Real people who reached places they never expected and still had to decide what came next.
These are stories of real people who faced situations that changed their lives completely.
Some survived circumstances that seemed impossible. Others lost parts of the life they knew and had to decide what to do with what remained.
Their stories are not here to compare suffering. They are here because each one shows something important. Even when life changes in ways we never chose, there can still be another step.
No one else can choose that step for you. Your life remains yours. But sometimes seeing how another person found a way forward can help us see that another way may still exist for us too.
When it feels as if there is no way forward, these stories remind us that there may still be another step.
Photo: Nicolas Richoffer, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
A freak accident in a remote Utah canyon left Aron Ralston pinned by a boulder for days. The decision that eventually freed him demanded a price almost impossible to imagine.
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Photo: Pietro Luca Cassarino, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Nando Parrado appears at left.
After a plane crash high in the Andes, Nando Parrado survived a fractured skull, the deaths of his mother and sister, 72 days in the mountains and a final trek for help that changed the fate of the remaining survivors.
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Symbolic image from the New Life photo library. This is not a photograph of Alison Botha.
Abducted and subjected to an exceptionally violent attack in Port Elizabeth in 1994, Alison Botha survived against extraordinary odds and refused to allow that night to become the definition of the rest of her life.
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Photo: Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
At 13, Bethany Hamilton lost her left arm in a shark attack. Less than a month later she was back in the ocean, learning how to surf again with one arm and refusing to abandon the calling that had shaped her life.
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