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I was at my peak physical shape, and having run since I was 14, I decided to try and up my weekly mileage from 35 miles to 50.
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I was a vegan at the time, and had been following a marathon training guide of a vegan ultra-marathon runner. After I recovered from my concussion, I had begun training again, and decided I wanted to attempt to run the Chicago Marathon in 2018. I dealt with the aftermath for almost half of that year. Then later on in my gap time, I was riding my bike from Chipotle where I worked at the time to IUSB to go to my classes for the night, and I fell off of my bike head-first into a ditch and got a concussion. I did my best to go to work everyday and explore my interests, but the pain drove me crazy. This is a chronic inflammation of the bladder and to put into perspective how this condition feels, imagine if a little troll was in your body and set fire to your bladder on a daily basis for 10 months, and then punched it repeatedly until the next day when he set it on fire again. Within the first month of my two and a half year gap time, I was diagnosed with a type of painful bladder syndrome known as Interstitial Cystitis. I had no idea that from the very beginning, physical pain would be at the center of the first goal. I had two broad goals when I started my gap time: learn more about myself and say yes to adventure. While I had the most incredible experiences of my life, it was those unexpected moments of adversity that allowed me to reorient my goals and not just return to normal, but transform into a better version of myself. But what is a gap year all about? It’s about adventure and giving yourself a moment to breath and figure out who you are and where you fit in this world. I realized when trying to give advice on this, that I have not properly reflected on the fact that while my gap time gave me the best three years of my life, it also gave me the most challenging three years. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.” This is what I want to talk about. My favorite perspective on resilience is by Elizabeth Edwards and it’s, “resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You don’t have a choice in what changes, but you do have a choice in how that changes you. The most important thing I learned on my gap time was that change is the only constant thing in life, and the key to absorbing change is understanding that life is only 10% what happens to you, and 90% your attitude towards what happened. I thought this would be easy for me, because my life has been defined by situations I had no control over and the more situations I go through, the easier it is for me to take a few breaths and say, “okay how do I make this better?” I think this is a key question because resilience can also be seen as being able to return to normal in the face of a crisis but I think returning to normal is not the point. But what is resilience really? How do we measure it and how do we achieve it? These are questions that I attempted to answer as I was trying to support gap year students who had to end their experiences earlier than expected.
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Every politician I listen to, every optimistic voice on a podcast, and even me in countless emails have proclaimed that in a few months time, we as a nation will come out of this new normal with a resilience we have never had before. The Intro: For the last couple of months, I’m sure you’ve heard the new buzz word sweeping the nation and no, I am not talking about the C-word.