Tidbit to Threads No. 7

The Art of Falling …Falling doesn’t mean Failing

“Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get” – Forrest Gump

I could almost hear Forrest Gump on the bus bench in my mind as I thought about how to begin this Tidbit to Threads: The Art of Falling… Falling Doesn’t Mean Failing. I wanted to start with something lighthearted — a familiar line people could recognize or at least relate to.

Why? Because there’s still a part of me that hesitates when I open the bracket around experiences of undue influence and high-control religious environments. What I’m about to share can feel hard to grasp if you haven’t lived inside spaces where everything is framed as success or failure — where you are either “in” or “out,” “awake” or “asleep.” If you’re not growing, you’re shrinking. You’re either for us or against us. The message is simple: you either want this life, or you don’t.

These types of environments eliminate the idea of gradual growth, uncertainty, or nuance. Struggle isn’t seen as part of learning; instead, it’s treated as proof that you’re doing it wrong. Whatever it happens to be.

Being shaped this way creates constant self-evaluation and an internal pressure that feels like you’re walking a tightrope.

In the narrative I was living in at the time, hearing and following what I believed God was telling me felt like my lifeline even though, in hindsight, that lifeline turned out to be more like an umbilical cord between myself and the prophet or apostle.

At the time, I was a baby Christian being taught this, and I carried that way of thinking for a long time. I was bottle-fed, then told I was learning to eat solid food (aka: learning to hear God for myself). But the bottle-feeding did what it was meant to do and the seeds that were planted took deep root. I came to believe that everything in life was pass or fail, and that “getting the right answer” meant life (blessing) or death (cursing), rather than an opportunity for growth.

My deconstruction of this belief began as I approached my first wedding anniversary, I never imagined a fall would leave me with a broken wrist. I certainly didn’t expect that the following year I’d fall again and fracture my hip. And by our third anniversary, I would be a very different woman. Inside and out.

Since I had been athletic most of my life, Andrew assumed my rumble was just a tumble and I’d get right back on my bike. But life had other plans.

With my first fall, I remember lying on the ground making a low humming “oooooo” sound while waiting for the ambulance. I kept making that same eerie sound when the paramedic told me I’d have to walk to the ambulance because they couldn’t bring it to me.

Once inside, shock took over. My breathing went shallow. My fingers curled inward. My upper lip disappeared. I couldn’t speak. I was convinced I was having a stroke.

“I tink im ha stok,” I tried to say.

“You’re okay. Just breathe,” the ambulance attendant said, placing an oxygen mask over my face.

Her words didn’t comfort me. In fact, they frustrated me, and I wanted to say, “F@ck you!” Something in me felt panic, even rage. I didn’t trust the ambulance attendant or what she was saying.

When the ambulance doors opened, my son, Ben, was there waiting. In the ER, stronger medication followed. At one point, he stood beside the gurney I was wheeled in on and said, “You don’t trust anyone, do you, Mom?”

Ben was right. I questioned everything the medical team said and did. My trust had been broken long before that night. My trust had been broken by a system I had left more than ten years earlier. In that moment, I could see how deeply that betrayal still lived in my body.

That fall taught me this:

Shock is real.

And trauma doesn’t stay neatly in the past.

Looking back now, I can call it The Art of Falling. At the time, it felt catastrophic. Like falling meant failure.

My wrist was reset, cast, and re-X-rayed only to reveal it hadn’t set properly. I needed surgery. But not that night. I was sent home with my wrist still out of place and placed on a waitlist.

“The medical system is broken,” became the refrain we heard again and again.

For a religious trauma survivor, this felt like torture. My nervous system went straight into survival mode. It was my dominant hand; the hand I did everything with.

My first surgery date was cancelled just as I was about to be wheeled into the operating room. Another emergency case. I was sent home again.

By the time my second surgery date arrived, I was agitated, saying things I normally wouldn’t say. My survival system had taken the wheel.

I needed safety.

I needed support.

I needed care.

And for the first time, instead of keeping that ‘f@ck you inside’ I found my voice and made sure people knew. Maybe not the most lady like way, but as they say – the system was broken.

Eventually, my surgery happened. Andrew was my wingman. I now have a plate and seven screws in my right wrist and a new hairstyle to prove it.

And then I fell again.

This time, the shock, the ambulance, and the surgeries were truly life changing.

And that change that once felt like a crisis has now become my new mantra: The Art of Falling.

I’m sharing an article I wrote in 2024 that became part of my memoir Velcro Kisses.

If you’ve ever been part of a system shaped by rigid black-and-white thinking, where identity is tied to performance, where the system is always right, where emotional highs and lows are built into the experience, where learning is conditional, and where leaving meant stepping out from under a sense of “covering”…

I hope these words offer something of hope, recognition, witness, and something that stirs possibility.

‘WHAT IF You’re Just Learning to Fall’ (written in 2024)

‘One of the first lessons that the Marines learn in Basic Training is the art of falling.’- Coach Chris Tocco

These words would come to echo the words of my friend Liz said as she tried to encourage me in what seemed to me to be an obviously bleak situation. In our biweekly zoom call Liz said Susan, “WHAT IF you’re just learning to Fall?’ something inside of me lifted, shifted you might say.

Who knew these seven words would change the course of 2024.

Falling: We all do it. Whether into or out of Love. Some of us fall into an opportunity of a lifetime, and for some maybe the fall is into some type of loss. Mine happened to be a fall of the second kind, and for a second time, literally falling, and although landing ever so softly yet this fall would fracture my hip.

The surgeon who operated ended up choosing to reinforce my hip with 3 screws that were placed to strengthen my hip rather than opting for a hip replacement. In his expertise he said it was my age was the factor, and he felt it was the best fit for me. What I wasn’t told prior to surgery was exactly how long this recovery would be and I found myself foundering for my footing in the months to follow, and as I foundered, what was becoming crystal clear was that I was never taught the Art of Falling.

My first fall just 7 months prior took place on a beautiful sunny day while riding my bike as I precariously tried to navigate my way through the safety rails that are meant to protect people who are cyclists from highway vehicles. Just yards away from a major highway, while navigating these barriers, literally inching along my tire got caught the rain ditch and I lost my balance.

I’ve come to learn my fall was a FOOSH (Fall on an Outstretch Hand). A FOOSH is also the second most common type of sports injury. My FOOSH resulted in a plate and 7 screws being surgically placed in my right wrist.

And this is where my Falling began.

I had recently left my place of employment for the last 10 years and had just embarked on a new writing project with a good friend of mine. Being right hand dominant, suddenly lacking was my ability to do most things for myself let alone continue my writing project. It seemed like everyday abilities instantly disappeared, the ability to put toothpaste on my toothbrush, to styling my hair and, yes, that was a big deal to me, or the ability to shower and dress myself were all the things I now needed help to do.

My brain didn’t register that this was a temporary state. With this fall my brain registered all this as, ‘catastrophic’, ‘the end’, ‘I’m finished’. I can laugh within myself now while in my mind’s eye picturing what a funny cartoon some of my attempts to get my own toothpaste out of its tube was, to finally surrender myself to a new hair style. But when my fall happened I really, really, believed that I was going to die. A broken wrist = death.

‘Oopsie daisy - up you go’, yes, Andrew actually said those words to me, yet when Andrew got to my side to try to help me up my entire body began to shake, and I could barely get out the words ‘F@ck! I think I just broke my wrist’. From there the shock escalated. My upper lip had curled itself so that it was difficult to speak, my face contorted, and my fingers clenched as if in permanent meditation. ‘I don’t want to die’ was my mantra and I would attempt to say it over and over to the ambulance attendant. “Tell Andrew I love him,” “Tell my children I love them”, “I don’t want to die”. I was sure I was having a stroke I argued with the emergency worker and each time she would respond “It’s because you’re not breathing right” “Take a BREATH”.

This scenario played out all the way to an emergency, and it would play out through laughing gas and even through attempting stronger opioids. In the end my fingers would unfreeze, my upper lip would relax, and I would most definitely live. And in the weeks to come it would take people around me supporting me and lovingly mirror back to me just how far I had fallen. Physically I would recover in time, but I hadn’t seen how far mentally and emotionally I had fallen.

Learning to Roll

Once we see a thing, we cannot unsee ‘IT.’ We may downplay ‘IT’, detach from ‘IT ‘or even disassociate from ‘IT’, but ‘IT’ doesn’t go away. For me that ‘IT’ was the narrative that was playing over and over in my head. Once I clearly saw what was happening, I could begin to change IT.

Getting myself unstuck from a mindset is not something new. I’ve had practice from past experiences. I’d overcome adverse and traumatic experiences that I had worked through and transformed into a new way of thinking. Getting myself unstuck was not new but learning how to roll and then using that momentum to help myself get back up and regain my balance and move forward was.

You see I had spent years being indoctrinated with a mindset that said, “Falling is Failure.” And it was a downward spiral that had loss, punishment and ‘my fault’ attached to it. Years of learning to self-examine my actions, motives, or my why. Years of belly gazing as I call it. Years of looking through the lens of ‘where did I go wrong’, ‘what do I need to learn’ or worse yet ‘this is what happens when I’m out from under spiritual covering’. Can you see the introspection, the naval gazing at self and the phobic indoctrination and fear-based learning? The shame spiral begins before I could say the word ‘triggered.’

But -WHAT IF

The road of fear is laden with ‘should’ve’ ‘could’ve and ‘would’ve paths. And those paths are riddled with regret and guilt. Regret and guilt like to hook up on their journey with anxiety and fear-based thinking – see the spiral? None of this is helpful – just an exhausting loop with very few exits.But WHAT IF this season of my life was more about the ART of falling and what it means in a person’s life when skills are learned that give the ability to center oneself, anchor one’s nervous system and untether one’s mind and emotions from their past beliefs.

Finding a Sinkhole - Meaning Making

As months passed and my recovery and finding my new footing didn’t happen as it ‘should have’ I found myself in the pothole of ‘Meaning Making’. I found my mind trying to make meaning out of the dates, the timing, to the type of bone break I experienced, especially WHY I was not recovering as I should. What could all this possibly mean? What was I supposed to learn out of all this. And before I knew it that Light that I had experienced was now blacked out by the seemingly massive pothole of Meaning Making.

Mystical Thinking is the belief that thoughts, actions or rituals can influence real-world events, even though there is no logical connection between them (google). Meaning Making is where meaning and randomness cannot co-exist, so I had to find the reason, the cosmic hidden meaning in all of this. I thought I did everything ‘right’, yet I failed.

As my unsuccessful recovery turned into an extended season of WHAT IF this new pothole, I found myself in, began to feel more like a sinkhole until I uncovered mystical thinking for what it was. A worldview that I was taught didn’t make it true. This new learning would allow me to re-anchor myself in new strengths and beliefs about what it means to gain strength, what it means to roll, then what it means to stand up again and find my new balance. And when I have this new balance, I then have all this new energy and momentum to move forward.

For me this experience has taught me that Falling is a natural part of life.

I’ve Learned to Roll.

And with this Fall I’ve learned to Roll and what that means for my life. I’ve learned that in rolling I may not have gotten the momentum to get back up right away, but I can continue to educate myself, to rest, wait, adapt, and to let myself heal.

By re-learning to follow my intuition, my body’s wisdom and replacing self-punishment with compassion, even curiosity, I can then seize the moment where timing and readiness meet and I find myself in an upswing, in a momentum that puts me back on my feet.

This time with superpowers.

Ready to join me on the upswing?

When you do the work, you own the skills. They can’t be taken away. They are yours to keep forever

– Michelle Obama

Thank you for reading Tidbits to Threads: where small moments, insights and deep threads become a return to self-trust, reflection and healing.

Small moments. Deep threads. A return to self-trust.

Author of Velcro Kisses: prophecy, trauma bonds and Reclaiming narrative.