Chapter 6: Controlling Fear
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The leap, the mission, and the hardest lesson: you can't save anyone until you save yourself.
There's a point — and I think most people who've been through something life-altering know exactly what I'm talking about — where surviving stops being enough.
You've done the rehab. You've learned the routines. You've accepted the chair. You've figured out how to get dressed, how to drive, how to exist in a world that wasn't built for you. You've checked every box on the Recovery Checklist, and everyone around you is proud of how far you've come, and you smile and nod because what else are you going to do?
But inside? Inside you're dying. Slowly. Quietly. One careful, measured, risk-free day at a time.
By 2012, I had been in the chair for three years. Three years of being a patient. Three years of being careful. Three years of people telling me what I couldn't do and me mostly agreeing with them because I didn't have the energy to argue. I was surviving. I was stable. And I was absolutely, completely miserable.
Not the dramatic kind of miserable. Not crying in the shower — though there was some of that too. The quiet kind. The kind where you wake up and the day stretches out in front of you like an empty parking lot and you think: This is it. This is the rest of it.
Something had to give.
But let me back up. Because to understand 2012, you need to understand 2009. The specific texture of fear in those first weeks. What it actually felt like.
The first morning I woke up at The Med in Memphis — not the morning after the dive, because that morning was chaos, machinery, voices, the Colonel's face — but the first morning when the noise had quieted enough for the reality to land, I lay in that bed and understood something in my bones that no one had said to me yet.
This is permanent.
Not as information. Not as a diagnosis. As a fact that lived in my body the way pain does, past the thinking, past the processing, at the level where you just know.
The fear that came with that understanding was not what I expected. I thought fear would feel like dread. Like a dark cloud. Like the horror movie version of itself.
It did not. It felt like a weight. A pressure behind my sternum that did not move. Like gravity had gotten personal. Like the same force that pulled me into that pool was now sitting on my chest, and it was not leaving.
I did not cry. Not that morning. I just lay there and felt the weight, and the weight was fear, and the fear was the knowledge that my body was not going to be what it was.
The days at Shepherd Center had a specific architecture of terror to them. You wake up and there is a window of about four seconds — every single morning, for months — where your brain has not caught up yet. Four seconds where you are just awake. And then the catch. The weight. The remembering.
I learned to hate those four seconds. I also learned to live for them.
There are two kinds of fear. I know this now. I did not know it then.
The first kind is physical fear. Concrete. Immediate. Pain as signal. The body saying: this is wrong, pay attention here.
After a C6-C7 spinal cord injury, your body develops a whole catalog of new signals, many of them alarming and some of them genuinely dangerous. Autonomic dysreflexia — if you do not know that term, look it up, it is the body's extremely dramatic way of communicating distress below the level of injury. Blood pressure spikes. Headache like a railroad spike behind the eyes. Sweating. The body screaming at you in a language you did not know it spoke.
The first time it happened to me, I did not know what was happening. I thought I was dying. Maybe having a stroke. The fear was total and immediate. Fight-or-flight, except I could not do either.
That is physical fear. It has a cause. It has a solution. You find the source of the irritation — a full catheter, a pressure wound, something the body is registering as a crisis even if you cannot feel it directly — and you address it. It is terrifying and it is manageable, once you learn the language.
The second kind of fear is harder. Existential fear. The kind that does not have a specific address.
Who am I now? What is my life worth? What can I offer? Is anyone ever going to look at me like a whole person again?
That fear does not respond to troubleshooting. You cannot find the source and fix it. It lives in the space between who you were and who you do not yet know how to be. And it is patient. It will wait.
I lived in the second kind of fear for years without really knowing it. Because I was performing fine. I was doing the recovery. I was showing up. But underneath the performance, the weight was still there, unchanged, pressing.
The question I kept circling was: is this fear telling me something, or is it just noise?
Because that is the real work of controlling fear. Not conquering it. Not eliminating it. Figuring out which fear is information and which fear is paralysis.
Fear as paralysis says: stay here, stay small, stay safe, do not risk anything else.
Fear as information says: something here requires your attention. There is a gap between where you are and where you need to be. Feel that. Don't run from it. Use it.
The first three years in the chair, I mostly listened to the paralysis version. And I can give myself some grace for that — I was in recovery, I was processing, I was learning a new body. But by 2012, the paralysis version was killing me.
I needed to find out which kind of fear I was living in.
So I decided to jump out of an airplane.
Here's the dark truth about what happened next, and I want to be honest about it because this book doesn't work if I'm not:
I didn't know if I was trying to live or trying to die.
That's not dramatic. That's not me being provocative. That's the honest-to-God reality of where I was. I knew I needed to push my limit — to find my maximum, to test the boundary of what this new body and this new life could handle. But I didn't know if that was the brave move or the giving-up move. I didn't know if I was reaching for something or letting go of everything.
All I knew was that staying in the middle — that safe, measured, careful existence everyone was so proud of — was killing me slower than any fall ever could.
So I made the call.
I found a place called Gold Coast Skydiving in Slidell. Called them up.
"Can you handle a quadriplegic?"
The lady on the phone, Linda, didn't hesitate. "Absolutely."
I sat on it for a while. The idea marinated. But eventually, I showed up.
Linda was there when I arrived. She recognized me from our conversation — or maybe it's just hard to miss the guy in the wheelchair asking to fall out of an airplane. She didn't just throw me on a plane. She sat me down. Told me that just weeks prior, they'd done an event for Steve Gleason — the former Saints player fighting ALS. Raised money. Jumped with guys who had bigger physical challenges than mine.
That wasn't pity. That was credibility. She was telling me: We've done this. You're not the first. You're not going to be the last.
My dad has a saying about young men: "All dick and balls and no forehead."
That was me.
They introduced me to my tandem master — a guy named Charlie. Roughneck. Offshore guy. The kind of guy who looks like he eats gravel for breakfast and washes it down with motor oil. He strapped me to him like a human backpack.
I was cool. Collected. Calm on the ground. Calm at 5,000 feet. Calm at 8,000. I was actually feeling pretty good about myself — like maybe I'd been overthinking this, like maybe I was tougher than I thought.
Then they opened the door.
The wind hit like a freight train. The noise swallowed everything. I looked down at the patchwork quilt of Louisiana swamp and concrete, miles below, and one thought crystallized with absolute clarity:
Oh shit. I done fucked up again.
Same thought I'd had in that pool. Same realization. Different altitude. I was strapped to a stranger at 10,000 feet with no way to back out, and my brain was filing this under "Decisions Chase Makes That End Badly."
But this time — this time — there was nowhere to go but down.
We tipped forward.
The freefall.
Here is the thing about gravity: it doesn't give a damn about your spinal cord. It doesn't care if your legs work. It pulls everyone down at exactly the same speed.
For sixty seconds, I wasn't a quadriplegic. I was a projectile. I was flying. The chair was on the ground. The "No's" were on the ground. The pity was on the ground. And yes — I pissed myself. More than once. But that's what the bag is for, and when you're tumbling through the sky at terminal velocity, dignity is a luxury you leave at the door.
And somewhere in that freefall — somewhere between the second time my bladder gave up and the moment the world stopped being a blur and started being everything — I had the clearest thought I'd had in three years:
God is good. Jesus, take the wheel.
Not as a prayer. Not as a plea. As a fact. As the most obvious, undeniable truth I'd ever felt. I was falling through the sky, completely out of control, and for the first time since the dive, that was exactly where I was supposed to be.
It was the most exhilarating thing I'd ever experienced. And the most natural. Like my body — this broken, rebuilt, stubborn body — had been waiting for this. Like this was the reset button I'd been looking for.
The chute opened. The jolt. Then silence. Floating over the world at sunset.
I landed — a slide-in, dirt and grass, strapped to Charlie, looking up at the sky I'd just fallen from. My heart was hammering a rhythm I hadn't felt since Oxford.
And I had my answer. The one I'd gone up there to find.
I wanted to live.
That answer is more complicated than it sounds.
Because "I want to live" is not the same as "I want the life I have." There is a gap between those two things that took me years to close. In the freefall, I confirmed the biological fact: I am not done. My body, my mind, some unnamed thing underneath both of them, was not ready to be done.
But wanting to be alive and knowing how to build a life worth living — those are different projects.
The skydive answered the first question. The second question took everything that came after.
Here is what I learned about fear that day, though: the fear that had been paralysis became information the moment I stepped to the edge of that door. Because up until that moment, I did not actually know what I was afraid of. I thought I was afraid of dying. I thought I was afraid of more loss, more limitation, more things taken away. But at the door, at 10,000 feet, strapped to a roughneck offshore guy, I realized the actual fear was simpler and more embarrassing.
I was afraid of wanting things. Of reaching for something and losing it again.
The pool had taught me: reach and lose. So I had stopped reaching.
The airplane taught me: you can reach again. You can want things again. The reaching does not guarantee the result, but the not-reaching guarantees nothing.
Fear as information.
I became a firm believer that day in something I still believe now: there's no right way to learn how to relive. Nobody hands you a manual for Act Two. There's no twelve-step program for "My Life Changed Completely and Now What." But you have to take the big step of faith. You have to push past the boundary of what feels safe, even when you don't know if you're being brave or being stupid, even when the line between courage and surrender is so thin you can't tell which side you're standing on.
Because the answer is on the other side of the jump. Always. It's never in the waiting. It's never in the careful. It's in the wind and the freefall and the sixty seconds where nothing matters except the fact that you chose this.
And what I chose, after I landed, was bigger than myself.
The Chase Your Dreams Foundation started in 2012. Same year as the skydive. Same energy. Same philosophy: if pushing your limit is the only way to find out you want to live, then other people need that push too.
It started with hospital visits. I'd go see people with newly acquired spinal cord injuries — people lying in the same beds I'd lied in, staring at the same white ceilings, running the same terrified math in their heads. And I'd sit with them. Not as a motivational speaker. Not as an expert. Just as a guy who'd been where they were and was still breathing.
"We're going to find the next step together," I'd tell them. "It doesn't have to make sense right now. But it's going to be okay."
I didn't have a program. I didn't have a curriculum. I just had the truth of my own experience and the willingness to share it with someone who needed to hear it from someone who actually understood.
Then it grew. I started doing talks at schools. First one was St. Peters Elementary — walked in, March 2012, talked to a room of kids who had no idea what to do with the guy in the chair, and watched them figure it out in real time. Abilities awareness. The stuff nobody teaches kids: that different doesn't mean less, that the kid in the wheelchair isn't fragile, that bullies target what they don't understand, and that everyone — everyone — is going to face a moment where life doesn't go the way they planned and they have to decide whether to shrink or stand up.
I wasn't trying to be inspirational. I was trying to be real. Kids can smell fake from a mile away, and I've never been good at fake.
And then there was Charlie. Carlos LocoHombre — a friend who decided the best way to support the foundation was to get on a bike and pedal over two thousand miles. For chaseyourdreams.org. For me. I still don't fully know what to do with that kind of loyalty except to try to deserve it.
Then there were the graduate students. Physical therapy programs. That was different. With the kids, it was about heart. With the grad students, it was about technique. How to actually live post-SCI. How to talk to your clients not as patients but as people. How to inspire them to find their own next chapter instead of just managing their symptoms.
I was living my purpose. For two and a half years, I was.
And then I stopped.
Not because the work wasn't important. It was the most important thing I'd ever done. But because I realized something that hurt worse than the dive:
I was a fraud.
Not intentionally. Not maliciously. But I was standing in front of people telling them how to find their next chapter when I hadn't finished writing my own. I was a people pleaser — always had been — and I'd found the ultimate people-pleasing gig: being the guy who helps. The guy who shows up. The guy who makes other people feel better about their situation.
But how could I preach if I didn't practice? How could I tell someone to find their peace when I hadn't found mine? I was compensating. Part of the foundation was genuine, real, important work. And part of it — a part I didn't want to look at — was me running from my own unfinished business by burying myself in everyone else's.
The hardest thing I did wasn't jumping out of that plane. It was stepping back from the foundation and admitting: I'm not ready yet. I need to do my own work first.
That's not a failure. That's the most responsible thing you can do. You can't pour from an empty cup — and my cup wasn't just empty, it had a crack in the bottom I hadn't even acknowledged yet.
The fear that came with stepping back from the foundation was different from anything I had felt before. It was not the physical terror of the door at 10,000 feet. It was not the weight-behind-the-sternum of that first morning at The Med.
It was the fear of being ordinary. The fear of not having a mission. The fear that if I stopped being The Guy Who Helps, there was nothing underneath.
That is worth naming, because I think a lot of people — not just people with SCI, not just people who have been through crisis — carry that fear. The fear that the role is the person. That if you step out of the role, you step out of yourself.
I had to find out if that was true.
It was not. But I had to go look.
The looking took years. It was not cinematic. It was not a single moment of clarity. It was a long, grinding, sometimes boring process of doing the internal work I had been postponing. Getting honest about what I wanted and why. Getting honest about what I was afraid of and whether the fear was information or paralysis.
I built something real inside myself. Not a performance. Not a persona. A foundation. The real kind. The internal kind.
But here's the thing about purpose: once you've tasted it, it doesn't leave you alone.
I stopped the foundation. I went inward. I did the mirror work, the hard work, the ugly work that fills the chapters between this one and now. And slowly — over years, not months — I came back.
Every single April, I go to Delgado Community College. Their physical therapy assistant program. Five hours. One day. Me and a room full of students who are about to spend their careers working with people like me.
Five hours is a long time. Long enough to get past the polite stuff. Long enough to tell the real stories — the ones I couldn't tell when I was running the foundation, because I hadn't lived them yet. The catheter stories. The spasm stories. The depression stories. The autonomic dysreflexia at 2 AM stories. The "I didn't know if I was trying to live or trying to die" stories. All of it.
I tell those students the same thing I tell you now: your future clients don't need your pity. They don't need your inspiration. They need you to see them as whole people who are figuring out the hardest thing they've ever had to figure out. And the best thing you can do — the only thing that really matters — is sit with them in it. Not fix it. Not motivate it away. Just be there and say: "It doesn't have to make sense right now. But it's going to be okay."
That's what I learned from the skydive. From the foundation. From walking away from it. From coming back.
Fear looks different now than it did in 2009. I want to be honest about that, because the narrative of "and then I conquered my fear" is garbage and you deserve better.
I am still afraid of things. I still wake up some mornings and the weight is there. I still have bad pain days where the physical fear spikes and the existential fear shows up right behind it. I still catch myself sometimes in the paralysis version — the stay small, stay safe version — and I have to redirect.
The difference is that I know the difference now. Between the fear that is information and the fear that is noise. Between the fear that is pointing at something real and the fear that is just the old alarm system, still calibrated to a threat that no longer exists.
In 2009 I did not know I had a choice about what to do with fear. I thought it was weather. Something that happened to you.
In 2026 I know it is a dilemma. Something you work with.
That is the whole lesson. It is not dramatic. It fits in one sentence.
Fear is a dilemma. Work it.
Controlling fear isn't about conquering it. It's not about being fearless. It's about choosing to move through it — and knowing that sometimes the bravest thing you can do is stop, look in the mirror, and admit you need to do the work on yourself before you try to do it for anyone else.
I jumped out of a plane to find out if I wanted to live.
I started a foundation to help others find their answer.
I stopped the foundation because I realized I hadn't actually found mine yet.
And every April, I sit in a room at Delgado for five hours, because now I have.
I love you but damn.