I heard a great story on NPR’s Storycorps recently that epitomizes something I talk about often in therapy and something I try very hard to live: instead of trying to forget difficult life events, figuring out how to make them work for you.

In this story, two adults talk about a car accident they’d been in when they were in high school. The man was driving and he hit the woman as she was crossing the road. I’ll skip over most of the story to get to the point of this post: guess what they did with their lives? She became a stunt woman specializing in car hits, and he became a surgical technician who does a lot of orthopedic surgery on car accident victims. An incredible and inspiring use of difficult life events. Does it make you wonder what path you might have taken had you used certain difficult events to work for you?

Or maybe – what path you still could take?