OUR STORY: When Life Drops a Boulder

February 19th, 2016 started like any other day. For Schuyler Arakawa, a 23-year-old Yale graduate on a fellowship in Peru, it was supposed to be an adventure—a quick excursion to Colombia for white water rafting with friends. For me, Meridith Alexander, her mom back in Tampa, it was just another busy Friday afternoon.

Until 3:15 PM. That’s when I got the call.

The Day Everything Changed

That morning, Schuyler and a group of tourists had booked a white water rapids excursion. After navigating the first challenging stretch of river, they pulled into a grotto for a swim. Everyone climbed up to a ledge and started jumping into the water below—the kind of moment that makes you feel gloriously alive.

Somehow, those jumps loosened a boulder that had probably clung to that mountainside for millions of years.

Moments later, as Schuyler prepared to get back into her raft, that huge rock broke free and came crashing down—directly onto her. Her injuries were so catastrophic that medical precedent dating back thousands of years indicated that survival would take nothing short of a miracle.

30,000 Feet and a Choice

When I got that call in Tampa, my world fractured. Panic. Denial. Fear. Grief. Every nightmare a parent can imagine flooded through me in waves.

But somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico—sitting on a plane at 30,000 feet, hurtling toward a tiny hospital in Socorro, Colombia where my daughter lay fighting for her life—I realized something: I had a choice to make.

How much power would I give that boulder?

Would I become its second victim? Would I set Schuyler up for the miracle she desperately needed by showing up believing her death was inevitable? Or would I choose something else entirely?

I thought about all the other boulders I’d faced in my life—the metaphorical ones. Those experiences had driven me to study why some people face insurmountable challenges and emerge as bigger, bolder versions of themselves, while others get crushed. It always came down to one thing: their inner game.

I couldn’t control what was happening to Schuyler’s body in that Colombian hospital. But I could absolutely control my own mindset, my energy, my leadership.

So I made a promise to myself, surrounded by darkness and the hum of jet engines: Even if Schuyler doesn’t survive this, I will not let her legacy be that I spent the rest of my life as the mother of a child tragically killed by a boulder. I’m going to show up as a force to be reckoned with. Game on.

When You Decide, Life Responds

From that moment, it was like the universe heard me and said, “Okay, let’s see what you’ve got.”

Miracle upon miracle began to unfold. On February 22nd—just three days after the accident—we were able to airlift Schuyler to Miami. Over the next four months, I became the leader of Team Schuyler, writing daily posts that kept our community of friends, family, and eventually thousands of strangers focused not on tragedy, but on Schuyler at her most empowered.

I knew from studying the Law of Attraction (which I prefer to call the Law of “Attracting the Right Action” aka “Att’r’action”) that I needed to ignite an energy around the globe that expected miracles. If anyone could defy the odds, it would be Schuyler. Those posts eventually became my first book, The Sky is the Limit.

On May 11, 2016, Schuyler was released from the hospital. She had survived the unsurvivable.

The Part No One Warns You About

Of course, survival was just the beginning. Schuyler couldn’t walk. She could barely speak. She couldn’t be left alone for even a minute. I went from being a single mom and sole breadwinner to a full-time caregiver whose business had been all but destroyed by those four months at her bedside.

Schuyler now had a severe traumatic brain injury that left her without a sense of balance, lacking peripheral or long distance vision and with so many physical limitations that it seemed as if all of her big dreams would never be realized.

The next year and a half became the years when both Schuyler and I had to choose what we were going to make our current circumstances mean. Would we give this boulder the power to define who we both showed up being just because the outcome was uncertain?

Ten Years Later: This Is Where the Magic Expands

Today, a decade after the boulder, I’m still Schuyler’s primary caregiver. She’s made extraordinary progress—she was crowned Miss Wheelchair Florida 2025 and won both Ms. Congeniality and the Derrick Manning Jr. Award at Nationals. But we still don’t know if she’ll ever live fully independently or hold a traditional job due to challenges with vision, ataxia, and some cognitive differences.

Here’s the thing, though: our story doesn’t end with the poison apple moment. That’s where most people think the story concludes—tragedy strikes, someone survives, cue the inspirational music. But that’s not where the real magic lives.

The real magic is what we’ve built from the boulder.

Why We Do This

We don’t tell this story because it’s dramatic (though it is). We don’t share it because we want sympathy (although we LOVE your cheers, championing, hugs and heart emojis).

We share it because every single person has their own boulder—and most of us have been taught to let it crush us, define us, or shrink us.

We’re here to show another way. We’re here to prove that you can take the worst thing that ever happened to you and turn it into fuel for the most meaningful work of your life. We’re here to model what it looks like when you refuse to be the second victim of your own story.

Schuyler didn’t just survive that boulder. She’s thriving because of how we chose to meet it. And if we can do that, so can the kids reading our books, the leaders we coach, and the communities we serve.

That boulder was supposed to be the end of Schuyler’s story. Instead, it became the beginning of ours.