"It's okay, little sister."

This is a post about the power of meditation. But it's also a post about getting shot, so please save it for later if this isn't what you need in your inbox today.

Beach at sunrise, photo by Jessie Kwak

It’s a gorgeous sunny Saturday in July, and I’m lying in the emergency room studying the faces of the doctors and nurses around me with my good eye.

I have no idea how bad I look, but I did get shot in the face so I appreciate that everyone’s treating this as worst-case scenario.

It’s not, though.

I know I’m going to be okay, and I’m trying to make sure everyone else knows that, too—especially my husband, and my friend Mark who was driving when someone in the car in front of us decided to unload a clip into the street.

The doctors don’t believe I’m fine (which is probably for the best), so they’re running me through a battery of tests. As tests and scans come back, though, everyone’s been delivering good news to me with relief.

“There’s a lot of blood, but it’s mostly from this small cut. We’ll stitch that right up once we remove the shrapnel.”

“The CT scan came back, and the bullet stopped before your brain.”

“We don’t see any other injuries—does it hurt anywhere else? No? That’s good.”

But no one’s saying anything about my eye.

None of them want to be the one to tell me I’ll never see out of it again.

I get it. I don’t blame them. And I already know that in the core of my being—I knew it the second I heard “fireworks” and the windshield exploded in front of me and my left eye exploded in pain.

Still, as I’m laying in that hospital bed there’s a tiny part of me hoping for a miracle.

Years ago, my friend Seyi told me a horrifying story about a sewing accident—a SEWING accident—when a needle broke on her mom’s sewing machine and the tip flew into her mom’s eye. The eye burst and her mom was blinded, but once they stitched it back up her sight went back to normal.

I would love for that to be the case with me. I would love for my sight to come back once the eye itself is repaired—but I’m pretty sure if there was a chance someone would have tried to reassure me about it.

So I let them avoid telling me, and I focus on my breath some more. I focus on paying attention to the pause at the beginning and the end of the breath. I focus on being extremely grateful it’s still flowing in and out of my lungs.

Breathing exercises have been keeping me calm for the past few hours—so calm that nurses keep remarking how surprisingly steady my heart rate is. But breathing exercises don’t help when I allow myself to start thinking about my eye. Fortunately, that’s when another voice pops in.

“It’s okay, little sister.”

I’ve been an off-and-on meditator for years. I subscribe to the Calm app because I like their meditations, and because paying for a meditation app provides just enough guilt for me to use it on a semi-regular basis.

Earlier this year, I decided I needed to get back to basics, so I took the app’s 30-day Mindfulness for Beginners course taught by Jeff Warren. It does what it says on the box: introduce you slowly but surely to the process of meditation.

I like Jeff’s voice. I like his wry sense of humor. I like how, in every lesson, he reminds you that you’re doing just fine, no matter how it feels like the session is going.¹

Because, let’s face it. I never feel like I’m “meditating right.”

My monkey mind is all over the place, planning my to-do lists, obsessing about past problems, worrying about the future, deciding what I’m going to have for dinner. Most days, I end my meditation session feeling just as scattered as when I started.

There’s a reason they call meditation “practice,” though. When the stakes were high, all those practice hours I’d put in calming the chatter paid off.

On Day 23 of the Mindfulness for Beginners course, Jeff talks about how hard it can be to have compassion and empathy for yourself. It’s true. Most of us are so much harder on ourselves than we would be on a friend.

If a friend had gotten shot three months ago and still wasn’t writing her novel, I’d tell her it was okay. But it’s not okay for me—I should be tougher than that. Right?

In the meditation, Jeff says:

“When I’m having a hard time, instead of being self-critical—although sometimes I still end up being self-critical, it just takes me a while to notice. But when I’m on my game, I stop. I notice what I’m doing and I deliberately do the opposite. I say to myself, ‘Hey, little brother, it’s okay.’ And I send in some love. And it makes a big difference.”

In the meditation, Jeff invites you to meditate on the phrase It’s okay, little [sibling]. Which seemed at first corny—but as I went through the meditation I felt such peace. Like instead of fighting my situation, my imperfections, my frustrations, the loving big sister version of Jessie gave me permission to simply let it go.

“We all go through hard times,” says Jeff near the end of the meditation. “Instead of ignoring this, we could actually have enough self-respect to notice we’re being impacted, and send ourselves some caring.”

Self-compassion isn’t weakness. It’s giving yourself the same respect you’d give to a loved one who’s going through a rough time.

It’s okay, little sister.

As that voice whispered through my mind in the emergency room, I knew it was true. After all, I knew plenty of people who lived full lives with one eye. The doctors had assured me that nothing worse was wrong with me. I knew that whatever happened with my eye, I was fundamentally going to be okay.

Hours passed before I finally worked up the courage to ask about it, though.

I chose my target carefully: the doctor who’d been plucking shrapnel out of my forehead told me he was actually an army doctor, down from Joint Base Lewis-McChord. I figured he was used to delivering bad news straight, so when he asked if I had any other questions for him, I asked him to tell me about my eye.

He paused. “It’s been badly damaged,” he finally said. “The ophthalmologist is on his way, and he’ll be able to give you more details. But it looks very bad.”

I thanked him, and he went off—presumably to treat someone in far worse shape than myself.

It’s okay, little sister.

When the ophthalmologist finally arrived, he blessedly didn’t pull any punches. I forget how he phrased it, but it was medical speak for, “In the CT scans, your eye looks like it’s completely fucked, but we’re going to do our best to save it.”

And then he donned his headset for a closer look, and I held my breath, knowing I was finally about to see what everyone else had been tiptoeing around.

I studied my ruined eye in the reflection of the ophthalmologist’s headset.

That’s it, that’s what everyone’s so upset about, I remember thinking, calm settling through me as I finally confirmed what I’d known all along. And it’s okay, little sister.

The phrase that sustained me in the emergency room has played a massive part in my past three months of recovery.

So I still need naps in the afternoon. It’s okay, little sister.

So I’m still jumpy in cars. It’s okay, little sister.

So I haven’t gotten back to work in the way I would like. It’s okay, little sister.

So I’ll never be able to see out of my left eye again. It’s okay, little sister.

And you know what?

It is okay. In fact, life’s pretty damn good.

1. Since we’re talking about the Calm app, I also like Tamara Levitt’s Daily Calms a lot. I tend to bounce back and forth between those and Jeff’s Daily Trip meditations. And for sleep stories, you can’t beat LeBron James’s “King of the Sleeping City,” which I’ve never heard the end of.