Ali Truwit talks about her trauma at the Paralympics

Ali Truwit had been through so much. She narrowly survived a shark attack while snorkeling off the coast of the Turks and Caicos Islands in May 2023, shortly after graduating from Yale. The shark bit off her left foot and part of her leg, and Truwit angrily swam to a boat 200 feet away so a friend could put a tourniquet on her and stop the bleeding. The pain was unbearable. Truwit’s left leg had to be amputated below the knee.

But amidst all that trauma, an unexpected opportunity arose for the former NCAA swimmer to represent the United States at this summer’s Paralympics in Paris. Truwit, 24, made the team and was excited to cheer on her U.S. teammates at the La Defense Arena before her own swim meets began. The pool looked beautiful. The arena was packed with fans. The atmosphere was electric.

Then, as the races began, Truwit felt her chest tighten as she revealed this publicly for the first time. “I realized I was staring at a really big, black underwater camera,” Truwit says, referring to the device Olympic commentators use to capture the view beneath the surface of the pool. “And the camera moves underneath the swimmers, following them and chasing them as they compete in crystal clear, blue, shallow water. Even sitting in the stands, it evoked for me the exact conditions of a shark attack that I had been trying to survive.”

Tears immediately welled up in her eyes and she tried to hide the tears from her teammates. She sent her mother, a behavioral therapist, a text about what she had seen to begin the process of coping.

The next day, she had a practice session at the pool. Truwit saw the camera moving beneath her. “My whole body was shaking,” she says. “My goggles filled with tears.” She cried with her mother for several hours that night. Four night terrors woke her up as she tried to sleep. They were flashbacks that related to the details of her shark attack or similar situations.

The incident brought with it two very understandable sources of frustration. First, a feeling of now this? Truwit worked so hard to come to Paris as part of her healing process, only to be unexpectedly traumatized again. “I was frustrated with life,” Truwit says.

Second, she was a little mad at herself because her body didn’t seem to be listening to her mind. She knew the camera wouldn’t hurt her. But her muscles tensed up anyway. “My body’s involuntary reaction at that moment made me feel like I had lost all my energy,” she says. “It had been sucked out of me.”

The Paralympics bring enough pressure as it is. For Truwit, this additional level of difficulty threatened to ruin her entire experience and recovery from the seizure. But with the help of her mother and coach, Truwit was able to reorganize her thoughts and calm her body. She used some of the tools she had learned during rehab: breathing exercises and mindfulness.

At the Paralympics, she gave herself a mantra. “When I got back in the pool, I kept repeating, ‘I’m safe, I’m safe, I’m safe,'” she says. Truwit also made sure to look for her support group of around 60 friends and family members in the stands before her start.

“Usually when I go to a race I look nervous and don’t really smile or look at anyone,” Truwit says. “I remember taking a moment to look up and wave to the box and smile and really take that in and understand that no matter what was happening in the pool, that support was behind me.”

Another technique: sweet child therapy. “What takes me straight from tears to joy is that all of my cousins ​​have little babies,” Truwit says. “They send me photos and videos of their babies. And it’s impossible not to smile when you see that. Those videos and photos started pouring in, and I focused my energy on that and watched the videos and photos over and over again, just to make myself smile and seek joy and capture it in the midst of a stressful and really hard time.”

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And it all worked out. Truwit took home two silver medals, in the women’s 400 freestyle S10 and the 100 backstroke S10. (Para swimmers are divided into categories based on how severe their physical impairment affects their swimming, on a scale of 1 to 10; the higher the number, the less severe the impairment.) She set American records in both races.

Truwit doesn’t mind asking if the camera trauma cost her gold. “Because I’m in the Paralympics a year after a shark attack and an amputation, I was already thinking about winning gold, no matter what place I finished in the race,” she says. Overall, Truwit had a positive experience in Paris. After the race, she cheated on her gluten-free diet and tried the now-famous chocolate muffins in the village. “They were really great,” she says. “There’s a soft filling in the middle.” She smuggled about 10 muffins out of the village to bring to friends and her coach, who devoured one in two bites.

Tom Cruise called before her races to wish her luck. An unknown number appeared on her phone: “Please hold for Tom Cruise,” said the person on the other end of the line. “Those are my new five favorite words,” she says.

On the way back to Connecticut, Truwit, along with her parents and coach, stopped off in London to visit Cruise on the set of his latest film. Mission: Impossible film. “We were able to spend a lot of time talking about what he does to recover as an athlete,” she says. “It was the best day. It was another surreal moment where I thought, ‘Where am I?'”

She packed her silver medals in socks for the trip home. “I didn’t want them to jingle and get damaged,” Truwit says. They were still in socks on her kitchen counter during her interview with TIME. (The next day, she covered her medals instead with the two small red berets she’d ordered for her dogs. “We’ve gotten smarter,” she says.) She plans to take it easy for a few weeks. “I’m still healing,” Truwit says. She got her first running prosthetic and plans to learn to walk with one. In November, she’ll start a job in New York City with McKinsey & Company, the consulting giant.

Truwit did not speak about the incident on camera in Paris, planning to focus only on the good things at home. But now she is sharing the details because, she says, “I have realized that it is important to continue to talk as openly as possible about some of the difficult things on the road to recovery so that my story is as helpful, accessible and understandable to people as I hope it will be. Because the road is not always as bright and shiny as it seems.”

She wants to put into words the surprising lesson she learned in Paris. “I am stronger than I thought, and I think we are all stronger than we think,” Truwit says. “In the moments when you doubt yourself or your ability to get back up, you know you have it in you.”