Jim Stovall

  b. 1959 | American entrepreneur

At The Bottom

— 1988

And I realized, that's it, I have now reached the bottom of this.

Jim Stovall had withdrawn completely from the rest of the world.  Day after day, he sat in the smallest room in his house, ignoring his wife and refusing to speak with anyone.  A former national champion and Olympic-caliber weightlifter, Stovall had married and settled into a comfortable life as an investment broker in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  The only glitch in his life was that he was slowly losing his eyesight.  Diagnosed with macular degeneration as a teenager, Stovall chose to ignore the progress of the disease as best he could, even when he could no longer read for himself.  In fact, he met his future wife, Crystal, when they were both in college at Oral Roberts University; Crystal volunteered as a reader for the visually impaired, and she was assigned to Stovall one day.  As his career got underway, Crystal continued to help her husband with his work, going so far as to join him in the office each day as his assistant.  But when the darkness came at last when Jim was 29, he was unable to cope.  “I remember waking up one morning,” Stovall explains, “and I stepped into the bathroom and turned on the bright light and looked in the mirror, and I couldn’t see anything … the bright light, the mirror, nothing. And I realized, that’s it, I have now reached the bottom of this. And I actually went into this little 9 x 12 room at the back of my house. And I really fully intended never to walk out of that little room again.”