No Turning Back

by Bryan Anderson

  Before you decide your problems are impossible to handle, ask yourself some questions, and try to be honest when you answer them:

  Have you really done everything you can? Tried every angle? Or did you give up when you started to realize the only options you had left were the ones that required real work? Most of the time if there’s more than one course of action open to you, there’s a simple way to tell which is the right one: it’s the one that will require you to make the greatest effort.

  If it’s a moral or ethical problem, the easy way out is almost always the wrong way, and the hard way is usually the correct choice. A good rule of thumb in such cases is that going back or around is cheating. The honest paths are forward and through.

  Did you ask anyone for help? No matter how many times you hear people tell stories about being “self-made” successes, remember this: no one in this world ever really does anything completely alone. Millionaires and billionaires build their fortunes on the backs of people who pave the roads, lay the train tracks, work on loading docks, run fiber-optic cables, manage the banks, and do thousands of other jobs that too many of us take for granted.

  There is no shame in asking for help. Our friends, families, and neighbors often are willing to pitch in, but too often we let pride get in our way. Don’t worry about looking weak or stupid. If you muster the courage to ask, I think you’ll find the world is full of people who really want to do the right thing and give one another a hand up during tough times.

  Sometimes, however, one can end up in a hard place with no one to turn to—no family, no friends, not even trusted coworkers or neighbors. When you have no cash or credit, it can seem like there are no options. Life can feel like little more than a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe this is the jam you’re in right now as you’re reading this. You feel as if you have no place to go, and you want to ask, “What tools do I have, Bryan?”

  You have yourself. You are your own most valuable resource.

  The best tool of all is courage. A lot of people mistake courage for fearlessness. They aren’t the same thing. If you never feel fear, then you’re an idiot. Fear is a very important tool: it’s a warning of danger. Courage is about mastering your fear, controlling it instead of letting it control you. Being brave is all about having the discipline to do the right thing despite your fear.

  Life can take everything from you except your will to keep on fighting, to keep on working to make your life better. The only way to lose that is to give it up, and that’s a choice. But even if you’ve lost the will to fight, you can get it back just as easily: it’s just a matter of deciding not to surrender—to not give up. You can choose to take back control of your life.

  So, no matter what life is throwing at you right now, this is my advice: Get up. Keep going. Find a way to do what you need to do. If you need help, ask for it.

  And whatever you do, don’t give up.

  4

  WE’VE ALL BEEN HURT

  Since recovering from the wounds I suffered in Iraq, I’ve realized that we all have our issues. Whether it’s missing legs, or a lousy job, or not knowing how to pay to send your kid to school, everybody has their own problems—but yours shouldn’t consume you or hinder you from moving forward with your life.

  It’s just a fact of life that bad things will happen to us. Sometimes they happen to a lot of us at once, like in a flood or an earthquake or a tornado. Other times they happen to a few of us, or to one of us, like losing a job, or wrecking a car, or having a house burn down. I’ve heard so many people in these situations say, “I’m fucked.”

  When I hear that, I say, “No, you’re not. You won’t realize this for a few weeks, or months, or maybe years, but in all reality this is gonna be the best thing that’s ever happened to you. Now c’mon, let’s go figure it out. Let’s work through it and get you goin’ again.”

  The ones who choose to get up and go forward, most of the time they find a better job. They build a better house. In my personal experience, every event that I’ve ever thought of as a tragedy has always worked out for the better. So you know what I tell people?

  “It’s gonna be all right. Have faith. You’ll figure it out. You’ll find a way. I promise.”

  Look, I know this might sound like a bunch of positive-talk bullshit, but I’m not just talking out of my ass. I’m not some guy who’s had a charmed life feeding you some line. I’d say I’ve seen my share of bad things. But I’ve accepted the bad stuff and just kept moving ahead.

  I know that no amount of positive thinking is going to protect you from all the bad things that life can throw at you. You could live in a germ-proof bubble inside a nuclear fallout shelter and you still wouldn’t be 100 percent safe—and even if you were, what kind of life would that be?

  What matters in life isn’t what happens to us but how we choose to react to it. We can mope and stew and complain about how unfair life is, or we can get up and keep going.

  To see this idea in action, watch a dog that has lost one of its legs. Having a leg amputated is a major trauma—believe me, I speak from experience—but does a three-legged dog lie down and sulk? No. Within a few days, almost any dog will get up and start teaching itself how to walk again. Dogs don’t need pep talks; they don’t sit around and feel sorry for themselves. Look into their eyes and you can see their secret: They get up because they want to. They fight to move on because it’s what comes naturally to them.

  We could all learn a lot from dogs.

  I believe the single most important factor in whether each of us is happy is how we choose to think about our lives. We make ourselves happy or miserable. Forget about what other people do or say; put aside the things that happen to you. You can’t control other people, and you can’t dictate terms to fate. The only thing that’s up to you is how you react to events.

  For instance, many people, when they first hear about my experience in Iraq, want to express sympathy. I tell them, “Don’t feel bad for me. Maybe you see what happened to me as a tragedy, but I don’t.” That surprises a lot of folks. Some of them don’t believe me, but it’s true. I think of the day I got blown up as just another day in my life; that event is just another thing that happened to me. I don’t see it as the beginning of my story as a person, or as the end. It’s just a middle chapter, and not even the most important one, in my opinion.

  It was a pretty painful part of my life, though. Some days I dealt with the pain fairly well, but sometimes I didn’t. For instance, before I got hit, I’d always enjoyed my dreams. They had always been really vivid and sometimes completely crazy. I used to wake up and tell my Army roommate, Crenshaw, about whatever dream I’d just had. He’d always shake his head, grin, and say, “You’re messed up, man. You should write these down. You could sell ’em.” I wish I had. I bet a few would have made great movies.

  After the accident, though, my dreams went bad on me. The first week after I woke up at Walter Reed, my dreams were positively surreal. In one, I felt as if I was sitting up in my bed instead of lying down, and that my legs extended down through the bed and touched the floor. Some nights, I dreamed I was still normal, with all my limbs, as if the bomb had never hit me. Over time, I began to change in my dreams. I started to see myself with prosthetic limbs, but I was still moving around as if I had regular limbs.

  It was strange to wake up in the mornings, look down, and not see anything at the end of the bed where my legs used to be. That took some getting used to.

  Soon it got to the point where I didn’t sleep well in the hospital. I was able to sleep only one or two hours per night. The doctors kept telling me, “You need more sleep. You need to rest so you can heal.” It didn’t matter what they said. I simply couldn’t stay asleep in that place. It might have been all the drugs they were giving me. Come to think of it, maybe the drugs were part of why I had such lousy dreams.

  Right after I got out of the ICU at Walter Reed, I stopped remembering my dreams completely. I wake up and don’t even remember dreaming.
I hardly ever recall my dreams these days, and I don’t think I’ve ever dreamed of myself being in a wheelchair. I know it might seem strange, but I think I miss my dreams as much as I miss my legs and my hand. They were part of me, and now I feel like they’re gone. Maybe I should think of it as a trade-off. I may not dream at night, but I’m living plenty of dreams during the day.

  One thing that has stayed with me, however, is pain.

  I get phantom pains and sensations all the time. There are pills that I take when that happens, but their side effects suck. Part of what makes my phantom pains hard to cope with is that they’re unpredictable. I might feel fine for a few days or even a week. Then, when I’m focused on something else—BAM! they’re back. Even after all these years, I still don’t know what triggers them, so I have no idea how to control them. All I can do is grit my teeth, take another fistful of pills, and tough it out.

  When I lie down at night in bed, that’s usually the worst time for me, because it’s so quiet. I have nothing else to think about except the tingling in my nonexistent legs. It starts out as pins and needles. At first it’s a distraction, but it quickly gets worse—a lot worse. Before long it feels like daggers and hot pokers jabbing me.

  That’s not even the worst kind of phantom pain that I get. There are some that last for only a few minutes, but they can be excruciating. Imagine a huge 250-pound man wearing cowboy boots stomping on your toes and grinding them into the pavement. That’s what it’s like. When those hit, all I can do is bang my leg up and down, hoping and praying that I can smack the nerve that’s misfiring and make it stop before I lose my fucking mind.

  The doctors told me they don’t know what causes these sensations, they have no idea how to make them stop, and that I might have to deal with them for the rest of my life.

  “Well,” I said after getting the news, “at least I’ll never get bored.”

  When the pain hits, all I can do is remind myself that it’s temporary. After it fades, I remind myself that surviving those kinds of moments makes me tougher. I like to think that it’s teaching me something—patience, maybe, or perhaps humility or empathy. But sometimes I snap, and I just want to scream at God, “Why are you making me go through this? Haven’t I suffered enough already? Don’t you think you’ve made your point yet?”

  Then I remember that the key to moving forward in life is learning to accept what we can’t change. If I could make my pain go away forever with a snap of my fingers, I would, but that’s not an option. Instead, I have to stop pretending that it will go away on its own; I need to stop wishing it away or waiting for it to go away and just find the strength to keep going even though I know the pain will come back sooner or later, no matter what I do. It’s not easy to do this. Sometimes it feels like giving up hope, but it isn’t—it’s simply accepting reality as it is and continuing my journey.

  I know it can be hard to lose the things we love, but too many of us measure our lives by the stuff we own—by the value of our houses, cars, clothes, gadgets, and bank accounts—or by the illusion of status that we get from our jobs.

  When your things get damaged or destroyed, or when your job is taken away, it can feel as if there’s a hole in your life. That feeling of emptiness can be frightening, but I’m telling you it’s an opportunity—a chance to replace a job or an object with something that really matters: a relationship, an experience, or an accomplishment. It’s a chance for you to grow as a person.

  Let’s say you’ve just been laid off from your job. Naturally, your first reactions will be negative. Maybe you’re angry because it seems so unfair, or you’re nervous because you don’t know how you’re going to pay your bills. It can also be humiliating; it feels like a badge of failure. You don’t want to admit it, not even to yourself, never mind deal with that stack of paperwork down at the unemployment office. All these feelings are natural, but it’s up to you to make sure they’re also short-lived, because you need to get on with your life.

  Adapting to life after losing a job won’t be easy. It’ll mean making changes. You need to find ways to spend less money—maybe just for a while or perhaps for a long time—and give up some luxuries you took for granted. This probably won’t be fun. And the longer you are out of work, the harder it will be. But you have to cut back where possible, keep looking for a new job, and weather this hardship the best you can.

  Tough times suck. I’m not gonna lie. But you can’t let them knock you down. Besides, what choice do you have? Like my mom told me when I woke up at Walter Reed, you have two choices: You can roll over and die or move forward. Which are you going to do?

  And when you talk about losing material things, it should be even less of an issue. A wrecked car is an expensive problem and an annoying inconvenience, but as long as no one is hurt because of it, it’s not the end of the world. The same goes for the loss of a house. A house is just a structure, just a place like any other—a home is wherever you feel safe; it’s where you can be with people you care about.

  The worst part of having a home destroyed—whether by fire, flood, tornado, earthquake, or some other disaster—is losing truly irreplaceable things. You can’t just go out and buy another old family photo album full of memories. You can never replace your kids’ drawings that hung on the refrigerator, or the handmade gifts that remind you of Christmases past. I know that, and I’m not saying not to mourn your losses. And I can’t imagine someone not being angry or depressed about that kind of loss at some point. It’s only natural to have emotional attachments to those things. But tragic as such losses are, they serve as important reminders to us that things don’t last, and neither do we. We’re all just passing through this world, and nothing is forever.

  I can already hear some of you thinking, But what about the death of a loved one, Bryan? How do you put a positive spin on that?

  My take on death is kind of funny. I’ve seen a lot of it.

  In combat, I’ve seen lethal shots miss people, go around people, kill good people, and leave bad people alone. It doesn’t matter who you are. You could get struck by lightning. There are a million ways you could die. Freak accidents. Routine accidents. It’s so random that I’ve come to believe that if it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.

  If we’re talking about a death due to old age, I would just tell someone who was grieving, “Hey, this is the way it was meant to be. It was their time. They’re in their better place now.” There are many possible ways of thinking about death and what it really means, or whether it means anything at all, but my point is that it’s not a bad thing. It’s part of nature. Everyone passes on. Sooner or later, we all need to move on from this life.

  It’s inevitable: everybody dies. And those left behind need to grieve.

  Everyone mourns in their own way. We all need time to process big moments like these. Do what you have to do to make your peace with it, but the important thing is to accept what has happened. You can’t undo the past; you have to live with it, to accept what you can’t change. If you don’t, you’re going to die—inside, by degrees, a little bit every day.

  There’s no point being afraid of death or dwelling on it or being angry at it when it takes someone we care about. The key to accepting this part of existence is to celebrate life. Don’t think about what you’ve lost when someone dies, but about what you gained from knowing the person. Remember the joy, the wisdom, and everything else good they brought to your life.

  Truth be told, being around death doesn’t really bother me anymore. I’ve experienced so much of it, and seen so much of other people dealing with it, and learned so much about myself in the process, that I understand now that I can’t change stuff like that.

  My own death, though, is a slightly different story. I admit I’m scared of it, if only because all I can think of when I imagine death is space—not stars, just blackness. Empty and going on forever. What weirds me out is when I try to imagine what “forever” really means. When you die, you’re forever dead, gone. And that f
rightens me, just a little.

  But...

  I can’t change that.

  When I think about this, I understand why we have religion: it offers us hope and gives us ideas we can understand to replace the ones that we can’t understand. Now, I don’t want to get into a whole thing on religion; there are some things I believe and some I don’t, and that’s my business. I do have a lot of questions, but I’m more interested in living my life than in worrying about my death. I’m not worried about whether there’s a God; I’m worried about such questions as Am I gonna have kids? Who am I gonna marry? What am I gonna do tomorrow? What’s for lunch?

  I don’t know why we’re here. To be honest, I don’t think anybody really knows that. Nobody knows what life means, or what happens after death, or anything. Anyone who tells you they know all the answers is lying, deluded, or trying to sell you something.

  One thing we do know is both bad and good things happen to us and the people around us. Seems a pretty simple idea to me that we should at least try to make things better for ourselves and others, to try to have more good than bad. But when the bad is piling on, it’s sometimes hard to think about the good stuff. One thing that makes it hard for us to recover after we’ve been hurt is that sometimes we don’t know how to let go of the pain. It becomes part of us, and before long, even though we hate it, we start to cling to it, even if just out of habit. So how do you break free of that?

  Sometimes the best way to heal is to continue to give your best even when you don’t feel like giving at all. It’s similar to the advice some people offer about making yourself smile when you feel depressed. Forcing yourself to put on a brave face can actually make you feel happier. Imagine how much better you might feel if you get up and do something, too.