Albert Espinosa was only 13 years old when he was diagnosed with osteosarcomathe most common type of bone cancer. He overcame three cancers in the ten years he lived between hospitals, where in his own words he did not lose a leg, but rather gained a stump, and he did not lose a lung, but rather learned that with half of what he had he could live.
Now, already in my forties He is a writer, playwright, screenwriter, actor and film director.He studied Industrial Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, but already during his time at the Higher Technical School of Industrial Engineers in Barcelona his passion began to emerge. passion for theatreIt was there that he joined the theatre group for which he would begin to write short plays that gave a glimpse of what his career as an artist would be. His first play, «Los Pelones», premiered in 1995, when Albert was only 21 years old, and inspired the script of his first film «Floor 4»which follows the lives of the group «Los Pelones» in the traumatology ward of a hospital.
The illness and the years he spent going back and forth between hospitals would end up impregnating most of his works, but they would also build the foundations of a optimistic philosophy of life which has taken him to the sets of numerous television programs, where he has been responsible for showing the most pleasant side of diseases.
Albert Espinosa: writer, screenwriter and film director
After his university years, Espinosa began writing scripts for various television programmes. In those years, between the late 90s and early 2000s, he appeared on numerous programmes on Televisió de Catalunya and La 2. However, it was not until 2003 that he experienced success by writing the script for «Planta 4ª», which was nominated in the category of best film at the Goya Awards.
With his plays, among which are titles such as «Idaho and Utah (lullabies for bad babies)» either «The big secret»has toured the largest and smallest theaters in Catalonia and Madrid. In 2007, Albert left scripts aside and made his debut as a film director with «Don't ask me to kiss you, because I will kiss you.»
He has also written ten books. Works such as «If you tell me to come, I'll leave everything… but tell me to come.» earned him a reputation as a writer that has led him to become one of the most widely read authors in the country. His latest work «If we were taught to lose, we would always win» He draws on one of those lessons he learned at the same time he was learning to walk for the second time: “When I was a teenager, before I tried on my first prosthetic leg, I was taught to fall before I was taught to walk. All of us kids without legs were told that if we lost our fear of falling, we would walk better. If you learn to fall, you learn to walk…»
They told all of us kids without legs that if we lost our fear of falling, we would walk better.
Albert Espinosa, on overcoming fears.
This philosophy so full of positivity can be seen in the plots of each and every one of his works. Perhaps, from a more traditional point of view, it can be considered «Red bracelets»the series that began on Catalan television and that captivated Steven Spielberg to the point of making an American adaptation of the series. However, the real success is not in the series, but in the learning behind the story of this group of young people who learn to live within the walls of the hospital, ravaged by the disease, and manage to be happy together.
A way of life that has helped millions of people
Although he is not a psychologist, lAlbert Espinosa's reflections on life, death and illness have helped millions of people to move forward who needed some reason or other to continue living. Through his words, novels and stories, Albert Espinosa convinces his readers that a happier world is possible.
In one of his last interviews —since the author is convinced that his death is imminent and has left the studios— he shared the emotional story of a girl who contacted him after one of his countless visits to El Hormiguero: «When I came three years ago I talked a lot about 'love your chaos, love your difference, love what you've been given in life' […] and A girl who had tried to commit suicide four times listened to us and after listening to you and me she loved her chaosloved her difference and is now one of the most prestigious doctors at a Boston hospital […] «I think it's the most wonderful thing and the most beautiful letter I've ever received in my life.»
A girl who had tried to commit suicide four times listened to us and after listening to you and me, she loved her chaos, she loved her difference and now she is one of the most prestigious doctors at a Boston hospital.
After losing a leg, a lung and part of his liver, Albert is clear: «To live is to learn to lose what you have won. And that is why he claims that he is not afraid of death, the idea of which has been with him ever since he was told as a teenager that he had only a 3% chance of surviving cancer: «For me, death is not sad, what is sad is not living intensely.»
To live is to learn to lose what you have won
Albert Espinosa, about life.
«They gave me 200 rounds of chemo, 150 X-rays, 300 CT scans… and my doctor told me: your 50th birthday will be someone else's 90th, things will fail you», he recounted in El Hormiguero, his penultimate interview. In the last one, which he gave to Eloi Vila on his programme «Al cotxe», he stated that he will die on 23 April 2023. And, although death does not scare him, he is terrified of the consequences that precede it. That is why it is not strange that, after fighting against illnesses and fighting for his life tooth and nail, he has spent years fighting for the legalisation of euthanasia: «Losing your abilities, not remembering… nobody needs that end if you know that you are not going to live. One day the importance of a dignified death will be understood..
What are Albert Espinosa's most important lessons?
Strange as it may seem, Albert Espinosa was taught by his great teacher that happiness does not exist. He refers to her as “his hospital mother” and describes her as a 92-year-old woman who took in all the children with cancer at the hospital and taught them to accept what they were going through. “She was a woman who said: There is no happiness, but there is being happy every day» And perhaps that is why Albert Espinosa has been so determined to bring happiness to the lives of the millions of people who have read his books, enjoyed his scripts or simply listened to him speak.
There is no such thing as happiness, but there is such a thing as being happy every day.
When he talks about her, Albert's eyes shine with the wisdom that his second mother left him as an inheritance. Others, the friends from the hospital that he lost as a teenager, when the other kids his age were just learning to live and he was preparing to die, left him a handful of lives that he had to live for them. Albert Espinosa has the character of a person who turned hospital rooms into a school where she would learn the lessons that have stayed with her throughout her life: “She made us feel proud of every loss and made us understand that if you grieve enough, every loss becomes a gain.”
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Albert Espinosa carries these experiences learned by heart and repeats them whenever he can. They are the simplest lessons that he learned in the midst of the most difficult moments and, instead of treasuring them, he has decided to give them to others. optimism and the humor The people with whom she shares the losses that filled her life fill auditoriums with laughter every time she speaks. She tells, while teaching others to laugh at her happiness, that after having her leg amputated she had the opportunity to bury it: «I can say that I have one foot in the cemetery.» […]but since I lost my left leg I am also the only one who can say that I always wake up on the right foot.
Thus, with the simplicity of someone who accepts death and while waiting for it lives life intensely, Albert has filled thousands of lives with that optimism that characterizes him. As for the key to his happiness, he assures that it is so because live according to the «hornbeam diem» and, faced with the possibility of dying, he lives in the moment: «When I was 15 and a half years old, my doctor told me that I had a 3% chance of living and he told me to go to Menorca to spend the last month of my life and I went to a beautiful hospital that they called 'The Hilton of Death' and there I learned that if you learn to die you learn to live«I was in that hospital with my parents and I knew I had thirty days left to live and that was where I found happiness.»
I went to a beautiful hospital called 'The Hilton of Death' and there I learned that if you learn to die, you learn to live.
In the accumulation of circumstances that have crowded his life, Albert Espinosa broke his hip at the age of 46. From that perspective, constant learninghe understood what the world was like from another perspective. It is precisely this perspective that he has tried to share in each of his projects, in an act of solidarity with all those who were not as lucky as him and, therefore, were unable to extract these lessons directly from experience.
Beyond his role as a writer, screenwriter, director or actor, Albert Espinosa has become over the years a example of overcoming. It is living proof that happiness exists, that it can be everywhere, but also that it can only be found when you strive to build it with each of your actions. It is the example of that all difficulties can be overcome with enough time, enough learning, and enough help.
In 2008, Albert Espinosa launched his book «The yellow world«. In it he claimed the yellows: «They are the new ladder of friendship, those people who are neither lovers nor friends, those people who cross your path and who with a single conversation can change it.» Over the years, he has amply demonstrated that he is also one of those yellows who, by changing lives, change the world.
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