03/11/2025
He survived four plane crashes, two wars, and watched his closest friends die. Then he sat down at a typewriter with trembling hands—and wrote himself back to life.
Ernest Hemingway is remembered as one of literature's giants—a Nobel Prize winner, a master of sparse prose, a man who seemed fearless. But what most people don't know is that his greatest act of courage wasn't surviving war or hunting lions in Africa.
It was getting out of bed every single day when his mind was screaming at him to stop.
The breaking began early. In 1918, at just eighteen years old, Hemingway was serving as an ambulance driver in World War I when an Austrian mortar shell exploded near him. Shrapnel tore through his legs. He was carrying an injured Italian soldier at the time and refused to stop, dragging them both to safety before collapsing.
He spent months in a hospital in Milan, undergoing multiple surgeries. They pulled 227 pieces of shrapnel from his body. Some fragments would remain embedded in his flesh for the rest of his life—literal scars he carried every day.
But the invisible wounds went deeper.
He came home from the war different. Nightmares plagued him. Sudden sounds made him flinch. He couldn't sleep without a light on. Today, we'd call it PTSD. In 1919, they called it nothing—and expected him to just move on.
So he did what so many of us do: he kept going. He wrote.
But life kept adding weight. In 1928, his father—suffering from diabetes and financial ruin—took his own life with a Civil War pistol. Hemingway found out by telegram. He was twenty-nine years old.
Years later, he would write: "I'll probably go the same way."
The crashes came next. In 1954, while on safari in Africa, Hemingway survived two plane crashes in two consecutive days. The second crash was catastrophic—it ruptured his liver, spleen, and kidney, crushed vertebrae, and caused a severe concussion. International newspapers actually published his obituary. The world thought he was dead.
He read his own obituaries from a hospital bed.
The injuries never fully healed. He suffered chronic pain for the rest of his life. Headaches. Vision problems. Memory loss. His hands shook when he wrote—the one thing that had always saved him.
Still, he kept going.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature that same year, in 1954. But when it came time to accept it in Stockholm, he was too injured to travel. He sent a written speech instead, and in it, he wrote something hauntingly honest:
"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life... He does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day."
The loneliness was suffocating. Three of his closest friends—F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound—either died young or fell into madness. His marriages crumbled, one after another. The bullfights and safaris and larger-than-life adventures he became famous for? They were often him running from the quieter, darker truth: he was drowning.
And yet, through it all, he wrote. When his body failed him, he wrote. When his mind betrayed him, he wrote. When every reason to quit piled up like stones on his chest, he sat down at that typewriter—hands shaking, vision blurring—and he wrote.
He produced some of the most influential literature of the 20th century: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea. Stories about courage and loss and survival. About broken people doing the best they can.
He was writing about himself.
"The world breaks everyone," he wrote in A Farewell to Arms, "and afterward, some are strong at the broken places."
But here's the hard truth about Hemingway's story—the part that's uncomfortable but real:
He didn't win in the end.
In 1961, at age 61, suffering from depression, paranoia, and the cumulative weight of a lifetime of trauma, Ernest Hemingway took his own life.
And that's where so many inspirational posts would stop. That's where the narrative becomes "too dark" to share. But here's why his story still matters:
For forty-three years after that first war wound, Hemingway kept going. Through pain that would have destroyed most people, through losses that compounded year after year, through a mind that was actively working against him—he kept showing up. He kept creating. He kept trying.
That's not failure. That's heroism.
Because the point isn't that life guarantees a happy ending. The point is what we do in the middle—in the messy, exhausting, often invisible middle.
Hemingway showed us that resilience isn't about never breaking. It's about what you do with the broken pieces.
It's getting out of bed when everything hurts.
It's creating something meaningful even when you feel hollow.
It's showing up for one more day, even when you're not sure why.
And yes—sometimes it's also asking for help. It's recognizing when the weight is too much to carry alone. That's the lesson Hemingway couldn't fully embrace, the one we must learn from his story.
Mental health struggles don't make you weak. Trauma doesn't define your worth. And survival—even the messy, imperfect, barely-hanging-on kind—is a profound act of courage.
Hemingway once wrote: "Courage is grace under pressure."
But maybe real courage is simpler than that.
Maybe it's just this: waking up tomorrow and trying again.
Hemingway did that for over forty years. He left behind works that continue to move millions. He showed us what it looks like to keep creating even when you're falling apart.
And in his struggle—in his very real, very human struggle—he gave us permission to acknowledge our own.
So if you're reading this and you're tired, if you're broken, if you're barely holding on:
You're not alone.
And every day you choose to keep going—no matter how small that choice feels—is proof of your strength.
That's not just survival.
That's bravery.
{PS}
