The Opportunity of Adversity

Written by Jason Shields (Adapted from Aimee Mullins' Talk on TED)

I made a recent discovery a few months ago when I was working on my autobiography. I love technology and being able to have a dictionary and a thesaurus at the click of my fingers. I’ve always used them in the past whenever I wrote anything. I came to the startling realization that I have never looked up the word “disabled”. In all of my writings throughout the years I never thought to actually look up the word. It was just a part of my vocabulary, that and the term “physically challenged.”

Allow me to repost the entry:  "Disabled," adjective: "crippled, helpless, useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, rundown, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile, decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see also hurt, useless and weak. Antonyms, healthy, strong, capable." These “adjectives” were so ridiculous that as I read them, I started to laugh hysterically, until I got to the words, “mangled, lame, mutilated” and I choked up. A wave of sadness and emotional shock went through me. These words unleashed such a catastrophic impact on me emotionally and I felt assaulted mentally.

However, it is not just about the words. It is what we believe about people when we label them with these words. It is about the values and beliefs behind the words and how we construct these values and beliefs. Our language reflects and affects our thinking and how we view other people. Many ancient societies such as the Mayans and the Romans believed that to vocally utter a curse was so powerful, so magical, because to voice the curse out loud would literally bring it into existence. So, what reality do we want to call into our existence: a person who is limited and weak, or a person who is empowered and strong?  By simply “naming” or “labeling” a person as casually as we do today, we are placing that person, that child, that individual, into a box and sealing off their power. In fact, we do it to ourselves every day! Would we not want to shine the light on them and open doors to endless possibilities instead?

One person in my life who had a profound impact on me was my late uncle Ernest. We called him Ernie. He was confined to a wheelchair since birth, paralyzed from the waist down. In spite of his physical condition, I never saw him as “disabled” or “maimed”. He was just Uncle Ernie to us children. Ernie had a high position in the Public Works office of the city where he supervised hundreds of employees. He lived in a time where there were no Americans with Disabilities Act and the majority of buildings did not have wheelchair accessible ramps. Everyday though, he climbed the steps up to his office and performed his duties. The family suffered a severe blow when Ernie died of cancer when I was around 12 years of age. In the years I did know him, not once did he discuss my “physical challenge” related to cerebral palsy. He simply treated me the same as the rest of the children.

This is an example of how an adult in a position of power or authority figure can ignite the spark of power in a child. However, when you think of the previous examples of the thesaurus entries, you quickly come to the conclusion that our present use of language does not allow us to evolve into the reality that we all would like, the reality where an individual can see himself/herself as capable of accomplishing anything. Our language has not caught up with the present demands and changes of our society. We have discovered beautiful technological advancements, from artificial limbs and laser surgery for vision improvement. He have replacements for aging bodies that allow people to fully engage in life again and even move beyond the limits which nature has imposed upon them. We now have a multitude of social networking platforms which allow people to express their own unique identity, to describe themselves in their own unique way. They can choose which groups they can belong to. So, technology has revealed that everyone, every single individual has something rare and powerful and beautiful to contribute to the world. Most importantly, the ability of the human being to adapt is one of our greatest assets.

The human ability to adapt is an amazing thing! People have continually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, but I must make a distinction here. I have never been comfortable with the phrase “overcoming adversity; I have always felt uneasy attempting to answer people’s questions about it. The reason to me is clear now: in the phrase “overcoming adversity” is an implicit meaning that success or happiness is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed or barely scratched. It is as if my successes in life have come from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumed pitfalls of a life with cerebral palsy, or what other people perceive as my disability. However, we are changed, we are scathed or marked by a challenge whether it is a physical mark or mental/emotional one.

Today, I am going to make a suggestion: I believe adversity is a good thing to experience. Adversity is not an obstacle course that we learn to navigate through or “get around” in order to resume our life. It is an integral part of life. I tend to think of adversity as my shadow. Even though there are times when I see a lot of it, or during times when it’s very small or even barely noticeable, it is still there. It’s always with me. Of course, I am in no means trying to diminish the impact and the tremendous weight of a individual’s struggle.

There is adversity and challenges in life; it is all very real and relative to every individual, but the issue is not whether or not you are going to meet adversity, but how you are going to meet it. So, your responsibility is not to simply shield those you care about from adversity; but preparing them to meet is with strength and belief that they can persevere. We do such a disservice to our children when we make them feel that they are not equipped to adapt. There is an important distinction between the objective medical fact of my having cerebral palsy and the subjective, societal opinion of whether or not I am disabled. To be honest, the only real and consistent disability that I have had to confront is the world ever thinking that I could be labeled by their definitions.

In our desire to protect those we care so much about; when we give them the cold, hard truth about their medical prognosis, or a prognosis on the expected quality of their life, we have to make sure that we are not putting the first brick in a wall that will eventually incase that individual and actually disable him/her.  We must abandon the current model of only looking at what is broken and how to fix it; this only serves to be more disabling to the individual than the medical pathology itself.

By refusing to treat the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging their potency, their possibilities, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle they might have. In effect, we are grading a person’s worth by our community. We need to see through the pathology itself and into the range of human capability and adaptability. Most importantly, there is a relationship between those perceived “deficiencies” and our greatest creative ability. It is not about devaluing or negating or looking at adversity as something bad or something to avoid; something that must be swept under the rug. No. instead, it is to find those opportunities that are wrapped up inside of the adversity.

My point is not so much as overcoming adversity; as it is opening ourselves, our inner souls up to it, embracing it, grappling with it and yes, even dancing with it. If we learn to see adversity as natural, consistent and useful, we will be less burdened by the presence of it.

There is a fundamental truth regarding human character: it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent, it is the one that is most adaptable to change. I believe that conflict is the beginning of creation. The human ability to survive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit through conflict and transformation. Transformation and adaptation is our greatest human skill. Until we are tested, we do not know what we truly are made of. Maybe that is what adversity gives us, a sense of self, a sense of our own true power. We can be receptive to adversity as a gift. We can reimagine adversity as something more than just “tough times”. We can view it as change. Adversity is simply change that we haven’t adapted ourselves to yet.

I believe that the greatest adversity that we have created is the idea of “normalcy.” Who on earth is “normal?” Normal does not exist. There is common. There is typical, but there is no normal. Would you honestly want to meet or be that boring, drab person if they did exist? I think not! If we can change this belief system from one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility and potency, to dare to be a little bit more dangerous and adventurous, we can release and fully engage our own personal power. We can unleash the atomic power that is within so many of our beautiful children who look up to us, and invite them to never fear engaging in their rare and valuable abilities with the community.

Anthropology tells us that human beings have always needed one requirement from its respective family and community: the need to be of use, to be able to contribute. There is evidence that 60,000 years ago, the Neanderthals carried those with serious physical injuries and their elderly. Why? Perhaps they believed and respected the life experience of these people were of value to their own community; they did not view these people as broken or useless, they were seen as rare gems, valuable.

Many of my friends and people I see as “family” have made this shift in thinking. They understand that there is a huge difference between the medical condition and what a person will do with it. There has been a shift in my thinking over the years. If you would have asked me at the age of 18, if I would trade the body I had for a stronger one, a “robust” and “normal” one, I would not have hesitated for a split second. I had aspired to that kind of “normalcy” back then. If you asked me today, however, I would not be so sure. This change inside of me has occurred because I have been exposed to more people who have opened doors of possibility for me, rather than those who labeled me, placing me into their comfortable little boxes.

All you really need is just one person to show you the realization of your own power. You sometimes hold the key which unlocks another person’s power simply by your own words! The human spirit is very receptive and if you can be open to your own intuition, God will use you to open the door for someone at a crucial moment in their life. You are then educating them in the best sense. You are teaching them that they can open doors for themselves. The meaning of the word “educate” in Latin literally means “to draw out”.  It means to bring forth what is already within, to bring out the inherent potential of another person. Which potential do you want to bring out of yourself and others?

There was a psychological case study performed in the late 1960’s in Britain when researchers were observing students who were in the midst of moving from grammar schools to the more comprehensive schools. This is much like American students transitioning from middle school to high school. They call it “streaming trials” and we call it “tracking” in the United States. It is the process by which researchers separate students from A, B, C, D, etc. The A students receive a tougher curriculum along with the best teachers and so forth. Over a three month period, the researchers took D level students and game them A’s. They told them they were A students; they told them they were smart and very bright. At the very end of this three month trial, the students were performing at A levels.

The heat wrenching flip side of the study is that they took the A students and told them they were D’s, and that is exactly what happened at the end of the three month trial. Those who were still in school, that is, besides the students who had dropped out, performed at the D level. One crucial aspect of this study was that the teachers were duped as well. The teachers did not know that a switch had occurred. They were simply told: these are the A students and these are the D students. They acted accordingly with the labels. This is how they taught them and treated them.

I think that the only true disability that exists is a crushed spirit; a spirit that has been crushed does not have hope. It fails to see the beauty in life. It no longer has a natural, childlike curiosity or the innate ability to imagine. If instead, we seek to bolster the human spirit to keep hope, to see the beauty in itself and others, to be curious and imaginative, then we are using our power responsibly and well. When a spirit possesses those qualities, it is able to create new realities and new ways of being.

There is a poem by a fourteenth-century poet named Hafiz. The poem is called “The God Who Only Knows Four Words.” Every child has known God, not the God of names, not the God of don’ts, but the God who only knows four words and keep repeating them, saying, “Come Dance With Me!” Come dance with me.