Chapter 22: The Good Soldier
3.2k words
The Colonel never yelled.
That's the thing people get wrong when I describe growing up with a retired Air Force colonel for a dad. They imagine boots on the table, someone barking orders from across the room, that kind of thing. It wasn't like that. My dad was — is — a good man. Loving, funny, steady as a rock. The kind of man who shows up every single time, no exceptions, no excuses.
But there was a way things worked. A chain of command that wasn't written down anywhere and didn't need to be.
You adapted. You overcame. You did not, under any circumstances, make a scene.
Not because my dad was cruel — he wasn't. It was just the operating system he ran on, and when you live inside someone's operating system long enough, it becomes your own. Emotions were handled. Problems were solved. Weakness was something you acknowledged privately, processed quickly, and never let interfere with the mission.
The mission was always whatever was in front of you.
I didn't realize this was a thing until I was well into my thirties, sitting in a therapist's office — one I could barely afford, mind you — trying to explain why I couldn't feel sad about things I was very clearly sad about. And she asked me, "Where did you learn that feelings were something to manage?"
I thought about it for half a second.
"Probably around 1993," I said. "Fort Wherever-We-Were-Living."
We moved a lot. That's the military life. You land somewhere, you unpack, you figure out the social hierarchy, you make friends, and then you move again. You don't get attached to geography. You don't get too attached to people. You adapt. You overcome.
It made me resilient. I want to be clear about that. Whatever I survived after that pool in Oxford — the four months of rehab, the years of figuring out how to exist in a body that didn't respond the way it used to — a big part of what kept me vertical was that military-kid wiring. The Colonel installed something in me that didn't have a shutdown command.
But resilience and emotional suppression are not the same thing, even though they look identical from the outside.
There's a specific memory that comes up when I think about all of this. I'm probably twelve, maybe thirteen. We're at some base somewhere — they blur together after a while — and one of the other kids in the neighborhood had gotten hurt. Not seriously, but enough that there was crying, enough commotion that everyone came out of their houses. And I remember the Colonel standing next to me, watching the scene, and just saying quietly: "You handle it."
He didn't mean the situation. He wasn't telling me to go help. He meant myself. You handle it. You don't make it bigger. You don't add to the noise.
I was twelve. I filed that instruction like it was an order. Roger that.
For twenty years, that's exactly what I did. And it worked, sort of, the way any system works when the load it's designed for doesn't exceed its capacity. The Colonel's framework was built for life's normal chaos — moving, adjusting, starting over. It was not built for lying face-up in a Mississippi pool at 1:20 AM, realizing nothing below your shoulders was answering anymore.
The system overloaded. But I kept running the old code anyway, because it was the only code I had.
Here's what the performance looked like in practice.
The morning after the accident — some version of morning, whenever they let enough people into the ICU — I remember making a joke. I don't remember what it was. Something dumb. Something that made the nurse laugh and made my parents look at each other in a way I caught and filed away: he's okay, he's cracking jokes.
I wasn't okay. I had a broken neck. I would never walk again. But the good soldier knows how to read a room, and what that room needed was for me to be okay. So I gave them that.
It's so automatic I didn't recognize it as a decision for years. I thought that was just who I was. The guy who keeps it light. The guy who doesn't go dark. The guy who is, by all external measures, handling it.
What I was doing was running a script. The "Chase is fine" script, version 2.0, adapted for catastrophic injury. Every visit: jokes, optimism, gratitude for the team, "I'm going to get through this" energy on demand. I could perform it half-asleep. Sometimes I did.
The cost didn't hit immediately. That's the thing about performing strength — the invoice arrives late. You go through rehab telling everyone you're good, and the therapists make notes, and your parents sleep better, and your friends leave visits feeling hopeful. And you feel the small, quiet drain of it, but you chalk it up to everything else. The pain. The adjustment. The work.
By the time I was out of rehab and back in Louisiana, the drain had become a deficit. I was operating in the red emotionally and I didn't have language for it. Didn't know that "exhausted by the performance of being okay" was a real thing. Thought maybe I just needed to try harder.
Trying harder at performing okay is still performing. It's just more expensive.
Nobody tells you about the mental health part.
Not in the hospital. Not in rehab. The focus — and I understand why, I do — is physical. Can you breathe on your own? Can you sit up? Can you use your hands? How high is your injury? What does function look like from here? Those are the right questions in those first weeks. Nobody has time to ask, "Hey, are you okay with the fact that your entire identity just got shredded?"
Because that's what a spinal cord injury does. People think it takes your legs. It takes your whole self.
I don't mean that in a dramatic way. I mean it literally. Everything that made me me — the hiking, the random 2 AM pool parties, the way I moved through a room, the physical confidence of someone who'd never had to think twice about his body — gone. Not changed. Gone. And in its place was this new version of Chase that I didn't know, didn't like, and had absolutely no idea what to do with.
That's not sadness. I want to make that distinction because people conflate them constantly.
Depression after a spinal cord injury isn't crying in the shower. It's looking in the mirror and not recognizing the person looking back at you. It's the space between who you were and who you now are — this hollow, echoing gap that nobody outside your skull can see, so they assume it's not there.
It's going through the motions of recovery while something in the back of your brain is quietly asking a question you don't want to answer.
I didn't want to answer it for a long time.
I'll say it plainly because this book has always been about saying things plainly: I had periods where I wasn't sure I wanted to be alive. Not in a dramatic, "I'm going to do something" way. In a slow, grinding, what is the actual point way. The kind of depression that doesn't announce itself. It just makes everything gray and heavy and distant, and eventually you can't remember what color looked like before.
Nobody asked me about it. Not in the hospital. Not in rehab. One therapist checked in briefly — bless her heart — but there's no real protocol for sitting with a newly injured twenty-something and saying, "This is going to mess with your head in ways that might be harder than anything we're about to put your body through." There probably should be.
The ADHD made it worse. My brain, which was already a browser with forty-seven tabs open, lost its primary coping mechanism overnight. Before the injury, I self-medicated with movement. I didn't know that's what I was doing — nobody did, because I wasn't diagnosed until 2020, over a decade later — but I was. Constant activity, constant stimulation, always in motion, always having somewhere to be and something to do. The ADHD was manageable because the world was big and I moved through it fast enough that the chaos inside my head couldn't catch up.
After Oxford, everything stopped.
I was in a bed. I was in a chair. I was in a room. My brain, which had never once in its life slowed down, was now trapped in a body with limited options, climbing the walls of my skull, eating itself alive.
Medication helped eventually. It also took years and a carousel of wrong answers first — this one makes you zombie, this one makes you anxious, this one does nothing at all, this one works until it doesn't. No insurance means every adjustment is a financial negotiation. You're trying to get your brain chemistry right while also doing math about whether you can afford to try something different. Cymbalta eventually stuck. Sixty milligrams. It doesn't fix anything — let me be crystal clear, it doesn't fix anything — but it turns down the volume on the worst of it enough that the other stuff becomes survivable.
The "other stuff" being the daily reality of a body that doesn't work the way bodies are supposed to work, an unmedicated attention disorder that makes everything take three times longer, no insurance in a country where that means you're constantly one crisis away from financial collapse, and a personality that was specifically trained from childhood not to complain about any of this.
"I'm good."
I said it so many times after my injury that it stopped being a sentence. It became punctuation. An automatic response. A reflex.
How are you? I'm good. How are you holding up? I'm good. That must be so hard — are you okay? Yeah, I'm good.
I was so good. I was the goodest person who ever gooded.
I wasn't good. But I understood, on some level I couldn't fully articulate at the time, that people needed me to be good. They needed it more than I needed to tell the truth.
Here's what nobody talks about when they talk about recovery: the emotional labor of managing other people's feelings about your injury.
My parents were terrified. My friends felt guilty — some of them still do, I think, in ways they've never quite shaken. Strangers who heard the story needed it to end well because the alternative was too uncomfortable. Everyone in my orbit needed to believe that I was okay so that they could be okay.
And I gave them that. Repeatedly. Consistently. At my own expense.
I didn't recognize it as people pleasing back then. I thought I was just being strong. Being the good soldier. Keeping it together so the people around me didn't have to watch me fall apart. But at some point, "keeping it together for other people" becomes indistinguishable from "lying about your own experience," and I crossed that line so long before I knew where it was that I couldn't have told you when it happened.
The military wired this in early. Not on purpose. My dad wasn't trying to teach me to suppress my emotions — he was trying to teach me strength, and those lessons landed in a kid's brain and got translated into a different curriculum. The lesson I learned was: your feelings are a burden. Get them handled and get back to the mission. Don't make this about you. The unit comes first.
After Oxford, the "unit" was everyone who loved me. And they were scared, and grieving, and trying to hold it together themselves. So I became what they needed. I performed recovery. I said I'm good. I made them laugh when I could. I made it easy to be around me, because the alternative — watching me be as broken as I actually was — felt like cruelty.
That's not strength. I know that now. That's a very sophisticated form of self-abandonment.
Here's where the threads tie together, and it's not pretty:
The Colonel taught me that emotions had a chain of command. File them, manage them, report for duty.
The military upbringing taught me that the mission came before the man.
People pleasing was the natural endpoint of both of those lessons, deployed at scale.
And then Oxford happened, and my spinal cord snapped, and every single coping mechanism I had — the motion, the activity, the forward momentum, the ability to physically leave a situation that felt like too much — all of it was gone. What was left was the loop. The same thought running on repeat. You're a burden. Keep it together. Say you're fine. Don't make this harder for everyone.
I was doing that loop without the tools to break it. Without the ability to burn off stress with a run. Without the impulsive midnight drives that used to reset my nervous system. Without even the basic luxury of walking away from a room that felt too small.
The walls came in pretty close some nights.
I don't know how to describe the specific experience of lying in bed, not being able to move, and needing to be somewhere else in your own brain but not being able to leave. Not being able to do the physical thing your nervous system is screaming at you to do — get up, move, go — because get up, move, go is no longer an option. I had always been a person who thought better in motion. Now I was stationary by force, stuck inside a brain that didn't know how to be still, and the dark thoughts had nowhere to run to.
That's when it gets real. That's when the gray gets heavy enough that you start asking the questions you don't want to ask.
I asked them. I survived asking them. I'm still here, which is either a testament to something or just statistics, I haven't decided which.
What eventually got me through — and I mean through, not over — was something I'd been trained to see as weakness. Something a good soldier was never supposed to need.
I had to ask for help.
Not the "I'm struggling, can someone pass the salt" kind of asking for help. The real kind. The naked, terrifying, no-longer-pretending kind. The kind where you look at someone you love and you say, "I am not okay. I have not been okay for a long time. I need more than I'm getting, and I don't know how to get it without telling you the truth first."
That is, without question, the hardest thing I have ever done. Harder than rehab. Harder than the four months of relearning every basic function. Harder than the first time I had to ask someone to help me with something I used to do completely alone.
Because at least rehab had a protocol. At least physical recovery had metrics. With the emotional stuff, there was no checklist, no rep count, no chart that tracked improvement. There was just the terrifying open water of I need help and I don't know what form that takes and I'm going to have to trust someone with the parts of me I've been hiding.
The Colonel would probably say that's the bravest order you ever give yourself. I think he'd be right. I think he'd also understand why it took me so long to give it — because he was the one who taught me the chain of command in the first place, and he lived it too. Different generation, different war, same instinct to hold the line.
But even the best soldiers know that a position isn't worth holding if the cost is everything.
The moment the performance had to stop wasn't dramatic. That's the thing about the good soldier routine — it ends the same way it runs, quietly, in a room where nobody's watching.
I was alone. It was late. The specific date doesn't matter, but it was a few years out from the accident — far enough that nobody was cutting me slack anymore, because from the outside I looked like I had it together. Which was the whole point. Which was the problem.
I was going through the checklist — the mental one, the "what do I need to look okay tomorrow" checklist — and somewhere in the middle of it I just stopped. Sat there. And I let myself acknowledge, for the first time without immediately filing it away: I have been doing this performance for years. I am exhausted. And nobody even knows because I am very, very good at hiding it.
And then I cried. Not dramatically. Just: the weight that had been accumulating for years found an exit, and I let it go, and I sat there in the dark feeling like I'd finally put down something I'd been carrying since the ICU.
That's when the actual work started. Not the physical recovery. The other thing. The harder thing. The thing that doesn't have a discharge date or a set of metrics or a moment when someone hands you a certificate and says you're done.
The soldier doesn't retire. He just stops pretending the war is what it isn't.
I still say "I'm good" sometimes. Reflex. Old code running.
But now there's a second voice underneath it that checks. Are you actually good? Or are you managing the room again? It's a small thing, but it took years to install, and I'd argue it's done more for my actual recovery than half the physical therapy.
The mental health piece of SCI — of any life-altering injury or diagnosis — doesn't get the airtime it deserves. Not in hospitals. Not in rehab. Not in the inspirational stories people want to tell about disabled people who "overcame." Because the true story is messier than that. It's not overcoming. It's coexisting. It's building a life that includes the hard parts instead of pretending they resolved.
Depression didn't leave. ADHD didn't leave. The anxiety about money and insurance and what happens if something goes wrong didn't leave.
But I stopped letting them run the show from backstage.
The Colonel raised a good soldier. I'm proud of that. The structure, the discipline, the refusal to quit — I'd be nowhere without it. But the best commanders I've heard him talk about over the years weren't the ones who never felt fear. They were the ones who felt it and made the call anyway.
That's the job now. Feel it. Make the call.
Ask for help when help is what the mission requires.
Report back honestly, even when the report is bad.
And stop performing fine for an audience that deserves to know the truth.
I'm good is a reflex.
I need help is a choice.
One of them kept me alive. The other one is letting me actually live.
I think the Colonel would be proud of that distinction. I think he's getting there.
I know I am.