How Carrie Underwood Found Her Way Back to Happiness After the Toughest Year of Her Life

For many people, the turning of a calendar year represents a fresh start, a clean break, a reason for hope. And few were as excited to embrace 2019 as Carrie Underwood. Anything to put some space between her and 2017, really. 

At first blush, her decision to label it as "a very soul-searching year for me," in an interview for September's Redbook evoked the obvious. That fall. The one that saw her tripping on a stone step on the walkway outside her Franklin, Tenn. estate and breaking her tumble with her face. 

The incident was certainly bad. Metal plate in her wrist bad. Some 40 to 50 stitches holding together her face bad. Spending nights worrying that her famous visage may never appear the same way bad. Definitely bad enough that one could imagine it inspiring an album called Cry Pretty and a song like "Low" in which she sings "Oh, I've hit rock bottom, I'm in it deep."

And yet in her chat with Redbook, Underwood insinuated the "random freak accident" as she's called it wasn't her toughest test of the previous 12 months. "There were some personal things that happened," she shared somewhat evasively. "Life is full of ups and downs, and I might have had a few more downs than ups last year."