About three years ago, I was on my way to work. It was a Sunday morning, while most people were still in Church, and I was on the way to the library.

The morning had started somewhat grudgingly. My dog had woken me up, and I had become irritated with her. I didn't wake up my now-fiancée to say goodbye, since I was in a sour mood. I left.

Two minutes before I arrived, a drunk driver rammed me into the median, totalling my car.

When I heard the sound of his tires burning out, I experienced something I hopefully never will again. Everything felt slower. The distance between us grew and grew, the movement becoming fractions of fractions.

I replayed the whole morning. I regretted the anger towards my dog. I regretted not saying good morning to my fiancée. I regretted not saying goodbye to my parents.

I regretted being so afraid of being honest, of embracing the Atheism I hid from my family, of not committing to studying philosophy like I really wanted.

I purged it all in the moments before he hit me, figuring the last thing I wanted to do in my last moments was home in on regrets.

The tires burned again, I heard metal bend and things breaking, I felt the left side of my body collide with the door, felt my head hit the window, my legs ragdoll beneath me, and then I was still.

I honestly thought I had died, and just hadn't caught up to it yet.

I sat there, dazed, watching the man who hit me watch me as he pulled away and fled down the street. I tried to move, barely aware of the man knocking on my window, asking me if I was okay. I fumbled for my phone, pawing at the screen, trying to stay awake long enough to call my mother.

When she answered, I just said her name a few times, and I heard the panic tinge her voice.

I said the intersection I was in weakly, and managed to whisper "Help" before I dropped the phone.

The man opened my door and I slid out, keenly aware of how hot the sun was, the way the palm trees were moving, the way my body ached.

I was alive, and felt nothing. No thoughts, no hopes, no wishes, just the very present moment.

I slowly sat on the asphalt, looking at the twisted wreck of my car, slowly turning my head to watch a police car speed down the road, eventually stopping the car who had hit me. Then my parents were there, trying to get me to speak, trying to lift me, cursing, crying.

I went to the hospital. My fiancée came, and held me for what felt like forever. I barely felt anything. She felt like a stranger, because I had, in my heart, given up hope of ever seeing her again.

I lost my job soon after, due to a mix of mental instability and what I assumed was an unwillingness to let me be a liability.

Six months later, after months of physical therapy, mental preparation and endless thinking, I returned to school, and entered my Existentialism class for the first time.

After a month of the course, I gained something all the hours of therapy hadn't granted: Perspective.

I learned of philosophers who preached meaninglessness, absurdity, chaos, arbitrariness, freedom, anxiety, hope, passion, reason, purpose, finiteness, and how to come back from tragedy.

I learned how to turn the wreck into a transformation, a crucial part of my new identity as a student of Existentialism, of a radical new freedom that merged the fear of death I had tasted with the realization it had always loomed.

I resolved myself to never let someone else feel like there weren't answers to the aimlessness that came with stepping away from what you thought was the End.

I crashed headfirst into my new life. My bones and muscle in the left side of my body never let me forget that day, on the nights my fingers and hand spasm, when my leg shakes with the strain of a phantom pain.

I preach the gospel of coming to terms with death, with godlessness, with regaining hope after you've cast all yourself out a car window, after you've forgotten how to feel, after you can't go back to the illusion of "It can't happen to me".

It was a rebirth as much as anything else ever will be. It was a promise to make something of my life, to never be ashamed of my questioning nature.

It was the closest feeling I've ever had to "finding God", albeit by remaining an atheist. I don't deify the Practice by any means. It simply feels... Right. I feel whole, having dedicated myself to these studies. I still think of the crash, almost every day. But I know I came out more whole for it, oddly enough.

There's a lesson to be learned in small tragedies, I think. Sometimes the lesson is there is no point to anything. Sometimes it's to see how you're changed by tragedy.