A Car Accident Wrecked My Life

“This is happening. Accept it,” I thought to myself.

Screeching through a red light at the rainy intersection of Upsal and Mansfield, I let my instinctual wisdom guide me. In the longest five seconds ever recorded, I ripped off the front of a broadside car and crashed my 2006 Honda Accord into the previously obscured traffic light, which collapsed in the opposite direction. They say life can change in an instant, but they don't say if that’s a good or a bad thing. It just is. Accept it.

My sweet chariot was totalled on impact, and immediately towed away. Nobody was injured, thankfully. It was April 7th, 2025, and I was 38. Hondee Baby was my first car, which I proudly owned for nearly two years. While bending and curving on Lincoln Drive, or sitting in traffic on I76, I would often pinch myself and affirm, “I’m free!”

A few weeks after the accident, I complained to a friend,“This shouldn't be allowed! I never took that car for granted, loved it like a first-born child.”

“Unfortunately we don’t live in a merit based world,” Evey said, interrupting my victims' manifesto.

Annoyingly, she was right. The world owed me exactly nothing, and I needed to take control of the narrative. I wondered: what if this accident was a good thing? A cosmic upgrade propelling me deeper into the void to reclaim my personal power.

So, I turned my crisis into an opportunity. Once my contract expired that June, I retired from nannying — a career I had fallen into eight years earlier when I moved back to my hometown in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For a long time, I had wanted to quit. Afterwards, I proceeded to lie down for two months, eating peanut butter from the jar and heavily smoking cannabis to numb my bereft soul.

Cannabis and I were in an 18-year-long relationship. Only in therapy did I acknowledge I had a self-control problem. Like stealing pot from four different roommates, or canceling plans because I was too high. Getting stoned temporarily euthanized the loneliness that accompanied me since childhood, but it also deadened my sense of ethics and responsibility. I was bound to it.

In the void is a mirror. In that mirror, should you dare to look, is a confrontation with the truth. When I finally peered inside, I saw the picture of me smoking earlier on the day of my accident. The implication was clear, and denial toppled over like the traffic light I had unceremoniously plowed into. My spirit declared: So long as cannabis is in my life, I am not free. And now I am a danger to myself and others. A change must be made.

Summoning all my power, that July 22nd I parted ways with the green goddess I had so intimately known and crawled ever deeper into the great unknown.

By August I was standing again. My body was 20 pounds heavier and painfully contracted, my spirit bewildered, but I was free. Life started moving. A friend loaned me money for a new car, rehearsals started for my show in Philly Fringe that September, and I got a sales associate job at a consignment shop. The name? Greene Street.

The void is serious. Its force will strip you naked, demanding a sacrifice in exchange for liberation. But a sense of humor? That was the quality I least expected to find upon my departure from that narrow place.