Carlyn's Story: "I Convinced Myself I Was Okay."

“I used to see it as the worst day of my life,” Carlyn says. “Now I see it as the day I got a second chance.”

Every year on September 5, Carlyn honors the day. Not to mourn what happened, but to celebrate that she’s still here.

At 27, Carlyn was living a typical Denver life: sunny days, dog parks, and small worries. She had always faced anxiety and the struggles of being a woman of color, but nothing had stood out as a significant point of adversity.

On a fall Sunday afternoon, she was walking to meet her friends at a brewery when she stepped into the street and was hit by a car. What should have been a carefree afternoon turned into an ambulance ride that would change her life. “They cut my clothes off in the middle of the street and put me into the ambulance,” she remembers. She had a broken arm, a broken leg, and a severe head injury.

She recalls the accident vividly. “I felt the pain in my arm and my leg. I was hit on my right side, but my brain never let me look at my arm.”

She tried to argue against the ambulance. “I kept asking, ‘Can I just Uber to the hospital?’ It was like fight or flight because I knew I couldn’t afford the ambulance bill. They told me I was hurt, that I broke my arm and leg, but I still couldn’t let myself look.”

“I was sitting in the hospital like they do in the movies - your arms and legs up, my face bleeding. You could see part of my bone. My dad struggled to look at me.”

She spent ten days in the hospital, in and out of surgery. Friends and family took shifts caring for her. “I couldn’t even put toothpaste on my toothbrush.”

That was when her mental state started to shift. “Everything suddenly came to light. All the small things - forgetting my wallet, losing my debit card - felt so tiny compared to scaring my loved ones like that.”

As she was grappling with the accident on her second night in the hospital, she got a call from Planned Parenthood with the results of a previous biopsy. “They called and said, ‘Hey, are you sitting down? We need to talk to you about something serious.’ I giggled and joked, ‘I’m actually lying down!’ Then they told me, ‘We found some cancer under your cervix.’”

Her cervical cancer was slow-moving, and surgery removed the cancerous cells before they spread. But the trauma of the accident, the constant medical procedures, and the diagnosis weighed on her mental health more than she expected.

“I’ve always been anxious,” she says. “But being hit like that, and then being told I had cancer, it hit me in both directions.”

“I think I could have handled the cancer diagnosis separately, but I was also feeling like a burden because people were buying flights to take care of me.”

Although her body began to heal, her mental health started to unravel. “Trauma and PTSD exist in a way I never knew was possible,” Carlyn says. “I convinced myself I was okay because I wanted everyone else to think I was okay.”

Between five surgeries and hospital stays, she numbed herself with impulsive activities that felt good in the moment: binge drinking, spending money, getting tattoos. “If my friends were like, ‘Let’s grab a drink,’ I was down for four drinks. I was always taking it too far because I didn’t want to sit with how I was actually feeling, especially the days I found out I had to get new surgeries.”

Her friends noticed the shift, but they didn’t grasp how serious it was. “It was really hard to deal with feeling like I needed so much support. I kept holding onto the idea that I was the fun friend people come to when they want to have a good time.”

“It got messy. I was a liability. Because I never said, ‘Hey, I’m really struggling,’ they chalked it up to being who I am now. A loose cannon. No one ever asked, ‘How are you really?’”

Though surrounded by people, Carlyn felt alone.

Two years later, the self-sabotage caught up to her. At a friend’s wedding, she blacked out. When she came to, she was on an airplane with no memory of how she got there. “I wasn’t even supposed to be at the airport. I had bought myself a flight home. It scared me.”

Back in her apartment, she finally broke down. And when she met with her therapist soon after, she couldn’t stop crying. “I told my therapist, ‘I don’t think I’ve been okay for a long time. I don’t feel safe being in this apartment by myself. I’m having suicidal ideations.’”

She packed a bag, grabbed her dog, and drove to her parents’ house. That night, she Googled “mental breakdown Chicago” and found a trauma recovery program.

The program was an intensive outpatient and partial hospitalization program. “The beautiful thing is that you don’t tell each other what happened to you,” she explains. “You just talk about how you feel. The reactions and things we were all doing, the self-sabotage, the impulsiveness, the lashing out, were so similar for all of us. I felt so seen.”

Through therapy, medication, and community, Carlyn began to heal. “It truly saved my life.”

She set a goal to go 30 days without drinking, then 90, then 100, then over a year. “I just felt so clear-minded. Sitting with my feelings was painful, but I could finally see how long I’d needed to do it.”

Naming her PTSD and brain injury helped her reclaim her identity. “The fact that I hit my brain really hard makes sense why sometimes I can’t form thoughts the way I used to. I’m grieving the brain I had before.”

She will always carry the scars, the medical bills, and the grief of friendships that didn’t survive the accident. “Losing friends was more painful than the physical parts. Having my heart shattered like that hurt the most.”

“I had friends who got tired of being around drunk Carlyn, and when they found out I was in the mental health program, they never reached back out,” she says.

When she is hard on herself, she asks, What would I say to a best friend going through this? “I’d tell her none of that matters. You’re an incredible person. You’ve had a rough few years, but it’s a bad season, not a bad life.”

As Carlyn worked through her program, learning to sit with her feelings instead of running from them, she collected the strategies that helped her most and created a workbook for those navigating trauma.

Every day, Carlyn focuses on reclaiming her story. “I’m trying to pivot from being a victim to being a survivor. I never was allowing myself to be a victim because I was trying to act like things were fine,” she says. “But I also never allowed myself to be a survivor. I just constantly wanted to minimize what was going on and not talk about it. Now I’m trying to recognize all the progress I’ve made.”

Instead of associating September 5 with the day that ruined her life, she celebrates it as the day she survived. “This day changed my life forever. I could’ve not been here, and I’m going to celebrate the fact that I still am. This is who I am today.”