Chapter 13: The Secret Ingredient
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You want to know the first thing I did after I got enough independence to make my own terrible decisions?
I bought a Nissan GTR R35.
If you don't know what that is, let me paint you a picture. It's a 565-horsepower, twin-turbo, all-wheel-drive Japanese supercar that does 0 to 60 in 2.9 seconds and was designed by engineers who apparently thought speed limits were more of a suggestion than a rule. It costs more than a house in most parts of Louisiana. It sounds like God clearing His throat.
And I bought one. With hand controls.
Why? Because when you're a twenty-something quadriplegic who just spent the last however-many months having hospital techs do things to your body that we're not going to discuss in polite company, you develop a certain... need. A need to feel like something other than a patient. A need to feel dangerous. A need to look in the mirror and see someone other than the guy in the chair.
I needed to feel like a badass. And nothing says "badass" like a GTR with a hand-controlled gas pedal.
I remember sitting in the dealership — if you can even call it that, it was more like a temple to bad financial decisions — and watching the salesman try to figure out how to handle me. He kept glancing at the chair, then at the car, then back at me, doing the math in his head and coming up empty. I could see him wondering whether this was a good sale or a liability.
I wrote the check. He stopped wondering.
The hand controls got installed by a specialist out of Metairie. Guy named Dave. Dave had done probably a hundred of these setups and he walked me through the whole thing like it was a routine oil change — except at the end I was driving a car that could outrun a Porsche on the interstate. Dave shook my hand, handed me the keys, and said, "Try to keep it under a hundred."
I nodded with my whole face and absolutely did not do that.
Here's the thing about overcompensation: it works. Temporarily.
You sit behind the wheel of a car that can outrun anything on the road, and for those few minutes, the chair doesn't exist. The spasms don't exist. The insecurity doesn't exist. It's just you and the road and the unholy sound of twin turbos spooling up, and for a brief, beautiful, stupid moment, you are invincible.
I did some genuinely dumb things in that car. The kind of things that would make my mother cry and my insurance agent quit.
The GTR was just the loudest version of a pattern I'd been running for years. Everything I did was designed to remind the world — and myself — that I was still Chase. Still the guy. Still worth something. Still here.
I threw parties I could barely navigate in my own chair because I needed to be the host. I dated women who were complicated in ways that kept me busy enough not to think. I bought things I didn't need because the transaction felt like proof of life. Look at this thing I can still do. Look at this guy over here. Still going. Still in the game.
None of it was dishonest, exactly. I genuinely enjoyed those parties. I genuinely liked some of those women. The cars were legitimately incredible machines and I have zero regrets about the automotive chapter of my life.
But I was also running. And I was fast enough that I didn't notice for a long time.
There was this one time — and I want to be clear, I am not recommending this to anyone, ever — I was on the highway. Late at night. The kind of empty Louisiana road where the only witnesses are armadillos and God, and both of them have seen worse.
I looked down at the speedometer.
170 miles per hour.
One hundred. And seventy.
At that speed, the world stops being real. The lines on the road blur into one continuous stream. The trees become a smear. Your peripheral vision goes dark because your brain literally cannot process information that fast. It's terrifying and euphoric and deeply, profoundly idiotic.
And then I saw the lights.
Blue and red. Behind me. Getting closer, which is impressive because I was doing 170.
I pulled over. Because what else are you going to do? You can't outrun a radio.
The cop walked up. Flashlight in the window. The whole routine.
He looked at me. He looked at the hand controls. He looked at the wheelchair folded up in the back seat. He looked back at me.
And there was this moment — I've thought about this moment a lot since then — where something shifted in his face. Not pity, exactly. More like recalculation. The story he was writing in his head about the guy he just pulled over at 170 suddenly didn't fit the guy he was looking at.
I don't remember exactly what I said. I'm sure it was some combination of charm, honesty, and the quiet desperation of a man who really, really did not want to go to jail in a wheelchair. There's a logistical nightmare in that scenario that I don't think either of us wanted to deal with. Who transfers him? How do you book a guy who can't raise his hands over his head? What does that arrest report even look like?
He let me drive home.
I still don't fully understand how. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Maybe he was impressed. Maybe he just didn't want to figure out how to get my chair into the back of a squad car at 2 AM on a Tuesday.
Whatever the reason, I drove home that night at a very responsible 65 miles per hour, gripping the hand controls like a man who had just been given a second chance at life. Again.
I remember thinking, in the silence of that drive home: What exactly are you trying to prove? And who are you proving it to?
I didn't have an answer. Not yet.
The overcompensation wasn't just cars. I have to be honest about that.
It was relationships too. I have a type — or had a type, before I figured out the pattern — and the type was women who were charismatic, slightly chaotic, and who needed something from me. That last part is important. I'm drawn to feeling useful. Needed. Like the chair and the disability and all the complications of being me somehow disappear if I'm solving someone else's problems. If I'm the anchor.
The problem with being an anchor is that you don't move. You sit there, heavy and reliable, while everything swirls around you. And when the storm finally clears and the person you've been anchoring sails away, you're still sitting on the bottom of the sea.
I kept mistaking codependency for connection. I kept thinking that if I could just tolerate enough, absorb enough, be patient enough, then eventually someone would look at me — really look — and see not the chair, not the disability, not the list of accommodations, but Chase. Just Chase. The person.
Part of it came from a theory I'd been running unconsciously for years. The theory went: I can't imagine how difficult it is to be with someone with a disability. So I'll be easy. I'll be patient. I'll absorb the hard stuff. And maybe, if I do all of that, they'll stay.
That theory is a trap. A beautifully constructed, totally logical, completely self-destructive trap.
Because what you're actually doing is teaching people how to treat you. And when you teach them that you'll tolerate everything, they test that tolerance. Not out of malice, usually. Just because you gave them permission.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to see this clearly. And when I finally did, it wasn't comfortable. Because once you see the pattern, you can't unsee it. And then you have to decide whether you're ready to actually do something different.
There was a party I threw — I think it was 2013, maybe 2014. Nice house, good people, music too loud, drinks flowing. Everything worked. I was the host again. I was Chase again. People laughed and the kitchen was loud and somebody spilled a drink and somebody else caught it and the whole night had this easy, warm energy that I used to take for granted and now spent an enormous amount of effort engineering.
I was navigating my own house in the chair, which meant squeezing between people who were standing talking, asking them politely to shift a few inches, rerouting around the coffee table because three people had planted themselves in front of it. Smiling through all of it. Playing host. Making it look effortless.
Around midnight I found myself in a corner of the kitchen, mostly to get out of the way, and this woman I knew came and leaned against the counter next to me. Not flirting. Just talking. Checking in, the way people do at parties when they actually like you.
She said: "You're the only one working this whole room. Everyone else is just living in it."
I laughed it off. Changed the subject.
But that landed somewhere and sat there for a long time. Because she wasn't wrong. I was working the room because I had convinced myself that if I stopped — if I stopped performing, stopped being useful, stopped being on — they would all see through it. See the guy who was exhausted and in pain and three hours past when his body wanted to go home. See the chair instead of the host.
The performance was the cover. The secret was that I didn't know who Chase was without it.
The parties stopped eventually. The cars slowed down. The relationships ended the way they always ended. And one day I found myself sitting in a quiet house with no performance left to give, and I had to face the thing I'd been running from.
Myself.
Not the version I performed. The actual one. The man who dove into four feet of water on the Fourth of July when he was twenty-four and had been paying the tab ever since. The man who woke up in chronic pain every morning and cracked jokes about it. The man who sat with a dark voice three times a day and kept saying no to it, stubbornly and without fanfare, for years.
That guy.
Looking at him honestly meant looking at the grief I'd never let myself feel. I'd grieved things in flashes — a moment here, a hard night there. But the real, full, unperformed grief? I'd kept it buried under horsepower and social events and the chaos of other people's problems. I hadn't sat with it.
So I sat with it.
And here is what I found, which took me longer to understand than anything else in this book:
The thing I was grieving wasn't the legs. It wasn't even the body. It was the self I thought I was supposed to become — the guy I was on his way to being when the dive happened. Twenty-four years old, full of forward momentum, the future just beginning to come into focus. That guy got interrupted mid-sentence. And I'd been trying to finish his sentence ever since.
The speed. The cars. The parties. The relentless forward motion. That was me trying to finish a sentence that stopped making sense the moment I hit the water.
Sitting with yourself is harder than it sounds. I want to be clear about that.
It's not meditation. It's not journaling. It's not a weekend retreat where you find your authentic self and come home with a crystal and a purpose statement. It's sitting in a quiet house at 2 AM with nowhere to be and nothing to do and looking at the life you've been living and actually asking: Is this me? Or is this me performing?
The answer, for a long time, was the second one. And that's a brutal thing to admit. Not because the performance was wrong — I was performing okay, which is something. But because okay is not the same as real, and real is the only thing that holds when everything else comes apart.
I had been the host so long that I forgot how to be the guest. Forgot how to walk into a room without scanning it for what needed to be managed. Forgot how to have a conversation that wasn't at least partly about managing how I was perceived. The chair made me so aware of everyone's awareness of me that I'd preemptively taken control of the narrative in every room I entered.
It's exhausting. I can tell you that. The performance of okay, sustained over years, costs something. It costs you the ability to know, on any given Tuesday, whether you're actually okay. Because you've been performing the word so long that it stopped having a shape.
When I stopped performing — when I finally sat still and let the quiet be quiet — the first thing that happened was nothing. Which was disappointing. You expect some kind of revelation. Some cinematic moment where the curtain parts and there you are, your real self, finally visible.
Instead there was just silence. And the kind of discomfort that comes when a system that's been running at full capacity finally drops to idle.
That lasted a while. Weeks, maybe. Just sitting with the silence, not filling it.
And then, slowly, things started surfacing. Not dramatic things. Small ones. A preference I'd buried. An opinion I'd stopped expressing because it was easier to agree. A feeling I'd been routing around for years because I didn't have time for it. They came up the way water comes up through cracks in old concrete — not all at once, just persistently, through every seam.
I started writing again. Not for an audience. Just for me. Scraps. Notes. Fragments of thoughts I'd been interrupting before they finished. And in those fragments, I started to find the guy I'd been looking for in the speedometer at 170 miles per hour.
He wasn't particularly comfortable. He wasn't fully healed. He was, in fact, kind of a mess. But he was mine.
But here's the secret ingredient. And it's not the car.
The car was a bandage. A loud, fast, twin-turbo bandage that I slapped over a wound I wasn't ready to look at. The wound was this: I didn't know who I was anymore.
Before the dive, I was Chase. The host. The guy who bought rounds. The guy who walked into a party and made it better. The social animal. The athlete. The kid with the future.
After the dive, all of those identities were either gone or fundamentally altered. And instead of sitting with that loss — instead of grieving the person I used to be — I tried to replace him. With horsepower. With speed. With anything loud enough to drown out the silence.
It didn't work. It never does. You can go 170 miles per hour and you're still you when you stop.
There's something I wrote down once, during a stretch where I was doing a lot of sitting with myself and not much liking what I found: "I'm as limited as I plan on being." That sounds like motivational poster garbage out of context. But it hit different when I understood what it actually meant.
It doesn't mean pretend your limitations aren't real. They are. I can't walk to the kitchen. Those are real limits. I live with them every single day.
What it means is: the limits I build in my mind are the ones that actually trap me. The belief that I don't deserve to take up space. The belief that my needs are a burden. The belief that I owe the world gratitude just for including me. Those are the limits that were actually running my life — not the spinal cord injury.
The secret ingredient isn't speed. It's not adrenaline. It's not the thing you buy or the stunt you pull or the persona you construct.
The secret ingredient is this: you have to stop running.
I didn't learn that behind the wheel of a GTR. I learned it years later, sitting still, looking in a mirror, doing the hardest thing I've ever done — which, believe it or not, was harder than the dive, harder than the hospital, harder than any of it.
I sat with myself. And I didn't look away.
I looked at the man who bought a supercar to feel invincible. I looked at the man who threw parties from a wheelchair so nobody would see him grieve. I looked at the man who absorbed emotional jabs from women because he'd convinced himself he had no right to be difficult.
And I looked at that man and I thought: I love you. But damn.
That was the ingredient. Not the drama. Not the speed. Not the performance.
The willingness to stop. To look. To stay.
But that's the next chapter.