Introduction: Before You Read This
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"It took a broken neck to fix my life."
I know. That sounds like a bumper sticker. Or the kind of thing someone says at a TED Talk while the audience nods and reaches for their phones to screenshot it.
But I mean it. Literally. A broken neck — C6-C7, severed spinal cord, July 4th, 2009 — was the best and worst thing that ever happened to me. And I've spent the years since then trying to figure out whether that's something to be proud of, or just something to be honest about.
This book is both.
Let me tell you where I'm writing this from, because it matters.
Before Covington, there was everything else.
I was born at Torrejon Air Force Base. Madrid, Spain. Military family. We moved eighteen times before I stopped counting. Five high schools. Different states, different friend groups, different lunch tables you have to earn your way into as the new kid — again. You learn fast how to read a room, how to make people laugh before they've decided what to think of you, how to be whoever you need to be until somewhere starts to feel like home.
Covington was the first place that stuck. That's not nothing.
I'm in Covington, Louisiana. For those who don't know, Covington is a small town on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain — the kind of place where the oak trees have been here longer than the arguments and the restaurants are worth the drive across the causeway. Everybody knows your business. The food is remarkable. The summers will absolutely try to kill you with humidity alone, and they'll succeed in killing your hair.
But here's what I didn't expect about Covington: it's quiet in the right way. Not dead-quiet. Not nothing-happening quiet. Just — there's space here. Space between things. Space to think. Space to stay.
After years of chasing whatever came next, I didn't know that "staying" was going to feel like the most radical thing I could do. That choosing a place — really choosing it, not just landing in it on orders — was going to feel different than every other place I'd lived. And it does. It feels different every morning.
I don't take it for granted. I know what not-staying felt like. I know what it feels like to never fully unpack the boxes because why bother, we'll just be moving again. Here, I unpacked the boxes. I bought furniture I actually like. I have a neighborhood, a regular coffee order, a parking spot that I have very specific opinions about. I have roots, for the first time in my life, at forty-one years old.
It took a broken neck to stay in one place long enough to mean it. I'll take it.
I live here with my fiancée Beka, my dog Delta, and a spinal cord stimulator I had implanted on Valentine's Day 2023 that changed my life more than I could've imagined.
I run a web development and AI agency. I have an online presence that occasionally makes people think I have my life together. I am in a wheelchair. I take approximately thirty-seven pills a day, which is its own chapter and honestly its own therapy. I have a standing Thursday night tradition with my dad that involves chicken tenders, a mystery cocktail, and a competition to come up with the most inappropriate name for said cocktail. Last week's winner was "Lick Her 43." The week before: "Floral Foreplay."
I'm telling you this because I want you to understand who's talking to you. Not the inspirational version. Not the TED Talk version. Just the guy, sitting here in Covington, trying to write an honest book about an honest life.
Here's what I'm not going to do: pretend this is a tidy story. Real life doesn't have tidy stories. Real life has scatter plots and scar tissue and 2 AM realizations that wake you up with their clarity and then evaporate by morning. Real life has women who made you question your sanity and dogs who gave you your soul back and spinal cord stimulators that changed everything and still didn't fix the thing that needed fixing most.
What I am going to do is tell you the truth. Or at least my version of it, which is the only version I've got.
And the truth is this: I spent years after my accident running. Not literally — that ship had obviously sailed. But metaphorically. I drove fast cars. I threw big parties. I dated complicated women. I kept moving, kept performing, kept being "Chase" at approximately 170 miles per hour, because if I slowed down I was going to have to sit with myself.
And I did not want to sit with myself.
Let me give you a specific example of what that looked like, because I don't want this to be abstract.
There was a period — maybe 2013, 2014 — where I had convinced myself I was "doing great." I had the adapted car. I had the social life. I had the answer to "how are you doing?" down to a science: confident, brief, redirect the conversation. I could walk into any room — roll into any room — and within twenty minutes make it feel like I ran the place. People loved me. I was fun. I was killing it.
I was also not sleeping. I was writing 3 AM texts that I deleted before I sent. I was sitting in the parking lot of a Walgreens once for forty-five minutes because I couldn't remember why I'd driven there, and also couldn't make myself go back inside wherever I'd come from, and the idea of just being nowhere for a minute felt like the only thing I could manage.
That's what "doing great" looked like up close.
I couldn't tell you that at the time. Partly because I didn't have the language for it. Partly because I had spent my whole life — Air Force brat, military family, new school every two years — learning that the performance of okayness is what kept the social machinery running. You don't slow down the line. You don't make yourself the problem. You smile and you adapt and you find the nearest lunch table and you sit down like you've always belonged there.
That skill saved me in a dozen different schools across four states. It nearly killed me in the decade after Oxford.
Because sitting with yourself means asking the questions you've been avoiding. It means looking at the gap between who you used to be and who you are now and not flinching at the size of it. It means grieving some things and accepting others and building something new out of the material you actually have instead of mourning the material you lost.
Hard stuff. Much harder than going fast.
"You don't appreciate something — usually — until it's gone. I'm here to talk to you about how to appreciate things before regret finds you."
That's the thesis. That's the whole book in one sentence.
I've had the luxury — if you can call it that — of losing almost everything physical. My legs. My hands. My grip on a shot glass, a steering wheel, a dog's leash. The version of me that could run into a pool without thinking twice about what was at the bottom.
That version of me is gone. I'm not getting him back. And I spent a long time being angry about that — not loudly, not in ways people could see, but quietly, in the way a fire burns in a basement. You can't smell it from upstairs. But it's going.
Here's what I know now that I didn't know then: the things I had, I had fully. I just didn't notice them. I had legs and I used them to run into a pool without looking. I had hands and I used them to hold a shot glass I don't remember. I had a body that worked and I treated it like a car you assume will always start.
Until it doesn't start.
The grief isn't just about what I lost. It's about how I didn't appreciate what I had before I lost it. That's the part that keeps me up some nights. Not "why did this happen to me." But "why didn't I slow down long enough to notice what I had?"
You can't go back. But you can start paying attention now, to the thing you still have, before you lose that too. That's the only direction this book goes.
What I didn't lose was my brain. My voice. My stubbornness. My truly excessive capacity for optimism, which everybody around me has called either a gift or a character flaw depending on the day and their relationship to my decisions.
And that's what this is: the record of what survives.
I want to say something about the title before you go further.
I Love You But Damn.
That's not just a cute phrase. It's a philosophy.
The "I love you" part is non-negotiable. The people in my life — family, friends, the women who came and went and left me smarter, the dog who somehow made herself indispensable — I love them without qualification. The world I inhabit — complicated, expensive, occasionally brutal, full of bad parking lots and worse Instagram influencers — I love it too. Because it's the only one I've got.
The "But Damn" part is the honest part. The acknowledgment that love doesn't protect you from anything. That the people you love most will sometimes disappoint you in ways that take your breath away. That life is genuinely, objectively difficult, and pretending otherwise isn't optimism — it's cowardice.
"I Love You But Damn" is what I thought when I woke up in the hospital and someone had to explain to me that my neck was broken and my spinal cord was compromised and that I was going to need to significantly rewrite my plans for the next several decades.
It's what I think when a relationship implodes.
It's what I think when my body decides today is a bad day and nobody consulted me.
It's what I think when I see a parking lot with twelve steps and no ramp, or a restaurant with tables too close together, or a world that was clearly designed by and for people who had never stopped to consider that some of us experience it from a different angle.
It's a way of holding both things at once: the love and the cost of the love. The life and the full price of the life.
I want to say something about Covington, because it matters to the story and because it doesn't get enough credit.
I've lived a lot of places. I've already told you that, and I'll tell you more about it later. But I've never lived anywhere the way I live here.
The Northshore. The oak trees. The way the air smells like river and coffee and something older than anything I can name. The neighbors who know your business and cook when you're sick. The roads that weren't built for wheelchairs but where people move over without being asked because that's just what you do here. It's small enough to have regulars and big enough to have something happen on a Saturday.
I came here for the first time after the injury, when my parents were looking for a house with enough room to set me up properly. And something happened when I crossed that bridge over the causeway and looked out at Lake Pontchartrain stretching flat in both directions.
It felt like a place someone had built to last. Not temporary. Not transitional. Not a base that would reassign itself in eighteen months.
I kept coming back. Then I didn't leave.
That's not romantic. That's just what happens when you've been looking for a place that holds and you finally find it.
Covington is where the second half of the story happens. Where the book gets written. Where Delta lived and ran and died under an eclipse. Where Beka is, right now, probably making coffee that's better than anything I'd manage on my own. Where my dad drives over on Thursday nights with a straight face and an absolutely terrible cocktail name ready to go.
Home isn't geography. I know that now. But if you need it to be somewhere, it's here.
"Disability is my canvas, experience is my medium, and my brain is the brush. Now why do I keep painting this damn smiley face?"
I wrote that in 2016. I was having a bad day. But it made me laugh. And I've kept painting it, because it turns out — the smiley face is real. I'm not faking it.
Or rather: I was faking it for a long time, until I stopped needing to. That's how it works. You fake it until it becomes real, and then one day you look up and realize you're not performing anymore. You're just living.
Amy Cuddy called it "fake it till you become it." She's a Harvard professor so probably she has a more rigorous framework for the thing I've been fumbling my way through for sixteen years. But the core idea is right. You don't arrive at your best self fully formed. You build toward it. You practice it. Sometimes you perform it before you feel it. And somewhere in that gap between performance and feeling, something real takes root.
I've mulled over countless insecurities only to realize I was living in a symphony of chaos, not recognizing the simplicity of pain. Pain is not the enemy. Pain is information. Fear is a dilemma you can solve. Temptation fades when you understand what you actually want.
I feel less complicated now, but more advanced. I know that sounds like a contradiction. It isn't.
One more thing before we start.
I know what some of you are waiting for. The inspiration. The part where I wrap it all up with a bow and tell you that suffering builds character and everything happens for a reason and if I can do it you can do it and believe in yourself and all of that.
That's not this book.
What I can tell you is this: I'm still here. I'm still going. I have a fiancée who loves me and a dog who is the best dog that has ever existed and a Thursday night tradition that is genuinely one of the highlights of my week, and I built a business, and I'm writing a book, and on most days I wake up and I'm glad I did.
That's not nothing. In fact, from certain angles, it's everything.
I'm not a doctor. I'm not a therapist. I'm not even particularly qualified to write a book, except that I've been living one for sixteen years and at some point the responsibility of that becomes clear.
The responsibility goes like this: if you survive, you say so. If you learn something, you share it. If you can make someone laugh while telling them a hard truth, you've done something worth doing.
I wrote this for the people who are mid-fall and wondering if they'll land. I wrote it for the people who landed already and are still trying to figure out what just happened. I wrote it for anyone who has ever loved something — a person, a body, a version of themselves — and then had to figure out what comes after.
I wrote it because I have a responsibility having survived all of this, and that responsibility is to not shut up.
"I came here to make the walls tremble and shake down the trees."
Let's begin.