There is a moment most people never talk about.
Not the moment the bad thing happens. Not the aftermath, when the support arrives and the plan forms and the story starts to make sense in the retelling.
The moment before all of that.
The quiet one. The one where the future you imagined has just dissolved and the new one hasn’t arrived yet and you are standing in the gap between who you were and who you’re going to become — and it is completely, utterly silent.
Amy Purdy knows that silence.
She was 19 when bacterial meningitis took both her legs. She has described that in-between period — not with bravado, not with the kind of polish that comes from telling a story a thousand times — but honestly. The surrender. The letting go. The moment she stopped fighting the reality of what had happened and sat inside it instead.
She called it the place where her life actually began.
The Border of Your Life Is Not Fixed
In her TED Talk — watched by over 4 million people — Amy said something that quietly rearranges how you think about limits.
“If our lives are a sum of our experiences, then one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is the gift of trying.”
Not succeeding. Not overcoming. Not winning.
Trying.
Because she wasn’t talking about triumphant comeback arcs. She was talking about something smaller and more honest — the decision, made in the dark, to take one step without knowing where it leads.
She went on to become a Paralympic snowboarder. A bronze medalist. A TED speaker. An author. An actress. But none of that is the point of her story — not really. The point is the moment before any of it. When the future was blank. When the borders of her life seemed closed.
And she discovered they weren’t.
They never are.
What Hopelessness Actually Is
Hopelessness is not the absence of hope.
It’s the attachment to a specific version of the future that no longer exists.
You had a picture. A plan. A version of how things were supposed to go. And then something happened — a diagnosis, a loss, a door that closed, a relationship that ended, a body that changed, a dream that didn’t survive contact with reality — and the picture broke.
And you’re standing in front of the broken pieces thinking: there is nothing here.
But there is something here. There is you. There is right now. There is the extraordinary fact that you are still breathing and thinking and feeling and reading these words.
Amy Purdy didn’t find hope by rebuilding the original picture. She found it by asking a completely different question.
Not: how do I get back what I lost?
But: what is still here?
You Are Not The Story You Were Told
At some point — in a hospital room, in a school corridor, in a relationship, in a career, in someone else’s expectations of who you should be — someone handed you a story about your limits.
Maybe it came with a clinical label. Maybe it came from a parent or a teacher or a system that looked at you and saw only what you couldn’t do. Maybe you handed it to yourself after one failure too many.
That story is not true.
Not because everything is possible if you believe hard enough — that’s not what this is. But because the version of you that exists right now is not the final version. You are not a finished thing. You are not a fixed point.
Amy Purdy was handed a very specific story about limits at 19. Both legs. Bacterial meningitis. The doctors gave her a version of the future that was small and certain.
She wrote a different one.
Not by ignoring reality. By expanding what she believed reality could hold.
Snowboarding. A stage at TED. An Olympic opening ceremony performance. A life so full it became a book and then a film and then a symbol for millions of people who needed to see what was possible.
You are allowed to write a different story too.
Hope Is Not a Feeling. It’s a Practice.
The problem with hope is that we treat it like a weather event. Either it’s there or it isn’t. Either you feel it or you wait for it to arrive.
It doesn’t work that way.
Hope is built. Slowly. Through small actions taken before you feel ready. Through one decision made in the direction of life rather than away from it. Through showing up — for yourself, for the people who need you, for the version of yourself that is still forming.
Amy Purdy didn’t wake up one morning flooded with certainty that everything would work out. She got on a snowboard when she wasn’t sure she could. She fell. She got back up. She tried again. The hope came from the trying — not before it.
This is available to you right now.
Not a perfect plan. Not a guarantee. Just one small move in the direction of something real.
You Are Infinite. Nothing Can Confine You.
The body can be changed. The circumstances can be hard. The system can be slow and the road can be longer than anyone told you it would be.
None of that changes what you are at the core.
You are a person with an interior life that no diagnosis can reach, no loss can fully take, no limitation can permanently define. You have the capacity — right now, in this moment — to imagine something beyond where you currently are. That capacity is infinite. It doesn’t run out. It doesn’t expire.
Amy Purdy didn’t lose that capacity when she lost her legs. It was the one thing the meningitis couldn’t touch.
It’s the one thing nothing can touch in you, either.
The border of your life — as Amy said — is not fixed. It never was. It never will be.
What you do with that is entirely up to you.
This is Part 3 of our Amy Purdy series.
Part 1 — What Is Possible: How Amy Purdy Showed Us What Is Possible
Part 2 — Shaping Your Story: Amy Purdy — Shaping Your Story
Credit: Amy Purdy TED Talk — “Living Beyond Limits” — youtube.com/watch?v=NsEFvBHSXqE © Amy Purdy / TED. All rights reserved. Referenced for educational purposes.