I’d finally settled back into Queens for winter break, and it was just an average Tuesday with my mom. We were on our way to pick my sister up from the airport (the wrong one in fact), and we were going to surprise her with a shopping day in Long Island. Man, was I excited to see her.

When my mom was behind the wheel and I was just texting in the passenger seat, the car began switching lanes on the Van Wyck Expressway. As we shifted into a new lane, we felt a big vehicle bang on the back of our car. Once that happened, I felt the car swerving in a bunch of circles and crash into the median wall, causing the air bags popped out, which was pretty painful. The car then stopped, and my mom and I smelled smoke, so we instantly got out of the car.

The minute we stepped out, we saw it was an NYPD truck that had banged into our car, saying that it was our fault for “coming out of nowhere when switching lanes.” As my mom called the insurance company and the officers from the NYPD truck call their supervisors to report the accident, I just stood there shaking in shock (I mean the fact that it was cold out didn’t help, but still). After waiting on the side of the highway for almost an hour and being asked by passing cars if I was okay, our car was totaled.

After watching so many TV shows and movies filled with car crash scenes, I would think how unrealistic they all are and how they’re just created to maintain a good audience. Little did I know, that something like that would happen to me. I used to think that car crashes are never as major as they seem on “Grey’s Anatomy,” and even though the one I was in wasn’t that extreme, it did effect me emotionally in so many ways. Once I really thought about how major this accident was, I realized how lucky me and my mom really were to come out of that accident only feeling sore-given the circumstances. I kept playing the image of the crash in my head, and I finally considered my accident to be a big one.

Even though the bang from the accident hurt the most, it brought a “big bang” to my perspective of life itself. You can’t take everything for granted, especially cars. Don’t underestimate the ability that the world has to throw curveballs at you. Tuesday was supposed to be a shopping day, not one of the scariest days of my life. My day was not supposed to be like that, nothing was, but then again, I don’t really have a choice in what happens. But I do get to decide on how these happenings affect me.

Despite that fact that the crash traumatized me and consumed me with fear, it also saved me. I was saved from becoming paralyzed, from losing my memory, or from losing myself. I came out completely clean, and physically safe. Sure, I was a mental wreck at that time, but I saw those mess of thoughts turn into a new perspective. I’ve discovered how grateful I should be for making it through and even though I hated that it happened, every fall out is important. Those worst case scenarios that we think about can become real and a lot of them don’t have the kind of ending that I did. Everything can flips on you in the matter of thirty seconds, that’s how fast I knew the car crash was, just seconds. For me, this crash was a painful wake up call to be grateful for ever result that you’ve been given and that the rest of our lives is going to be wonderfully and terribly unexpected, which is just a part of the ride.