Welcome to Meet the Author, a show that takes you behind the scenes to meet the authors of today's most impactful books. This is a show about stories and ideas that will educate, encourage, and inspire you to live a richer, more meaningful life. Today, we're joined by Ruthie Lindsey, speaker, coach, and author of There I Am, to discuss pain, identity, and the long road back to herself. At 17, Ruthie survived a car accident that broke the top two vertebrae in her neck, an injury doctors say kills or paralyzes almost everyone who has it. Years later, an undiagnosed complication from that accident would leave her bedridden for seven years. In There I Am, Ruthie tells the story of what that pain ultimately opened up in her: not a return to who she was before, but the discovery of who she'd always been underneath the roles, stories, and conditioning she'd taken on to feel worthy of belonging.
About Ruthie Lindsey and There I Am: Ruthie Lindsey's accident at 17 left a wire from a spinal fusion surgery undiagnosed in her neck for years, a wire that eventually caused debilitating pain, a reliance on narcotics, the end of her marriage, and the loss of her father, who died suddenly while working to fund the surgery she needed. During the seven years she spent largely bedridden, Ruthie says she found within her pain an unlikely invitation: to unlearn the stories she'd carried since childhood about what made her worthy, and to remember, as she puts it, what had always been good, beautiful, and holy about her simply because she existed.
The book's title comes from a moment months into her recovery, dancing alone in her living room to Justin Timberlake on a night she calls "Justin Timberweek," when she caught her reflection in a dark window and thought, "Oh, well, there I am." Today, Ruthie works with clients on shadow work and reconnecting with the body's own yes and no, work she says she couldn't do if she hadn't lived through every part of her own story first.
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