Resiliency
Resiliency is an amazing thing–one’s ability to bounce back from an event that had a traumatizing effect on them. The power to overcome an incident meant to break us and instead grow from it. The capability to rise above what would shatter others.
A friend of mine, Tristan, was in a car accident 6 weeks ago. He is only 19 years old. Tristan was hit by a drunk driver on the wrong side of the highway–both drivers were going 70 miles per an hour. He was med-flighted to the closest hospital where his parents were told they should hurry to see him–they were preparing his organs for donation. The accident broke his nose, cheek and jaw bones, along with his ribs, sacrum, pelvis and femur. He lost teeth and shattered an eye socket. His family was told to prepare for the worst.
Six weeks later and Tristan is not only alive, but he is thriving. He has been released from the hospital and is home, walking on crutches. His jaw has been unwired shut and he is already able to eat food that doesn’t come from a syringe. The doctors say that he is nothing short of a miracle. The first responders say they have never seen anyone survive an accident as horrific as his. No one can believe the tremendous progress that he has made in just over a month.
Everyone’s questions is HOW? How can he be making such strides given everything that has been thrown at him? The answer is resilience.
“I have a positive attitude, a positive outlook on life. And I never blamed the other guy or questioned why this all had to happen. Instead I concentrated on getting to my next achievement,” Tristan told me when I asked him what gave him his motivation to push to get better. First he wanted to stand. Then he wanted to walk with a walker. Then he wanted to walk with crutches. Then he wanted to be taken off the feeding tube. Then he wanted to go home. His drive is amazing and he has had thousands of people cheering him on as he has met every one of these goals.
Through this whole ordeal, I have never seen Tristan without a smile on his face. He could still be laying in a hospital asking “Why me?” But instead of focussing on all the bad that has happened to him, all he can talk about is the good that will be happening and the positive things that have come from his trauma. At one point he even said to me, “I’m glad it was me and not someone else. I know a few of the girls from my school passed him on the way up the highway. I’m just glad it wasn’t them he hit instead.”
Focussing on the future and not the past is what has made Tristan so resilient. He has a drive to be the best that he can possibly be and he knows that in order to do that, there is no room for dwelling or pointing fingers. “It came from everything I grew up knowing and believing in,” Tristan said with a smile on his face. A real life example of the power of resilience.