Hijacked: Injury, Force, and Surrender

I have spent years helping people cross thresholds.

Through grief. Disruption. Confusion. Loss. Transition. Spiritual unraveling. Nervous system overwhelm. The moments when life interrupts the plan and the old way of moving no longer works.

Now I am writing from inside one.

An injury hijacked my life.

It took over my body, my rhythm, my functionality, my independence, and my relationship to force and surrender.

It did not ask permission.

It arrived.

Not politely. Not symbolically. Not in some tidy spiritual lesson I could wrap in a bow and offer back to the world.

It took over my body, my sleep, my confidence, my trust in my own body, and my own knowing of what I truly needed.

It entered the center of my daily life and rearranged everything.

And somewhere inside the swelling, stiffness, metal, therapy, pain, discouraging mornings, tiny gains, and relentless repetition, I began to understand:

This was not separate from the work I do.

This was the work meeting me in my own body.

I did not choose this threshold.

But I am inside it now.

And I am listening.

My Hand Almost Looks Normal

My hand almost looks normal now.

That may be the strangest part.

Because there was a moment when it looked dead.

Not bruised.
Not sore.
Not temporarily inconvenienced.

Dead.

Disconnected from me. Swollen beyond recognition. Heavy. Silent. Foreign. As if something essential had gone quiet inside the very part of me I use to touch, hold, work, cook, write, pray, tend, and offer.

I could not have written this earlier.

Not because I did not have words.

Because I did not yet trust my own read.

I was still inside the force of it. The medical urgency. The pain. The swelling. The fear. The instructions. The opinions. The evaluations. The pressure to improve. The pressure to comply. The pressure to know whether I was doing too much or not enough.

I had to get here.

To today.

To the place where my hand almost looks normal, and I can finally feel the truth of what happened without being swallowed by it.

To the place where I trust myself again.

My body again.

My own perception again.

Threshold work is not something I offer because I’ve avoided the edge.

It is something I offer because I know the edge changes you.

And now I know it again — not as a concept, not as language for a website, not as something I hold for other people.

But in my own hand.

The Moment Everything Changed

One moment, I was walking my dog like I do nearly every day.

Then an unleashed dog appeared.

And then time became distorted.

Next, I was on the ground.

I still have no recollection of actually falling.

It felt like I had crossed into an alternate reality — one where my body, my hand, and the ordinary world I had been moving through seconds before no longer made sense.

My hand took the impact in a way no hand is meant to receive.

I did not fall onto my palm the way people often imagine.

I fell on top of my hand.

It was folded beneath me, forced into a position it was never meant to hold, taking the weight and force of my body before I even understood what had happened.

There are clinical words for what happened: fractures, dislocation, reduction, surgery, hardware, therapy.

Those words matter. They help explain the mechanics.

But they do not capture the shock of looking at your own hand and feeling, in some primal part of yourself, that something has gone terribly wrong.

They do not capture the trauma of an injury that has just hijacked your reality.

Not just the body.

Reality.

Even Writing This Is a Threshold

Even writing this is harder than I expected.

There is a difference between reporting what happened and telling the truth of what it did.

The facts are one thing.

The impact is another.

Writing this asks me to return to parts of the experience I was too overwhelmed to face in the moment.

Not because I was avoiding them.

Because my system was busy surviving them.

I knew the ER was next.

And I was terrified.

The pain was enormous — not something I could soften, organize, understand, or breathe into in any clean spiritual way.

It was bigger than my ability to frame it.

And beneath the pain was another fear: what this meant, and what would happen to my body next that I could not control.

That is its own kind of fear.

The fear of being injured, yes.

But also the fear of being carried into the machinery of response: evaluation, X-rays, reduction, decisions, procedures, hands on my body, instructions, urgency, and the unknown.

The body keeps moving through what the mind cannot fully hold at the time.

And later, when there is enough space, enough safety, enough return, the truth begins to surface.

Not all at once.

In pieces.

In sensation.

In memory.

In the strange distance between how my hand almost looks normal now and what it has taken to get here.

And in the slow return to trusting my own read again.

I did not yet understand how completely this injury would take over my life.

Not just my wrist.

Not just my hand.

My reality.