ONE OF THE BIGGEST LIES WE TELL OURSELVES IN moments of crisis is a very simple sentence that’s easy to believe: “No one will understand.”
It doesn’t matter if you’re surrounded by people who know and care about you, or how deeply connected you are to your family, friends, and coworkers; that one little lie can creep into your mind and disconnect you from everyone who loves you just when you need them most. For some people, this sense of disconnect can become a full-blown mental illness; for others, it’s just a sense of estrangement they carry with them because they know something that no one else does.
It’s a difficult place to be, if for no other reason than it can sometimes feel like there’s no way out.
Once I realized I was trembling on the wire, things began to change for me. The corner I thought I’d already turned ended up curving longer and wider than I could’ve ever imagined, and the sense of shame and loneliness that came over me was intense. I didn’t have the option of literally hiding myself away, so I opted for spiritually hiding. Though I continued to pray and seek God the way I always had, I became distant from the people around me.
Fortunately, they did not become distant from me.
That’s the benefit of being part of a community—of having family and friends who know you. In my case, not only do they know me, but they intimately know the life of a performer as well. One of those people—in fact, the best of those people—is my wife, Erendira. She not only understood what I was going through but also knew the lens through which I was seeing it, and she knew my mind and heart. If there was anyone on the planet to whom I could turn for insight, it was her. And it still took me days to do so.
When I finally decided to talk to Erendira about what was going on, I discovered she had already noticed.
Before I could open my mouth, she confronted me, saying, “You’re shaking.”
“Yes,” I said, acknowledging the obvious and the uncomfortable.
“What’s going on with you? What’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. But I’m certainly not comfortable.” I paused. “And I don’t know that I can do this anymore.” There was an awkward silence. I had never said the word anymore.
Some people will tell you that admitting your doubts is helpful, but I wasn’t in that camp. I felt so defeated mentally. It was something I’d never experienced before, which only amplified the fear. I wish I could paint a compelling picture of how it felt—the sense of being overwhelmed that came with every unwelcome thought. It was like being trapped in a swarm of insects, and fighting each thought was exhausting. Nothing that I’d tried before was working; I was no longer able to just shut out the fear, and the nerves and uncertainty were now translating to the wire. In every way possible, I felt weak.
Erendira listened patiently. Growing up as a performer and in a circus family, she had a sense of what was going on. Both of her parents come from circus families—her mother’s in Australia, her father’s in Mexico. Erendira grew up learning stunts and feats, which is part of why we work well together—she knows the danger in what we do and isn’t put off by it. She doesn’t love the wire the way I do, so she performs other stunts that are just as dangerous. But she’ll tell you the teaching is the same: you stare down the fear; you don’t give in to it.
When you watch her, it’s easy to believe she’s fearless—something I know firsthand from her record-breaking 2017 iron-jaw hang 300 feet above Niagara Falls. She literally suspended herself by her teeth from the bottom metal hoop attached to the bottom of a helicopter that hovered over the falls. The record she broke was a 250-foot hang . . . performed by me.
As far as I knew, Erendira had never felt fear in her life. But when I started talking about what I was going through, she told me about a panic attack she had during one of our stunts. We were opening the season at Foxwoods with a wire act, and she began having difficulty breathing. For an asthmatic, being short of breath isn’t anything new—but what was happening that night felt different. Standing on the platform as the act began, she just blanked; she described it as feeling like blacking out, where she couldn’t hear the music or pay attention to what was going on around her. I was on the wire with her and had no idea; she was literally sitting on a bar that I was supporting with one other performer, and I couldn’t tell she was in distress.
She never talked about that night with me because she felt like it was hers to handle alone. We’re both believers, so we know that pride is a sin, but when you’re struggling on the wire, it’s not pride that keeps you quiet. It’s almost a protective instinct—the belief that if you talk about it to other performers, you’ll somehow infect them with your thoughts. It’s what I was dealing with in New Jersey—but it’s also why I eventually went to her, and it’s why she was able to understand.
“I just want you to be safe,” she said. “If you feel like you can’t do this, if that’s what you truly feel, I support you.”
And then she let me know how much she understood, how much she truly supported me.
She said, “Let’s cancel the contract.”
There was so much happening at once, so much I couldn’t control, so much I couldn’t make right, that the appeal of killing the deal was definitely there. If I canceled the contract, I wouldn’t have to worry about training people or what they did on the wire. Most of all, I wouldn’t have to worry about my shaking. But the appeal of covering up my struggles were outweighed by what I would lose by canceling: my income, my reputation, my sense of self. Giving in to my fear wouldn’t just cost me the wire; it would cost me something much, much greater: my integrity. It was a price I couldn’t pay.
I looked at Erendira and said, “No. Let me try to work through it more. Let me give it a few more days.”
She nodded. “You don’t think canceling is the right idea?”
“No. I think I can get through this. I don’t feel as though I’m going to fall; I’m just trembling, and it’s not good.”
After talking with Erendira, I felt a little bit better, but it didn’t last. A couple of days went by and rehearsals were okay, but I still wasn’t completely myself. Part of the reason was trauma, I’m sure, but the other part was the conditions for the New York routine. In my entire life, every time I’ve done the seven- or eight-person pyramid, I’ve never had a safety net. We just don’t use that stuff. My family has always taught that safety nets provide a false sense of security; my great-grandfather had a brother fall into a net, and he was still killed. While the rigging and technology have changed a lot over the years, the truth is that no matter what you do for safety’s sake, nothing is 100 percent guaranteed to work. Even the best gear doesn’t always keep you safe. My whole life that truth has been drilled into my mind, so much so that I’ve accepted it. Safety is on me, not the net.
By law, New York requires a safety system in place for any high-risk performances, and the circus we signed with wanted us to use an airbag as well. I had never trained or performed with an airbag before, but no matter how much I would’ve preferred to change that, it was one of the rules. Everyone wanted us to have some kind of safety mechanism, and it was with that safety mechanism that I experienced true fear on the wire.
Please understand: I’m not against safety. I prepare and train with safety in mind at all times—I’m constantly thinking about where I am, what I’m doing, and how it impacts the wire and the other performers. Those are all elements that I can and should work diligently to control because they have the most bearing on whether I stay safe. So when I say I felt true fear on the wire for the first time in New York, it had nothing to do with the quality of the safety; it had everything to do with how that safety rigging impacted me mentally, which was that it did nothing for me. It didn’t make me feel safe or protected—quite the opposite. Most people would think, Well, he’s got a safety net, so now he can relax! Everything’s good. But that just wasn’t the case. The extra equipment, the extra responsibility, and the change in routine only made things worse for me, and I struggled as a result. The net made me so much more aware of the risks, so I was focusing on the risks and not my skills and training. My shaking got worse, which compounded the shame I felt, which further spiraled my fear. I felt completely out of control, out of sorts, and out of options.
A couple of days of repeatedly bad practices tipped the rest of the team off that something wasn’t right. Dieter, the teammate I had confronted in that argument, pulled me aside after practice and said, “Nik, what is going on with you?”
I avoided the question, asking, “What do you mean?”
“There’s something wrong,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but you need to snap out of it.”
He grabbed my shoulder and shook me as he spoke, almost as if he were trying to literally snap me out of the funk.
I just went back to my RV and sat there thinking. I remember asking myself out loud, “What is going on with me?”
It was another example of how alone I felt. Few things shake you to the core like someone else pointing out what you thought you were hiding. I knew that if Dieter was asking me what was wrong, the rest of the team was aware of it too. It undid me—I was supposed to be the leader, the one everyone else looked up to as an example. And yet I wasn’t projecting that sense of leadership; I wasn’t inspiring confidence in my team because I was struggling with confidence in myself. Not in my abilities, mind you—walking the wire is second nature to me, as much a part of me as my blood—but more in my confidence to overcome the unknown. If I was unsure on the wire, how could any of my team feel safe? It was a textbook leadership challenge.
I don’t remember his exact words, but what Dieter was saying to me was this: “You’re not who you’ve always been. We’ve always looked up to you. You’ve always been so inspirational, you’ve been the leader, and you’re not that person on or off the wire. There’s something wrong with you!”
Even his simple observation that something was wrong reverberated in my head and amplified my shame. I sat in my RV thinking not that something was wrong with me but that I was wrong.
That I was broken.
That I wasn’t capable of being fixed.
It was another confirmation that I had more going on than I even realized. I was trying to hold it together on the outside and act like everything was great, but the reality was that inside I was a mess. I wondered how I had gotten to that point. And I came to the realization that I was allowing thoughts of falling and thoughts of the accident to flood my mind whenever I was in the tent. I was worried about what happened to Lijana happening to someone else, or something like what happened to my great-grandfather happening to a member of my team.
Then I realized I was also worried about what happened to me happening again.
Growing up, I believed two things: God was in control of everything, and I was in control of what I did. I was taught the faith part by my parents, and I was taught the second part by my community. My faith in God had always been unwavering—I’ve trusted him since I gave my life to Christ when I was three years old—and my trust in my abilities was something I’d never doubted. The fall in Sarasota was a storm, a trial that shook my faith as well as my confidence and forced me to reexamine both, to really look deeply at what I believed. It was a call to stop and assess my internal and external worlds in order to make sure they not only aligned but were founded in something solid. I was experiencing a spiritual battle as much as a mental one.
Suddenly, it all made sense. I believe that humanity has an enemy who is out to destroy every person on earth. His name is Satan, and he wants to separate us from God and from the life God designed each of us to live. The Bible calls Satan “a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). He’s crafty (Gen. 3:1) and deceptive (Rev. 12:9), a murderer and a liar (John 8:44). While he’s often popularized as a character in a red suit with a pitchfork and horns, the truth is much more terrifying: he’s a manipulator who can challenge our very understanding of the world and our place in it. One of his biggest weapons, one of his best strategies, is to separate us through a cloud of shame, to lead us into thinking that no one could understand us, and that the reason for that isolation is our broken, worthless selves.
I’m not trying to minimize the real mental illnesses regarding shame or isolation that people battle on a daily basis. There are God-gifted counselors who are capable of helping people who struggle with fear, anxiety, and shame, and there’s nothing wrong with making use of them. In fact, after the accident, our amazing church, Bayside Community Church, and Pastor Randy Bezet provided a counselor that each member of the team could visit if we wanted to talk about things and get help dealing with the fall. I was reluctant at first, but about two weeks after the accident, I said to myself, Okay, I’ll go. The psychologist was kind and polite, and after speaking with her and telling her my view on what happened (she’d already heard the story from several of the other members of the troupe), she said, “Well, you’re going to have to deal with it.”
I immediately replied, “Oh, I’ve dealt with it. I got back on the wire.”
She pressed in on the fact that this wasn’t enough—that I would need to really deal with the experience, but I didn’t catch her meaning. I went to one session with her for about forty-five minutes, and then that was it. I never went back.
As I think about it now, I understand that she was right; I did have to deal with it, and despite what I thought at the time, I wasn’t really addressing the deeper issue—mostly because I didn’t know what that deeper issue was. I was looking at things from a purely factual perspective: I fell off a wire, I saw some of my dearest friends injured from the fall, and I was shaken. The only way to overcome the fear that spiraled out of that was to obviously get back on the wire again and remind myself that I could handle it. Despite being a person of faith, I didn’t think about the supernatural perspective. I didn’t consider that maybe this was a moment of spiritual warfare, and that’s why the counseling route didn’t work for me. But once I was aware of that reality, I put all of my focus on that arena. I was determined to conquer the Enemy who wanted to conquer me.
Not every personal battle is a spiritual one. But my battle was—my struggles with allowing a devastating visualization of the accident to go through my mind over and over again was more than just trauma. Beating myself up for no reason was more than just embarrassment. I needed to see the truth about what I was facing because it was the only way I was going to make progress. I needed to remember the truth I’d come to at the hospital: that God is sovereign, which meant that no matter what I was going through, he would make a way forward for me. It didn’t mean everything was going to work out perfectly, but it did mean that things would work out for my good (Rom. 8:28). Once I remembered that God was in control of everything, I could turn my focus back to the second part of my belief: that I was in control of myself. I was in control of my thoughts, and I was in control of what I allowed to enter my mind, as well as what I allowed to come out of it.
It’s not the pathway that everyone can walk, but it’s the one God placed before me, which meant it was time for me to start practicing what I’d always preached. Sitting there in my RV, I knew I had to do two things in order to make progress—first and foremost, I had to surrender the fears to God, and then I had to go to war within myself against the anxiety and cast out all of those fears. For too long, I’d been allowing the fear to make itself legitimate; I never questioned it when it came into my mind, never measured it against reality. Standing on the wire, shaking, I didn’t stop and assess whether I was in any real danger—I just let the fear wash over me. I needed to go back to my training, which meant not allowing my fears to legitimize themselves.
That may sound a bit strange, so let me give you a little context. When I’m on the wire, I try to activate my faith at all times. I fully believe that I was made to do what I do, which means that when I’m walking on the wire, I’m pleasing God with every step. As a result, Satan would love nothing more than for me to not walk. While I have natural human responses to the danger in what I do—I’m a professional aerialist, but I’m not an idiot—I’ve found that the bigger battles are always in my mind. For instance, when I was walking over the Grand Canyon, there were forty-three-mile-an-hour wind gusts. My mind wanted to go crazy with fear because I was more than 1,500 feet up and out over the basin, far from either side, far from safety. But I countered that fear with the fact that I rehearsed with seventy-mile-an-hour winds; I’d literally trained for harsh gusts to assault me while I was over the canyon, so I was able to recenter myself on the truth that I was more than capable of safely making it across the wire. In fact, that is a perfect example of what I do—how I counter a negative thought with something positive that’s related directly to that negative thought. I defeat fear with faith and facts.
It’s why I train as hard and as specifically as I do. When I’m in the air, I need to be able to defeat the negative thoughts with the facts of my training. I don’t just prepare for walking a wire, because I’m doing something greater than that. I know that people are watching me who not only will be inspired by what I’m doing but also will be curious as to how I do it with such confidence and skill. I’ve met people after Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, and so many other performances who wanted to know my secret for staying so calm and focused. And I always get to tell them about how I train and whom I walk to honor. It’s one of the best things about what I do, and sitting in my RV, I knew in my heart I’d lost that.
Now I needed to get it back.
I needed to go back to basics, back to my training and my faith. Over the next days and weeks, every time I went into practice, I started thinking, What do I tell myself to reaffirm that I’m okay up here? Almost immediately, the options started flowing:
You’ve done this as much, if not more, than anyone in the world.
You’ve done it successfully.
You’ve probably done over a thousand seven-person pyramids with training and performances and had only one accident.
The odds are still on your side.
Those are the sorts of thoughts I used to convince myself that I was okay. It didn’t work right away, but I continued to do it. Whenever I began to visualize the accident, I would quickly visualize myself in the stands, watching the seven-person pyramid making it across and the audience being inspired, up on their feet cheering. Or I’d visualize myself standing on the far platform, the stunt complete, the team waving wildly to the crowd. I’ve found that visualizing what you want—really imagining the outcome you’re chasing with detail and clarity—is an amazing way to overcome negative thoughts and feelings. We’re visual learners, so it makes sense that a healthy picture in your mind can help you get a positive outcome.
It was a daily battle to think through that stuff, a mental discipline to keep the positive thoughts and truths ever present in my mind. As soon as the negative started to come, I’d cast it out, cast it out, cast it out—I’d practice my visualizations or review my training or remind myself that I was fully competent to complete the trick without a single error or misstep. It doesn’t sound like much, but once I started practicing that over and over and over again, I was eventually able to make progress. I wasn’t fully over the challenge—I would need another weapon in my arsenal, which I’ll write about in the next chapter—but I was on my way toward a healthier attitude on the wire.
Whatever your struggle, whatever your need, there is a solution available to you. Maybe it’s counseling; maybe it’s learning to fight fear with facts; maybe it’s learning to visualize the good outcome that you’re working so desperately to achieve. Maybe, as it was for me, it’s a wrestling of faith that will ultimately bring you peace. I don’t know what you’re facing, but I do know the world can overwhelm you, and I know there are probably days when you feel ashamed and alone. But you’re not—you’re surrounded by people who not only see you but know you and want the best for you. It can be difficult to see, but it doesn’t change the truth that you have support that can help you stand strong. It doesn’t change the truth that your life has a purpose and you’re meant to fulfill it. Today may feel hopeless, but there’s always hope. Work hard to make the best of today.
After all, making it one more day means making it one step closer to a better day.