Chapter 14: Trapt

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I used to be the host with the most.

That's not me bragging — that's me eulogizing a dead version of myself. Pre-injury Chase was the guy who threw the parties, who bought the rounds, who walked into a room and made people feel welcome. I fed off connection. I needed people the way some people need coffee — constantly, aggressively, and in large quantities.

After the chair, I became a hermit.

Not overnight. It was a slow fade. Like a song that gets quieter and quieter until you realize the music stopped ten minutes ago and you've just been sitting in silence.

First, it was the logistics. Going out is different when you're in a wheelchair. Every door is a question mark. Every curb is an obstacle course. Every bathroom is a gamble you might lose. The energy it takes to do something "simple" like go to dinner — the transfer, the drive, the parking, the ramp, the table that's too high, the looks, the awkward silence when people don't know what to say — it adds up. After a while, the couch starts winning.

Then it was the insecurity. I became hyper-aware of every eye in every room. Are they staring? Are they pitying me? Are they uncomfortable? Am I making this weird? The inner monologue was relentless. A running commentary of self-doubt narrated by the worst version of myself.

Then it was the purge.

I pushed everyone away.

Not dramatically. Not with a big speech or a slammed door. I just... stopped. Stopped answering calls. Stopped saying yes. Stopped showing up. One by one, the connections that used to define me went dark.

This is the part of the story where I'm supposed to say it wasn't my fault. That the injury did it. That circumstances forced my hand.

But that would be a lie.

I chose it. I chose the isolation. I chose to push people away because it was easier than letting them see what I had become. It was easier to be alone than to be seen.

I purged everyone and everything and every habit. I stripped myself down to the studs like a house being gutted for renovation. Except I didn't have a blueprint for what came next. I just had an empty house and a mirror.

That was unfair to a lot of people. Friends who tried. Family who showed up and got turned away. People who loved me and got nothing in return but silence. I know that now. I knew it then, too. But knowing something and being able to change it are two very different things.

I went from the host with the most to a recluse. A self-proclaimed pariah. I wore it like a badge because if I called myself the outcast first, nobody else could do it for me.

There was a band in the early 2000s called Trapt. You probably know the song. Headstrong. It was everywhere. Loud, aggressive, driving — the kind of song that sounds like punching something, in a good way. The kind of song a twenty-something plays when he wants to feel unstoppable.

I loved that song in a past life. The version of me that walked into rooms and owned them — that Chase listened to Trapt in the car on the way to parties. Volume up. No apologies.

And then the accident happened, and the word started to mean something different.

Trapt. Not the band. The state.

I was trapt. T-r-a-p-t. The wrong spelling that becomes the right word. Because being trapped and being trapt feel subtly different. Trapped is something done to you. Trapt is something you participate in. You're not just caught — you're tangled. You got in there somehow. You took steps that led here. The distinction matters.

Because here's what I had to figure out, slowly and painfully over the course of years: the chair wasn't the trap.

Let me say that again because I need you to hear it.

The chair was not the trap.

Here's what was actually trapping me.

A story. One story, on permanent loop, that went like this: You were someone before. You aren't that someone now. The goal is to get back.

That story is poison. It sounds like motivation. It sounds like hope. Get back to who you were. Fight your way back to the man you used to be. Restore what was lost. It sounds like something you'd embroider on a pillow and sell at a gift shop.

It's poison.

Because "getting back" is a direction that doesn't exist. There's no back. There's only forward or stopped. And I spent years stopped — standing in a hallway trying to walk through a wall to reach a room that wasn't there anymore — while I told myself I was being determined.

Meanwhile, forward was right there. The door was right there. I just wouldn't look at it because I was too busy staring at the wall.

The trap was the story. The chair just got blamed for it.

Here's the part nobody wants to write about. The math of isolation.

When you remove everyone, you think you're simplifying. You think: fewer people, fewer problems. Fewer expectations. Fewer chances to disappoint someone or be disappointed. The equation looks clean.

But what actually happens is the opposite. You don't simplify your life — you concentrate it. All the noise that used to be distributed across a dozen conversations and relationships collapses into one channel: you. And that channel doesn't have the bandwidth for it.

Imagine taking every argument, every insecurity, every fear you'd normally process with a friend or a partner or even a bartender — and routing all of it through one person. Yourself. At 3 AM. With no one to tell you you're being ridiculous.

That's isolation. It's not quiet. It's the loudest place I've ever been.

There's something I haven't told you yet. The real reason the circle got small.

It wasn't just shame. It wasn't just the logistics of wheelchairs and bathrooms and the social tax of existing in public as a disabled person. All of that was real. But the real reason — the one I had to sit with for years before I could say it out loud — was this:

I didn't think I was going to be around much longer.

Not as a dramatic thought. Just as a practical one. The body I lived in was unpredictable. I had no idea how long it would keep cooperating. And on top of that, three times a day, a voice was already making a very compelling case that I should speed things along.

So I made a decision that felt like love at the time. I pulled back from people so that when the day came — if the day came — there would be fewer people standing at the edge of a hole asking what they could have done differently. I was pre-minimizing the damage. Managing the blast radius of my own potential exit.

That is either the saddest thing I've ever written or the most logical thing I've ever done. Maybe both.

I got too attached to people. I always had. And people who get too attached make too much wreckage when they leave. So I left first. Quietly. In all the small ways that don't require a funeral.

I thought I was doing them a favor. I was wrong about that. But I understand why I did it.

The voice. Let me talk about the voice.

Three times a day. Over the course of fifteen years. That voice showed up and suggested I leave this planet. Not once in a while. Not in my darkest moments. Three times a day. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, served with a side of "what's the point?"

Breakfast looked like this: wake up, transfer from bed to chair — the daily reminder that nothing is effortless anymore — wheel to the kitchen, make coffee, sit by the window. And then, right on schedule, right around the second sip: You know you don't have to keep doing this. Not screaming. Never screaming. Just a quiet suggestion. Patient. Like it knew it could wait me out.

Lunch was the same. Dinner was the same. The consistency was almost impressive.

The thing about a voice that shows up three times a day for fifteen years is that it becomes furniture. You stop being shocked by it. You stop being scared of it. You start having a relationship with it — the same way you have a relationship with a coworker you can't stand but see every day. You know their patterns. You know when they're going to show up. You know the script.

And somewhere in that familiarity, the power starts to drain out of it. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just slowly, like a battery that doesn't get charged. The voice kept coming. I kept saying no. And over time, the "no" got easier. Not because the voice got weaker. Because I got stronger.

Fifteen years. Do the math. That's over sixteen thousand times I had to say no.

Sixteen thousand times I chose to stay.

I don't tell you that for sympathy. I tell you that because if you're reading this and you're at one — just one — I need you to know it can be done. Not heroically. Not easily. Just stubbornly. One no at a time.

I want to be careful here because I know someone reading this is in that place right now. That place where the voice is loud and life is quiet and leaving seems like the only logical move.

It's not logical. It feels logical, which is different. Feelings are convincing liars.

I stayed because of a thought that kept showing up uninvited, like a song you can't get out of your head. The thought was this: If I actually have a purpose — and that's a big if — it's not going to be respected or remembered if I just tap out.

Not exactly a Hallmark card. But it was enough. It was the thinnest thread imaginable, and I hung the entire weight of my life on it, and somehow it held.

The mirror years.

I'd just lost my job. COVID was about to become a thing, which meant the whole world was about to become as isolated as I'd already been for a decade. The universe has a dark sense of humor.

I buried myself in my house — which wasn't exactly new — but something shifted. Instead of hiding from myself, I started looking.

I'd sit in front of the mirror. Not checking my hair or my teeth. Just... looking. Studying the man in the chair like he was a stranger. Trying to figure out who the hell he was.

I developed this habit. I'd replay scenarios in my head. Conversations. Decisions. Moments I wished I'd handled differently. I'd run them through my inner monologue over and over and over, like rewinding a tape to the same spot. Rewriting history in my head because I couldn't rewrite it in reality.

This was not healthy.

But it was necessary. In the same way that you sometimes have to tear a muscle to rebuild it stronger, I had to sit in the uncomfortable reality of who I'd been before I could figure out who I wanted to become. The replaying wasn't wallowing — or at least, it wasn't only wallowing. It was auditing. Running the tape back and asking: What was I actually doing? What did I actually want? And what did I do instead?

The answers were not flattering. But they were honest. And honest is the foundation you build on. Everything else is sand.

For years — years — I lived inside my own skull. The inner monologue became a roommate I couldn't evict. He was loud. He was critical. He was convincing. And he was wrong about almost everything.

"You're broken." "You're a burden." "They don't really want you there." "You should just — "

The voice again. Same script. But now I had the mirror. And the mirror showed me something the voice never mentioned: I was still here. Still breathing. Still showing up to the argument every single morning. That's not a broken person. That's a stubborn one.

There's a specific moment I keep coming back to. Not dramatic. No music. Just a Tuesday.

I was in front of the mirror. Bad day — the body had been arguing with me since the transfer that morning, the voice had been loud at breakfast, and I was sitting there tired in the specific way that sleep doesn't fix. The tired that lives in your bones.

And I looked at myself and I said, out loud, to the empty room: "You are still here."

Not as a celebration. Not even as a comfort. Just as a fact.

You are still here.

I'd been so focused on everything I wasn't anymore — everything the dive had taken, everything the chair prevented, everything the future had stopped being — that I had lost track of the one thing that was undeniably, stubbornly true.

Still here.

Still breathing. Still running CT Solutions out of Covington. Still showing up for Thursday nights with my dad — chicken tenders, cocktails, the ongoing argument about whatever's on TV. Still calling my mother. Still feeding the dog. Still doing the work.

The trap cracked open in that moment. Not shattered — cracked. A thin line of light through something that had been solid dark for years.

The crack was enough.

Here's what I learned in front of that mirror, after years of toxic replaying and destructive monologues and the slow, brutal process of gutting the old house and staring at the foundation:

You can't find your purpose without finding your peace first.

That's it. That's the whole thing. The thesis. The answer. The secret I spent a decade and a half trying to figure out.

I had been chasing purpose like it was something you hunt. Like if I just drove fast enough, or pushed hard enough, or thought long enough, I'd catch it. Purpose was the prey and I was the predator and all I needed was more speed, more effort, more suffering.

Wrong.

Purpose isn't something you chase. It's something that shows up after you stop running.

Peace first. Then purpose. In that order. Always.

That's not some bumper sticker philosophy. That's field-tested data from a guy who spent fifteen years running the experiment the wrong way. I chased purpose through relationships, through careers, through speed, through isolation, through every strategy I could think of — and it kept outrunning me. Because you can't catch something when you're sprinting on a treadmill. You're moving but you're not going anywhere.

The moment I stopped — the moment I sat still, took the pill, built the routine, looked in the mirror, and said okay, I'm here, now what — purpose walked through the door like it had been waiting in the hallway the whole time.

The day I understood that — really understood it, not just intellectually but in my bones — was the day the renovation began.

Not the old house. Not the pre-injury Chase. A new house. New blueprints. Built for the man in the chair, not the ghost of the man who used to stand.

I stopped trying to rebuild what was broken. I started building something new.

The trap was never the chair. The trap was the belief that I needed to get back to who I was before. That the goal was restoration. Put me back. Rewind the tape. Give me back the legs and the parties and the rounds I used to buy.

That's the trap. That's what "Trapt" means.

You get caught in the before. You live in the replay. You sit in an empty house, staring at a mirror, wondering why the man staring back doesn't look like the man you remember. And you stay trapped until you figure out that the man you remember isn't coming back — and the man in the mirror is the one worth building.

I think about the Trapt song sometimes. Headstrong. The irony writes itself — the song that used to make me feel powerful became the name for the thing that was keeping me powerless. The headstrong insistence on going back, on restoration, on reclaiming a self that no longer existed. Headstrong in the wrong direction is just spinning your wheels.

Took me fifteen years to figure out which direction was forward.

I want to say one more thing about being trapped, because I think about the people who are reading this from inside their own version of it.

Not necessarily a wheelchair. The trap comes in a lot of shapes. The job you've been at for twelve years that's making you miserable but you can't imagine leaving because what else would you do. The relationship that stopped working four years ago and you're still in it because you've invested so much that leaving feels like admitting defeat. The version of yourself that you keep trying to restore — the thinner version, the younger version, the version with more hair or more money or more time — and the effort of trying to restore it is consuming all the energy that could be going into building the actual life in front of you.

That's the trap. Any trap is the trap.

And the way out is the same for all of them: you have to grieve the thing you're not getting back, and then — and this is the part where it gets hard — you have to stop pretending the before version was as good as you've made it in your memory.

I have spent fifteen years polishing the memory of who I was. Making him more free, more whole, more complete than he actually was. Because grief requires an object worthy of grieving. And somewhere along the way, the pre-injury Chase became a myth instead of a person.

The person was twenty-four and impulsive and charming and a little lost. He dove into a shallow pool at 2 AM without checking the depth. He was on his way to something, yes. But he wasn't finished yet.

Neither am I.

That's the exit from the trap. Not getting back. Getting somewhere new. The direction doesn't have to be the same direction. It just has to be forward.

I don't recommend the scenic route.

But the building? That's the next chapter.

I told you this was a journey. I never said it was a short one.