Mental health and diverse abilities advocate Jack Kavanagh spoke about grief, energy vampires and cultivating a challenge mindset in a moving talk about overcoming adversity at Dublin's Pendulum Summit last week.
Kavanagh's life was changed forever when in 2012 he suffered a spinal cord injury while abroad, which left him with 15% muscle function. Previously an independent and athletic young man, Kavanagh was paralysed from the armpits down and left reckoning with a total change in how his life would be.
Speaking to RTÉ Lifestyle after his talk, he said that grieving for an "imagined future" was an integral part of his long recovery.
"It comes in lots of shapes and forms", he said about grief. "You grieve the loss of a relationship with someone you loved. You grieve the loss of a job and the friendships you had there. You grieve the loss of a place that you once lived, or in my case, this imagined future that I had. And I think that grief is an important and normal piece."
Grief, he noted, has an arc, regardless of who or what we're grieving. There's shock and denial, anger and bargaining, and a probably inevitable dip into depression.
"For me, that was very much the case. I had shock and denial, and I didn't so much allow myself to feel the anger because I was trying to be strong for everyone else at the beginning. But that came later. And I definitely hit the dip."
He doesn't see that period of depression as a negative thing, however, saying: "It's really important that you feel the tough emotions because if you deny them, they bubble up somewhere else."
Coming from an athletic background, Kavanagh initially struggled to find the right outlet for these feelings: "All of my normal mechanisms of doing that, running, playing rugby, being on the water, surfing or windsurfing, these were the things that were my healthy releases."
It helped that he was surrounded by loving and supportive family and friends, he noted, who gave him space to feel the big feelings and process them. In time, he entered the "reconstruction phase": "That's where you're reimagining what a possible new future can look like with this new circumstance."
In the years since his accident, Kavanagh has turned his injury into a calling, working to find the good and benefit in his experience by sharing insights into what people with different abilities need and advocating for them, be it inTED talks or his documentary, Breaking Boundaries.
In his speech, he refered to this perspective as the "challenge mindset", a believe that you rise to the adversity facing you and, ideally, use it as a means for growth. When asked how he cultivated that, Kavanagh said part of it was "innate".
"When we view something as a challenge or rather than a problem, or mostly when we view something as a challenge, what that actually does is it taps into our psychological resources, our internal resources, and it allows us to make better use of our external resources as well", he said.
"That's how I found myself sharing my story and on stage, because I was like, well, there has to be something in this that is universal", he explained. "When I stopped making it about me and I was like, well, what's in this that could be maybe applicable to others?"
When it comes to mental health, Kavanagh said he believes there are "really good conversations" happening.
"What's hard, though, is to couple that conversation with action when you're actually in the tough moment. I think it's easy to talk about things on the far side of coming through something or a challenging period. What's more difficult is to recognise that you're in it and to realise that maybe the burden could be eased on that journey if you allow someone else to carry some of the load with you."
Similarly with better supports for people with disabilities, Kavanagh said there needs to be more expansive and logical approaches to how we provide access for them.
"I think disability is the only cohort of society that any one of us can join tomorrow, and any one of us will join at some point in our lives", he said, noting that longer lifespans don't always mean increasing health spans.
"So designing spaces, designing jobs, designing our policies and our places and our online technology, with difference in mind and with different types of ability in mind, it makes sense, it's the right thing to do, it makes good business sense, but it also allows us to tap into, to include and to have the benefit of the skill sets of all of the one fifth to one 7th of the population at any given time that have and live with some kind of disability.
"So the question is, is the society disabling the individual?"
Wrapping up, Kavanagh stated: "It's going to need to happen anyway. Why don't we be proactive about it?"
