Just Because It Didn’t Kill You, Doesn’t Mean It Didn’t Hurt

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“I am going to die in a foreign country without ever getting to say goodbye to my mother.”

That was my last thought. The sun was already well into the afternoon sky as I watched the serrated edge of the blade arch down towards the soft flesh of my neck.  It was August 2017, and I was one month into my contract as an English teacher in Ipiales, Colombia. I had been warned, prior to my arrival, that the little mountain town to which I was headed had a certain reputation for violence. I was warned about the ex-guerrillas there that still lived in the mountains, hoarding their cache of guns. I was warned not to let my guard down.

Yes, I was warned.

That crisp fall afternoon, I stood basking in the rare warmth of the sun and the majestic views of endless grass-covered mountains. I didn’t notice the three men charging me from behind. I didn’t notice their garish knives, knives that would have made any Rambo-aficionado drool with longing. By the time I looked up, they were already trying to stab me – kill the gringo and take his iPhone, right? As I watched the knife come down towards me, in that one granular moment of absolute clarity, I realized there was nothing I could do. I was weak, and because I was weak, I was going to die.

Then something clicked.

The muscle memory of four years of boxing kicked in, and I put those men down – if only temporarily. I dodged and moved and swung my fists like a man possessed, but I didn’t get out clean though. In my hellish fervor to survive, I jumped off a highway overpass and broke both of my feet before falling backward and shattering my right wrist. My pursuers chased me anyway, even more intent on killing me now. I ran on broken toes down the only highway into and out of town, screaming in Spanish for help as I watched the cars pass me by, one by one.

As the men drew closer, and the adrenaline waned, I cried from the pain in my feet and the snot poured down my nose. I had given it everything I had, and the universe turned away from me.

At the last moment, a car screeched to a halt beside me. I looked just long enough to notice the two teenage faces, a skateboard and magazines in the backseat. Without hesitation, I dove through the back window and landed squarely on my broken wrist. The scream was drowned out by the roaring of the engine as we sped away towards the hospital.

And so began the hardest year of my life.

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What nobody tells you about living through trauma, is how to make sense of who you are once you’ve been stripped of everything that you thought defined you. How do you make sense of yourself when you can’t do the things you love?

Thanks to those kids, I didn’t die on a mountain that day in Colombia. But I did lose a great part of myself. After the reconstructive surgery on my wrist, I was placed in a wheelchair for months. I couldn’t walk, and if I crawled to the bathroom on my knees, it was with my one good hand.

I couldn’t even put socks on anymore without help.

Simultaneously mourning and angry, I could feel the mental pressure building up. My whole life I have wrestled demons and struggled for control over my chronic depression.  I discovered early on that movement and exercise were not only healthy forms of validation, but they gave purpose to my anxious energy. Sports became a catharsis,  a foothold on which to stake my identity. I was a mover of weights. A capable boxer. I was strong, healthy and secure in that identity…until the day that I was not.

Over the course of the next year, I left Colombia and moved back in with my parents to start physical therapy. I was now a broken, twenty-two-year-old bachelor taking up residence in his parent’s basement. “Who the hell is going to want me like this?”, I thought to myself over and over again. The mental narrative swung wildly out of control and my self-esteem plummeted. I lost more than twenty pounds as I slowly began to wither away.

Maybe it sounds silly in retrospect, but the thought I couldn’t seem to get away from was, “Who was I if couldn’t lift weights? Why would anyone want to know me in the state I’m in right now?”

It took me a whole year to understand the gravity and underlying implications of that question.

But here’s what I learned:

You are not the person you think you are. When everything you know about yourself has been taken away – when you’ve been stripped to your spiritual core – there is something that remains. Something intangible and infinite. The death of my ego was an extremely traumatic experience, however, it was also incredibly humbling. When you’re at the bottom of your life, you’re also the most to free to create. As I began to walk again and slowly regained feeling in my fingers, I was able to consciously re-construct my identity. I let go of the pieces of myself that I never realized were harming me. I apologized for the mean things I had believed about myself in the past and I became extremely selective and purposeful about the media and content I choose to consume. Which lead me to another discovery.

Your value does not come from the way in which you define yourself. Even at my lowest low, I had my friends, I had my family and I had my life. Too often I think we get caught up believing the stories we tell ourselves and forget that they are just that – stories! They can be changed and rewritten. The moment I chose to accept myself, exactly as I was in that condition, I realized a personal value that had nothing to do with external factors. It was a value that no one and nothing could take away from me as long as I lived.

While I would never wish my experience on anyone else, I am grateful for the lessons it taught me. Namely, that you must be flexible: rigidity is the enemy of nature. I would caution everyone against placing too much stock in singular, ephemeral belief about yourself. All it takes is one moment to redirect the course of your life.

After all, the paradox of the universe is that the only thing you can really count on is change.

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