I survived being a throw away teenager with no support of any kind from my parents. I did horrible things to survive. Sometimes I feel shame over this and sometimes I admire myself - how in the world did I survive? Some situations were life & death situations. Now that I am almost 50, earned a college degree and have a happy home with friends. I sometimes view my old self like a person I do not know entirely. Street smarts are great but I don't recommend getting street creed to improve your personality.
Here is to all the survivors out there - teenagers, homeless and others who were only told they were nothing and would never be nothing. We survived and thrived.
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What It Takes To Survive
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At ABC's "Good Morning America," where I worked as executive producer for two and a half years, I watched a veritable parade of survivors appear on television. The procession of death-defiers never seemed to stop, and I always wondered: How do these people endure their trials? Were they always so strong and resilient—or did these abilities suddenly materialize? And what do they know about surviving and thriving that we don't?
It's probably safe to say you're never going to end up with a knitting needle through the heart, but it's equally indisputable that eventually you will face some kind of life-changing crisis or struggle. How would you have responded if your airplane had landed on the icy Hudson River? Or what would you do if you were suddenly fired from your job or received a dire medical diagnosis? Dr. David Spain has a blunter way of putting it. He runs the trauma and critical-care department at Stanford Medical Center and sees what happens to regular people all the time. Every day, he says, some of us get dressed, kiss our families goodbye, walk out the door and get run over by cement trucks.
After two years of research, I discovered that everyone has a crisis personality—a Survivor IQ—that they marshal in a moment of adversity: a mindset and ways of thinking about a situation. The best survivors and thrivers understand that crisis is inevitable, and they anticipate adversity. Understanding that even misfortune gets tired and needs a break, they're able to hold back, identify the right moment and then do what they need to do. Psychologists have a clunky term for this: active passiveness. It means recognizing when to stop and when to go. In a critical sense, doing something can mean doing nothing. Action can be inaction, and embracing this paradox can save your life.
It was early Saturday morning, just 12 days after surgeons had delicately removed Ellin Klor's splinter and stitched her up. Klor had been home for a week, thankful for the attention of her husband and daughter, but she awoke with excruciating chest and back pain. Writhing and struggling to breathe, she had no idea what was happening, and she rushed to the emergency room.
Doctors poked and prodded her. They listened to her heart and lungs. They whispered their greatest fear: perhaps it was a pulmonary embolism, a potentially fatal blood clot in her lungs. They ordered immediate scans along with enough morphine to erase the pain.
When the doctors returned, they shook their heads and seemed confused. The tests were all negative. Her lungs were clear and her heart was healing just fine. So they explained it away as some kind of fleeting discomfort from surgery and gave her more painkillers before sending her home.
The next day, Klor was home alone when the phone rang. A radiologist from Stanford wanted to see her right away. At the hospital, the doctors explained the urgency. On a CT scan, the radiologist had detected a mass under her armpit. It looked like an enlarged lymph node, a telltale sign of breast cancer.
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