Why I’m so grateful for my f*cking tragic life, and how it’s helping people like you
Let’s not beat about the bush here, everybody’s had a tough life. It was tough growing up, school bullying, your lover cheated on you, you lost your job, the economy sucks, the dog ate your kids homework… whatever. We can all claim hardship from life.
For those of you who are new to my blog or do not know me, I was in a car crash when I was five. I wasn’t expected to live from that, my two-year-old sister died, and my mum broke her neck in the same crash. I was paralysed and sustained a traumatic brain injury. Last year I had brain surgery to remove a tumour the size of a tennis ball, which meant I had to withdraw from running the London Marathon.
As tragic as life has been, through 32 years of putting the broken pieces of my world back together, I’ve experienced and done some epic things that I probably wouldn’t have done had it not been for the tragedies. You’ve probably heard the aphorism: “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”? Well, I’ll drink to that one.
It is through life’s experiences that we learn and grow. A child learns not to touch the stove top when the ring is red because it burns, for example. If we don’t know what it feels like to be sad, it is hard to appreciate what it feels like to be happy.
Through all these extraordinary experiences I have learnt things that cannot be gained from sitting in a lecture hall, or reading a book. Nothing has ever been easy for me, and sometimes I get angry that things have been easier for other’s who have not had the hardships I've had. Underneath all that though, I have probably gained more knowledge and wisdom from being catapulted down the road of hard knocks, than someone who has strolled merrily along comfort avenue.
It’s only natural to feel a tad bit envious of someone who gets what you want easier than you. If everything was handed to you on a plate, life would be boring after a while. A diamond is formed under the Earth’s pressure. A strong person is created through Life’s pressure, which commonly gets called stress.
I wrote my second book about stress, namely post-traumatic stress, aka PTSD. Lots of people have said how that book has helped them, or how they bought it to help someone else cope with PTSD, but it related to them too. Everyone has stress in their life, in fact, some stress is good for you.
Without my life going the way it has, I never would have written, How To Heal From Trauma And PTSD: Your Ultimate Guide To Becoming The Person You Want To Be, a book that arouse through my own dealings of struggle, which is now helping people. I’ve had to learn many strategies to manage what life has thrown at me – the best way to play the hand life has dealt me. If you want to learn to play your poker hand better, how do you do that; by playing the game and learning through experience. If you don’t play the game, you’ll never learn how to win.
The whole point is that I want you to appreciate the hard times just as much as the good times. People spend a lot of time wallowing in self-pity, or complaining that life is not the way it should be. If people asked themselves, “What can I learn from this?” and then spend energy on that, we’d all benefit.
A guy asked me the other day, “Why do you go to the gym so much, and keep so fit? I hate going to the gym, but I need to.” My reply was that since the age of five I’ve always gone to physio therapy to learn to walk and move again, the gym is a progression of that, and it’s what I’ve always done. He responded by saying, “So life has done that to you?” And I replied, “Yes.”
Every downside has an upside, if you know how to work it. You just have to look, and love the hand you were dealt.
