I’ve been observing my own melancholy summer state – barefoot days moving from camper van to sand, changing only from nighty to swimsuit and back again. At first, I wondered if this was some sort of adulthood regression. But the more I leaned into it, the more I realized I’d been here before. Not regression – reimagining.
The joy I feel climbing into “Big Fancy,” my wildly wallpapered Winnebago tucked behind my parents’ cottage, could be an escape from city life. Maybe it’s easier to slip into childhood because I don’t have children of my own. Or maybe it’s that magical return to a time when joy came easily, when “making lemonade” meant stirring Country Time powder from my grandparents’ store – not making it out of the actual lemons life served me at age 21 – learning to survive the unthinkable.
On this 26th Legaversary, I can’t help but think my heart keeps calling me back to a time before everything changed.
Last year’s 25th Legaversary was all bells and whistles. This year has been quieter – months filled with contemplation. When you spend decades on stage telling the world who you are, what happened, and why it matters, it leaves little space to ask if it’s still the whole truth. I sensed a shift, but the direction wasn’t clear.
I toyed with superficial fixes – new headshot, new tagline, new website. But the real question was bigger: after 25 years, am I more than a “workplace injury survivor” who speaks on safety? And if so, how do I reimagine my story the way I’ve reimagined adulthood?
Every August 10th, I go to bed with the awareness that you can fall asleep feeling safe and have no idea what’s to come. But this year was different – I knew change was coming. I’d been rolling words and ideas around, ripping apart concepts and reassembling them, reworking, rewriting…
Even as I was putting my head down on the pillow last night, I was wondering where it was all going and when my mud would settle, and my water would be clear.
And then, on cue, the universe made its entrance by way of a creepy message sent to me by an unnamed, unknown person that lit up my phone:
“Hey Candace Carnahan, are you amputee leg?”
What the actual… no. It’s taken me zero days to know that I would never subscribe to a label. Yet here I was, deep in thoughts about identity, confronted by the very thing I refuse to be defined by.
“You have the wrong number”.
Determined not to let it rattle me, I opened my meditation app. The universe and Aristotle were waiting there to help me stay the course: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Losing my leg was one part of my story — but the whole of me is so much greater.
Twenty-six years ago, a moving conveyor belt took my leg. That day, I lost my leg below … I became a catalyst for courage.
And today? Today I am rewriting my story with new words, redefining my purpose, reigniting my passion.
Because the truth is: you are not one part of your life. You are the whole thing. And you can reimagine it anytime you choose.