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Sometimes The Best Thing You Can Do is Absolutely Nothing

We can’t always keep calm and carry on

Jessica Wildfire
5 min readMar 15, 2020

The car flipped sideways three times across the highway, with me inside. I remember rolling my eyes when the world turned upside down. My first thought wasn’t about death. It was more along the lines of, “This is just great. Now I’m definitely going to be late.”

I was on my way to a conference. Traffic and bad weather had delayed me by two hours, and I was driving just slightly over the speed limit to make up for lost time. Making up for lost time — it’s one of those stupid things smart people always try to do.

When the car came to a stop, I used all my weight to push the warped door open and climbed out — dizzy and disoriented.

I tried to act like I was fine.

For the first time in my life, I was the object of rubbernecking. People ogled the wreckage to see if there was a dead girl in there somewhere. My forearm had a nice stream of blood going, and there was a gash below my knee. It didn’t hurt. My skin didn’t feel like my own.

The roof of my car looked like a tent.

A first responder examined me. “I’m okay,” I said.

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