After becoming paralysed from the chest down after a car accident in Malaysia in 2005, Christina Lau was force to start from scratch and she has now changed her life to become a mouth artist and a table tennis player. She spoke briefly about the accident, about the car skidding in the heavy rain and her being a passenger in the back seat which got heavily impacted upon crashing. She was in ICU for 10 days and when she regained consciousness she had no memory of what happened. She was told she had spinal cord damage and would never be able to walk again. Her life had completely changed…

Having lost all her independence she was engulfed in a period of depression due to a loss of confidence and a loss of purpose. She also felt she was a huge burden on her friends and family. She had to learn everything again, it even took her somewhere between 6months to a year to learn how to sit up straight by herself. She also mentioned how the negative attitudes in Singapore towards disabled people held her back. She spoke about a period of time where she didn’t want to leave the house because of how people looked at her, she no longer “felt welcome” in Singapore. I think this is what I found most shocking about her story, how because of an accident she had no control over disabled her, she felt people had lost there respect for her.She said people thought she couldn’t do anything herself but she sought to “prove (she was) capable”. She couldn’t get a job as Singapore in general isn’t supportive toward disabled people trying to join the workplace, so instead she turned to her art and sports. She said both things ween’t easy but they helped build up her confidence and taught her to persevere.

I think the part of her talk that resonated with me most was when someone asked her “if she could go back now and stop the car accident would she?”. I thought she was going to mentioned how now she could spend more time with her family and that there was lots of positives to come out of the accident as these were points she had already mentioned; but instead she said she doesn’t waste her time thinking about the what might have been and instead focuses on the future.

Although I doubt many people will go through something as difficult as Christina Lau I think her message can be applied to everyone. We should all spend less time dwelling on mistakes, missed opportunities or regrets and instead try to find the positives to come out of the worse situations. Christina is a perfect example of Triumph of tragedy and I think her positive mindset and attitude is an example to others.

Life can be easy of difficult depending how you look at it.