Jessica West

Transcript

I remember being surrounded by Darkness it was the most intense Darkness I had ever experienced but I wasn't scared in fact I remember feeling a deep sense of bliss in all knowing I felt like I could stay in this place forever but I was being urgently disrupted I could feel a faint squeeze on my hand light flooding into my vision and a muffled voice coming into Focus the voice was calling my name Jessica Jessica can you hear me and without giving me any time to respond it said you're in the hospital you're in a car accident and at first I didn't want to believe it

I just wanted to close my eyes and go back to my peaceful state of Darkness but the voice was so insistent that eventually I just had to hear what it had to say the car accident had left me with a severe traumatic brain injury in multiple fractures and everyone was surprised that I survived but still my life was going to be uncertain the likelihood of me returning back to work completing my bachelor regaining Independence and maintaining a social life was extremely low and I was about to spend the next month and a half in the hospital and I remember there was one day it was

a beautiful sunny day I sat in my Hospital bed looking out the window in front of me having the final moment or something similar to it you know that final moment that we hear so often that people have when they face death that moment when they look back at their life often feeling regret wishing they would have done things differently when they actually had the chance to do it well I was having that moment but not because my life wasn't any physical danger anymore at that point but because life as I had known it had come to an end I remember thinking to myself why

didn't I take that chance why didn't I say yes to that opportunity why didn't I just do it and then my questions went a layer deeper why didn't I believe in myself why didn't I allow myself to be happy why didn't I accept myself just as I was because now well now in retrospect I see that I had everything going for me I was intelligent social had a loving friends and family I was active and healthy I had everything going for me but I got caught up in my mind you see I gave in to the thoughts of lack and limitation that were lingering in

the back of my mind and those thoughts caused me to feel shame and self-doubt and then in turn I sabotaged any opportunity and my true enjoyment of life this reflection period led me to one of my most profound realizations that most often in life the only real limits that we Face are the ones that we accept in our own minds how often do you allow your inner critic to hold you back from living to hold you back from speaking your truth and from doing the things that you would absolutely love I made a promise to myself then and there in that hospital bed that no

matter how I was going to recover I was not going to allow those thoughts in my head those thoughts of limitation to hold so much weight in my life anymore I was going to set myself free completely free to enjoy the life that I was living no matter what it looked like for this second chance that I had shortly after that I read a book and there was a quote in this book that beautifully encapsulated this promise that I made to myself a man's search for meaning was written by a holocaust Survivor who spent four years in the Nazi concentration camps and though he experienced

some of the most horrific things in the world he says this the last of human freedoms is the ability to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstance it's been N9 years for me now since my accident and through daily intention setting a lot of inner work perspective shifts and a lot of cognitive reframes I have defied all of the limitations placed upon me I regained my Independence I went back to work I completed my schooling all before starting a business and ultimately being here in front of you all tonight so I'm going to say something that is so cliche but it needs to

be highlighted anyways we cannot control what happens to us but we can always choose how we want to Define what happens to us how we want to respond to it and show up after that our thoughts are the Catalyst for how we feel and behave our thoughts can heal us Inspire us and Empower us but our thoughts can also weaken us harm us and hold us back and I know you know exactly what I'm talking about but the choice is ours we hold that power complete and total freedom of what we allow into our minds so let's not wait until it really is too late

and we're not given second chances to fully enjoy this life that we're living

Transcript generated from the recording and lightly cleaned. Some names and wording may differ from the spoken speech.