AFTER I TALKED WITH WINSTON, I MADE THE LONG drive back to the fairgrounds. I called Erendira, and she advised me to call the other members of the troupe and ask them to meet with me when I returned. I made those calls as I drove, and by the time I got back, the entire team was waiting for me. There were some skeptical looks on their faces, along with a lot of hurt. Truthfully, we hadn’t been getting along well as a team, and my outburst only made that fact all the more obvious. We went out to the middle of the fairgrounds and sat down in a field to talk.
I looked each person in the eyes and drew up the courage to say, “Guys, I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
There were a few nods of understanding, so I continued.
“I’m going through something mentally, and I have no right to treat you the way that I did.”
I looked at Dieter when I spoke, since he had been the one who took the brunt of my frustrated outburst. Dieter was staring at me, not unkindly but almost invitingly. And it was then that I broke down.
The stress and trauma of life since the accident came spilling out of me in a way that was different for me. I’m a very transparent person; I’ve nothing to hide, and I wear my heart on my sleeve. But I’m also a very reserved person. I’m not prone to dumping my emotional baggage on other people because I’m usually the person who helps others carry the load. It can cause problems at times, but it’s a side of my personality that developed as I acquired the discipline necessary to perform on the wire.
As I’ve mentioned, I was good at compartmentalizing my feelings because there’s no room on the wire for baggage—you have to be clearheaded and focused. Even if I got into an argument with my wife right before a performance, we would leave that argument on the ground, never bring it onto the wire. But I was struggling with compartmentalizing as a response to the accident, and that came to the surface in the middle of that fairground. I told everyone how sorry I was, how I needed their support and help, and how together we would get through this.
It was a remarkable moment. I’m the kind of person who immediately forgives when someone does something to me. I don’t hold on to grudges or any kind of negativity because that becomes one more emotion that has to be compartmentalized. There’s only so much of that I can take, so I choose to forgive quickly and keep things rolling. Because of that, I get embarrassed when I’m the one who needs to be forgiven. It’s a shame thing—a mixture of guilt for my actions and confusion over what drove me to behave that way. Sitting there with my team, I was feeling all of this—embarrassment, shame, guilt, confusion, fear—and I couldn’t see a way forward. Even as I told them we could get through it together—which I genuinely believed—I had no idea how that would even be possible.
Emotionally undone before my team, I felt the weight of Winston’s words to me. I hadn’t dealt with the accident at all. I’d been numb for months, and now, for better or worse, everything I’d been burying was out and alive and in front of me.
The question was, what would I do with it?
I want to take you back for a moment to the days after the accident, because that’s where the problems really began. I want to dissect those days so you can understand how easy it was for me to simply bury everything—but I also want you to see how so many people choose to do the same. As human beings we have a limit on our abilities to respond to traumatic events. At some point, if we don’t stop to deal with what we’re experiencing, we slip into the numbness that derails us down the road. It’s what psychologists call depersonalization-derealization disorder, and while it’s often brought about by substance abuse, it’s also a common response to severe or intense distress.1
I can’t say that I was experiencing depersonalization-derealization disorder, but I can say that I was under a serious amount of stress, not only from the accident itself but also from the way I had to respond to it. With my team scattered around different hospitals, there was a feeling of constant chaos—no one was where they should be, and I was limited in my ability to be everywhere at once. Further complicating matters was the attention being paid to Lijana’s condition and the status of the other injured members of the troupe. And when I say attention, I mean it—helicopters hovering over the hospitals, news crews parked outside the emergency room doors, trauma surgeons walking out to address the cameras and give updates on everyone’s conditions.
I remember being at the hospital when Winston called me.
“Everybody wants to talk to you,” he said.
“I know.”
“You should probably talk to them.”
“I know.”
There was a pause.
“You know, you could just lie low and let me deal with it.”
I took a deep breath. Letting my manager face the fires has never been my style, but it was tempting at that moment. Lying low was attractive to me, but it’s not how I work. In my career, I’ve always faced the music, good or bad, and running away after the worst possible thing happened felt like the wrong move.
“No,” I said. “That’s not how I do things. I think I should talk to the media.”
“Okay,” Winston said. “We’ll figure it out.”
Kerry Sanders, a journalist from NBC, ended up flying into Sarasota. I first met him in 2008 during an appearance on Today, and we became friends off-air. Winston had Kerry’s crew come to the lobby of Lijana’s hospital, and we set up the interview there. He was the only person I spoke to the day of the accident, and the interview ended up going on NBC Nightly News and then aired again the next morning on Today. Once I talked with Kerry, everyone else wanted to hear from me as well. The requests poured in, and my publicist began to campaign for a press conference.
Mind you, my sister was still in unknown territory; the doctors weren’t sure at all how she would respond. Meanwhile, I was being squeezed to come out and talk to the world about our fall and what it meant. I’d barely had time to process what had happened, much less anything else, but the pressure was on.
It got so intense that I called my pastors in Sarasota, Randy Bezet and Burnard Scott, and asked them to meet me at my RV, which served as my on-site greenroom and dressing room. Because it was right behind the tent where the accident happened, it was easy for us to slip away to meet together and pray. Early in the morning, they arrived and we prayed for Lijana, Andrew, Alec, Zeb, and Rietta, and we asked God to give me the wisdom to stand up and speak out. There was a quiet knock on the door from my publicist, and I knew it was time.
Forty-eight hours after we fell from the wire, I walked with my publicist back into the tent where the accident happened. There was still a mess on the floor—stains from where people had bled and where others had tried to clean up. A crowd of reporters were gathered with thirty or forty cameras and lights and microphones, and I had to walk right over those stains to get to them. It was a surreal moment. It was honestly the hardest thing in the world for me to do because I had to pass over the spots where people dear to me had lain injured and talk to reporters as if everything was okay. And as I was walking, I relived the accident—the slap of the balancing poles, a sudden gasp of air, the wire bouncing furiously, and me, hanging there, looking down at my sister and my family, helpless to reverse any of it.
By the time I reached the reporters, I had fully compartmentalized my feelings. I spoke with the press for almost an hour, answering question after question about what happened, who was hurt and how badly, what I was feeling, and what was next for my family. When it was over, I didn’t go back to my RV or find my wife for a moment alone—I went right back to the hospital, found a chair, and poured myself into it. My dad took a seat next to me, and we sat there in silence, him thinking about who knows what, and me thinking about never getting on a wire again.
I share all of that with you because I want you to know what happened: I didn’t have space to process any of it. I didn’t have time to accept that the accident was real. I was moving so fast and doing so much that there was a dreamlike quality to the whole thing. Sure, I was sitting in a hospital waiting room as my sister fought for her life, but I was fine—she was the one fighting, not me. The accident happened to her, Rietta, and everyone else, not me. I was a survivor. I got away unscathed.
At least, that’s what I thought. The truth was that I didn’t get away unscathed; I just didn’t have an injury anyone could see. And because of that, I was expected to continue on like I always had. I was expected to walk the emotional tightrope of trauma by simply putting one foot in front of the other and choking back my fear and doubt. But often, physical injuries heal much more quickly than mental ones.
I often think back to when my great-grandfather fell in 1962 and how many of his family were killed or injured. He suffered a double hernia from the fall and was dealing with catastrophic loss but still snuck out of the hospital to go perform the next day—which is insane to some people but just the way things are when you’re a Wallenda. This is what makes us some of the best aerialists ever to perform; we are dependable and consistent.
If I’m being honest, it’s not just a Wallenda thing; it’s a circus thing. If you were to ask anyone who is a circus performer or grew up in that culture, they’d tell you that they are the hardest working, most reliable people you could ever meet. They don’t call in sick. They don’t show up late. They don’t phone it in—because it’s been ingrained in them for generations that the show matters more. It is both a blessing and a curse.
I’ve worked on days when I didn’t feel great. I’ve worked on days when I wanted to stay in bed—days when I was running a fever or had a cold so bad I could barely breathe. I’ve held the seven-person pyramid with a fractured ankle for weeks before seeing a doctor, fully aware that he wouldn’t have let me perform if I had seen him right away. I did this in order to fulfill a contract; the show must go on, and there’s no backup I can call. There is no safety net for me—not only literally but figuratively. If I don’t hit the wire, if I don’t make the show, then there’s no one behind me who can pick up the slack. And if I don’t perform, I don’t get paid, and my family doesn’t get to eat. While I’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that my circumstances aren’t the same as my ancestors’, I’m still a performer, which means I have to perform if I want to earn a living. This is why I’m so fastidious about my health. Everybody else in my life can get sick and take a day off, but when I’m being paid to give a speech from a high wire above 3,500 people, I can’t call the temp agency and ask them to send a replacement. These are the terms of my life.
I can articulate these things now, but I couldn’t then. Instead, I kept doing what I had always done: stick to the training that made my family and me successful. I can see now that it wasn’t helpful to me—it was putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. All I knew to do was keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, but all the while I was reliving the accident. It would go through my mind at random times, and I would recall various images. I would always try to block out the accident, not allow myself to dwell on it, because I knew it was a weed.
Negative thoughts are like weeds growing in your garden; if you don’t pull out the weed, it will just lead to more weeds popping up until they overwhelm what you’ve planted. It’s the same with negative thoughts. But in trying to fight off those thoughts, I kept pushing the accident and its effect on me further and further into my emotional basement until, finally, I exploded on my team in Sussex at the fairgrounds and found myself in the New Jersey pastureland wondering what was wrong.
It’s the double-edged sword of strong conviction—your strength can become a weakness when overused. The line between being reliable and myopic is thin; the distinction between being attentive to details and obsessive-compulsive is subtle. Before the accident, I wasn’t even aware there was a tipping point, but sitting there in the middle of the fairgrounds, confessing out loud that I was not doing as well as I thought, the reality of where I was emotionally hit me. I was broken, and I would need fixing, and it was not going to be as simple as it used to be. I could no longer ignore the truth about my life—that danger was present in every step—but I also knew I couldn’t give in to those fears.
That’s essentially where I left it with my team that evening. I admitted my brokenness, my uncertainty, and my need for healing. In being vulnerable with them, I opened the door for us to clear the air about other issues. We talked out the problems we’d been ignoring, and then we literally hugged and made up. The bond we’d been missing over the weeks of rehearsal was suddenly reborn in the middle of that field.
I’d love to tell you that I was reborn that evening, but that was far from the case. At our next rehearsal, I noticed the wire was shaking. We were in formation for the pyramid, everyone was in their places, and the wire was trembling under my feet. There’s always some small amount of movement in the line—that’s just physics—but this was far more pronounced, the kind of shaking that only happens when someone isn’t solid in their technique. Some of my teammates called it out immediately, but I didn’t say anything. I cataloged it for later because there was no way we would be able to perform the act with a teammate shaking the wire like that. I would sooner cancel the contract for the show than go out with someone who was putting the entire team at risk—and I don’t cancel contracts. Honestly, the shaking unnerved me, but I was determined to keep going.
But it happened again the next day. And then the next day. And the day after that. No matter how many times people called it out, the wire kept shaking, and it started to affect everything. Someone on the team was unsteady, and after a week or so of letting it slide, I made up my mind to address it. I was going to have to root out the person who was putting us all at risk. The next time we went up on the wire, I decided to stop everything the moment the wire vibrated in the slightest and identify the culprit who was putting us in danger.
We climbed to the platform and arranged ourselves in formation. I watched everyone like a hawk, keeping my eyes on their form, their footing, the way they moved the equipment. They looked steady enough, but I knew someone was working hard to hide the shakes. We got everyone up and into place when I felt the shaking again. I knew I had to say something, to confront the person creating the tremor, but I stopped short.
I realized the person shaking was me.
All of my training, all of my experience, all of my history were worthless in that moment. I was afraid—and I felt it all the way through my body. There was no compartment where I could stuff it anymore—it had taken root in my mental garden and was revealing itself in full force, choking out every other thought.
What I knew to do with that fear was no longer enough. I had to find a way to face it and defeat it without making it my focus.
Of course, I had no idea exactly how to do that.