What being disabled in my early 20s taught me about confidence

I have always been an athletic person.

Soccer games and pickup sports defined my childhood and teen years, spawning many lifelong friendships and sprouting within me an adolescent sense of achievement and belonging. When I entered college I switched to weightlifting and yoga, which filled much the same role.

In short, my physical abilities were a major foundational pillar of my self-confidence. It helped me define who I am, giving me an identity as “the athletic guy,” a clear role through which I could find meaning and confidence in myself.

That’s why at 22, when a surgery and subsequent botched healing process left me physically disabled for three years, my identity as “the athletic guy” came crashing down – and my confidence came along with it.

During those years, I struggled with depression for the first time, and for a long time. I’d like to share with you how I overcame my situation, recaptured my self-confidence and built a more resilient mindset for the future.

Prologue: The Surgery

At 22, I was as committed to weightlifting as I had ever been. My gym partner and I were going to our university weight room five or six days per week, every morning before class. Both naturally skinny guys, we were excited and motivated by our newfound muscles and strength.

After nine months of this regime, however, I noticed a painful lump just under my tailbone that began impeding my workouts. A doctor’s visit told me it was a pilonidal cyst. Nothing particularly dangerous (I was just relieved it wasn’t cancer), but something that needed to be removed with surgery.

I was given two treatment options. A minimally-invasive procedure that had a significant chance of the cyst returning, or a more invasive surgery that involved opening a small wound but almost completely eliminated its chances of recurrence. Worried about future impediments to my workouts, I opted for the latter.

When I awoke from the anesthetic post-op, I was told by the surgeon that “things hadn’t gone as planned.” The cyst was much bigger and deeper than expected, and so the incision that was supposed to be a half-inch long and deep was in fact 3 inches long and much deeper than expected. I had an open wound stretching from my tailbone to my nether regions.

Because of the unusual location of the wound on an “area under considerable natural tension,” I was told I couldn’t sit, lay on my back or bend over for any reason for the duration of the healing process. This was concerning, but the doctor put me in touch with a wound care facility and assured me I would be healed up and back in the gym in a month or two.

That estimate would prove wildly inaccurate.

Year 1 – Hellish Hell

Not being able to sit, lay on my back or bend over was a massive, literal pain in the ass. I had to reinvent my life around standing and laying on my side. Exercise was out of the question. Work meant standing for 8 hours. Driving was both uncomfortable and, in retrospect, pretty dangerous. I was too embarrassed to date. For these reasons I was determined to get the healing process over with as soon as possible, and so I began regular appointments at a wound care facility every Friday after work.

At first, it seemed like I was making progress. For the first few appointments my physician assured me it was healing. But soon, things stalled. Any accidental sitting or slight bending-over motion could create enough tension to tear the fragile, newly formed tissue on the edge of my wound, which would then die and have to be painfully burned off every Friday with silver nitrate by my doctor so new tissue could grow.

Through my frustration I became vigilant in my movements, focusing on not slipping up at all – a task that proved virtually impossible with daily commutes to work and requirements that included “don’t bend over for any reason.”

It seemed like any movement – even switching from standing to laying on my side, or vice-versa – could trigger a tear and throw a week’s worth of healing down the drain.

It was paralyzing. I felt like movement was the enemy.

I began spending most of my free time in bed, afraid of getting up and moving around. My entire life seemed to stop. With every day came the fear that one wrong move would spell setbacks, and the only thing I could do to prevent it was to stay in bed.

This went on for weeks, then months, then over a year. Nearly every week I underwent a silver nitrate burning to “reset” the healing process. I became depressed, unable to see the end to my suffering. I floated through life in a daze, going through the motions at work, going to my doctor’s appointments, seeing no progress, then going home and distracting myself with video games or scrolling through my social feeds. Most weekends I simply stayed in to avoid driving or moving around too much.

I began to despise my doctor, and blame him for not being able to fix me. From my perspective, I was doing absolutely everything I could and was told to do, and every Friday would just end up with them painfully burning off my progress. After a year and a half I was so full of bitterness that I had resigned myself to defeat, lacking the will to try anything else.

Luckily, my mom intervened.

Year 2 – Hope & The Good Doctor

She was fed up with the doctor too, but was not resigned to defeat. She did her research and found another hospital with an expensive but well-renowned wound care facility. She dragged me out of bed and took me to see a new doctor there, where I started treatment.

The changes came quickly. The doctor seemed baffled by the poor treatment I was receiving at the previous hospital. He began packing my wound properly and showing me how to do the same, and I also began e-stim (electric stimulation) treatment. I started going to him every Friday, instead of the old place, and soon I was making actual, concrete, measured progress.

As I would come to realize, the issue was not just that the wound was difficult to heal, but also that I had received poor doctor care for over a year. Fixing the latter allowed me to make slow but steady progress towards healing for the first time. After several months, my wound was finally closed.

My mental health started to improve with this concrete progress, which was great – but proved temporary. I had still not addressed the core of the issue – that my mental health and self-confidence was tied to that fickle progress, as it had been with my athletic improvement. It would take a crushing relapse for me to realize this.

Year 3 – The Relapse

6 months after I began treatment with my new doctor, I was finally back in the gym. I was elated. My gains had disappeared and I was determined to get them back. I began lifting tentatively, avoiding heavy weights and exercises that put strain on my wound area. As instructed by my doctor, I practiced stretches to teach my new scare tissue to be more elastic. After about three months I was getting my gains, and my confidence, back.

Then, Rrrrrrrrrip.

It happened at work, while standing at my desk. I reached over to grab something and felt a sickening tearing sensation along the entire length of my previously-healed wound. My heart sank.

I carefully walked to the bathroom, nervous and fearful, and once inside felt the area of my wound with my fingers. Blood. It had opened again. After three months of believing it had healed, of having my life back, of being able to exercise and function (mostly) like my normal self, I was suddenly back to square one.

How to treat the damage wasn’t the issue – the course of treatment was the same as before, and I was assured by my new doctor that much of the wound was still intact and would therefore heal much quicker than before. Instead, it was my confidence that was shattered. After all I had done to heal my physical ability, it was taken away from me again in an instant. And because my confidence was tied to my physical ability, something so easily broken, my confidence too was brittle.

The Comeback

The depression hit me worse with the relapse than with the first healing process. I began to wonder if this was ever going to end. Would I ever be able to sit again without worrying? Would the rest of my life be me fearing my own body and this damned wound? Would I ever feel confident again?

After a long while of anger, self-pitying and sorrow I began to think about that last question in particular. Why was my confidence gone? Why was I in such bad mental shape? There are plenty of disabled persons in the world, many worse-off physically than me, living happy and confident lives. So how do they do it?

I began reading articles and watching YouTube videos with titles like “How to Find Happiness” and “How To Re-Build Your Confidence After a Loss.” Some were insightful, some were click-baity influencers simply regurgitating platitudes. But one theme that came up regularly was “reevaluating how you define success.”

I thought about how I defined success. Typically, it was through completing some external goal – i.e. earning a high grade, winning a sports game, making X amount of money. They were all accomplishments, things I “won” either in school, on the pitch, or in the office. Because of that, if I wasn’t winning, if my performance was poor – even due to factors out of my control – my confidence was poor too.

I needed to change how I defined success, and root it in something much deeper, that couldn’t be easily shattered. I realized I needed to base my confidence on who I am and how I treat others, rather than what I’ve accomplished.

My New Foundation for Self-Confidence

My old foundation for self-confidence was the list of feats I had achieved through physical or mental performance. And while I still wanted to do those things, I had to learn to think about them as “nice-to-haves” instead of foundational pillars.

To build a new foundation for self-confidence, I needed to think deeply about my character traits that I’m proud of, the things that make me who I am beyond external accomplishments. Then, I needed to re-orient my definition of success around those traits. Luckily, I had plenty of time to think as I laid in bed recovering.

I imagined my hypothetical funeral, and what I’d want my eulogy to read. How I’d want my friends and family to describe me. I came up with three things: Kind, Adventurous and Optimistic.

My three new pillars of self-confidence:

Kindness – I would define my success in this pillar by the amount and depth of kindness I show to my friends, family and strangers. I would do my best to proactively do kind things for my loved ones, and to respond with care and consideration to their needs.

Adventurousness – I would define my success in this pillar by my willingness to try new things, to put myself out there and be vulnerable in order to experience everything the world has to offer. Examples might be learning to dance, giving a speech, doing karaoke, traveling to a foreign country, reading a new book, or simply talking to someone new.

Optimism – I would define my success in this pillar by my ability to react to and process things with confidence in myself and my fellow humans, and with hope for the future. I can’t always control what happens to me, but I can choose to believe that people are inherently good, and that things will work out in the end.

The Future

Within a couple months of my relapse, my wound was again healed. But this time, with my new foundation, I was able to build and maintain a much stronger mindset and self-confidence throughout that healing process. Since then, that foundation has helped me handle and overcome many other hardships as well.

Do I wish I hadn’t spent three years in my early 20s bedridden and depressed? Yeah. At the same time though, without that experience I doubt I would have the mental strength and fortitude I do today.

And for that, I’m grateful.