How to Challenge Your Reality

Why we struggle to believe the truly extraordinary

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Shawn Cheshire and me on a super hot Sedona morning with Pepper.

“Life is stranger than fiction.”

As in, real-life events can be more unusual, bizarre, and unbelievable than anything an author could invent for a story.

Thanks to the book I wrote about Jo van Gogh and her extraordinary work in bringing Vincent van Gogh’s works back from the dead (only to be totally erased from history herself). . .well, let’s just say I have a spidey sense for noting when amazing accomplishments are being dissed.

Especially those earned against the odds.

Decide for yourself.

Meet Shawn Cheshire

I met a world-class athlete this past weekend named Shawn Cheshire and she is blind. She was in town to do Q&A following the showing of a documentary, Blind AF, about the demanding, inspiring athletic feats she’s accomplished as a blind athlete:

• Fastest Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim Crossing of the Grand Canyon by a Blind Hiker: In 2019 she completed a double crossing (rim-to-rim-to-rim) of the Grand Canyon, covering 45 miles with 22,000 feet of elevation change, in 24 hours and 15 minutes. This reportedly broke the previous blind man's record by almost four hours. It’s seven, steep miles down, each step like a descending stair, except in place of a stair there’s loose dirt, random rocks and ungroomed trail. The temperature approaches 100 degrees at the bottom. The 18-mile trek follows across the Canyon and leads up the other side of the so-called rim-to-rim hike. At that point, Shawn turns around and hikes back for it to be “rim-to-rim-to-rim.” Craziness.

• First Blind Person to Ride a Single Bike Across the United States (Pacific to Atlantic): In 2021, Shawn chose to ride her own single bike (not a tandem) across the United States from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. This is the epic 3,700-mile trek the documentary follows. It took her 60 days, making her the first blind person to achieve this feat on a single bike. She used a sighted guide with a speaker playing music on the back of their bike to follow. The close proximity of passing heavy semitrucks ignoring Shawn is terrifying.

• First Blind Person to Complete the Tour Divide Mountain Bike Race: In 2022, Shawn tackled the brutal Tour Divide, a 2,700-mile mountain bike race from Banff, Canada, to Antelope Wells, New Mexico, along the Continental Divide. She completed this incredibly challenging race, with over 400,000 feet of elevation change and through extreme weather conditions (snow, mud, hail, freezing and triple-digit temperatures), in 50 days. This marked another world record as the first blind person to ride their own single mountain bike to complete the Tour Divide race.

Unbelievably impressive, right?

For mildly athletic people like me—nuts!

And yet, I do believe her. So, why is she chased by whispers of fraud?

What Caused the Blindness

Shawn had normal eyesight until the age of 35. In 2009, while working as an EMT/paramedic, during a snowstorm, she slipped while treating a patient. The accident cracked her skull and damaged a cranial nerve. The traumatic brain injury led to the deterioration and eventual total loss of her vision.

But having been sighted for decades, she retains mannerisms of the sighted, like looking straight at people when in conversation. Her eyes aren’t injured.

If not for the seeing-eye dog and cane, there’s no obvious visual clues that Shawn can’t see.

Nor the effort it takes for her to appear that way.

For instance, unknown to the bystander are the steps she counts to go from one point to another. The systems she’s created to match clothes. The fine attunement to detail such as how she hears pizza sauce slide off a slice and plop onto her plate—and so she sops it up with a piece of bread—giving the appearance she can see it.

Never mind the months of vision rehabilitation training Shawn went through to relearn small actions—like using table utensils flawlessly—that sighted people do unconsciously.

The documentary shares how Shawn underwent painful sight testing when allegations were made against her to challenge her athletic feats. The exams confirmed her total blindness.

Fact, not fiction.

Being Open to Boundless Capabilities

Who knows why she’s doubted for what lands in the mixed bag of “outlandish?”

It’s all about your reality. From my book, Saving Vincent’s, world: Societal gender expectations (women have no head for the art dealing business), assumptions internalized from childhood (women can’t handle stress and should take to their beds), and reactions to another’s attitude (Vincent van Gogh’s personality was erratic and off-putting so his art couldn’t have been any good), to name a few.

All examples taken from early twentieth century, but still around today.

Real life often presents accomplishments and resilience that are far more extraordinary and unbelievable than anything that could be imagined in fiction. My personal experience with Jo van Gogh, whose profound impact was erased from history (I believe) because it defied societal expectations, serves as a powerful testament to this idea.

Shawn’s astonishing achievements vividly reinforce it.

When an individual's accomplishments are so far beyond common experience, particularly when those individuals don't conform to visible markers of their challenges (like Shawn's remaining sighted mannerisms), they can face unjust skepticism and accusations of fraud. This disbelief doesn't stem from a lack of evidence but from a cognitive bias; it's easier to dismiss the extraordinary as fabricated than to expand our understanding of human potential.

The "outlandish" is not inherent in the accomplishment itself, but in the gap between the truth and the observer's limited "reality."

(It was “impossible” for the human body to run a sub-4-minute mile until Roger Bannister did it in 1954. Now it’s no longer outlandish.)

I love how Shawn’s story is leading me to question my own filters of belief and to be open to the boundless capabilities of individuals, even when their achievements seem too extraordinary to be true.

Opens up possibility, doesn’t it?

Life can be better than fiction!

Warmly,

P.S. This past March, Shawn completed the annual Bataan Memorial Death March held at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, which commemorates the soldiers that defended the Philippine islands in WWII. In 2025, 5,867 participants registered, including many military personnel and civilians, to complete either a full marathon distance (26.2 miles) or a shorter 14-mile course. Shawn entered the "heavy" division, where she was required to carry a minimum of a 35-pound pack throughout the marathon race, often running in sand. She was the only blind runner in the race.

My book

Saving Vincent, A Novel of Jo van Gogh, is about the woman that would not let Van Gogh die twice. This biographical historical novel is based on a true story.

In the early twentieth century, a timid widow—and sister-in-law of the famed painter—Jo van Gogh takes on the male-dominated art elite to prove that the hundreds of worthless paintings she inherited are world-class in order to ensure her young son will have an inheritance.

Buy Here

Book Recommendations: Disrupting What You Thought You Knew

Order on Tara Westover's website

Educated

Up and Out

Living proof of the indomitable self – I’m so grateful Tara Westover wrote this beautiful memoir, Educated. This true story is about her strict upbringing by doomsday parents who eschewed formal education, the medical establishment and anything else that smelled like “government.” The reader is given an inside view on how their family survived, how her parents rationalized their estrangement for the external world, and what her upbringing was like. What’s amazing is how she was able to move forward and out of that world. Her intelligence in teaching herself earned sufficient ACT scores to go to college without graduating from high school. She went on to advance her education, including earning a PhD from Cambridge. The most important journey, though, was how she fought for herself. Eventually, she could separate herself from the childhood doctrine she no longer believed in. When pushed to deny traumatic events of abuse, she ultimately stood by what she knew was true. Her story of standing up for herself—with all of its tenacity and painful difficulty—is inspiring.

Order Viola Davis' book on Bookshop.org

Finding Me

Raw, beautiful journey to reclaim worth

Unvarnished, bald, unapologetic, brilliant – I found Viola Davis’ memoir, Finding Me, thoroughly wonderful. Curious to hear Viola’s narration, I read her story via audiobook. The Grammy-Award-winning narration is fantastic. And the journey–out of piss-reeking poverty and gnawing hunger in childhood–Viola’s reading is gut-wrenching. Imprinted so young with the conviction that she was nobody, worthless, not good enough, her journey to reclaim and come to terms and heal her experience is raw and beautiful. I’m inspired and grateful she’s literally shared her voice.