May 30th — My Alive Day

Seventeen years ago, everything changed in a single breath.

I was a new mom visiting family in Texas while my (then) husband was away at workups. What was supposed to be a rare girls’ night out—a moment to feel normal again, to breathe, to laugh—ended with me being cut from the wreckage of a car.

We were t-boned by a drunk driver, right into the passenger side—my side.

The driver who hit us ran a red light going 68mph.

He was drunk...

The woman driving me didn’t pause. She didn’t look.

She just went when the light turned green...

And just like that...I was gone—if only for a moment.

I remember the flashes.

Yelling in pain.

Begging for my phone to call my husband.

Hearing the metal of the car being cut around me.

Waking as they cut my clothes off in the ambulance.

And once more to my mother’s tears above me in the MRI.

Then finally—my husband’s hand in mine.

...That was the moment I gained full consciousness again.

The injuries were brutal: a shattered pelvis, broken ribs and spine, collapsed lung, lacerated organs, broken teeth, and a body black and blue from trauma.

But it was the unseen wounds that cut the deepest.  Sometimes what feels like love is just familiarity—and what feels like safety is really the beginning of a storm.

I returned home in a wheelchair with a 6-month-old baby I couldn’t lift and a deployment on the horizon. I couldn’t walk. I could barely breathe. I sat in silence. In the stillness, I listened. I grieved. I grew.

Today, I’m no longer with the man who once held my hand in that hospital bed. Life has changed in ways I never imagined—and not all by choice.  This accident didn’t just crack my bones. It cracked my reality.  I remember some of the greatest blessings come disguised as unanswered prayers.  And while life has taken turns I never would’ve chosen; I’ve discovered some things I wouldn’t trade for anything. 

This day—May 30—is a marker of everything I’ve survived. It’s not a celebration.  It’s reverence.

I didn’t choose the wreckage—literal or emotional—what I did choose was to keep going.

• To trust myself.

• To rebuild.

• To rise.

Because trauma doesn’t just scar—it shapes.

Pain doesn’t just break—it builds.

And transformation doesn’t begin in the light—it begins in the dark.

Today, I still carry pain—some physical, some emotional. But I also carry strength. Wisdom. Grace. 

Today, I’m still healing. Still walking the path.

But I am here.

I am whole.

I am safe.

And I am so damn grateful to be alive.

I am not the girl who was carried out of that car.

I am the woman who rose from it.

xx,

Steph