Chapter 3: I Love You But Double Damn
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If you want to understand why I handled breaking my neck the way I did, you have to look at the twenty years before I hit the water.
I was born in Madrid. Before I could form a coherent sentence, I'd lived in Monterey and Norway. By the time I was worrying about prom, I'd lived in Las Vegas, Alabama, Virginia, New Mexico, and Hawaii.
I am an Air Force brat. A Third Culture Kid.
Two summers before the accident — that's 2007 — I was working on a crab boat. That is not a metaphor. An actual commercial fishing boat. Hauling crab out of cold water on a schedule that cared nothing about what I wanted.
Twenty-eight days at sea. That's how long the stretch was.
I was twenty-two years old and I had never been so completely out of my element in my life. And I grew up military, which means I grew up in environments that were constantly not my element, so that's saying something.
The boat had its own rhythms, its own language, its own social hierarchy — like every new school I'd ever walked into, except that instead of a cafeteria you had a galley that smelled like diesel and fish, and instead of a bell you had the weather deciding things for you. You didn't leave because the weather turned bad. You adapted. You found your footing on a deck that wouldn't stop moving.
I missed land every single day out there. Every single day. Not just abstractly — I would catalog specific things: a cold beer that wasn't rationed, the ability to drive somewhere, the weight of ground under my feet that wasn't shifting. I wrote about it. Pages of what I'd do when I got back. Who I'd call. Where I'd go. Parties, friends, road trips, girls, all the parts of life that felt very far away and very worth returning to.
I grew a beard out there because shaving on a rocking boat is a particularly bad idea, and by the time I came back to shore I barely recognized myself in mirrors. Which felt symbolic, except I was twenty-two and didn't think in symbols yet.
What I did think was: my body is a tool. A machine. I was sore in ways I'd never been sore — shoulders from hauling gear, hands from the ropes, back from the motion of the boat over days and days. But the machine kept running. I pushed it and it answered. That's how bodies work when you're twenty-two and everything is still theoretical.
Two years later, I'd push my body in a different direction and it wouldn't answer. The lesson was in there somewhere, but I didn't know yet that I was being set up to receive it.
Look at the photos from those years. The ones from before. There is a guy in almost every shot who is grinning like he just got away with something. Rugby fields. Tailgates. Bars in Oxford. Rafting rivers. The energy in all of it is the same: "hold my beer." Not reckless, exactly. Just… limitless. A guy who genuinely believed nothing bad was going to happen to him because nothing bad had happened yet.
That guy dove into a pool and I took his place.
The Ole Miss years were everything I wanted them to be. I'd found my people — the crew you find in your twenties that feels like finally, like here, like these are the ones. The rugby team. The bar crowd. The social fabric of Oxford, Mississippi, which if you haven't been is a town that has organized its entire identity around the university and the Rebels and the Square and the bars and the tailgates, and once you're inside it, it's genuinely hard to imagine wanting to be anywhere else.
I was studying. I had plans — loose ones, the kind you have when you're twenty-four and the horizon is wide open and the future is more concept than schedule. There was a meeting in Manhattan on the horizon, the kind of professional inflection point that you schedule and think about and start mentally preparing for. The thread of a next chapter, pulling forward.
The summer before my accident, I had ten different futures I was auditioning. I had options. I had time. I had a body that worked and a city that fit and a life that was building toward something.
Then I dove.
People ask, "Where are you from?" and I usually say Louisiana because it's where I pay taxes, or Ole Miss because it's where I found my people. But the real answer? I'm from the U-Haul. I'm from the "New Student Orientation." I'm from the art of walking into a cafeteria where you know zero people and figuring out the social hierarchy in thirty seconds flat.
Moving every two years teaches you a specific set of skills. You learn to be a chameleon. In Norway, you're stoic. In Alabama, you say "Sir" and "Ma'am." In Hawaii, you slow down. In New Mexico, you watch your back.
You learn that attachments are temporary. Friends are seasonal. Houses are just structures you sleep in until the next orders come down.
You also learn the philosophy of the "Double Damn."
The "Damn" is the order to move. We're leaving. Pack your shit. Say goodbye to the girl you just started dating. Damn.
The "Love" is what happens when you land. You find a new crew. You discover you like green chile cheeseburgers. You realize the desert sunsets are actually kind of beautiful. You fall in love with the new place.
And then the "Double Damn" hits. Pack it up again. We're moving to Montgomery.
This cycle — Crash, Rebuild, Thrive, Crash Again — was my operating system. I thought I was an expert at starting over. I thought I had a PhD in adaptation.
My dad, Rich Treadway, gave me the code for this. "Life's not fair, it's Real," he'd say. He wasn't being cruel; he was being an Air Force officer. Fairness is a civilian concept. Reality is the mission. General Van Alstyne drilled another one into me: "Hope is NOT a method."
You don't hope the move goes well. You execute the move.
So, when I woke up in The Med, paralyzed, staring at the ceiling tiles, my first instinct wasn't "Why me?" My first instinct was, "Okay, we moved again. New base. New rules. What's the mission?"
I treated Quadriplegia like a deployment.
Hostile territory? Check. Language barrier? (Medical jargon). Check. New social hierarchy? (Nurses run the show, doctors drop the bombs). Check.
I thought, "I've got this. I've been starting over since Madrid. I'll figure out the locals, learn the customs, and thrive."
But this wasn't a move. This wasn't a "Double Damn." This was a nuking of the map.
In the Air Force life, you change your location. You change your context. But you stay the same. The Chase who landed in Honolulu was the same Chase who left Alamogordo, just with a better tan.
This time, the location hadn't changed. The world was still there. I had changed. The vehicle I used to navigate the world — my body, my swagger, my physical presence — had been totaled.
I remember my first full year of high school at Montgomery Catholic. It came after a period of "moving chaos" — that blur where you don't even unpack the boxes. I walked into that school with the confidence of a kid who knows he can reinvent himself. Who do I want to be this time? The jock? The class clown? The studious guy?
I had options.
Lying in that hospital bed, I realized I had run out of options. I couldn't reinvent myself as the "guy who walks." I couldn't charm my way out of a severed spinal cord.
The "Double Damn" of paralysis isn't the injury itself. The injury is just the first Damn.
The Double Damn is realizing that all your training, all your adaptability, all your "life is real" philosophy, is useless if you can't get out of bed.
Or so I thought.
It took me a long time to realize that the Air Force life did save me. It didn't save my legs. It saved my mind.
And I mean this viscerally — not as a nice thing to say, but as a fact about how wiring works. The training my dad gave me, not in briefings or lectures but in the way he lived, the way he moved through a problem, the way he never once treated a hard situation as something other than something to be solved — that was inside me already. It was structural. It was how I processed.
He flew F-117 Nighthawks. Stealth jets that nobody could see coming. He flew F-16 Fighting Falcons, which are machines built entirely around the idea that you are faster and more capable than whatever is coming at you. His whole career was about going into hostile airspace and not only surviving it but executing the mission. You don't do that by panicking. You do it by preparation, and adaptability, and the absolute refusal to let your circumstances write the outcome.
I was not conscious of having absorbed any of this when I was twelve years old watching him leave for another deployment. But it was in there.
When I woke up in The Med and the neurologist sat down and explained to me, carefully, exactly what C6-C7 meant — what I'd lost, what I'd likely never have back, what the realistic ceiling of my recovery might look like — I listened. I asked questions. I processed the information.
I did not panic.
Not because I wasn't scared. I was terrified. Not because I wasn't in grief. I was drowning in it, quietly, in the parts of the night that the nurses couldn't see. But the panic part? The panic had been trained out of me by a man who understood that panic is just energy that hasn't found a direction yet.
The Air Force also taught me about "Home." Which isn't a place — I'd proven that by living in eleven states and two countries before I was twenty-five. Home is a state of mind. It's a set of people, a way of operating, a relationship to wherever you've landed. That's portable. That travels with you.
And it turns out — mobility optional.
The "Normal" thing — that took longer to figure out. I wanted normal for years after the accident. I wanted to get back to something recognizable. I kept trying to find the version of my life that looked like the version before.
And then one day I stopped looking for it.
Not because I accepted defeat. Because I finally understood that "Normal is just a setting on a dryer" isn't a bumper sticker — it's a technical truth. There is no standard baseline. There is only what you build, where you are, with what you have.
My dad understood this. He went from base to base and built a home at each one and didn't spend time mourning the base before. That's not stoicism. That's efficiency. That's a man who understood that energy is finite and mourning what can't be changed is a terrible return on investment.
I thought I was an expert at starting over.
Turns out I hadn't even started yet.
Here's a question I've sat with for a long time, and I still don't have a clean answer to it:
Why do I keep attracting the same kind of relationship?
Not the same person. The specifics vary — different names, different faces, different origin stories. But the pattern keeps showing up. The early rush, the feeling of "finally," the moment somewhere around month three where something shifts and I realize the math is off and I'm carrying more than my share of the weight.
I've wondered whether it's me. It probably is, at least partly. But the specific part I keep coming back to is this:
I don't respond negatively to people I care about. I hold. I absorb. I give the benefit of the doubt for longer than is probably reasonable, because there's a part of me that knows — at a cellular level — how difficult it must be to be with someone with a disability. I can't fully imagine it. But I can imagine part of it, and that partial imagination makes me patient in ways that I sometimes shouldn't be.
I hold out. I stay steady. I respect the bad days. I give room for the emotional weather.
And then, eventually — after the holding and the absorbing and the benefit-of-the-doubt — I'll lose my temper. Not often. Not physically, never physically. But the valve blows. And when it does, I feel weirdly validated, because I know I waited. I know I tried. I know the response wasn't hair-trigger; it was the end of a very long fuse.
But validation doesn't fix the damage. It doesn't un-ring the bell.
The pattern that keeps catching me: I trust someone with my actual feelings — not the public-facing "I'm doing great" version, but the real ones, the ones that live under the forced optimism — and somewhere along the way, those feelings get used against me. Weaponized. My vulnerability becomes leverage in arguments I didn't start. My disability, instead of being accepted as a fact of my life, becomes a variable in someone else's emotional calculus. You're not enough. You can't do this. Your situation is too complicated.
I take up too much space. Or not enough. I'm simultaneously a burden and invisible.
That's the Double Damn of love post-injury. Not that nobody wants to be with me — people do, and I'm grateful for that. The Double Damn is that the vulnerability required to let someone in is the same vulnerability they sometimes use to tear me down.
There was a woman. Our first date felt like a magic trick. She had this way of making you feel like the room had shrunk to just the two of you. She got me to completely drop my guard — got me making out with her in the middle of a family restaurant, which is not my thing, not remotely my style, but she had this way of making uncomfortable things feel suddenly okay. I thought it was a gift. I thought it meant she was fearless about showing she wanted to be there with me.
A month later she told me she'd done it because she wanted to see me squirm. She didn't care about the environment because she didn't have to live in it.
That was the moment I started doing the math on who she actually was. And once I started, the numbers didn't add up.
I opened my home to her. My parents' home. My heart. The things I don't give out on a trial basis, I gave. And what I got back was someone who treated my trust like a test she'd already decided the outcome of.
I'm not writing this as a grievance. I'm writing it as a pattern. Because she wasn't the first, and she probably wasn't the last. And the common thread in all of it is me — not as the cause, but as the one who keeps making the door available.
I have a responsibility to my own emotional real estate that I've sometimes ignored. I've let people into rooms that weren't ready. I've mistaken someone's desire to be with a "good story" for someone's desire to be with me.
The disability is a filter. A brutal, efficient, unsentimental filter. And I've tried to bypass it by being more patient, more understanding, more generous than the situation warranted.
That's the Double Damn I'm still working on. Not the injury. Not the wheelchair. The habit of loving people harder than they've earned.
Here's the thing about the Double Damn — about all of them, the moves and the injury and the relationships and the losses: none of them destroyed me. They were supposed to. By any reasonable accounting, at least one of them should have.
But they didn't. And I've been trying to figure out why for fifteen years.
The answer I keep coming back to is this: the training. Not the kind you choose. The kind that gets done to you. Moving eighteen times before you're twenty-four. Being the new kid so many times you stop being scared of it. Learning that every version of home is temporary, and making peace with that instead of being broken by it.
When the pool happened, my brain already had a file for everything you know is gone, figure out the new place. The file was thick. It had been opened and closed and reopened so many times that the muscle memory for starting over was automatic.
That's the gift the Air Force life gave me without asking. Not resilience as a concept. Resilience as a reflex.
I didn't dive into that pool ready for what happened. Nobody could be. But I dove into it with a system that had been doing hard resets since before I could form coherent sentences — and that wasn't nothing.
It wasn't everything. But it wasn't nothing.
I love you. But damn — sometimes "you" is me, and sometimes "me" is who I needed to become all along.