Adversity

I was talking with a good friend today, and she told me a story about a young man who had once been a star athlete in high school.

You know the kid.

Everybody knows his name.

He’s wearing the jersey.

People are cheering for him on Friday night.

Coaches are talking about his future.

Maybe college.

Maybe something beyond that.

And when you’re 17 years old and you’re that kid, you don’t just play sports.

Sports become who you are.

And then he got injured.

Just like that, the trajectory of his life changed.

The cheering stopped.

The uniform came off.

The future he’d imagined disappeared.

And somewhere along the way, alcohol entered the picture.

Today, years later, he’s struggling with alcoholism and living in desperate circumstances.

And that story really stayed with me.

Because it made me think about one word:

Adversity.

Every human being on this planet is eventually going to meet it.

Adversity doesn’t give a damn who you are.

It doesn’t care how much money you have.

It doesn’t care how successful you are.

It doesn’t care whether you’re Republican, Democrat, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, Black, white, gay, straight, young or old.

Eventually, life comes knocking.

And sometimes it doesn’t knock.

Sometimes it kicks the damn door in.

You lose your job.

Your business fails.

Your marriage falls apart.

Somebody you love dies.

You get injured.

You get sick.

Your family stops speaking to you.

The thing you thought your life was going to be suddenly isn’t there anymore.

And then what?

That’s the question.

Then what?

Because I used to think adversity made people stronger.

You’ve heard that your whole life:

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Well…

Not necessarily.

Sometimes what doesn’t kill you leaves you lying on the floor wondering what the hell just happened.

Adversity doesn’t automatically make anybody stronger.

It’s what happens after the adversity that can change us.

And that’s where life gets complicated.

Because it’s easy to look at somebody who’s struggling and say:

“He made bad choices.”

Maybe he did.

But maybe he was also in pain.

Maybe he’d lost the identity he’d built his entire young life around.

Maybe alcohol started as a way to make the pain disappear for a couple of hours.

And eventually the thing that helped him escape became another prison.

That’s why I don’t want to judge this young man.

I want to understand him.

Because understanding somebody doesn’t mean removing personal responsibility.

It means recognizing that human beings are complicated.

And sometimes when we’re standing at a fork in the road, we don’t even realize we’re standing there.

One road says:

Keep going.

Keep drinking.

Keep hiding.

Keep blaming.

Keep running.

And the other road says:

Ask for help.

Try again.

Become somebody different.

And that second road can be terrifying.

Because sometimes rebuilding your life means letting go of the person you thought you were supposed to become.

The athlete becomes a teacher.

The executive becomes a volunteer.

The married person becomes single.

The healthy person becomes a patient.

The retired person starts something completely new.

You have to look at yourself and say:

“Okay. That life is gone.

What can I build from here?”

And here’s something else I’ve learned.

Sometimes you can’t make that turn by yourself.

We love the American story of the rugged individual:

“I pulled myself up by my bootstraps.”

Wonderful.

But sometimes you don’t have any damn boots.

Sometimes somebody has to reach down and give you a hand.

A friend.

A parent.

A doctor.

A counselor.

A recovery group.

A teacher.

Maybe even a complete stranger.

Somebody who looks at you at exactly the right moment and says:

“Your story doesn’t have to end here.”

Think about how powerful that sentence is.

Your story doesn’t have to end here.

Because none of us gets to control everything that happens to us.

That’s the bargain of being alive.

We can do everything right and still get clobbered.

But when there’s another decision available to us, another person willing to help us, another road we haven’t tried yet—that’s possibility.

And maybe resilience isn’t about being some superhero who never falls down.

Maybe resilience is much simpler.

You fall.

You lie there.

You hurt.

Maybe you lie there longer than you thought you would.

And eventually, somehow, you look around and say:

“Okay.

Where do I go from here?”

Not:

“Why did this happen to me?”

But:

“What am I going to do with what happened to me?”

That’s a completely different question.

And maybe that’s the question we should ask ourselves—and each other—when life changes without permission.

Not:

“What happened to you?”

Not:

“How did you screw this up?”

But:

“Where do you want to go from here?”

Because adversity will eventually visit every one of us.

We don’t get to choose when.

We don’t get to choose how.

And we certainly don’t get to choose all the consequences.

But whenever another road remains open, whenever help remains available, whenever another decision can still be made…

there is possibility.

And sometimes an entire life can change direction because somebody finally realizes:

**This isn’t the end of my story.

It’s just the place where I have to start writing a different one.**