“I felt my soul leaving my body.”

It’s a thing people say when they’ve experienced something spectacular, but for me — and nearly 400 million others, research estimates – it actually happened.

I felt my soul tug out of my body, up towards another place, before violently rebounding back into my body as the car stopped rolling and wedged itself between two trees.

I was 16, riding home with two of my girlfriends from Friendly’s one night when we hit a patch of sand driving too fast on a windy back road. All of the things people say happens, happened: I saw white. Felt time stretch seconds into minutes. Felt absolute peace.

The most peculiar part, though, was that as the car flew through the air I remember having one very clear, singular thought: “Huh. I’m not sure how to die.”

This is the part that has always baffled me. That in my final seconds, “I’m not sure how to die” was the one and only thought I had. Not that I was afraid, or sad that I’d never be married, or go to prom, have children or a dog or a house or see my parents or siblings or friends again. Not even that I didn’t want to die. It’s that I didn’t feel prepared. I wasn’t sure how to do it.

On a spectrum of near death experiences – or NDEs, as I’ve come to learn they’re more commonly called – mine was as minor as they come. Barely even anything. A blip. I was not clinically dead, my heart never stopped beating, I never floated above my body, I didn’t meet God or get ushered towards a light by dead family members. There was none of that. In fact, the whole ordeal lasted two seconds at most.

To the best of my memory, I never told the friends I was with that night that this happened. I’m sure I was embarrassed. One of them had suffered serious injuries to her face and arm, and to focus on anything other than that, I knew, felt both absurd and selfish. On top of that, I thought they’d think I was crazy. Maybe I am crazy. I remember telling my mom, though. She’ll corroborate.

But what I’ve come to learn is that to focus on whether these types of experiences are real or not is focusing on the wrong thing. We should be looking at the meaning of these events for people, because they have completely shifted individual lives and transformed their belief systems.

For me, those two seconds hold the key inciting incidents that have inspired me to begin this project.

I can’t wait to share what I learn.