Chapter 9: My Happy Place
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Peace before purpose. I said that in the last chapter like it was simple. Like I just woke up one morning, chose peace, and everything fell into place.
It wasn't like that.
It was messy. It was slow. It was the least cinematic transformation in the history of personal growth. There was no montage. No inspirational music. No moment where I stood on a mountaintop with my arms spread wide.
It was a guy in a wheelchair deciding to take a pill.
I resisted medication for years. Years. Because in my head, taking something for anxiety meant admitting I couldn't handle it on my own. And I had built my entire post-injury identity around handling things on my own. I was the guy who trained his own service dog. The guy who drove 170 in a GT-R. The guy who didn't need help.
Except I did need help. My brain was eating itself alive. The inner monologue had gone from toxic roommate to full-time landlord, and I was paying rent in sleepless nights and panic attacks and that three-times-a-day question that I was running out of answers for.
So I took the pill.
Cymbalta, if you're curious. Nothing exotic. Nothing that would make a good story at a party. Just a small, boring, daily medication that took the edge off the anxiety enough for me to think clearly for the first time in over a decade.
That's all it did. It didn't fix me. It didn't cure me. It didn't make the voice go away. It just... turned the volume down. From a scream to a whisper. And in that gap — in that tiny bit of silence between the noise — I found enough room to breathe.
Here's the thing about that gap. It's small. It's nothing, really. The distance between a scream and a whisper is maybe two inches on the dial. But those two inches are the difference between drowning and treading water. Between surviving the day and actually being in it.
I spent years white-knuckling my way through mornings. Grinding my teeth through afternoons. Lying awake through nights, running scenarios that hadn't happened and probably wouldn't, but the voice didn't care about probability. The voice dealt in certainty. This will happen. You will fail. They will leave.
Cymbalta didn't argue with the voice. It just made it quieter. Quiet enough that I could hear myself think for the first time in — honestly, I don't know how long. Long enough that I'd forgotten what my own thoughts sounded like without the commentary track.
Here's what nobody tells you about recovery: the breakthroughs aren't dramatic. They're boring as hell.
My breakthrough was a morning routine.
I started waking up at the same time every day. Making coffee — well, having coffee made, but the intention was mine. Sitting in the same spot. Breathing on purpose, which sounds stupid until you realize how many years you've spent breathing on accident while your mind was somewhere else entirely.
Then I added one thing. Then another. Then another.
Drink water. Take meds. Sit in the sun for ten minutes. Move the body, even when the body doesn't want to move. Read something that isn't my own thoughts. Talk to someone who isn't the man in the mirror.
Small things. Stupid things. The kind of things that a therapist would call "building structure" and I would call "finally acting like a functioning human being."
The thing about structure is it's boring on purpose. That's the feature, not the bug. When your internal world has been chaos for fifteen years — alarms going off, fires breaking out, the voice narrating your destruction like a sports commentator who hates you — boring is revolutionary. Boring is the first morning you wake up and nothing is on fire and you just sit there, drinking coffee, listening to the birds, thinking about absolutely nothing.
I didn't know you could think about nothing. I thought the human brain was always running. Turns out mine was just always panicking, and I'd confused the two.
The GT-R was part of the happy place before I had a name for it.
A 2010 Nissan GT-R. Silver. Hand controls custom-fitted. That car was a whole argument made in metal and horsepower about who I still was.
I need you to understand what it feels like to be in that car and open it up. Not the aesthetics — the sensation. The hand controls mean I'm accelerating and braking with my hands, which is its own kind of intimacy with the machine. I feel the torque through my palms. The car goes from zero to sixty in 2.9 seconds, and every one of those seconds is a full-body recalibration. Everything that was heavy — the chair, the limitations, the accumulated weight of being a person who needs accommodations and modifications and special consideration at every turn — all of it gets left behind at about 80 miles per hour.
At 170, it's gone entirely.
I'm not saying speed is therapy. I'm saying it's geography. The GT-R took me somewhere the injury couldn't follow. A place where the body's limitations didn't matter because the car's capabilities made mine irrelevant. The car didn't care that I couldn't walk. The road didn't ask about my C6-C7 injury. The physics were the same for me as for anyone else. Equal footing. Finally.
That matters more than it sounds. Finding places where you're equal — not accommodated, not pitied, not helped — just equal, measured by the same standard as everyone else in the room — that's not something you take for granted when it's rare.
The track gave me that. Road Atlanta. Rolling onto that tarmac and knowing the line was the line and the apex was the apex and my lap time would be what it was based on skill and nothing else. The chair stayed in the pit. On that track, I was just a driver.
There was a soundtrack to all of this. There always is.
Sevendust. That's the backbone. Heavy and precise and honest in a way I've never heard from bands that get more radio play. "The only day we live is the day we die" — I've been turning that line over for fifteen years. It lives in the same part of my head where I file the things that matter.
Music doesn't just play in the background for me. It organizes information. When words aren't landing, the right song will cut straight to the thing. Three in the morning with the voice going full volume — there's a playlist for that. Not to fix it. Just to not be alone in it.
Good music does what good people do: it shows up, it doesn't judge, and it stays until the thing passes.
The happy place has a sound. It has a frequency. And I know what it is and I can find it when I need it. That's more than most people can say.
There was a place that helped. The Barley Oak — a bar in Mandeville, the kind where everybody eventually knows your name not because it's charming but because you keep showing up. I'd go there when the walls closed in at home. Sit at the bar. Have a beer. Be a regular human being in a room full of regular human beings who weren't asking me how I was really doing.
That's harder to find than it sounds. Most places either over-accommodate you or actively make things difficult — the table in the back with zero room to maneuver, the bathroom with the door that's two inches too narrow. The Barley Oak just worked. Simple as that.
And the lakefront. Covington has a particular kind of stillness in the early morning. I'd get out early — early enough that it was just me and the joggers and the sun crawling up over the water. Trace workouts: roll a quarter mile, stretch the shoulders, roll back. Nothing that would impress anyone at a gym. Everything that reminded me my body was still mine to use. The lake didn't care about my injury. It just kept being beautiful. I took the hint.
Lakefront sunrises reset something in my nervous system that no medication touched. Free. Available every morning. I wasted years not taking advantage of it.
The air there is a specific thing. Not just "fresh air," which is what people say when they haven't thought about it. I mean the particular smell of Lake Pontchartrain in the morning — water and pine and something that doesn't have a name — and the weight of the light coming in low across the surface. It looks like a photograph someone thought too hard about. But it's just Tuesday.
There's probably a lesson there about how the most healing things in your life are usually free and usually sitting right in front of you, but you're too busy looking for the complicated answer to notice the obvious one. The sun comes up every morning. It doesn't charge admission. It doesn't ask how you're feeling. It just shows up. I figured the least I could do was meet it halfway.
But they added up. Day after day, these tiny, unglamorous acts of not giving up started to compound. Like interest in a savings account, except the currency was sanity and the dividends were paid in marginally better days.
I wasn't chasing purpose anymore. I was just trying to have a decent Tuesday. And somehow, that was enough.
What I learned about joy — the hard way, the only way — is that you can't wait for it.
Waiting for joy is the same as waiting to feel better before you exercise. The feeling you're waiting for is the thing that comes after the action, not the thing that precedes it. You don't wake up joyful and then decide to do something worthwhile. You do something worthwhile and the joy shows up as a byproduct. Sometimes a small one. Sometimes barely measurable. But it shows up.
I made joy out of Thursday nights with my dad. Chicken tenders, and whatever mystery cocktail he'd come up with — named something wildly inappropriate, because that's the bit and the bit is sacred. That's a standing creation. Built from nothing. Just time and presence and a man who flew F-16s for the Air Force deciding that Thursday nights belonged to his son.
I made joy out of the business. CT Solutions. Building things for people who needed them. The particular satisfaction of solving a problem nobody asked you to solve — you just noticed it and fixed it, because that's how your brain works. That's not a job description. That's a personality.
I made joy out of the GT-R, which probably goes without saying by this point. And Road Atlanta, where for four laps in 2012 I was just a driver. Not the guy in the chair. Not the inspiration. A driver, at speed, in a car that didn't care about anything except the next corner.
I made joy out of the small stuff too. The perfect cup of coffee that you didn't rush, because you had nowhere to be for another hour. The song that comes on at exactly the right moment. The text that arrives when you didn't know you needed it. The dog who figures out exactly where to be when you need something warm against the side of your chair.
Joy is not a location. Not a destination. Not a reward for getting your life together. It's a practice. A daily, sometimes hourly, often stubborn practice of looking at what's in front of you and choosing to call it enough.
Some days it's not enough. Some days the practice fails and the day is just a day and you survive it and you don't dress it up as something more.
But some days it works. And those days are the ones you navigate by.
That's a happy place. Not because it's perfect. Because it's consistent. Because I can count on it. After years of not being able to count on my body, being able to count on something feels like grace.
I made joy out of the work. CT Solutions — building websites, building AI workflows, building systems for people who need them. The work is the thing. The thing where my brain moves at the speed it was designed to move and the chair just doesn't come up. The client doesn't see the chair. They see what I built for them. And what I built for them is good.
That's a happy place too. The laptop. The problem. The satisfaction of a thing working the way it was supposed to work.
Peace didn't arrive with a fanfare. It showed up like a stray cat. One day I noticed it was there, sitting quietly in the corner of my life, and I realized it had probably been there for a while. I'd just been too loud to notice.
I started sleeping better. Not great — let's not get crazy — but better. The spasms were still there but they felt less personal, less like an attack and more like weather. Something that happened to me, not something being done to me.
I started laughing again. Real laughter, not the performative kind you do to make other people comfortable. The kind that catches you off guard in the middle of a random Tuesday because something was genuinely, stupidly funny.
I started wanting things again. Not the old things — not the parties and the rounds and the "host with the most" persona. New things. Quieter things. A good meal. A conversation that went somewhere. A sunset that I actually watched instead of just happening near.
I was building a new house. Room by room. No rush. No blueprint from the old life. Just new walls for a new man.
And then I met Beka.
February 2025. I don't remember the exact moment I knew — that's a lie, I remember exactly, but a man's got to maintain some mystery. What I will tell you is this: she walked into my life at precisely the moment I was ready for her, and not one second sooner.
That's not a coincidence. That's the reward for doing the work.
If I'd met Beka during the GT-R years, I would have ruined it. I wasn't ready. I was all speed and no substance, all noise and no signal. I would have overcompensated, pushed too hard, tried to impress her with horsepower instead of honesty, and she would have seen right through me because Beka sees through everything.
If I'd met her during the hermit years, I would have pushed her away. Added her to the list of people I ghosted because letting someone in was scarier than being alone.
But I met her after the mirror. After the pill. After the morning routine. After the peace. And because I had done that work — all of it, every ugly, boring, unglamorous minute of it — I was finally able to do the one thing I hadn't been able to do since the dive.
I let someone see me.
Not the performance. Not the GT-R version or the hermit version or the inspirational speaker version. The real me. The scared, scarred, stubbornly alive version who still had a voice in his head but had learned to talk back to it.
And Beka didn't flinch.
She is the apple of my eye, and I often tell her that loving her is second to breathing.
That's not poetry. That's math. Breathing keeps me alive. Loving her gives me a reason to keep breathing. The order matters.
We're best friends. Absolute partners in every sense. She doesn't complete me — I hate that phrase because it implies I was incomplete, and I spent fifteen years learning to be whole on my own. She doesn't complete me. She accompanies me. She walks alongside the man I built from the wreckage, and she likes him. Not despite the chair. Not because of some noble sense of pity or purpose. She just likes me. The real one. The one I found in the mirror after everyone else left.
Here's the thing about Beka that I need you to understand: she doesn't manage me. She doesn't mother me. She doesn't do that thing where someone loves you but you can feel the weight of what it costs them. Loving me doesn't look like labor on her. It looks like Tuesday. It looks like normal. And after sixteen years of wondering if anyone would ever look at this situation and think yeah, I'm good with this — normal is the most extraordinary thing she could have given me.
The happy place isn't just a location. It's not just the lakefront or the track or the bar. It's a frequency. A state. And Beka is part of that frequency now. Not because she completes it but because she belongs in it.
That's my happy place. Not a location. Not a memory. Not a feeling that comes and goes.
My happy place is the peace I fought for, the routines I built, the volume I turned down, the woman who showed up when I was finally quiet enough to hear her.
My happy place is right here. Right now. In this chair. In this life. With this woman.
I love you, Beka. But damn, you could have shown up sooner.
Just kidding.
The timing was perfect.