I had never truly felt that I was vulnerable. With the exception perhaps of a broken heart or pain inflicted by an unkind word, I had somehow managed to retain the arrogant belief that I was invincible well into my 40s. I believed that I could do or be whatever I wished, so long as I wanted it badly enough. In some naive way, I believed that I was in control and that if life didn’t go as I wanted it was only because I had miscalculated in some way. And then, in one breathless instant as I saw the headlights of a drunk driver suddenly appear at high speed from around the corner, in my lane, I understood how very wrong I was.

Prior to the accident, I was an active, adventurous, physically fit and fiercely independent individual. In a single, unanticipated moment, all that came to an abrupt end. The impact of the crash shattered my shin bone and knee cap, broke the femurs of both legs, snapped the bones of my left arm, broke my ribs and punctured both of my lungs. Perhaps most devastating of all, every bone of my facial skeleton was shattered leaving no bony fragment larger than 1.5cm.

Many people have told me how lucky I was not to have died in the accident. Yet, in many ways, I did die in that accident. Everything I had based my sense of "self" on was gone. My body, my face, my spirit and sense of invincibility would never be the same again. Yet, clearly, somebody had survived. In the long journey that followed, I struggled to discover who that somebody was. The "me" behind the body, the face, the personality and achievements.

"Why me?" I asked. "Why did this thing happen to me? Why now? Why when I was living life so authentically, so gently, when I finally felt like I’d found a place to call 'home'? "Why?!" ... When I finally began to come to terms with the unpalatable truth – that "shit happens" – I started asking different questions. Why, for example, if my entire face was crushed and both eye sockets shattered, can I still see? Why, if my body was so badly broken, was my spine uninjured? Why was I still alive?

It was then that I realised that while "shit happens" sometimes, change happens all the time. We don’t get a choice about that. What we do get a choice about – the only thing we get to control – is how we respond to change. It is the only way that we can create our own reality. Once I finally understood that concept, that there was nothing I could have done to avoid the accident, that disaster is often arbitrary and that all I had so naively taken for granted wasn’t necessarily in my control after all, I decided to turn the "shit" into compost. When adversity strikes – as it inevitably does – we can all turn it into rich compost to feed our souls and help us to grow in unanticipated ways.

I underwent rehabilitation and dozens of painful reconstructive surgeries over several years. With each successive surgery the face in the mirror began to more closely resembled my own. It was then that I realised that the image I saw reflected back at me in the mirror was never who I truly was. I continued the search for my self in all the usual places; in work, in relationships, in lifestyle ... all equally superficial and transient.

Slowly I came to recognise a self far more substantial. I realised that the image of my self that I had lost and was trying so hard to recover was a trap – made up of all the "shoulds" I had come to believe in. Things that I had come to learn would win me acceptance, love, status, safety. It shut out other possibilities. Opportunities to know and express parts of myself that I had never even acknowledged.

None of us is without loss in our lives. And none without altered body image, though luckily most experience this slowly. All of us can look at a photo of ourselves as small children with the realisation that, although the reflection in the mirror today may be a far cry from the child’s face, and our experience of the world as different as the faces we wore then and now, there is a common thread that is "me". Sometimes the entire fabric of our lives needs to be torn away before we can begin to unravel that thread.

To purchase Kathy Torpie's book Losing Face: A Memoir of Lost Identity and Self Discovery visit kathytorpie.110mb.com