Victoria Arlen and Desirable Disadvantages
The ESPN host used desirable disadvantage, 10,000 hours, and family background to become a success.
By Emily Stern | Biokinetics Major and Psychology Minor
Victoria Arlen opened her eyes, and is quickly blinded by bright lights, balloons, and cards. She faintly heard her mom’s familiar voice behind her. She turned to look, except her body was motionless. Completely frozen and glued to the hospital bed she is in. She tried to scream for her Mom to come to her, but not a single word left her mouth (Arlen 4). This would be her reality for the next four years. Trapped inside of her own body with no way to let anyone know that she is still there. That she can hear. That she hears the doctor’s conversations with her parents. That nobody knows that she needs her body repositioned and someone to scratch her nose.
Victoria had two rare conditions at once, transverse myelitis and acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (“The Story of Victoria Arlen” 1) that caused swelling in her brain and spinal cord, paralyzing her from the belly button down. The inflammation caused total paralysis throughout her body and explains why she could not move or speak for four years. Despite this setback, Victoria Arlen earned a gold medal, competed on Dancing with the Stars, served as an ESPN host, and became an author and motivational speaker. She managed to take the worst of the worst and turn it into a career and something that she uses to encourage and inspire people.
All of her greatest accomplishments point back to her four years of paralysis. Her story alone has gotten her on Dancing with the Stars and a position at ESPN. In Outliers: The Story of Success, author Malcolm Gladwell, writes, “People don’t rise from nothing….It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t” (Outliers 87). The moments that shape lives are important. Arlen comes from brokenness. She comes from doctors telling her she didn’t have a chance. She comes from hopelessness and ultimately, Arlen achieves success through the Gladwellian traits of desirable disadvantages, 10,000 hours, and family background.
Arlen reaches her arm forward. Her fingers graze the concrete wall of the paralympic swimming pool. She looks up at the pool leaderboard and sees a number one next to her name. Her eyes water and she slams the surface with the palm of her hand. She can’t wipe the smile off her face. Cheers erupted from the audience and she is overflowing with joy. Her first gold medal ever. Not only does Arlen win the race, but she wins with paralysis from the waist down. All of her training and hard work paid off (Roche 1).
Miraculously, after four years, Arlen came out of her vegetative state and slowly regained the ability to move her body, eat, and talk. But her legs never came back. Doctors told her that she would be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life and wheelchair bound. Growing up, Arlen played just about every sport imaginable. She had an appetite for competition most easily satisfied through hockey and swimming (Roche 1). Her hospitalization and diagnosis brought her sports careers to an abrupt halt in 2006. Not only was she unable to play sports, but she could do nothing at all. Her life consisted at staring at whatever was right in front of her. Since Arlen had not been able to play sports, let alone do anything for so long, her drive for competition was only fueled more. She began playing sled hockey and then transitioned back to the pool. After months of strenuous training, Arlen qualified for the U.S paralympic swimming team.
If Arlen ever had a shot at competing at the Olympics, taking four years off of training did not help her chances. According to the U.S census, the United States population consists of approximately 328,837,100 people (United States Census). At the last Olympic games, the United States sent 455 athletes to Rio in Brazil. Of those athletes, 291 of them were women. Of those women, 67 won gold medals in the Olympics in their competition (United States Olympic Committee). Altogether, that gives the average American woman a 0.00002% chance of winning a gold medal in the Olympics. It’s safe to say that if Arlen wanted to be an Olympic gold medalist in swimming, she would have her work cut out for her.
The odds of winning a Paralympic gold medal in comparison to those of winning an Olympic gold medal are more favorable. In the United States, 22,515,000 people have conditions that qualify them for the paralympics (United States Olympic Committee). In total, 9 women won gold medals at the paralympics (“USA at the Rio 2016 Paralympics”). That gives a female who is qualified for the paralympics a 0.00004% chance of winning a gold medal. The chances are still extremely rare, but the odds double in comparison to the chances of winning a gold at the Olympics.
Although being paralyzed is universally recognized as a disadvantage, the paralysis gave Arlen a better chance at winning a gold medal than being able bodied.
Although being paralyzed is universally recognized as a disadvantage, the paralysis gave Arlen a better chance at winning a gold medal than being able bodied. In Outliers, Gladwell, describes a lawyer named Joe Flom, who came from untraditional, modest beginnings. Gladwell writes, “All the things in his life that seem to have been disadvantages — that he was a poor child of garment workers; that he was Jewish at a time when Jews were heavily discriminated against; that he grew up in the Depression — turn out, unexpectedly, to have been advantages (Outliers 120).” He goes on to describe how each of those “disadvantages” helped to get him to where he is today. Similarly, Arlen’s disadvantage turns out to be an advantage for her. She won a gold medal in the Paralympics which later gave her the opportunity to cover the Winter Paralympics for ESPN. She now is a regular host on ESPN. Nobody would choose to be wheelchair bound, but in Arlen’s case it has given her opportunities that otherwise would not have presented themselves. She has taken the opportunities that have come her way and ran with them.
Arlen lets go of her physical therapist and takes a small uneven step forward with her foot. With guidance and support from her therapists, she continues to make small strides forward. It’s March 6, 2016, it’s the very first time that she has been able to walk without crutches since her diagnosis in 2006. She feels scared and anxious about what her life will look like from here on out. There will be no visible sign of her story and journey, yet it will continue to impact her life forever (Roenigk).
In 2012, Arlen began working with Project Walk in San Diego to try to regain the ability to move her legs. Project Walk uses the Dardzinski Method, which focuses on 5 main steps. The steps include: reactivation of the nervous system, development/stabilization, strength training, function and coordination; and gait training (Russell 3). The method doesn’t guarantee that every patient will return to normal functioning. When Arlen’s mother posed the question, would their daughter walk again? The therapist told her, “I wouldn’t mortgage the house” (Roenigk).
It took Arlen 4 years at Project Walk before she took her first step on her own. She spent 6 hours there daily. With days off for holidays and vacation, she was most likely there 335 days out of 365 days in a year. 335 days multiplied by 4 years results in 1,340 days. That number multiplied by 6 hours a day gives Arlen 8,040 hours of therapy. This number represents the amount of time it took her to walk unassisted, but does not include the practice it took to improve her gait. At first it was unsteady and she relied on ankle braces to support her legs (Roenigk). Between the amount of time that it took Arlen to walk on her own and the time it took her to perfect it, she roughly spent 10,000 hours devoted to therapy and rehabilitation.
10,000 hours is a significant number in Outliers. Gladwell focuses on rice farmers in Asia and their work ethic. Rice farmers put in a tremendous amount of work to obtain a harvest every year. He states, “”No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich”(Outliers 224). These people are working day in and day out to meet their goal. Similarly, Arlen worked daily on her therapy to meet her goal of walking again. It’s almost impossible to not reach your goal when you dedicate enough time to it. Both Arlen and the rice farmers work incredibly hard. The result of that consistent hard work is success.
The idea Gladwell gets at through these stories is that it takes a significant amount of practice before anyone can master something and make a success of it. In Arlen’s case, it took a significant amount of time before she achieved her goal. If she hadn’t put in the time at Project Walk, she would still be wheelchair bound. To this day she continues to stay active, she exercises for 2 hours daily so that she doesn’t regress (Roenigk). She clearly understands the importance of hard work and commits her time to her passions. She did not recover spontaneously. Through repetition of movement that she was able to get her life back.
Jacqueline Arlen walked into Arlen’s hospital room where her daughter lay motionless. Arlen looked directly at her mom as she looked at her. Arlen tracked her mom as she moved across the room. Jacqueline couldn’t believe it, Arlen had lost the ability to control her eyes a long time ago. She walked up to Arlen and asked her, “blink twice if you are there.” Sure enough, Arlen blinked twice (Tourjee). Tears welled in Jacqueline’s eyes. The bubbly, sporty, loving Victoria they all knew was still there. This wasn’t a hopeless cause after all. This small act of blinking began the slow process of recovery for Arlen and gave hope and encouragement to her family.
In Outliers, Gladwell states, “Where you come from matters” (Outliers 119). Where Arlen came from matters. She grew up in a family with two triplet brothers and two loving parents. Despite the diagnosis, her parents were determined that there was a way for Arlen to recover. They refused to believe that modern medicine wasn’t enough to help their daughter (“The Story of Victoria Arlen”). They even went as far as to set up a hospital room in their house to take care of her (Miller). Giving up on her simply wasn’t an option. When Arlen came out of her vegetative state, her mom took her to San Diego to live with family. In San Diego, she was able to work at Project Walk and work towards walking again. When they grew tired of being away from their family in Boston, Jacqueline mortgaged their home to open up a Project Walk facility in Boston (“The Story of Victoria Arlen”).
For people diagnosed with transverse myelitis, recovery is unlikely if there is no improvement within the first 3 to 6 months (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke). Arlen spent four years in a vegetative state and six in a wheelchair. She missed the recovery window by a longshot. Arlen’s parents had no reason to believe they would ever get their daughter back, but they maintained a positive attitude towards her diagnosis.
Outliers highlights Chris Langan, a man that has an IQ higher than Albert Einstein’s. Despite his incredible intelligence, Langan lives on a “slightly tumbledown horse farm in northern Missouri, sitting on the back porch in jeans and a cutoff T-shirt” (Outliers 114). Langan was raised in an impoverished family and had no father figure. His first stepfather was murdered, his second committed suicide. Langan “had to make his way alone, and no one, not even geniuses, ever make it alone” (Outliers 115). The difference between Langan and Arlen is their families. Langan’s story is a story of a person who didn’t go anywhere because of his family, Arlen has gone somewhere because of hers. Take someone like Arlen, someone who has the smallest chance of recovering, but give her a family that is willing to fight for her, and you get success. Take someone like Langan, smarter than Einstein, but give him no positive role models or support and you get complacency.
Today, Arlen shares her story with people through speaking engagements. She shares with people that “it’s the small, small moments where someone actually believes in you. When my mom looked at me and told me that she would love me and she believed in me, that lit a spark within me that this is not how my story is going to end” (The Welcome Conference). The small moment her mom took to show love and support towards her daughter gave her the drive to fight her condition. She then decided to take the positive route and shares that she could “ ultimately plan (her) own funeral, or can list all the things that (she’s) grateful for…for starters I wasn’t dead” (The Welcome Conference). She was not dead. She chose an attitude of gratitude because her Mom and her family believed in her and loved her. It takes an enormous amount of love and support to be able to look something as serious as her condition and have no fear.
Arlen inspires people with her story and her positive outlook on life. She doesn’t ask for people to pity her, but shares that there is something to be grateful in every stage of life because her family did the same. Her book and speaking engagements all serve as amazing testimonies on what life can look like when you never give up. If Arlen was born into Langan’s family, her story would look drastically different than it does today and she would would not be an inspirational figure to others.
Arlen gets ready to take the stage with her Dancing with the Stars partner, Valentin Chmerkovskiy. This week every competitor must choose to dedicate their dance to their most memorable year. For Arlen, that’s 2017. A video plays showing their rehearsal and footage of Arlen’s recovery. Arlen explains to the producers, that “this was the first year where (she) could finally just live” (DWTS youtube). She starts the dance in her old wheelchair and finishes standing beside it. She stares down at the wheelchair and sobs. This dance represents her triumph in relearning how to walk.
Arlen could have chosen her most memorable year to be the year that she won a gold medal or secured a job at ESPN, but instead, a rather ordinary year. 2017 did not hold any extravagant events. No memorable experiences. It was a year where she got to live. A year where she didn’t have to focus on what tomorrow would bring, but got to live limitlessly. Being healthy is something that so many people take for granted. Out of everything in life, what matters to Arlen the most is having her life back, living a life where she doesn’t have to live in fear and worry of what her future will hold. She’s worked hard for what she has now and secured a bright future through utilizing Gladwellian traits. She now has the opportunity to go and share her story with the world, inspire others, and make a positive impact on the world.
WORKS CITED
Arlen, V. “Locked In.” Howard Books, US, 2018. Print
“A Look Back At Each Of Team USA’s 46 Gold Medals Won At The Rio Olympics.” Team USA, 2016, www.teamusa.org/News/2016/August/31/A-Look-Back-At-Each-Of-Team-USAs-46-Gold-Medals-Won-At-The-Rio-Olympics.
Conference, The Welcome. “Victoria Arlen — Restoring from Rock Bottom.” YouTube, YouTube, 19 July 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDO1_PGbzR0.
Miller, Korin. “How Victoria Arlen Went From Being Paralyzed to Competing on DWTS.” SELF, 2017, www.self.com/story/victoria-arlen-went-from-being-paralyzed-to-competing-on-dwts.
“Project Walk Boston: Created With a Mother’s Love — The Story of Victoria Arlen.” Cure Medical, 6 Feb. 2019, curemedical.com/project-walk-boston/.
Roche, Dan. “Paralympic Gold Medalist Victoria Arlen Shares Her Story.” CBS Boston, CBS Boston, 27 Feb. 2013, boston.cbslocal.com/2013/02/27/paralympic-gold-medalist-victoria-arlen-shares-her-story/.
“Transverse Myelitis Fact Sheet.” National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2018, www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/Patient-Caregiver-Education/Fact-Sheets/Transverse-Myelitis-Fact-Sheet.
Roenigk, Alyssa. “One Small Step — My 10-Year Journey from a Wheelchair to Walking.” ESPN, ESPN Internet Ventures, 2016, www.espn.com/espnw/voices/article/15743440/one-small-step-my-10-year-journey-wheelchair-walking.
Stars, Dancing With The. “Victoria and Val’s — Foxtrot — Dancing with the Stars.” YouTube, YouTube, 9 Oct. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=NakgPyq93JQ.
Tourjée, Diana. “Once Paralyzed, Victoria Arlen Emerged from a Coma to Become a Champion Athlete.” Vice, VICE, 26 Oct. 2016, www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3wda5/once-paralyzed-victoria-arlen-emerged-from-a-coma-to-become-a-champion-athlete.
US Census Bureau. “Census.gov.” Census.gov, www.census.gov/.
“USA Paralympics — Rio 2016 Medals, Athletes & News.” USA Paralympics — Rio 2016 Medals, Athletes & News, 2016, www.paralympic.org/rio-2016/usa.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emily Stern, a freshman from Maple Grove, Minn., seeks a job in the future as a physical therapist. Stern likes spending summer days at the lake, snuggling with her dog, Cali, and eating too much ice cream at Nelson’s Ice Cream shop.
WHAT I’VE LEARNED
Research takes time and it can be hard to find the credible sources you need to write a well written paper. The library is a great resource for research help. I should spend more time in the library.
Speaking in front of a class of 20 students is still scary. It’s okay to be nervous because public speaking is the number one fear in America. It’s doable if you prepare and pretend to have confidence.
Gladwell is way smarter and better at writing than I will ever be. He has some pretty cool hair and some even cooler ideas when it comes to success.
Group selfies are easier when you aren’t the one taking them. It’s great to take them in the library where people can stare at you while you take them. Group work is also much easier when combined with a nice cup of iced coffee.
Success means different things to different people and isn’t easily defined. Take advantage of your disadvantages. Dedicate time to what you are passionate about.
Naming dogs doesn’t mean calling your dog by their name so you can rub it’s belly. It’s telling the reading the who, what, when, where, and why and being specific and clear in your writing.
Introvert voices need to be heard. The US can tend to be extroverted in nature. We need introverts who are introspective and thoughtful to speak their truth and bring their opinions to the table.
Inquiry Seminar is fun and I learned a lot while completing the course. I should recommend this class to other students who haven’t taken their inquiry class yet.
Writing is great when you can tell a story. People are interested in hearing stories and not so interested in hearing facts and statistics. Draw people in by creating an enticing moment and then follow up with analysis and sources.
My hero has a powerful story of hope that was amazing to research. She continuously inspires me to think positively about my own life. Hearing Arlen share her story gives me the confidence to share mine as well. Having been diagnosed with transverse myelitis in 2017, I was left paralyzed from the waist down like Arlen. I can use my story of recovery like Arlen has used hers to inspire and encourage others.
I walked into Inquiry Seminar the first day of class and scanned the room for an open seat. The only open desk in sight was one that was pushed against the front brick wall of the small classroom. In silence, the class watched as I pushed the desk toward the rest of the desks in the classroom. With a red face, I sat down in my chair. Shortly after I took my seat, Joel calmly walked into the classroom and takes a seat in a desk a couple rows down. There was an open desk the entire time.
(Editors note: This paper was written as part of a GES160 Inquiry Seminar class at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn.)
