You Don’t Have to Rebuild the Life You Lost

There is a particular kind of loss that cannot be solved by getting things “back to normal.”

Sometimes normal is gone.

A career changes. A relationship ends. An illness transforms the body. A family changes shape. An identity that once seemed permanent suddenly no longer fits the reality in front of us.

Our instinct can be to rebuild.

Get back to where we were. Recover what disappeared. Become the person we used to be.

There is nothing wrong with wanting some of that back. Loss naturally creates longing for the familiar. Yet there are moments when rebuilding the old life is not only impossible, it may keep us from seeing the life that is still available to us.

Scott Martin knows something about that distinction.

In 1993, Scott was building a life around soccer. He was the head women’s soccer coach at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. His team had been nationally ranked. He was preparing to travel to Europe, where soccer had long been an enormous part of his identity.

Then he became sick.

Scott contracted group A strep with necrotizing fasciitis. He slipped into a coma and woke approximately a month later to learn that, to save his life, doctors had amputated both of his hands and parts of both feet.

He survived.

Survival, however, did not magically tell him how to live the life that came next.

THE PROBLEM WITH TRYING TO BECOME WHO YOU WERE

One of the most revealing things Scott shared during our conversation was that he initially did what many of us might do.

He worked.

He returned to coaching and kept pushing. His teams continued to perform. From the outside, there was evidence that the old Scott was still there.

Inside, something was different.

Scott described it plainly: “I was also faking being myself.”

That distinction matters.

There can be a huge difference between continuing the activities of your previous life and actually feeling at home in the life you are living.

Scott was still coaching, but things that once came naturally had changed. Recruiting became more difficult. Interactions with other people changed. His confidence was affected. He was also confronting how others perceived and treated him after he became visibly disabled.

Eventually, simply pushing harder stopped being enough.

That is one of adversity’s more uncomfortable lessons. Persistence is valuable, but persistence does not always mean continuing in exactly the same direction.

Sometimes persistence requires allowing the direction itself to change.

WHEN THE OLD ROAD ENDS

Scott eventually resigned from his coaching position and moved west. He described deliberately breaking his life down in an attempt to build himself back up.

Even then, there was no perfect plan.

He pursued another path into university coaching and landed at Gonzaga University as an assistant. Once again, circumstances changed.

Then something happened that had very little to do with soccer.

Scott was watching television.

A news report featured a family outside Seattle who had adopted two children from Haiti.

Something connected.

Scott told me:

“Watching a news report one night on this family outside of Seattle that had two kids that they adopted from Haiti. And something went off in me. I went, man, I'm supposed to be doing something like that. So I withdrew my name from Gonzaga. And started the adoption process.”

That decision did not restore Scott’s old life.

It helped create another one.

Eventually, two children from Romania came home. Then a boy from Ethiopia. Then a girl from Ethiopia. Two years later, another girl from Ethiopia joined the family.

Scott became a full-time dad.

Soccer, the thing that had once defined so much of his identity, largely disappeared from his life for roughly two decades.

That is not a story about getting everything back.

It is a story about discovering that “back” is not the only direction available.

CREATION IS DIFFERENT FROM RESTORATION

We often use the phrase “rebuild your life” after something difficult happens.

It is a useful phrase, but it can also carry an assumption: that the objective is to reconstruct some version of what existed before.

What if that is not possible?

More importantly, what if it is no longer necessary?

There are things worth recovering after adversity. Confidence. Joy. Connection. Purpose. Curiosity. A sense of possibility.

Those qualities do not have to be expressed through the same career, relationships, routines or identity that housed them before.

That changes the question.

Instead of asking, “How do I get my old life back?” we can eventually begin asking, “What can I create from the life I have now?”

Those are very different questions.

The first keeps our attention fixed on comparison.

The second creates room for possibility.

THE LIFE YOU DIDN’T PLAN CAN STILL CONTAIN MEANING

None of this means pretending loss is good.

Scott was remarkably candid about the years following his illness. He spoke about depression. He spoke about discrimination. He acknowledged that he did not initially give himself enough space to work through what had happened emotionally.

At one point in our conversation, he offered advice to someone facing their own version of a hospital-bed moment.

“Gonna suck.”

There is something refreshing about refusing to manufacture inspiration from suffering.

Some experiences hurt.

Some change us permanently.

Some things never return.

Accepting that reality is not surrender. In some circumstances, it is precisely what allows the next chapter to begin.

Scott eventually returned to soccer. He coached again. He won championships after his illness. He raised five children. He returned to education. He wrote Play From Your Heart. When I asked for one word to describe his life today, he answered:

“Fun.”

Consider the distance between those two realities.

The man waking from a coma and learning that both hands and parts of both feet had been amputated could not have known what his future would contain.

Neither could the coach leaving one career behind.

Neither could the man watching a television report about adoption.

The future did not arrive fully formed.

It emerged through decisions.

A NEW QUESTION

There may be something in your own life that you have been trying desperately to restore.

Perhaps restoration is possible, and perhaps it is worth pursuing.

Perhaps not.

The important distinction is knowing when your attachment to what was is preventing you from becoming curious about what still could be.

You can honour the life you lost without spending the rest of your life trying to reproduce it.

You can miss something and still move forward.

You can grieve an identity while allowing another one to emerge.

You can acknowledge that a road has ended without deciding that the journey has.

Maybe the question is no longer, “How do I rebuild what I had?”

Maybe it is:

“What can I build from here?”

Hear my full conversation with Scott Martin on The Audacious Living Podcast as we explore adversity, identity, family, reinvention and what it means to keep moving when life takes you somewhere you never expected to go.