How a near-death experience helped me see my worth.
A little story of how I had a near-death experience from a dog bite and how it brought my life together and made me finally take the long-awaited first step into becoming my best version.
The incident
Out of all of the possibilities out there, even from my wildest imagination, I would not have believed that I would have a near-death experience with a dog.
Yup, a dog
So, here is some context, the dog, a cute boxer, has been receiving pets from me for 8 years (since my childhood), and well the time has come for it to exact its vengeance on me for being kind I guess, but could be that it’s just old and has that fighter (boxer) spirit in him and wanted to take someone down with him when he goes down (an eye for an eye per se).
Anyway…
I imagine my death to always be something noteworthy, that I would accomplish something and would die by doing it. For example, saving a child from a robber or protecting someone from imminent death. Doing something heroic is my dream death (if you even have these types of dreams)
But never would I have thought or wished that I would be frightened of death from a dog biting me.
I mean, what’s going to be on my tombstone?
“Brave explorer of boundaries”?
Imagine the conversations:
“Oh, that Alec, always smiling and being kind, how did he pass anyway?”
“Yeah, soooo, he pet a dog, and then it bit him….”
“Ah, I see…”
That is not the way I want to go, but it was a close reality I would had to have lived with, for about a month or so, depending on when the symptoms would have appeared.
So, when I got bit, I kept it cool, thinking “damn, got bit, got to get some bandages for it.”
Realization
Well, turns out there was a lot more to it than just a bite because of course a vital element that animal bites bring onto the table is the case of Rabies.
Now, thinking that it’s a dog in a gated house (yes, I stuck my hand through the gate, don’t judge me, you would too if you saw how he looks), I believed that a case of the rabies was not important to bring up.
Well, turns out that the owner has missed the annual vaccine shots for the dog….
Now is the moment in the story when my heart jumps into my throat because that minor thought of rabies has just become my biggest problem in life.
The best way to imagine the feelings I went through, think of a detective show or movie, and how you follow the main character as they go through a murder case, how they talk with witnesses and suspects, when the detective has collected all of the information together, all on a pin board with red string and pictures and has come to the conclusion that the killer is actually the one that no one thought it would be.
That moment when the camera closes in on the detective’s face when he realizes, that after a month of detective work it turns out that his best friend is the killer.
That is how I felt, like I just came to that realization.
Gut-wrenching, that’s the feeling.
So, got to say, when you think that you are going to die soon (as in, under a month) and you’re freaking out that (while being feverish) if a symptom of rabies had shown, then it was too late to act and my life is done was not how I would have wanted to live in my final moments. (every day for a week straight I had these thoughts)
Besides the freaking out and tearing up at night, I did have ample time to think about my life, and what I had accomplished in it.
And I have to say, that gave me another reason to tear up at night, like adding water to boiling oil.
Reflection
The reason being, that I kept procrastinating. I never really did anything, only the bare minimum so that I could get that dopamine hit. Always dreamed big but acted small. I was leading a life I didn’t like, doing a work I had no passion in, forcing myself into doing it, because I had thought that was my only choice.
My environment was also poison, comfort was everywhere. A reason to do nothing, a comfy sofa, enough money to not be afraid of tomorrow, and enough food to get fat on. Just enough commodities so that I don’t really have to work for it.
The funny thing is that I had watched every motivational content out there as well, and read every book about self-improvement, but like a cycle, I always had fallen back into bad habits.
After working out and paying attention to calorie intake, I would just stop after a month and start playing video games that took me nowhere in life and eat horrible food which made me lose all the progress I had gained from the gym.
I also tried to help people with their lives, but the value I would give had the same amount as if a parent would say “Do you want to end up like me?” to their child. Not really guiding, but just enough to steer them out of potholes.
And next to being passionless and not working hard for anything, I had dreamt of a life where I had accomplished everything. Travel to foreign countries, staying at nice inns and hostels, seeing every notorious historic world sites, and much much more.
But what was I left with at the end…
A life where I had done nothing and a stupid cause of death that could have been prevented with some common knowledge….
Redemption
Now here comes the happy part of this story.
Turns out the dog is safe, not rabid. They had the test and all that, so it turns out I got to live to see a tomorrow,
but these feelings I had remained.
That is how this experience truly affected me, it made me open my eyes that if I kept following this lifestyle, if not now then at a later age I would have thought the same feelings and would feel shameful about my life and would have less time to change for the better.
So as depressing of a moment that week has been for me, if it had not happened to me, I might as well have been killing myself by constantly procrastinating and being undedicated to true work.
I am now dedicated to changing my life for the better, actually doing work that matters, and I swear to never fall again into the sad state I had been in.
(About change, I have written an article about it, and plan to make more about it)
I have started to work out again with more importance towards it this time, pay attention to the food I put in my body so that I can be my healthiest, and try to be filled with positive and healing thoughts.
But my major improvement is the step I took towards reaching my work goal, which is finally writing. Write about my thoughts and learn how to be the best writer out there, not thinking about what other people’s opinions are, and “what I should be doing”, but rather seeking to create my own route that I see my future in and which I believe has the best outcome for me.
I have learned to accept change and to seek it as well.
My future
My plans include reaching a lifestyle where I can make a living with remote work. Achieve my dream body, and accomplish all of my goals that I have dreamt of.
(A major help in this for me, is my spirituality, and I’ll write about that in a later article because that is also an important part of me.)
I believe that this event had to happen for me so that I could learn and take away the importance of life and how to truly live.
This event helped me open my eyes to just how fragile life is, how we need to work for our goals and not wait for tomorrow, how to make an impactful life, and how to view our own lives.
A quote that emphasizes this and which I hold close to my heart:
“Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you will be damned either way, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” -Eleanor Roosevelt
(Another major event for me to truly learn how to live life is learning forgiveness)
So, if you are reading this, thank you, and if you had to take away one nugget of information I had learned from this experience:
Don’t waste your life. Do what you truly want to do, you never know when it will be all (stupidly) taken away.
Thank you again for reading.
