve me in the future? When I look for that growth, it keeps me moving forward past the difficulty.

You talked about grieving your past and going through the process of letting it go. What was something that helped you the most in this process?

Oh my goodness, for sure therapy, and specifically an exercise my therapist had me do, which I will explain in a minute. I’m so grateful for her and all the people who have helped me on this journey. My friend said something profound to me one day: “Only we can heal ourselves, but we cannot do it alone.” I would have never come this far without the people around me, or without asking for help and being willing to receive from those who care about me.

So one day, I went to see my therapist and I was furious.

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