Survival Saturday: You Haven’t Met Every Version of Yourself Yet

I think one of the strangest things we do as human beings is decide what we’re capable of based entirely on who we are right now. We look at ourselves in this exact moment, with the skills we currently have, the confidence we currently feel, and everything we currently understand about ourselves, and somehow decide this must be the complete inventory. I could never handle that. I wouldn’t know what to do. I’m not strong enough for something like that. We say those things with so much certainty, as though we’ve already met every version of ourselves we’re ever going to become. But life has a way of introducing us to parts of ourselves we didn’t know existed. Sometimes that happens gently through opportunities we choose, and sometimes life drops us into circumstances we absolutely did not ask for and leaves us standing there thinking, Okay…now what the hell am I supposed to do?

Ada Blackjack probably wouldn’t have been anyone’s first pick to survive alone in the Arctic. In 1921, she was a young Iñupiat woman living in Alaska, a mother struggling financially and desperately trying to provide for her son, who was sick and living in an orphanage because she couldn’t afford his care. When she heard about an Arctic expedition looking for an Alaska Native woman who could sew and cook for the crew, she took the job because she needed the money. She wasn’t an explorer or some celebrated adventurer looking for the next impossible thing to conquer. She wasn’t heading into the Arctic because she wanted to test herself or prove how tough she was. She was a mother trying to make enough money to bring her little boy home.

There is another part of Ada’s story that I think matters because it’s easy to rewrite people once we know how their stories end. Ada didn’t arrive as some secretly brilliant survivalist everyone had underestimated. She reportedly feared polar bears and didn’t have many of the wilderness survival skills people assumed she would have simply because she was Iñupiat. She was hired primarily to sew clothing for four young men who planned to live on Wrangel Island, a remote island north of Siberia, as part of an expedition organized by explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. The plan was to stay for about a year, and a ship was supposed to return with supplies and eventually bring them home. They arrived in September 1921 believing they understood what they were getting themselves into, which, if you’ve read enough Survival Saturday stories with me by now, should probably make all of us a little nervous.

The following summer, the resupply ship couldn’t reach them because of the ice. Food became increasingly scarce, one member of the expedition became seriously ill, and by early 1923 their situation had deteriorated enough that three of the men decided to cross the frozen sea toward Siberia looking for help. They disappeared and were never seen again. Ada remained behind with Lorne Knight, who was becoming sicker and increasingly unable to care for himself, which meant the woman who hadn’t been hired to lead the expedition, hunt for everyone, or save anybody suddenly found herself responsible for keeping two people alive in one of the harshest environments on Earth.

This is where I think we sometimes get survival stories wrong, because we tell them backward. Once we know someone survived, everything they did begins to look courageous. Their decisions seem heroic, their endurance seems almost superhuman, and their survival can start to feel inevitable because we’re reading the story from the safety of knowing how it ends. Ada didn’t have that luxury. She didn’t know there would eventually be a rescue ship. She didn’t know people would someday write about her or call her courageous. She was scared, isolated, desperately missing the son she’d gone there to provide for, and living beside a man who was getting sicker while the people who were supposed to know how to survive had vanished across the ice. She didn’t suddenly become fearless. She simply had things that needed to be done, and there was nobody else there to do them.

So she learned. She learned to trap animals and shoot a gun. She hunted for food, gathered wood, maintained the camp and cared for Knight as his health continued to decline. She learned enough about photography to document what was happening and figured out how to protect herself in an environment that had once terrified her. These weren’t skills she had arrived with, and I think that’s one of the most important parts of her story. Ada didn’t discover that she had secretly known how to do all of this the entire time. She learned because life changed the question from Can I do this? to What do I need to figure out today?

Knight died in June 1923, and Ada was left completely alone on Wrangel Island except for the expedition’s cat, Vic. There was no one there to reassure her that rescue was coming, no countdown telling her she only had thirty more days to survive, and no one waking up beside her in the morning saying, We’ve got this. She couldn’t know whether another ship would arrive next week, months from now, or ever. She only knew that she was still alive, which meant there was another day in front of her that needed to be lived. So she fed herself, maintained the camp, protected herself from polar bears, cared for Vic, kept learning and kept making enough decisions in the direction of survival that one day eventually became another.

Then, on August 19, 1923, nearly two years after she had first arrived on Wrangel Island, a rescue ship finally reached her. And when I think about Ada’s story, I keep coming back to the woman who stepped onto that island compared with the woman who eventually stepped off it, because technically they were the same person, but they also weren’t. Somewhere between I don’t know how to do this and there is nobody else here to do it, Ada discovered something about human capability that I think most of us don’t fully understand until life forces us to: we are unfinished.

We forget that all the time. We look at whatever is coming toward us—a divorce, a death, a career change, an empty nest, becoming a parent, losing a parent, starting over, walking away, beginning again—and immediately search our current selves for evidence that we’ll be able to handle it. When we can’t find that evidence, we assume it means we can’t do it. I’ve never done anything like this before. I don’t know how to live this life. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be now. Of course you don’t. How could you possibly already know how to be the person who gets through something you’ve never experienced before?

There are things I’ve survived in my own life that an earlier version of me would have sworn I couldn’t survive. There have been moments when I didn’t feel brave or resilient or particularly equipped for what was happening, and I certainly wasn’t standing there thinking about how much I was growing. Most of the time, I was just trying to make it through the day in front of me. Sometimes I did that well, sometimes I absolutely didn’t, and sometimes survival looked a lot messier than the version we like to tell afterward. But somewhere along the way, things changed. I learned things because I needed them. My perspective shifted because the old one couldn’t carry me anymore. Things I once believed would destroy me became things I eventually learned how to carry, not because I was somehow born knowing how, but because the version of me who could carry them was built while I was already doing it.

I don’t think that means we should romanticize suffering. I don’t believe everything happens for a reason, or that every terrible thing is secretly some gift we should eventually be grateful for. Some things are simply awful. Some losses don’t need silver linings, and some chapters of our lives aren’t blessings wearing clever disguises. We can acknowledge what human beings are capable of without pretending pain is necessary to become someone worthwhile. But I also think we underestimate ourselves when we assume the person standing here today is the only version of us we’ll have available when tomorrow gets hard.

The version of you who will face something five years from now doesn’t fully exist yet. That person will be shaped by thousands of ordinary experiences between here and there. They’ll know things you don’t know, have relationships you haven’t built, possess skills you haven’t needed, and understand parts of themselves you haven’t met. And even when something arrives tomorrow instead of five years from now, you’ll still learn inside it. You’ll ask for help. You’ll get things wrong. You’ll try again. You’ll adapt because human beings are incredibly good at adapting, even while complaining, crying, doubting ourselves and occasionally being a complete mess while we do it.

Ada didn’t need to know how to survive nearly two years in the Arctic when she first stepped onto Wrangel Island. She needed to learn what that particular day required of her, and then she needed to do it again the next day. That’s the part of her story I think translates into our ordinary lives, because most of our survival won’t involve polar bears, disappearing expedition members or Arctic winters. Ours is usually much quieter. It’s getting out of bed during the season when getting out of bed feels impossible. It’s making the phone call you’ve been avoiding, going to therapy, setting the boundary, sitting beside someone you love when you can’t fix what’s happening to them, learning how to live around an absence, walking into the first day of a life you never planned to have, or starting again at forty or fifty or seventy while wondering how everyone else seems to know what they’re doing.

Maybe that’s why asking ourselves, How am I possibly going to survive all of this? rarely helps. We’re asking today’s version of ourselves to explain exactly how we’re going to handle every part of a future we haven’t lived yet. That’s an impossible assignment. Maybe the better question is simply, What does today require of me? Not what will next month require. Not who will I need to become five years from now. Not how will I carry this forever. Just what is mine to do today, with the person I am and the resources I have right now?

Because you haven’t met every version of yourself yet. There are parts of you that haven’t had a reason to show up, skills you haven’t needed to learn, courage you haven’t needed to use, and ways of adapting you can’t possibly imagine from where you’re standing. You don’t need to become all of those versions right now, and you don’t need proof that you’ll be capable of handling every difficult thing that might someday happen. You just have to leave a little room for the possibility that the person you are today isn’t the end of your story.

Ada Blackjack walked onto an Arctic island believing other people knew how to survive there better than she did. Nearly two years later, she walked off having learned how to hunt, trap, protect herself, maintain a camp, care for another person, endure unimaginable isolation and keep herself alive without knowing whether anyone was coming for her. She didn’t begin the story as the woman who knew how to do those things. She became her somewhere along the way.

Maybe that’s true for us, too.

Reflection

Think about something you’ve already survived that an earlier version of you would have believed was impossible. Don’t just think about the event itself; think about who you were before it happened. What didn’t that version of you know yet? What did you have to learn along the way? What strengths appeared because you finally had a reason to use them? There may be more evidence of your ability to adapt behind you than you’ve ever stopped long enough to notice.

And if you’re standing in front of something right now that feels impossibly big, don’t demand that you know how to survive the entire thing today. Bring the question closer. What does today require of me? Do that, and then see who you are tomorrow. You may not know exactly who you’re becoming yet, and maybe you don’t need to. After all, you haven’t met every version of yourself yet.