Navigating obstacles through resilience

Twenty-four year-old Landenberg resident Sierra RyanWallick has lived with Lyme Disease since she was 14 years old. In late June, she shared her story as part of the Ted-X Youth @ Wilmington Series – one that believes courage and a proper mindset can overcome any of life’s roadblocks

Navigating obstacles through resilience

By Sierra RyanWallick

On June 10, 2012, when I was 14, I got sick with a fever that completely wiped me of energy, and I never fully recovered.

I started finding these small spots all of my body that started the size of a pea and some grew to the size of a softball. I was tested for Lyme Disease, and I was positive.

Can you imagine? All it took was one tiny tick to completely destroy the life trajectory that I had set for myself. Little did I know that this one tick had wiped the slate clean, so I would have to start over with new life dreams. But spoiler alert… Because I was forced to rebuild my life, I needed to make it better than I had ever imagined, but there was a lot that I had to go through first.

Over the next five years, I experienced every symptom in the book, from debilitating fatigue (where I had between zero to four hours of productive energy a day) to brain fog where I couldn’t tell my mom what I had just spent 30 minutes trying to remember after reading one page of my textbook.

I started having symptoms of insomnia, uncontrollable skin itchiness, nausea, irritable bowel syndrome, adult acne, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, and the list goes on. I was even taken to the emergency room when I experienced mysterious numbness on the right side of my body, and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.

During this time, I collected 27 different diagnoses and traveled hours every month to appointments. At one point, I had a PICC line surgically inserted into my arm that intravenously pumped medication directly into my heart. Unfortunately, I reacted to the cleaning products in the bandaging, so for a month and a half, it looked like I had a chemical burn on my arm. For two years, I took a medication that unknowingly gave me severe depression and suicidal thoughts, and at one point, I was taking over 50 pills a day that was comparable to putting my body through chemo treatment.

Yet, nothing seemed to take my symptoms away.

Landenberg resident Sierra RyanWallick.

Courtesy photo

Spelling out P-A-I-N

I share all of this because the trauma and pain of having a health crisis so young forced me to work out techniques to not just survive but figure out how to thrive, too. What I ended up doing was taking these lessons of pain and turning them into success through mindset changes. I’m going to use the acronym P-A-I-N to share how we can all use pain for triumph in everyday life.

The first letter is ‘P,’ which stands for post-traumatic growth -- transformation through trauma, which happened in my journey. Based on UNC Charlotte’s Posttraumatic Growth Research Group, there are five general areas where posttraumatic growth tends to occur: 1. New opportunities have emerged that weren’t there before the challenge. Since I had limited energy, I developed hyper-focus and a dedicated work ethic to focus only on projects that brought me immense purpose. I was forced to choose which people, projects and activities were important to me, and prioritize those above all else. I had to grow up quickly, and was thrown into adulthood early, so I became self-aware much faster than my peers.

2. Changes in relationships with others, where you develop a closer relationship or feel a closer connection to others who have suffered. During this time, my illness helped me discover my love for writing. I wrote poems, flash fiction, and short stories about my experience and emotions. As Anne Frank once said, “Paper is more patient than people.” I wrote because a lot of my friends didn’t understand what I was going through, but I connected with others at readings, where people resonated with my words of pain and purpose. 3. An increased confidence in one’s own strength. I realized that even though I have a disability, I still feel like I can do whatever I set my mind to. Ever since I started my non-profit when I was ten, I have believed that I can positively change the world, and that everyone has the same ability. That strong belief in positive power has helped me persevere despite obstacles. 4. A greater appreciation for life. Once you considered if life is worth living or not -- and when you choose to stay -- that makes life all the sweeter. You appreciate the good days all the more because there have been so many bad days, and I now appreciate the beauty of balance.

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5. A deepening or significant change in one’s belief system, spiritually or religiously. I started to believe in the power of the universe and knowing what I needed at the right time. While I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason, I do now believe that you can find a reason for everything that happens. This means that an event that caused us pain can be turned into something positive that has meaning if you choose.

Next, the “A” in P-A-I-N stands for “Amor Fati.” One of the most powerful tools I’ve used in my life is studying the stoic philosophy. Amor Fati (a love of fate) is my favorite stoic idea, where you embrace everything that happens to you. Everything is fueled to your life – good and bad – and in your eyes, it is all the same. This is a really hard concept to accept, but once you can see all events as neutral and as part of the story that you’re writing, the happier you will be.

Next, the “I” in P-A-I-N stands for instant vs. delayed gratification. At first, I fell into the trap of wanting only instant gratification. I wanted my health challenge to be solved immediately. But there was no magic pill in the 50+ pills I had been taking daily to help my symptoms, and I had to look at the long game and what choices I can make now that will help my health later.

I turned my focus to the habits I controlled that could help me in the long term. This is delayed gratification, and it’s doing things for your future self.

And finally, the ‘N’ in P-A-I-N stands for New Mindset, which for me was cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset. I would challenge myself to view obstacles not as roadblocks preventing me from achieving something, but as opportunities to grow. This translates into the obstacle is the way. In one of Ryan Holiday’s podcasts “The Daily Stoic,” he talks about an old Zen story that says, “never forget that inside every obstacle is a chance to improve your condition.”

I love this idea because with my chronic illness -- more

Courtesy photo

RyanWallick delivered her address at the Ted-X Youth @ Wilmington event in June.

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times that I can count -- I have had a challenge thrown my way that has caused a roadblock for me. The idea is that the new direction you are heading from a roadblock pivot is actually the direction you are meant to go. It’s an opportunity, not an obstacle.

Rising to the challenge

I believe that challenges are gifts, but they are only gifts if you make them gifts. You need to rise to the challenge instead of giving up. You’re not a victim; you’re stronger because of this, but only if you take steps to become stronger.

I also believe that people don’t know their full potential until they’re tested. They don’t know their full capability until their limits are reached and then stretched and expanded. I would rather have gone through everything I did and know my full capability than live my life in the dark without knowing what my superpowers are. And you can do this yourself, even if you aren’t experiencing a health crisis like I did. You can push your own limits without any outside circumstances pushing them for you.

In my case, I was challenged by an outside force of chronic illness, so I had more growing pains because it was forced growth, but the upside is that I grew faster than I otherwise would have -- and in ways that I never thought I could.

A 4.0 student at the University of Delaware, Sierra RyanWallick founded AutumnLeaf Fundraisers at the age of 10, and has raised over $100,000 over the past 14 years from the sale of handmade items by over 200 volunteers for Forgotten Cats animal rescue service in Greenville, Del.

In 2016, she received the Jefferson Award for Outstanding National or Global Service by Young Americans and later received a Diana Award, which recognizes humanitarian work and community action.

RyanWallick also helped to co-found Native Nourishment, a non-profit organization that recognizes food insecurities among the Native American population, and recently founded UP Cycle Design, a sustainable fashion brand creating handmade, UPcycled products with the goal of a zero-waste, transparent process.

The story is an abridged version of RyanWallick’s entire 17-minute Tex-X Youth @ Wilmington talk. To hear the speech in its entirety, visit “Navigating Obstacles Through Resilience,” available on YouTube.