Replying to ACL Recovery

Hey NS, it's been a while. I unfortunately ended my season mid December throwing a simple 3 off a cat track at Copper. Felt super confident because I had landed it bolts like 6 times, but then the next time I landed just slightly backseat on some hard snow and blew the ACL right there. Guess it goes to show that it really isn't very hard to tear your shit under the right circumstances. Super bummed because I was supposed to compete in big mountain for the first time this winter, but I guess it'll have to wait until next season.

Anyway, I'm now on the road to recovery. I had surgery on Friday, and I'm lucky that everything went well. I went for the quad tendon graft, and I've just been chilling on the couch for the past few days of course. I'm in a lot of pain and I literally can't lift my leg at all but I'm just trying to trust the process and take it one day at a time. I guess the reason I'm writing this is to see if anyone has advice on how to stay sane, has any experience with the quad graft (and if it's normal to not be able to use your leg for a while afterwards), and how to handle the mental side of things with this recovery. I'm supposed to start PT in just a few days but the thought of that seems impossible to me right now when any slight movement of my quad results in stabbing pain. This isn't my first season ending injury; I'm realizing just how fragile I really am and I'm scared that I won't be able to overcome the mental block of re-injuring myself once I'm able to ski again and it's just been really tough watching all my homies keep skiing and progressing and going on all the trips I was supposed to go on while everything is put on hold for me. I've been listening to Simon Dumont's Ascension podcast a lot lately and that's been giving me a lot of inspiration, but there's a small part of me deep down that fears that I won't ever be able to reach my full potential as a skier and that this might be a sign that this wasn't meant to be. I refuse to listen to it though, I know I can overcome this. I guess I just wanted to see if anyone else has words of advice to give, because I could really use some right now.

On another note, I think I'm gonna use this downtime to start putting a lot more effort into producing music. I started dabbling with it a couple years ago when I fucked up my collarbone in the middle of the season and ever since I've realized that I really enjoy doing it. I am by no means good at it, but I feel like I've fully gotten the hang of GarageBand and I've been sitting on this house track for a few months now and I think I'm gonna put it out there. Music is a powerful thing and it's definitely helped keep me in a good headspace throughout all this. If you made it to the end, thanks for reading.