I sit here in a wheelchair, a brain-damaged paraplegic but also a person who hasn’t changed at all beyond the superficial and an inability to stand up under my own strength. I am not looking for any pity from anybody else, I am too busy living and fighting, to deserve any of that at all. Needing help doesn’t make me helpless. If I am happy in being here and being me today then what is there to pity and for anybody who might do so, it probably reveals more about them than it does me. I have no willingness to accept any notion that my current situation today, no matter how bad it may seem has to define my tomorrow, my next month or even my next year because quite simply I am not going allow it.
Until I actually feel that I can make no further progress, all I can do is to keep on moving forward. Selfish of me perhaps, I know, but as long as I am afforded the opportunity to get better then I don’t think anyone can really begrudge me if I grab it with both hands. I am grateful to anyone and everyone who allows me to keep battling through their assistance and support, a particular shout should go out to my wonderful wife for allowing me to keep fighting against my injuries whilst she goes out to do a tough job of work to keep me fed and clothed with a roof over my head before coming home tired in the evening and help me with my rehabilitation at night.
Although I might not be able to walk today, one day soon I am absolutely sure that I will be able to at least hobble around inside this humble little apartment and as simple as that might seem, it will come as a huge boost in my quality of life and greatly reduce the stress and pressure that my wife totes around every day on her shoulders. Through hard work and determination I have already made more progress than had ever been anticipated. Until I actually feel it for myself, deep in my own bones that it is just all too much for me and I am left with no choice but to throw in the towel then I will continue in my single-minded pursuit of being able to walk once again and I haven’t yet come remotely close yet to reaching that unfortunate conclusion for myself. Until that dreaded day, I will continue on undaunted with my pursuit of learning to walk once again and I haven’t yet come remotely close yet to reaching the painful decision that I am chasing the impossible.
There is no doubt in my mind that hard work is a benefit as of itself, of course doing your utmost allows you to create tangible benefits for yourself through the creation of improvements in personal performance and excellence in the field you’re endeavouring to master. Hard work and effort are virtues worth instilling, and worth having too. The benefits of self-control seem readily apparent. Ignoring distractions, perseverance in the face of difficulty, conscientiousness in general; these traits all allow us to grow as people. Studies in the UK have perhaps not unsurprisingly shown that individuals with better work habits go on to be more successful than their less motivated peers.
As with anything else, there is always a price to be paid and after all, if success was freely available to anyone who wanted it then everybody would have it. Most success comes from doing enough productive work. Just by working hard on what you believe will give a better perspective and then you can better understand its true value? That’s when you start to respect the work itself and when you start to learn the important life lessons of patience and responsibility. It’s only when avoiding the bad habits of procrastination, insecurity and the fear of failure that success becomes more attainable. When it comes down to it, nothing else delivers results and progress better than good, old-fashioned hard work, action is habit forming and leads to more action. So build a plan, roll up your sleeves and work as hard as you can on your journey to where you are planning to be.
Unfortunately, for those averse to hard work the prospects are not as rosy and can see people with poor work habits having issues with inadequate sleep, insufficient nutrition and poor hygiene. For me, getting worse is the greatest fear, if there is a risk of getting worse that comes from inaction I will always seek to counter that by pushing ahead with the task at hand. Getting better and bringing my body as far as it has come has taken a tremendous amount of hard work, and sometimes I have hurt myself by pushing too hard and seeing my urine turn cola-coloured from a bout of rhabdomyolysis. Rhabdomyolysis is a serious syndrome due to a direct or indirect muscle injury, resulting from the death of muscle fibers and release of their contents into the bloodstream. This can lead to serious complications such as renal failure, meaning that the kidneys cannot properly remove waste and concentrated urine. Apart from going too far and hurting myself, I have only got as far as I have through a lot of hard work each and every day since I first got injured.
The idea for this website, if that is indeed what it’s destined to grow into has been brewing slowly in the far corners of my mind since I got sick all those many years ago. Slowly coming back into consciousness tethered to the bed in ICU because my uncomprehending mind kept trying to rip out all the tubes I was connected to. Tubes that now, of course, I understand were only there to keep me alive. In between the crazed morphine dreams that were running through my mind and the occasional moments of clarity when I would imagine writing my experiences down in a letter. A letter that now has grown and grown through the days, months and years that it has taken me to even get so far as to actually be able to write this all down.
Unfortunately, I had grossly underestimated the time frame involved in getting a 6′ tall adult male back on his feet and had thought it would be much easier than it has actually turned out to be. With my muscles wasting away far much faster than they can be built up again and the hidden enemy of spinal cord damage a truly unforgiving opponent, this story has grown from no longer than a letter to magazine article size and still insists on running and running. There have been times on this journey when it would have been much easier to give in to frustration and call time on the whole thing. Though, I have always been mindful of what giving up would actually mean, turning back on all the hard work and allowing my condition to get worse and worse. To resign myself to a life in this wheelchair and the inability to get myself to the bathroom and the consequent lifelong need for these increasingly irksome nappies is just something I cannot allow myself to do. As long as I keep making progress and am able to continue fighting against my injuries because of the care and attention afforded to me by my wonderful wife, I see no reason at all to give up.
Those were dark days and I don’t think I have ever been as weak at any point in my life as I was then. There were desperate times, lying awake unable to sleep and feeling so utterly alone with despair getting the better of me, I prayed for all the pain and uncertainty that crushed my spirit to be taken away from me. I had dropped so far down into a hole of physical weakness, muscle loss and nerve damage that it has taken me almost five years and all my effort and hard work to drag myself to a point where today I feel that I might be able one day soon to take my first steps into a brave, new world. Please don’t get me wrong, I am not looking to talk myself up into being something or someone that I am patently not. When I do at last actually beat this horrible affliction the credit will not belong to me but all the remarkable people who have fought alongside me, to get me back on my feet.
But my dark, despairing mood was only a matter of interpretation because even the tiniest amount of light will always outshine the darkness of the blackest night. Darkness is the absence of light, which in scientific terms is simply electromagnetic radiation, produced by photons of energy and visible to the naked eye. Darkness, the truest and darkest of all is not the simply the absence of light, it is the belief that the light will never return. The light will always return, to illuminate our lives and show us our in our loved ones, family and things entirely new and long overlooked, new possibilities and the challenge to pursue them. From those darkest of days, the light has always shone forward and chased away the pitch darkness that had once come so close to swallowing all hope.
Assuming that we all have sufficient scientific knowledge to blunder through all this let’s talk about light for a second, without light we wouldn’t be able to see and we wouldn’t have anything to eat without photosynthesis kick-starting the food chain and without light for about 6 months we’d all become completely and hopelessly disoriented.
Light is fundamental to our lives and we are utterly dependant on it, it serves to nurture our spirituality and across a number of religions, light is seen as the source of goodness and the ultimate reality. Nothing can ever outrun the light, it is all powerful and unvanquishable. No matter how desperate your situation might seem, no matter how hopeless and futile there is always light to be found and the hope that comes with it. Darkness only provides the opportunity to hide away from our reality, to avoid facing up to the challenge and the opportunity to make the change.
Unfortunately upon leaving hospital I wasn’t strong enough to even grip a pen or even attempt to type this all down and so I opened a file on my mobile phone to jot things down, using the index finger on my working left hand to note down anything and everything that seemed as though it might potentially be worth writing about once I eventually sat down to write everything down, because brain damage made it difficult for me to use my right hand without experiencing an awful lot of pain, with my muscles and tendons contracted so much that my hand resembled a gruesome claw.
What you are reading now on these pages before you is the product of those notes, in all their garbled, shorthand glory. I sit here tapping away at the keyboard with that same phone sat on the table next to me and refer to it constantly for inspiration and reminders of just everything that has gone before. I am not really sure why I insist on checking those notes quite as often as I seem to do. Perhaps it’s just in the hope that on just one more glance there might have been a wondrous plot twist that sees me make a huge spontaneous leap forward with my training and fly forward in time to a point where I no longer have any need for a wheelchair to sit in and type but unfortunately my progress has never been that miraculous and for now this story isn’t quite finished just yet.
Don’t get me wrong I haven’t been childishly putting off writing all this down, treating it like some needless chore with little tangible benefit. If anything it’s quite the opposite and for a long, long time I had been throwing myself wholeheartedly into getting stronger, training my muscles and building towards getting back on my own 2 feet. Please don’t make the mistake of assuming that this story happened in the blink of an eye, it has taken five long years of blood, sweat and tears to fight my way this far along this tough, unforgiving road of rehabilitation and training.
Telling this story might have just been down prioritized, it has taken a while to drag myself forward to a point where at long last I am strong enough to sit here at my desk overlooking the river. Here I sit, listening to a cacophony of dissonant music coming through the stereo and try to commit everything onto my laptop, having built up sufficient strength in my back muscles to stop me falling forward whenever I might lean over the PC looking for another rarely used letter on the keyboard. Damn you letter ‘J’!
More than anything it’s just a matter of timing, as I sit here with a broken ankle curtailing any further training for the time being. It’s about time to get everything down for posterity and it feels good to be in something approaching a kind of work routine, to be using my brain. Not just stagnating in front of daytime TV and the constant re-runs on Cable Television that reward fleeting stardom in the 1980s with televisual immortality into perpetuity.
I appreciate it when well-meaning people lean in to tell me in conspiratorial tones that I shouldn’t give up because nothing is impossible. Unfortunately, it’s also sadly true that all I do is nothing, each and every day. Hardly ever leaving the same four walls, my life for most of the last five years has for been spent during the waking hours in this one room. Sat here, I have learned to cope with life as someone with life-changing injuries and the newfound perspective that affords. For want of an alternative expression, growing as a person and adapting the ways I go about living my life. Life from a wheelchair is an entirely different experience to any adventure I had ever been on before and I have learned to approach life from an entirely new perspective based on my new fundamentals of humility, gratitude and positive thinking.
In our modern society full of corporate power and the cult of stardom, being humble might seem like a weakness to be exploited. If anything, it is actually a trait to be praised and cultivated and once balance had been achieved between self-confidence and humility, I had crossed a significant barrier in our own personal development. Hubris isn’t conducive to a healthy lifestyle as evidenced by the dramatic falls of such diverse personalities as President Nixon, Lance Armstrong, Martin Shkreli and Harvey Weinstein. All of whom didn’t realise the world was watching them quite so closely and lost their place on the pedestal of fame and power. Power and influence don’t provide carte blanche to do absolutely anything and shouldn’t apply to everyone trying to drag themselves up the tree towards the higher branches or even for me, desperately straining to reach the bottom-most branch.
How can it be possible for the human ego to resolve itself to being both omnipotent and also willing to take a back-seat? For me, I have always known that I possess no god-like powers and am not and never will be a deity. As a mere man, I am frail and weak as the recent past has more than adequately proven and all I can do is endeavour to be the best me that I can be, to do my utmost in every situation I encounter and bear responsibility for taking the course of action that I felt compelled to take.
When I think back to my school days and the two schools I went to when I was a child. Which like most Public Schools in England had ominous sounding Latin mottos; “Prodesse Quam Conspici” and “Ut Severis Seges” and I think both of them have helped shape me as the person I am today by being the tenets that my education was based upon. “Prodesse Quam Conspici” or to accomplish without being conspicuous, to generate results without the need to show off just for having done what needed doing. Whereas “Ut Severis Seges” meaning as you sow, so shall you reap or basically every choice and action you make has a result and a direct consequence. In the internet era with self-worth and accomplishment measured in followers and likes it is difficult to forget about a constantly watching world and try to work anonymously just for the sake of working and not have that effort recognised, taking responsibility for everything you do, labouring in an assumed vacuum. I think an important lesson can be learned by taking time to think on these two simple principles, take them to heart and change our behaviour so we’re able to reach that point in our lives when we did things for nothing more than the enjoyment and challenge that it brought with no thought at all about reward, to also take responsibility for what had been done. I am convinced that we can all manage to make progress towards our preferred destinations of choice in life and take responsibility for our actions along the way.
Plaudits are a consequence of life and not a reason for living, a by-product and not the goal. They will come along naturally once you concentrate your efforts on more important things. Climb a mountain not to plant a flag and conquer it but for the challenge and to take in the view, ascend it so you can see the world and not so the world can see you. Travel the world not to cross places off a list and pat yourself on the back for being worldlier than the next man but to grow and develop as a person from the experience. Challenge yourself to do new, untried things and create what previously hadn’t existed, not for self-satisfaction but for the good it will bring to you and others, the benefits you will be able to deliver to the world that surrounds you. The sweetest joy in life comes from the recognition that you aren’t alone in being special because everyone is.
Ego is the enemy and never a friend. Becoming a slave to personal ego is the ultimate exercise in futility, surrounding yourself with yes-men who always agree whatever you might say and massage the ego is entirely self-defeating. At its negative worst ego is a sense of superiority and certainty that exceeds the bounds of confidence and talent. Although, it is also true that ego is a motivating force that drives people towards excellence it can also be the inner enemy, chipping away at you from the inside and driving you towards questionable decisions that benefit nothing but your own ego and tenuous sense of self-worth. Having a few people who can say it like it really is and help bring you back to reality are essential to personal growth, staying humble and keeping your feet grounded firmly on the earth.
Regardless of whoever you might be it is essential to treat everyone around you with respect and courtesy. We are all in it together and can only make progress because others chose not to stand against you and block your efforts. When we listen, we discover a world of alternative insight and simply ignoring them and forcing our opinions on them relegates you to the assumption that you are omnipotent and can solve any problem on your own. Which is nothing more than a rear-view mirror perspective that forces us to rely on past experiences and leaves us completely unprepared to face the googly that we all might have to face one unexpected day?
Nothing is ever going to be learned and nobody impressed by anybody who consistently insists on shifting blame and making excuses for their actions. Forward movement can only be achieved by taking responsibility, owning your mistakes and apologising for them. Saying that you’re sorry isn’t an admission of inferiority, unworthiness or weakness. Rather it serves a useful and objectively measurable purpose by converting a desire for revenge into a willingness to forgive and forget but only if you take ownership of the apology by accepting blame and not fanning the flames with mere sympathy.
No matter what you are able to achieve it is vital that you treat it as an ongoing process, a life-work in progress. Never allow complacency to enter your thinking, complacency is the fruit of ego and not humility. The pursuit of excellence is a journey, not a destination and only achieved by pushing yourself to keep progressing forward. Continuing with the process of growing, through to higher levels of excellence that enable you to keep working on your limitations and to remain grounded.
We lose a lot of energy and end up hurting ourselves by brooding with negative emotions. There have been innumerable studies that scientifically demonstrate that happy people live healthier lives by living them positively. It is my firm belief that adequately expressing and feeling gratitude leads to happiness, by focusing on the positive we can compensate for our brains’ natural tendency to focus on negative, threats and worries. By broadening our thinking to include positive emotions such as joy, love and happiness we can effectively relegate negative anxieties to the back of our minds.
Recently released research testing emotional responses in an MRI environment has shown when presented with uncertain or questionable situations, negative responses are achieved faster and more smoothly than positive. Test subjects were asked to look at photographs of other people’s faces and rate their likeability. The same test subjects were then called back later for a follow-up session inside an MRI scanner the following week and were shown fearful, surprised and neutral faces. Now they were asked to change their opinion of some of the images to gain insight into how they went about reframing their opinions and which part of the brain actively responded to facilitate this change.
The analysis revealed that the brain reaches for negative responses faster and more easily than when developing positive opinions. Indeed, the human brain finds it easier to think negatively especially in younger people. As we get older and develop more experience, we are better able to appraise without simple knee-jerk negativity. In much the same way as we learn to stay in better emotional control as we advance in years we are able to learn to override initial negative responses by ignoring the negative that surrounds them and focus on the positive instead.
So it is possible over time to learn to see things from a different perspective, we can unlearn the knee-jerk negativity our brains initially jump to and see things in a more positive light. By learning to take our time and not going with the immediate response and allowing ourselves to see the other side of the coin. It is both possible and part of the human experience to change our emotional responses and experiences, with a bit of time we can learn to change those parts of ourselves we are not happy with.
It’s easier than you might think too and you can start by eliminating outward anxieties by removing doubt and nagging, complaining about things we deep down know aren’t really all that important. That alone should provide us with more than enough time to focus on positive inner emotions of love, contentment and friendship. Life is precious and who really knows when that bolt from the blue is going to strike, relish the moments of joy and be thankful for living your life with purpose and the opportunity to create your own destiny.
Be grateful for the little things like the roof over your head because there are a lot of people who aren’t so fortunate. Break your life down into what is needed for you to grow as a person, to achieve and function. Think in terms of the model laid out by Maslow, a bottom-to-top pyramid of hierarchical needs ascending from the basic to the psychological and then on to self-fulfilment. Starting at the bottom with food, water, warmth, shelter, safety and security. Then on to the psychological needs of love, friendship and accomplishment before topping out with self-actualisation and achieving the place in society that each individual longs for the most.
I am sure that for many of us are fortunate enough to have already met a lot of those needs and are just struggling to top it all off satisfactorily by filling our lives with luxuries and those nice-to-have items that feel important before you acquire them but aren’t actually life-essential in the long run. In simple terms, anybody fortunate enough, in this modern world, to have a roof over their head, food in their belly, a PC, a mobile phone, loving family, supportive friends and a special someone in their lives has already ticked most everything off their list of needs and that’s a tremendous amount to be grateful for. The reward that comes from this sense of happiness and self-satisfaction is achieved through giving thanks to all the other people we meet as we go about our daily lives, to acknowledge the good in people and giving a nod to someone else’s attitude and effort.
I love where I live, it isn’t palatial but is more than I had ever hoped for in a place that I am absolutely delighted to be able to call home. We had bought it less than a year before I had got sick and now the tyre track scars on what had once been a newly purchased apartment floor are constant reminders of my change in circumstances. The damage on the walls and doors play ample testament to the significant changes my present lifestyle has been forced to undergo and my reliance on this wheelchair in every aspect of my current life. I am grateful that it has been here to help me, though I do regret the damage caused to a perfectly good apartment and hate catching even a glimpse of my own reflection sitting here chair bound in the windows on the dark winter evenings. Though that is just the vanity of ego and self-image and who knows, maybe one day this same wheelchair might sell to wealthy collectors for the large amount of money that Dr Stephen Hawking’s has recently gone for. Though, for that to happen I will need to do something more significant to contribute to the Human experience and would need a little bit more time, say a couple of hundred years by which time I’d only have come to be known as the man who lived almost as long as Clive of India’s tortoise, Adwaita.
In fighting back from life-changing injuries or just going about your daily life, just remember there is no such thing as false hope, it’s all just hope and that can never be a bad thing at all. Thinking positive can only ever make you feel better, significantly reduce stress and lift your spirits especially if you ever take time to consider what might happen if thoughts ever might ever turn dark and negative. Now that doesn’t mean that it’s bad to have negative thoughts, it is all just part of the natural grieving process and it took me a long time to come out into the light and put that dark tunnel behind me. For now, I’d prefer not to go too deeply into them and allow even a slight hint of that soul-crushing negativity back into my mind, now I’ve gotten through that painful and uncertain stage in the grieving process.
It wasn’t easy and took an awful lot of emotional energy and self-control to be able to smile again. It’s embarrassing just to think that I’d almost forgotten how to do something so utterly fundamental. I would wheel myself to the big picture window at the end of the hall in the Rehabilitation Hospital and consumed with negative thoughts would try and allow my mind to escape into the unknown to watch random people walking into the shopping centre that stood opposite, to dream of abandonment and the welcoming abyss of nothingness. It was a blessed relief to allow my thoughts to wander vicariously but I learned more when I switched my focus onto my own face reflected in the window and set about teaching myself how to smile again, my mood lightened and felt a lot less dark and foreboding, far less consumed by stress and uncertainty.
I have been fortunate throughout this time because I have always had Miko with me, we married less than a year before I was struck down with my injury and were very much newlyweds. She has always been with me, every step of the way, visiting the hospital twice a day when I couldn’t even feed myself and giving constructive, loving feedback. She has never once doubted that I would be able to walk again and her upbeat perspective has kept at bay the latent negativity I might have been harbouring inside. More than anything her love and support has enabled me to avoid the slippery slope where thoughts are given a voice, then become actions and habits. Which ultimately take over my personality before eventually subverting my fate completely.
After all, it’s OK to have negative thoughts, humans are a paranoid species which years of evolution have hard-wired it into our programming. Running away from the suspicious shadow you thought might be a Sabre-toothed Tiger imparts an evolutionary advantage because those who didn’t run and got it wrong were no longer to contribute to the gene pool. Keeping an eye out for threats because of the fear of being stalked or threatened enables people to be prepared for potential threats in the future and plan around them. Which makes far more sense than removing yourself from the gene pool like a needlessly brave idiot or a contender for the Darwin Awards.
Positivity alone might not always be enough, someone so imbued with positive thoughts may well be unable to ascertain true motives in all their colleagues. To be completely unable to consider the possibility that others in their group might be working against them, such naivety is dangerous and opens people to being taken advantage of. Positivity should always be employed with internal boundaries and balance is key, because everyone being out to get you is ridiculous paranoia so is the notion that everyone is on your side.
Positive thought is important but it is only through feelings of anxiety that we are able to realise when change is vital. I am incredibly fortunate to be in such a good situation at the moment. Where I’m focused completely on rehabilitation and getting back on my feet because my wonderful wife has taken the anxiety out of my life and I must shower her with thanks for assuming that burden and allowing me the freedom of mind to revel in its own positivity.
But I must be ready to step out of my comfortable cocoon once I do manage to start walking around in the house and it’s important to stay grounded and aware of the world that has continued on apace in my absence. Life can be a cruel teacher, if I don’t learn from my past I am destined to repeat previous mistakes. When trauma strikes, it is logical to positively think our way through it, but fear, sadness and worry are equally important emotions too. Just as you can over-eat at the table of positivity, so can you over-indulge in negative thought? Too much positive thinking hampers the ability to respond to the unforeseen and work our way out of difficulties without repeating the same situation again and again. At the same time, negativity leaves people powerless, victims of circumstance unable to make the changes needed.
With a mind already hard-wired towards anxiety and negative thoughts, balance can only be achieved by introducing controlled positivity to enable the creation of the appropriate mind-set needed to respond adequately to unforeseen situations and create your own desired outcomes into the future. Self-perception is our own internal guidance system that helps us keep tabs on our own personal balance; through awareness from things we’ve been exposed to, deletion to filter out whatever is determined to be worth ignoring and distortion which is the filter you use when looking at reality. With decisions and deletions made always influencing your awareness of reality. To change your circumstances or make changes in your life, you must modify your awareness through conscious choice. The internal resolution that is ongoing inside all of us, to allow ourselves to move forward according to our hard-wiring or to debunk it is more than anything else an opportunity for Personal Growth. My injuries were a wake-up call, a seemingly impossible situation that challenged me to do something and in doing so alter my sense of perception.
For me change required positive thinking and a hefty dose of reality, change is inevitable just as doing produces an action and a reaction and inaction results in atrophy and decay. There is always balance, you can’t have black without white and without darkness, and there is no light. Positive and negative are connected, it is only the way that we perceive them that is disjointed. Positive thought is important but without anxiety and discomfort, we can never realize what needs to be changed. Only when it becomes more difficult to suffer than to change, most of us will choose to think logically and pursue change but we must allow ourselves to feel fear, anger, sadness, worry, they are important emotions. Understanding all this drove my decision making and enabled me to create balance so I could respond to the situation I had found myself in, to move forward towards creating the desired outcome in the future. Maybe, I’m half shark and would die if I ever stopped moving because instinctively I felt deep inside that doing nothing at all was never an option.
Having left Rehabilitation Hospital and all the good that had been achieved there I made the conscious decision to draw a line under that phase of my journey to allow for a natural reset and begin anew with the immense challenge of learning to walk with renewed vigour and I haven’t looked back since. Now my positive mind is driving me forward towards happiness, health and a satisfying end to what might have easily turned into a sad story if I had ever allowed it to take a turn away back into the darkness.
I’ve been there before in the past and never want to return that deep, dark pit of loneliness and despair, nothing good can ever come from that kind of thinking and nothing ever absolutely and definitively has to be impossible. With my sense of humour intact, self-assuredness and consummate faith in myself and everyone around me I am going to get over this unfortunate situation and above all else, that will get me through to the very end of this monumental journey.