![]() I used to do things in my 20s prior to my amputation, like voluntarily fasting for a week, just to see what my body would go through as it shifts. You don’t get to be an experienced adventurer without going through a lot of misadventures along the way and fully learning through that. The way I see it, though, is I’m not abnormal or superhuman or anything else other than a person who was put into an extraordinary set of circumstances for which I was particularly attuned to. There was a woman in the book signing line who said, ‘I wrote my psychology thesis on you.’ She’s talking about defense mechanisms and fight-or-flight response. I haven’t submitted myself to medical testing like, ‘Here’s my brain.’ We’ll see at the end of all this. Getting back to the canyon-have you been studied by medical professionals? Because you shouldn’t have survived for that long. Depression in so many ways is a disconnection from love, so in the moments when I feel depression, I reconnect through love with the people who are important to me. While I was trapped, it was to turn on the camera and reconnect with my family. I’ve had other times in my life when I’ve been in suicidal depression from ended relationships, other experiences-and I’ve lost friends to suicide, too-that it’s in the depth of that, then, to find something that’s worth the pain of life. Why wait for it? I’m not going to get out of it here so why not just end it now?’ And yet that was where I also had to tap into something that said, ‘No, it’s worth every minute that I spend here, that I see this through to the very end and I don’t take action against myself I don’t commit suicide in this moment.’ And that was hard. ![]() I was thinking, ‘This is just going to keep getting worse. Once I figured out the puzzle, it was like, ‘That’s it, that’s it, get out of here.’ Before that, it was mostly keeping myself from using the knife to cut myself enough that I would bleed to death on purpose. I think the problem solving of how to cut my arm off-that was the issue that I was trying to resolve, but that was more a how-to kind of thing than a getting my gumption up. While I was there in those hours and days, it was mostly maintaining my motivation. ![]() ![]() What was the biggest “boulder” for you when you were stuck in the canyon? Was it cutting off your own arm, or something else? Like I said in my speech, we’re a lot more capable than what we think of ourselves as being. We need that light to shine when it feels like it’s just too much and we can’t deal. We’re all experiencing the “boulders,” the traumas-a woman who lost her brother in Afghanistan, that phone call when you find out that your mom’s got brain cancer. So knowing things like that that people had shared with me, and saying, ‘OK, well I want this to be a legacy once that People magazine is off the shelves.’ There’s something still there for folks when they need it. She figured that if I had something to live for, that she clearly had something to live for-her four grandchildren-and I’d reminded her of that. It was an inauspicious mechanism of salvation, but she wrote this card to say it had shone a light in the darkness for her, that she had flushed the sleeping pills. She’d saved his sleeping pills and was going to overdose if she wasn’t over it and then read my story in People magazine. One that in the early days stuck out was a grandmother who wrote to tell me she had been contemplating suicide on the anniversary of her husband’s passing. Ralston sat down with 5280 after his riveting speech to learn more about his 127-hour ordeal, the lessons he’s learned, and how he’s grown in the decade and a half since his experience.ĥ280: What prompted you to start public speaking-or, on an even deeper level, to think that other people might be able to gain something from your experience?ĪR: The prompting was really going all the way back to when it first happened, when I was getting cards in the hospital from strangers who had heard my story and wrote to tell me it had affected them. This past Friday, for instance, Ralston headlined the last general session at the massive 2018 Magnet Conference at the Colorado Convention Center, regaling close to 10,000 nurses with his epic tale and the idea that everyone has “boulders” they need to conquer. So what exactly do you do after all of that? In the 15 years since his accident, Ralston has continued to triumph in the wilderness, becoming the first person to climb all 59 of Colorado’s fourteeners solo in winter, and has transformed what could have been a tragic experience into a lucrative public speaking career. That's only $1 per issue! Subscribe Today »
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