The Tattoo That Changed How I Saw My Own Hip

First couple weeks of school at the University of Arizona, I walked into a class, and there was a guy from my past sitting in a wheelchair.

I recognized him before I placed him. Travis Anderson. We'd played on a Babe Ruth team together when we were both fourteen — one of those seasons where you're just a kid on a field with another kid, no idea either of you is going to remember it twenty years later. I hadn't seen him since. I'd heard what happened to him, the way you hear things about people from your past, secondhand and half-formed. I sat down next to him anyway.

We started talking. And at some point I noticed a tattoo on his leg.

What doesn't kill you

It was in some kind of Chinese or Asian lettering, and he told me what it said: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

He'd gotten it after the accident. Two sixteen-year-olds, both newly licensed, doing the kind of stupid, ordinary thing sixteen-year-olds do — racing another car. It went wrong the way it goes wrong. The other driver walked away. Travis didn't. He was paralyzed from the neck down.

He'd been a three-sport varsity athlete as a sophomore at Pinnacle High School. Then one afternoon he wasn't anymore, and everything after that was a different life than the one he'd been living an hour before.

I was pretty floored, sitting there hearing all of that and then looking down at what he'd chosen to put on his own skin about it.

Four weeks out

I need to say where I was that week, because it's the only way the moment makes sense.

I was four weeks into recovery from a total hip replacement. I'd lost both my parents inside the previous year. I'd just started at a university I hadn't planned on attending, on a leg I wasn't sure would hold up, carrying around every version of why me a nineteen-year-old has available to him.

And then I sat down next to a guy who couldn't feel his own legs at all, wearing a tattoo that said the thing that happened to him made him stronger, not weaker.

From that day forward I stopped thinking about my hip replacement as a burden. I could still walk. I could still feel every part of my body. Whatever I thought I'd lost, I was sitting three feet from a reminder of how much I still had.

That's not a metaphor I built later to make the story work. That's what happened in that classroom, in real time, in the first couple weeks of a semester I almost didn't get to start.

Where I am now

I haven't talked to Travis in a long time. I don't know exactly what he's doing these days, and I'll say that plainly instead of pretending otherwise.

But I know what he gave me, whether he ever knew it or not: he was one of the people who kept me pushing to get back into the game, at the exact moment I needed a reason bigger than my own recovery. And I wish him well. Genuinely, all the way — wherever he is, whatever he's building, I hope he's good.

If this ever finds its way to him: it worked. Twenty years later, it's still working.