Every two hours, a person under the age of 25 dies by suicide. There are, however, some people who attempt suicide and are lucky enough to barely survive. One of these people is a young man named Jordan Burnham. As a student, he was always very good at sports--baseball, basketball, golf--but he was depressed for various reasons after failing his driving test and seeing his grades drop. He felt increasingly like he was a disappointment of a son. One day, his father uncovered the bag of alcoholic beverages he had been hiding to quell his anger. Racked with dejection and guilt, Jordan fled to his room and barricaded the door. His mother stood outside and tried to console him, but he was not consoled. That is the last thing he remembers before he woke up in a hospital ward with severe wounds to the everything. He asked his family what had happened to him, to which they responded, "It was a suicide attempt. You jumped out the apartment window."
It took months of slow rehabilitation and physical training, counselling, a few surgeries and gradual transitions between modes of transportation, but he is finally able to walk with the assistance of a cane, talk, and even play golf. He now works as a motivational speaker at schools, telling kids about his experiences and urging them toward telling someone if they are in a similar situation.
I feel this story shows the incredible instability of a job relying on an aspect of you independent of your personality- for example, a sports player, a child actor, etc. This allows you to be a complete jerk to everybody and still command respect and high wages because of your physical talent. It also means that if you're a person of great generosity, but a mediocre sports player, or one that used to be great but became physically incapacitated in some way, you can be spurned by your former devotees just because you can't play as well, while remaining the same at heart (so to speak). If you have prepared your whole life for a sports career and suddenly have that opportunity closed, you may find options of things to do with your life become very scarce.
It took months of slow rehabilitation and physical training, counselling, a few surgeries and gradual transitions between modes of transportation, but he is finally able to walk with the assistance of a cane, talk, and even play golf. He now works as a motivational speaker at schools, telling kids about his experiences and urging them toward telling someone if they are in a similar situation.
I feel this story shows the incredible instability of a job relying on an aspect of you independent of your personality- for example, a sports player, a child actor, etc. This allows you to be a complete jerk to everybody and still command respect and high wages because of your physical talent. It also means that if you're a person of great generosity, but a mediocre sports player, or one that used to be great but became physically incapacitated in some way, you can be spurned by your former devotees just because you can't play as well, while remaining the same at heart (so to speak). If you have prepared your whole life for a sports career and suddenly have that opportunity closed, you may find options of things to do with your life become very scarce.
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