I'm a HOPEtimist

Today is the six-month anniversary of my accident. This post is about what I think it means to be inspirational. I started to write this a few months ago, but I had trouble capturing my thoughts on the subject. Linda was right when she told me my recovery journey represented hope, but I just couldn’t figure out how to express my objection to being called “inspirational.” Well, it just so happens that today, I came across an article in The Atlantic that helped my thoughts fall into place: “The Difference Between Hope and Optimism,” by Arthur C. Brooks, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/09/hope-optimism-happiness/620164/?utm_source=pocket-newtab.

The other day, some friends told me they think I’m inspirational. I have a hard time with that. I look at my recovery, which is categorized as a top 5% recovery for spinal cord injury, but I personally can’t take credit for most of that. I was fortunate that my injury wasn’t worse, that I had a surgical team that decided against surgery when many others would have performed surgery, and that my feeling and sensation started coming back quickly. I can’t take credit for being a fast healer. As my neurosurgeon said to me when I was still in the ICU, “You are very lucky. I mean, for being so unlucky, you are very lucky!”

My friends tell me my recovery has been inspiring because they have watched me work hard and maintain a positive attitude. As far as working hard—I’ve just done what my therapists have forced me to do. I’d love to take credit for being a fantastic self-starter who did lots of extra work, but I simply did what was necessary to the best of my capability. Perhaps I have inspired someone to remain in shape, because my fitness level at the time of the injury certainly had a lot to do with my recovery. Okay, Lee showed me how important it is to be in shape, so I need to work out more—but to me that seems like a New Year’s resolution. It will inspire for a while, but it will fade unless there’s truly something behind it. The inspiration for staying healthy and in shape should come from the people you love, because you want to be with them and capable of living life fully with them for years to come.

What I’ve discovered is that what we are really talking about, and the source of my positive attitude, is hope. Hope is more than an optimistic attitude—expecting things to always turn out better, regardless of the reality of the situation—it is something more active. The article in The Atlantic states it this way: “optimism is the belief that things will turn out all right; hope makes no such assumption but is a conviction that one can act to make things better in some way.” The article prescribes specific steps for increasing hope:

1. Imagine a better future, and detail what makes it so.

2. Envision yourself taking action.

3. Act.

From the first day after my accident, I imagined a better future in which I was fully recovered. I told my nurses about future woodworking projects and began planning with my daughters to ride our bikes the length of the Natchez Trace. And I did what my physical and occupational therapists told me to do, in the belief that doing so would create the full recovery that I envisioned. So many things happened along my recovery journey that people might call coincidental but which happened, either directly or indirectly, because I never lost hope. For instance, discovering that I was eligible for VA benefits. That came from my psychologist friend at SAI spending time in my room just chatting with me after his “official duties” were done. It seems coincidental, but I don’t think it would have happened if I hadn’t been truly grateful for his time and had the kind of attitude (hope) that made him want to stay with me and chat. That kind of thing happened multiple times in my journey. I think it’s because I could imagine a better future and act on that vision with gratitude towards those working with me to help me attain it.

I don’t know that I’m inspiring in the ways that people mean when they tell me I am, but I do think my recovery journey can be a source of hope for me and for others. People can look at my progress and realize it’s possible to fully recover from what many would call a hopeless situation. If you want to say I’m inspiring, then I should inspire you to focus on the actions that create hope. It’s all there in the last word of my blog title: I Can’t—YET!

Pictured four days, one month, two months, three months, five months, and six months after my accident: