I told the story of my first backbend at Speak Up last night.
If you missed the show, you missed a good one.
Here’s what I wrote on May 5, 2018, about the moment, including photographic proof of the moment:
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I did the impossible this week. I did a backbend.
Maybe you know me well and agree that this is impossible to imagine. Or perhaps you don’t know me as well and think that a backbend hardly constitutes a significant achievement.
Either way, it was a moment I’ll never forget, and it’s no exaggeration to say that it changed my life.
I was wandering around the playground at recess earlier this week when I saw some students, including a pair of twin sisters, doing backbends.
From a standing position, they bent all the way down and all the way back up.
When a student trying to learn to do a back bend finally managed one, I applauded. Then I joked with them that a backbend was no big deal and that I could do one whenever I wanted. When they challenged me to do one, I came clean and admitted I had never done one in my life and never would.
That was all these girls needed to hear. In an instant, they surrounded me and encouraged me to try. I laughed again, assuring them I was not built to perform a backend.
When the sun casts my shadow on the ground, it’s a rectangle with a box on top.
My friends once referred to me as a neckless stump with legs for arms.
I don’t think there was ever a time when a back bend was possible.
But they persisted, insisting I try. Eventually, I agreed to attempt the first step—raising my hands over my head and looking backward—thinking this would placate them.
Instead, it emboldened them. Through a level of persistent positivity and a torrent of encouragement that I have never experienced before, they continued to insist that I try. They did not harass, taunt, or tease. They simply expressed an unwavering conviction that if I tried, I would succeed.
I fell. They helped me up. I fell again. They spotted me, two girls on each side, wisely fleeing when I started to collapse. One girl took an elbow to the head and shook it off like it was nothing. Over the course of 15 minutes, I went from a man who would never do a backbend in his life to a man trying like hell to do a backbend because the positivity and encouragement of these girls had pierced my belief that this was impossible.
They had turned me into a believer.
Then I did it. Starting from a standing position, I reached back and continued bending until my feet were on the ground and my hands touched the ground behind me. I looked back and saw my heels, as they said I would.
I had done a back bend.
I couldn’t believe it. I had done something that I had thought impossible just minutes before. I had thought it impossible for my entire life.
I’ve been walking on air ever since.
I know. It doesn’t seem like much. And I’ve certainly done difficult and even seemingly impossible things before.
For more than four years, I managed a McDonald’s restaurant full-time while simultaneously attending two colleges full-time (earning two degrees and finishing near the top of my class), launching a business, working part-time in the school’s writing center, serving in school government, and writing for the school newspaper.
Honestly, I don’t know how I did it. I was just so happy to be off the streets and making my dreams come true that I would’ve done anything to succeed. The work seemed like nothing compared to all that had preceded it.
Even more impossible, I somehow convinced Elysha Dicks to love and marry me. And to keep on loving me more than a decade later. A woman who I desperately admired from afar but never dreamed of dating somehow agreed to spend the rest of her life with me.
Astounding.
Even the publishing of a shelf full of books once seemed impossible. So, too, did my success in storytelling and my unplanned career as a storytelling and communications consultant.
A backbend might not seem like such a big deal compared to those achievements, but you would be wrong. The actual backbend might not be as momentous as my other accomplishments, but the way I had been transformed from a nonbeliever to a believer through relentless support and endless positivity was astonishing.
The way those girls encouraged me was inspiring.
They had gotten me to do something that I never thought possible. That many people thought impossible.
I will never forget that moment in the grass beside the tree. I walked away thinking about all the other possibilities that I had closed off from my life, wondering what other impossibilities I needed to tackle.
I did a backbend under a tree on a spring day, and now I feel my potential is boundless.
