Brain on Fire meets Carry On, Warrior, There I Am is an arresting inspirational memoir about one woman’s journey from chronic pain and hopelessness to finding joy, redemption, and healing. At 17 years old, Ruthie Lindsey is hit by an ambulance near her home in rural Louisiana. Brain on Fire meets Carry On, Warrior, There I Am is an arresting inspirational memoir about one woman's journey from chronic pain and hopelessness to finding joy, redemption, and healing. At seventeen years old, Ruthie Lindsey is hit by an ambulance near her home in rural Louisiana. Ruthie Lindsey is a renowned speaker, activist, podcast host, social media figure, and author, Ruthie travels the globe sharing her story, empowering others to find purpose in their pain, to look for beauty in the midst of their brokenness. Her forthcoming memoir, Salvaged, will be available through. 'THERE I AM: THE JOURNEY FROM HOPELESSNESS TO HEALING' by Ruthie Lindsey (Gallery Books, 288 pages, $35). In her memoir, 'There I Am: The Journey From Hopelessness to Healing,' Ruthie Lindsey. A speaker, author, podcast host, and social media figure, Ruthie travels the globe sharing her story, empowering others to find purpose in their pain and to look for beauty in the midst of their sacred wounds. Her new memoir, There I Am: Th e Journey from Hopelessness to Healing, from Touchstone/Simon and Schuster debuted April 21, 2020.
Overview
At seventeen years old, Ruthie Lindsey is hit by an ambulance near her home in rural Louisiana. She’s given a five percent chance of survival and one percent chance of walking again. One month later after a spinal fusion surgery, Ruthie defies the odds, leaving the hospital on her own two feet.
Just a few years later, newly married and living in Nashville, Ruthie begins to experience debilitating pain. Her case confounds doctors and after numerous rounds of testing, imaging, and treatment, they prescribe narcotic painkillers—lots of them. Ruthie has become bedridden, dependent on painkillers, and hopeless, when an X-ray reveals that the wire used to fuse her spine is piercing her brain stem. Without another staggeringly expensive experimental surgery, she could well become paralyzed, but in many ways, she already is.
Ruthie goes into the hospital in chronic pain, dependent on prescription painkillers, and leaves the same way. She can still walk but has no idea where she’s going. As her life unravels, Ruthie returns home to Louisiana and sets out on a journey to learn joy again. She trades fentanyl for sunsets and morphine for wildflowers, weaning herself off of the drugs and beginning the process of healing—of coming home to her body.
Raw and redemptive, There I Am is not just about the magic of optimism, but the work of it. Ruthie’s extraordinary memoir “like going on a walk with a best friend and listening to a life-changing speech at the same time: it’s equal parts familiar and profound, warm and insightful, comforting and challenging, relatable and unlike anything you’ve read before” (Mari Andrew, New York Times bestselling author).
(CBS Local)– Sometimes in life, things happen for mysterious reasons and Ruthie Lindsey is living proof of that.
Lindsey got into a devastating car accident when she was 17 years old in Louisiana and she was given a five percent chance to live and a one percent chance to walk. Lindsey ended up being bedridden for seven years, battled issues with chronic pain, and became dependent on prescription painkillers. All of these stories are featured in Lindsey’s memoir for Simon & Schuster called “There I Am: The Journey from Hopelessness to Healing.” Lindsey’s story of perseverance is unlike anything you’ve ever heard or read before and the process of writing her story was extremely difficult.
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“When you’re writing a memoir, you are going back in and re-traumatizing yourself,” said Lindsey in an interview with CBS Local’s DJ Sixsmith. “I had to go through my wreck, being in my bed for seven years, finding out about the wire in my brain stem, and burying my dad, and going through my divorce. It was really painful and really hard, but in the same breath it became this invitation for me to do the deepest healing work I’ve ever done. I don’t think I would’ve gone in so deeply, if it wasn’t such a nightmare.
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Ellicott City Planning Group To Shape Town's FutureAs a result of her experience, Lindsey is now a renowned speaker and activist who travels around the country to tell her story. The author said she was properly able to mourn the death of her father while writing her book and learned a lot about herself that she hadn’t focused on before.
“I had a complete nervous breakdown about seven and a half years ago, which I now call my breakthrough. My marriage had ended, my dad passed away and there had been so much loss and so much trauma. I stopped sleeping, I had to move home, and I couldn’t take care of myself. My family was going to send me away to get help because I was not okay. I started weening myself off the drugs the next day. I had to relearn how to live. I felt like my brain started to come back. In order to feel the beautiful good, you have to experience the loss. I thought I was broken. We are not broken, we are traumatized and the beautiful thing is we can heal from that.”
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Lindsey’s book is available now wherever books are sold. Watch all of DJ Sixsmith’s interviews from “The Sit-Down” series here.