Chapter 10: Conversations with My Shadow
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We all have shadows. Literal ones that follow us in the sun, and metaphorical ones that follow us everywhere else. After my accident, mine seemed to grow larger. I used to fight it — try to outshine it, outrun it, pretend it wasn't there.
But shadows don't work that way.
Here's something you should know before we go further: the darkness didn't start in a pool in Oxford, Mississippi.
It started earlier. A lot earlier.
St. Paul's. A boarding school in Covington, Louisiana — which I did not pick, which is a strange loop given that I live in Covington now, as if the city itself wanted another look at me. I was a teenager. I'd already been through Alamogordo High, already been homeschooled by my mom, already moved enough times to know that starting over was the family business. My dad flew F-117 Nighthawks. We went where the Air Force pointed us.
At St. Paul's, the shadow had a name and it talked to me constantly. The name was not enough. I don't need to walk you through the details — some things get their power from specificity and some get their power from discretion. What I'll tell you is this: I tried to leave. Not the school. The whole thing.
A friend named Aliocha stopped me. I don't think he knew, fully, what he was stopping. I'm not sure I knew. But he was there, and being there was everything.
That was the first time I met the shadow directly. Not as a mood or a bad week or a difficult adjustment. As a voice with a plan.
I went to Montgomery Catholic after that. Then Saint Stanislaus. Then life, and the accident, and all the chapters before this one. But I want you to understand that the conversation I'm about to have with you is one I've been having for a long time. It didn't begin on July 4, 2009. The pool deepened something that was already there.
The first time my body betrayed me on purpose was about a month after the injury. August 2009. Shepherd Center in Atlanta — the spinal cord rehab facility where they teach you how to do things you used to do without thinking, except now every movement is a negotiation.
I was leaving the gym. Normal day. Normal hallway. And then my body decided to introduce itself.
Everything below my chest seized at once. Not a cramp. Not a twitch. A full electrical revolt. My legs locked, my trunk torqued back and to the right, and the chair went with me. Or I went without it. Hard to say which. Either way, I was on the floor before I understood I wasn't in the chair anymore.
It was violent. The kind of thing that, if it happened on a sidewalk, someone would call 911. But this was Shepherd Center. Someone glanced over, said something like "hey, can you grab him?" and another person helped get me back in the chair like they were picking up a knocked-over grocery cart.
No alarm. No panic. Just another Tuesday at the spinal cord injury hospital.
That casualness messed with me more than the spasm itself. Because it meant this was normal. Not normal for regular people — normal for my people now. This was going to keep happening. My body was going to keep doing things I didn't ask it to do, and the best I could hope for was getting good at not being surprised.
The voice was loudest at 2 AM. That's when the shadow held its office hours.
Not every night. But enough nights. The particular quality of darkness at 2 AM in the early years — the way the silence amplified everything the daytime drowned out — that's when the voice brought its full case to the table.
You were twenty-four. You had one job. How do you go to a pool party and come back a different person?
Everyone who knows you now — they know the broken version. They don't know what you lost. They only know what's left.
What exactly is the plan here?
I didn't have good answers for any of it. The voice didn't need good answers. The voice just needed you in the room with it, at 2 AM, alone, running out of options.
The bad medical news sessions were their own kind. Every time something shifted — a new complication, a procedure that didn't work the way we hoped, a number on a chart that went the wrong direction — the voice would be ready with its full presentation. See? This is what I've been telling you. The math doesn't work. The body has a timetable and you're not on it.
Relationships ending were the worst. Because the voice had been quietly building a file for months. Every small withdrawal, every subtle distance, every moment that felt off — the voice had catalogued all of it. And when the ending came, the voice said, simply: I told you. I've been telling you. Here's the evidence.
I had a thought. The thought wasn't me.
That took years to understand. The voice feels like you because it's in your voice, at your frequency, and it knows your material. It has access to everything you're ashamed of, everything you're afraid of, everything you've tried to pretend isn't true. It sounds like the most honest thing in the room.
But the voice isn't you. The voice is the shadow. It's what forms when light hits a solid object. It is shaped by you. It follows you. But it is not you.
I don't remember a specific moment where I made peace with my body. There wasn't a eureka flash, no montage-worthy breakthrough where the music swells and I suddenly "got it." That's the Hollywood version. The real version is slower. Quieter. More like erosion than explosion.
Over the course of years since the injury, I just became more numb to fighting. Not numb to living — numb to resisting what I couldn't change.
The spasms never stopped. Severe body spasms that rip through me throughout the day. Each one lasts about six to eight seconds. I don't take medications for them. I have a spinal cord stimulator implanted in my back — put in on Valentine's Day 2023, because the universe commits to the bit — that helps scramble the nerve signals, makes things more tolerable. But when the spasms decide to let loose, I've learned that I just have to let them totally let loose.
That sounds simple. It wasn't.
For years I'd tense against them, try to control them, feel frustrated or defeated every time they hit. It was exhausting. Like arm-wrestling yourself all day, every day.
The first time I stopped fighting one, I was on the couch watching some garbage reality show. Didn't even remember the name of it. The spasm hit like someone plugged me into a wall socket. My whole body locked up — legs, core, everything below the line going rogue at once.
And I just... didn't fight it.
Not because I was enlightened. Because I was tired. Bone-deep, sick-of-my-own-bullshit tired. So I sat there, cross-legged, and let it do whatever it was going to do.
Six seconds. Maybe seven. My legs shook. My jaw clenched. And then it was over.
That's the thing nobody tells you about surrendering. It doesn't feel like peace. It feels like giving up. The difference between the two is what happens after. Giving up means you stay down. Surrendering means you pick up the remote and find out who got eliminated.
I've done that math a thousand times since. Tense up, fight it, feel defeated — that costs me twenty minutes of frustration. Let it ride, six seconds of discomfort, back to work. The economics aren't complicated. I was just too stubborn to read the spreadsheet.
Now when they come, I ride them out. The only real accommodation I've made is sitting cross-legged on my couch. Something about that position seems to calm the storm. It's become my workstation, my command center. The place where I can actually focus.
Pain taught me something I didn't expect.
I used to think pain was the enemy. Something to eliminate, avoid, be sad about. But pain is just information. It's an indicator, not a sentence.
I once wrote something in my notes that surprised me when I read it back: "I feel as though I've discovered a new me. A version of accepting rather than tolerating." That's the shift. Tolerating is gritting your teeth. Accepting is opening your hands.
Once I stopped treating pain like a personal attack and started treating it like data — I could actually work with it. That shift wasn't just about physical pain. It unlocked something emotional too. When I stopped fighting my body, I had the bandwidth to make the necessary adjustments to my emotional health. The two were connected all along.
I understand pain as fear, and fear as a dilemma. Once you see that chain, temptation seems less prominent. Desire seems less apparent. You stop chasing the absence of pain and start working with its presence.
The tools I developed to counter the shadow were not elegant.
They were not the kind of tools that look good in a book. No meditation retreats. No breathwork. No journaling practice with a beautiful notebook. I mean, the notes on my phone were a version of journaling — timestamped thoughts at midnight, evidence of what was alive in my head at the worst hours — but there was nothing intentional about it. I just needed somewhere for the thoughts to go that wasn't more of my skull.
What actually worked:
Movement. Any movement. Rolling the lakefront in Covington in the early morning. The chair on the pavement, the lake on the left, the sun coming up slow. Not exercise in the performance sense. Just the body doing what it could do, reminding both of us that we were still in this together.
The car. The GT-R. Speed as silence. When you're doing 170, the voice can't keep up. That's not a sustainable practice. But it was a real one, and it worked, and I'm not apologizing for it.
Thursday nights with my dad. Chicken tenders. A mystery cocktail named something I can't print here without losing certain family audiences. The ritual was the medicine. Consistency. A person who showed up every week, on time, no questions asked, just presence. That's harder to find than it sounds, and it did more than anything with a clinical name.
Work. CT Solutions. The problem in front of me. When the shadow gets loud, the fastest way to turn down the volume is to give my brain something real to solve. A client's broken website. An AI workflow that isn't running right. Something concrete and fixable. The voice doesn't have much to say about CSS errors or API integrations. It needs existential real estate. Give it logistics instead and it goes quiet.
The first time the voice went quiet — actually quiet, not just background noise — I almost didn't recognize it.
It was a regular morning. Sitting with coffee. Sun coming through the window. Nothing dramatic. No breakthrough. I just sat there and realized the commentary track wasn't running.
I waited for it to come back. It didn't. Not that morning.
I didn't celebrate. I was suspicious. Years of the voice showing up reliably will do that — you stop believing in its absence and start waiting for its return.
But it came back quieter the next time. And quieter again after that. Not gone. It's still there. I'd be lying if I told you it isn't. But it doesn't hold the majority stake anymore. It's a minority investor that I'm aware of and occasionally have to manage but no longer runs the whole operation.
The first time I noticed that shift, I sat with it for a while. Tried to figure out what changed. The honest answer is: a lot of small things over a lot of time. The medication. The morning routine. The work. The people inside the circle who got the real version instead of the performance. Learning to say I had a thought. The thought wasn't me. And then not living in the thought.
That's not a resolution. That's a practice. There's no finish line. But there's a before and an after, and I'm solidly in the after, and the after is livable.
I'm not sure I'll ever truly, fully make peace with the parts of me I can't change.
But I can recognize this: once I became more peaceful with my body — once I stopped fighting it and let it do its thing — I knew I could adapt. Adjust. Build something different.
That's probably the scariest part for most people. Not the injury. Not the diagnosis. Not the loss itself.
It's the lifestyle change.
People become so accustomed to who they were, how they lived, what they could do. The thought of becoming someone different feels like dying. And in a way, it is. The old version of you has to die for the new version to live.
Change is not easy.
But it's also not optional. The only choice is whether you fight it the whole way down, or whether you let the spasms run their course and get back to living.
There's another conversation with the shadow that's harder to write about.
It's the one that starts with: Who am I? And why do I keep ending up here?
Here is the most honest version of it. Unfiltered. This is the shadow talking.
I attract a particular kind of woman. I respond to her in a particular way. And then I watch the same movie play out, just with a different actress in the lead role.
I hold out. I stay patient. I absorb the emotional jabs, the sharp remarks, the frustration that doesn't quite have a name but always seems to land on me. I absorb it because I genuinely try to understand their position. Because I think: I can't imagine how difficult it is to be with somebody with a disability. I remind myself of that. Constantly. It's both my grace and my excuse.
The pressure builds. Slowly, like water behind a dam. I give my full and loving attention. I trust them with my feelings — the real ones, the embarrassing ones, the ones that take courage to say out loud. And somewhere around the three-month mark, the return on that investment starts to look like charity. That timeframe keeps shrinking. I feel it getting shorter every time.
I feel taken for granted. Then I finally say something. Quietly at first, then with some heat. Because I'm not made of stone, and nobody is.
When I do finally lose my temper — which is rare, never physical, always verbal — there's a strange validation in it. Like: I held out for so long. I tried so hard. And still. The validation doesn't feel good. It just feels true.
Here's what I don't say out loud enough:
People don't see my pain. And I don't think it's my place to make them see it.
I live with embarrassment about my limitations in a way that I'm not sure healthy people understand. Life is physically uncomfortable for me. Has been for years. I don't announce it. I don't expect accommodation beyond what's practical. I just quietly manage it, because I don't want to be a burden, and I don't want pity, and I don't want someone's love to feel like labor.
I don't like to smile in pain. I'm fighting my own battles without putting pressure on someone else to deal with my requirements. Life is uncomfortable for me. I don't like it. Haven't for some time now. I live in pain and I am embarrassed by it.
But that silence creates a gap. And into that gap, relationships pour their frustration. They trust me with their feelings, and I trust them with mine. And then they weaponize my presence — the chair, the limitations, the things I can't do — and I sit there and take it. Because what else am I going to do?
August 28, 2015. I wrote about resentment. Not publicly — just for myself, in the late-night way I do when something has been sitting on my chest long enough. The resentment wasn't about any one person. It was about the accumulated weight of being the one who always adjusts. Who makes room. Who understands their position and forgives before anyone asks for forgiveness. I'd been doing it for six years at that point. And the shadow was getting longer.
I'm not proud of that resentment. But I'm not ashamed of it either. It was honest. And honest is the only thing I know how to be when nobody's watching.
I've been carrying my accident in ways I never fully processed. And it has gotten the best of me — I know that. I accept it. The shadow isn't something to be ashamed of. It's evidence of something survived.
What I'm still learning is this: letting people in doesn't mean making them carry it. There's a version of openness that's not a burden. That's just honesty. I'm working toward it.
November 10, 2013. A friend posted something on my wall — "Never change who you are."
Four words. Not deep on the surface. But I kept coming back to it. Because at that point, two years into trying to figure out what version of myself was worth rebuilding, I needed someone to tell me the raw material was worth keeping. Not the injury. Not the chair. Me. The parts of me that predate July 4, 2009.
The reckless generosity. The need to host, to connect, to make the room feel alive. The stubbornness that looked like stupidity from the outside but was actually just a man who refused to accept the terms as written.
Don't change those things. Aim them better.
That's what I took from it. And that's maybe the most useful thing anyone said to me in that whole decade.
I keep my circle small. Not because I don't like people. Because I don't want the people who care about me to be as sensitive to my final departure. They don't deserve that weight.
That sounds darker than I mean it. Or maybe it sounds exactly as dark as I mean it. I don't expect my body to keep functioning forever. The math isn't great. And I naturally get too attached to things — people, routines, the way someone laughs — so keeping the circle tight feels like the easiest and most logical option.
But here's the thing about small circles: when someone steps inside one, they matter more. Every person in my life right now is there because they earned it, not because proximity put them there. There's something clean about that. Honest.
The shadow grows large because we refuse to look at it.
That's what I've learned from years of spasms, from 37 pills, from relationships that taught me more about my patterns than about the women in them.
When I finally look at the shadow directly — when I have these conversations out loud, even just on a page — it gets smaller.
Not gone. Never gone.
But something I can sit with.
I wrote this in my notes years ago: "Disability is my canvas, experience is my medium, and my brain is the brush. Now why do I keep painting this damn smiley face?"
Maybe because the smiley face is easier than the self-portrait. But this chapter — this book — is the self-portrait. No filter. No pose. Just the shadow and the light that casts it.