The point is, how you perceive your circumstances goes a long way toward determining whether they’ll be a handicap or an advantage. Many people see a wheelchair as a limitation, but if you change your way of thinking, you can transform it into a more efficient mode of personal transportation than what you had before. Do it right and other people should envy you: “Hey, how come that guy gets to speed through here on wheels? Why can’t I be in a wheelchair . . . ?”
Learning to live without boxes is about more than turning setbacks into opportunities. It’s also about not letting other people take away your possibilities.
After I came home from Iraq, I learned not to listen to doctors when they told me all the things that I would never be able to do again. Can’t is not in my vocabulary. I can try. If it doesn’t work out, then it doesn’t work out, but I can always try.
Don’t listen to other people who want to tell you what your limits are. There’s nothing stopping you in life except your own mind. When my doctors said to me, “We don’t think you’ll be able to do this,” or “We don’t think you should try to do that,” it only made me want to do those things more. Being told that I can’t do something just makes me want to push myself even harder. Maybe that’s why doctors say it. Perhaps it’s some kind of reverse psychology to goad patients into making the effort. Or not. I don’t know. But when a doctor sees a patient who has been in a car wreck and suffered a spinal-cord injury, and they tell that person, “You’ll never walk again,” I don’t think that’s right. If they said that to me, I’d shoot back, “Screw you. Who are you to say that I’m never gonna walk again?” That’s not their call to make, it’s mine.
I’m not saying that positive thinking is going to repair a real spinal-cord injury. An optimistic outlook isn’t magic. It won’t raise the dead or bring back things that have been destroyed. Scars, whether physical or emotional, don’t go away overnight. Sitting in your recliner and visualizing yourself winning a million dollars won’t make it happen—believe me, I speak from experience. Long, bitterly disappointing experience.
What I’m talking about is taking charge of your own mind. Everything else depends on that first step. Changing your point of view is what makes it possible to see options that you might have missed. It’s an essential part of building your self-confidence so that you can be the one who tells other people who you are and what you can do.
No matter what you do, people will still try to fit you into boxes. It might seem as if the easiest thing to do is to let it happen; after all, it doesn’t matter as long as you know the box is an illusion, right? Wrong. If you don’t stand up for yourself and refuse to be boxed, how will other people know the way you feel? Part of being free of the box is not letting others put you back inside one. Show others what it means to not be a number or a label but a free human being.
One thing to look out for is when well-meaning people—be they family, friends, colleagues, or strangers—try to disguise the box as a pedestal. It might feel like you’re being propped up and lavished with praise, fame, and glory, but this is when you need to be on your guard: you’re just being fitted for a different, prettier kind of box.
Sometimes, both happen at the same time.
After I came home from Iraq, different groups and individuals wanted to hold me up as a symbol for whatever agenda they were pushing. Some wanted to paint me as a hero, and others wanted the world to see me as a victim. What they all were missing is that I just wanted to be seen as myself—as Bryan Anderson, a fun-loving guy from Illinois.
As far as my experience in Iraq is concerned, I don’t see what happened to me on my last afternoon in Baghdad as a tragedy. You might see it that way, but I don’t, and that difference matters. Calling it a tragedy makes me a victim. A victim has no control. Victims are treated like spectators to their own lives. Describing my combat experience as tragic and shoving me into a box labeled “victim” diminishes me, and it robs my military service of its honor and dignity. I served by choice, and I don’t regret any of my experiences, not even the one that cost me three limbs. I’m a soldier, and I was proud to serve and make my sacrifice. I will never let someone slap a label on me and take all that away. To me, that day was just another life experience. I’ve learned from it, gained great new opportunities from it, embraced it, and made it part of who I am.
On the flip side, though, some people have told me that I’m a hero. I don’t know about that. I was just a guy driving a Humvee that got blown up. My wounds were extreme, but my story is far too common. There are literally thousands of other veterans who were wounded as I was, and more getting hit every day as I write this. If I’m a hero, so are they . . . and I’m okay with that, I guess. But I think a lot of them would tell you the same thing I’m about to: We’re just soldiers, and this is our job. We won’t ask for your pity, but we deserve your respect.
The bottom line here is that I don’t have to accept a label, either positive or negative, just because it would make it easier for someone else to define me. I don’t have to see myself that way. I am who I choose to be.
When people talk about me, I don’t want them to say, “Bryan Anderson? Oh, yeah, he’s that guy who got fucked up in the war.” I don’t want people to think of me in terms of what happened to me: I want them to notice how I live and what I do. I am more than a wounded veteran. I’m an athlete: a snowboarder, a quad driver, and a skateboarder. I’m a national spokesperson for Quantum Rehab. I’m an actor and activist. I’m a man.
One moment will not define me or my life. I am what I do.
This is your chance to make the same declaration. What boxes have you been living in? Are you defining yourself by a job you hate, a relationship that has run its course, or something that happened to you against your will? Look at yourself in the mirror and set yourself free. Say to your reflection, “I am not my dumb job. I am not my shitty relationship. I am not a victim.”
You need to believe what you’re saying. Get angry about it if that’s what it takes. All our lives people punish us for getting angry. Our parents and teachers and bosses tell us to calm down. Friends and strangers get nervous when we show strong emotions. Screw them. When we’ve been wronged, mistreated, lied to, or taken advantage of, getting mad is exactly the right reaction. There’s no shame in it. On the road to self-change, a deep reserve of righteous anger can be a gift. Use it if that’s what it takes to free yourself from a prison made of labels.
Once you figure out what you’re not, you need to be ready to answer bigger questions: Who are you? How do you define yourself? What do you want people to notice about you? It’s easy to tell yourself, I am not a victim, but if you keep referring to yourself that way when you talk to other people, you’re putting yourself back in the box. You can’t define yourself only by denying what others might think, or what even you might have felt in the past. You have to picture yourself in a positive way, not a negative way. Being free of the box is just the beginning of living a free life. The hard part is defining yourself through your actions and your attitude. Becoming the person you wish to be takes a lot of work and a lot of time. You’ll have setbacks; there will be days when you’ll feel like you’re once again buried under boxes.
Break free, again and again, as many times as it takes. Don’t settle for second best.
Find something you love and give it your all. Create something you can be proud of. Do something that makes the world a better place, or helps another person, or rights a wrong. Transform yourself from someone to whom things happen into a person who makes things happen. Step out of the shadows and take center stage in your own life.
Enriching your life with new experiences is the best way I know to help discover what really matters to you. Part of what helped me realize anything is possible is traveling, seeing new places, and meeting new people. It’s amazing to me that no matter how many new places I visit, the people I’ve met always have a lot in common with one another. Even though it’s a big world, in the ways that really matter
, it’s actually kind of small.
Some people are perfectly happy never seeing more than their own hometown. They have all they want right there, so they feel no need to travel.
Not me. Once I got a taste of the world, I knew I wanted more. I found out that I like learning about architecture, and I enjoy looking at art. I marvel at how much humanity has accomplished—in engineering, communications, and so much else—in such a short time. I’ve also confirmed through extensive firsthand research that I don’t like fish, not even the really expensive kinds, such as shrimp, lobster, or crab legs. I found out I’m also no fan of fishing. If I want to sit on a boat and drink beer, I’ll go on a Caribbean cruise.
If I had listened to people who told me I was a handicapped victim who couldn’t do this or that, I might never have left home. I’d still be in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, locked in a stupid little box, living down to someone else’s pessimistic labels.
Screw that. I want to go everywhere, try everything, meet everyone, and see it all. I might not make it, but I’m on my way.
You can start your own journey right now. All it takes is a single instant of clarity, one moment when you can see past the labels and the lies and discover the truth for yourself:
There is no box.
Honestly, the way you think about yourself and your circumstances is everything. If you can change your way of thinking, you can change your life. You can change the world.
8
HOW WE SURVIVE
What is the first thing that you think of when you hear the word survive? When something awful happens to us, what does it really mean to survive the experience? To me, surviving means a whole lot more than simply not dying.
Emerging with a pulse on the other side of a shit storm is commendable, but if that’s all you’ve got, it’s not enough. That’s just enduring punishment and continuing to exist. In my opinion, to really survive means accepting what has happened, picking yourself up, and going forward with the rest of your life, in whatever form it takes. The key word here is life. Existing is just taking up space and converting oxygen into carbon dioxide. Living is about growing and changing. Be honest with yourself: do you understand the difference?
I have to admit, before I got blown up in Iraq, I didn’t really see much of a distinction. Before that day in Baghdad, I saw things in black or white—you were either dead or alive. It wasn’t until I got hit by an IED and ended up in rehab that I learned that there are shades of gray in everything, including life and death.
It can be hard to tell what’ll happen to someone who suffers the kind of injuries I had. That kind of trauma can lead to infections; it can kill you in lots of different ways even after you get to the hospital. If you live through it, it can still end your life as you knew it. It can just blast away the hopes and dreams you had before it happened, and leave you with nothing.
I think that’s what my family was most afraid of—that even after I recovered, I wouldn’t be me anymore. That I’d be changed. Well, I was. Fortunately, I had been changed for the better.
One thing I had gained from my experience was a new sense of patience. I rolled out of the Walter Reed rehab clinic one afternoon, exhausted after a long, hard day of therapy. Sticking to my routine, I stopped outside the Malone House, where my mom and I shared a room, and I lit up a cigarette.
My mom joined me and asked, “How did therapy go?”
“It was shit,” I said.
“Well, you need to remember that in time, this is all just gonna be a memory.”
Hearing this immediately made everything better, because I knew she was right.
“Just keep pushing yourself,” she said. “Do what you do, and it’s going to be all right. You’re going to get home in no time, and then you’ll do whatever you want.”
On bad days or on good days, my mom’s message was always the same: “We’re not gonna be here forever.”
That was what I needed to hear, and she knew it. When I was deep in the grind of rehab, all I really wanted to do was go home. Mom’s job was to remind me that the only road home ran through the rehab clinic. I started telling myself that Walter Reed was not the end of the line for me—it was just another stop on my way to freedom.
Remember the girl I told you about earlier in the book, the one who threatened to tear off her prosthetic legs if she fell? She was a bilateral who’d had two amputations, both below the knee. In other words, she still had both of her real knees, completely functional. She didn’t seem to appreciate this at the time, but the fact that her knees were intact was a major advantage. The only thing that she really needed to get the hang of was balancing on her new limbs. Motion wasn’t going to be a total grind for her the way it is for people who have lost one or both knees, as I did. But all she could focus on was the frustration of falling down.
She always had people do things for her that I think she should have done for herself. “Can you hand me my phone? . . . Can you get me a glass of water? . . . Can you push my chair?” As I said earlier, when she threatened to rip off her prosthetics if she fell again, it just pissed me off. I couldn’t understand why someone with such a clear path to recovery would choose to give up. To me, her reaction seemed like a perfect example of the wrong way to tackle a problem. Her approach was a good way to grind to a halt and sink deeper down a hole. I wasn’t gonna have that for myself. I knew my way would be more work, but since when did people start thinking of that as a bad thing?
The truth is, getting through rehab isn’t easy for anybody. Before I started therapy, I was in a lot of pain. My arm hurt, my legs hurt, my stomach hurt. My whole body hurt. My doctors and therapists kept telling me, “You should get out of bed and into a wheelchair.”
At the time I was in no mood to do the work that had to be done to get well. I was like “Guys, I just got blown up. Can’t you just let me lie here awhile till I heal?” I didn’t want to do anything. I just wanted to be left alone so I could rest. That’s what I told myself, anyway. I think what was really happening was that I was in danger of just shutting down. If they had let me do that, I might have gotten used to being nothing more than a bump in a bed. If people had made daily life too easy for me, I might not have tried as hard to get my own life back.
Honestly, I didn’t really get motivated until I saw my first set of prosthetics—and even then I had serious doubts. At that time I was the only bilateral, above-the-knee amputee in Walter Reed, so I didn’t see anyone else with injuries like mine. Consequently, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to handle the rehab regimen. The soldiers I saw were having enough trouble getting the hang of using one prosthetic limb, and I was looking at two C-legs and an arm. It was a lot to get my head around.
I couldn’t help but wonder, What happens if I’m not able to do this? I knew I didn’t want to be in a wheelchair the rest of my life. That was a lot of pressure at a time when I was already feeling really vulnerable. It didn’t take long for all that anxiety piled on top of my pain and exhaustion to get me seriously down.
Luckily for me, my therapists made me get out of bed and do the work even when I didn’t want to. I had good days and bad days; keeping myself on track was a struggle at first. During my stay at Walter Reed, I began suffering panic attacks. My heart would race, and I’d feel my pulse thudding in my head. At times I felt as if I was going to explode. Eventually I got so exhausted that I started to sink into a depression, and that’s an emotional black hole that’s really hard to get out of, even when you’re surrounded by professionals who are trained to help you and by family members who throw you as many lifelines as it takes to pull you back into the light.
For some reason, as miserable as that experience was, it really helped put things into perspective for me. I realized that everybody gets hurt. We all have our problems. What makes us who we are is how we survive after bad things mess us up. It’s what we do afterward that makes us who we are. So, when I finally started to pull myself together, I decided that I was going to live my life the way I
wanted to. I was going to be free and enjoy every day and every experience as much as possible, and I was going to learn all that I could about anything and everything. I felt as if I finally had started to see how big life is, and I wanted savor it all.
In order to really survive and continue our lives, we need to have that kind of long-term, big-picture view. Look past the current moment, no matter how awful it is, and know that it won’t last. It will end, and after it does, you will be somewhere better, and the worst part of the experience will be behind you. Then you can tackle the next challenge.
For me, the next hurdle to reclaiming my life was learning how to get other people to see me as a person and not as a statistic or a stereotype. I didn’t want people to define me by my injuries. Yes, that experience is a part of me, but it’s not what I want people to remember about me. I’d prefer they know me by my accomplishments, my actions, and my words. I want everyone to know me for what I do, because that’s what defines how I survive and who I am.
Unfortunately, some people, even after they finish the rehab process, never really get on with their lives. They just sit at home and channel surf, watch movies, and play video games—and that’s all they ever do. Life becomes about what happens to them, not what they’re doing. They dwell on that one moment when they got hurt, on whatever event changed their life, and then they act as if it’s not worth even trying to do anything else.
“I can’t,” they say. “I can’t do what I want to do the way I used to do it, the way I want to do it.” They give in to that poisonous idea: I can’t. I hate that phrase. It makes me sad and angry to think of how many lives have been wasted because of that stupid, self-defeating expression.
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