A Happily Missed Milestone

It only occurred to me last night, a few days after the fact, that a two-year anniversary passed on March 7 (I think?) without my registering it.

Two years and less than a week ago, I was discharged from the rehabilitation hospital and plopped back into real life. It’s now been two years, and I haven’t had a single trip to the ER, let alone admission, since. Instead, my health has steadily improved despite the inevitable ups and downs.

For the first of those years, every milestone, no matter how tiny, felt monumental. My days very much revolved around the business of staying alive; around appointments, PSW and nurse visits, naps. Wins were hard to come by, so I celebrated each and every one of them. By the one-year mark, things were significantly different: I’d regained a ton of independence and had managed to get back to stuff I love, and I’d even begun the process of starting to travel again. Still, though, health-related tasks occupied hours a day and way too much headspace. Marking this anniversary was a triumph, and I went all out. It was a big deal. It had to be.

It’s no mystery to me why I not only didn’t break out the balloons but indeed straight up forgot the significance of March 7 this year. It isn’t solely because I’m horrible at remembering all anniversaries, although goodness knows that’s the truth—in contrast with those awe-inspiring people who manage to recall the date they went out with their significant other for the first time and/or the date they got engaged, I have to ask my husband on a yearly basis whether our wedding was on July 2 or July 3. More pertinent to the point I’m meandering my way toward, however, is that I’ve noticed a massive shift in my functioning and mindset since March 2024, and even more so over the past few months. The importance of this identity-related development eclipses that of an annual temporal milestone connected to a version of myself I hardly recognize but to whom I’m grateful. That me, after all, laid the groundwork for a change that I swear warrants all this rambling.

Here’s where I’ll finally get to it and reveal the epiphany that came to me while I was writing the first paragraph of this very post: that in the months that have elapsed since the first anniversary of my homecoming, I stopped thinking of myself as being “sick.” Disabled, sure, but even that’s a single fragment of the greater mosaic of my personhood. There’s no denying that living with disabilities poses certain limitations, but it also offers me the opportunity to do things differently, more creatively, more deliberately, at a pace that benefits my overall health, and with more focus on what enhances how I exist in this world and less on what I used to think I “should” be achieving at any given moment. I no longer struggle to figure out how to fill my time; now, I struggle to find enough time in the day for all the stuff I want to do.

And there, my friends, lies the real truth: March 7 slipped me by because I was simply too busy to notice or care, let alone throw a party or whatever. People to see, places to go, things to write, objects to sew.

It makes sense, then, that these medical milestones don’t seem as significant to me as they used to. It makes me happy to give them a smiling nod, and I do think there’s value in that, but I’m unwilling to linger on what was if it detracts from my ability to celebrate what is and what will be. The present of being in the present is, as I see it, the most generous anniversary gift I could give myself. No confetti required.