Do What You Can

Contour Lines | 010

I’m not feeling the best today, though better than yesterday. In fact, I almost didn’t publish my first Compass Point because I didn’t feel as though I clearly explored or explained the topic in the way I wanted to. I’ve got a mixture of pain, odd sickness (no congestion, sore throat, etc., just feeling like I’ve been in a fight or had the flu for days straight, neither of which is the case). I couldn’t really move around, but I could type.

I mentioned last week I might move away from Chinese philosophy for a bit, and I had intended to pick up Ralph Waldo Emerson, another author I read extensively as a teenager. But given the state of my body and mind, I’m more in the mood for Nietzsche.

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“I assess the power of a will be how much resistance, pain, torture it endures, and knows how to turn to its advantage.”

The voices of self-doubt that constantly creep into my head have been breaching the walls for many years off and on. As a younger man, physically capable to exercise without as much regard for how I treated my body, I could prove myself wrong by showing my worth and prowess, but my injuries are extensive.

At 20 years old, an artillery simulation grenade went off two feet from my head. The hearing loss and ringing in my ears gets worse every year, sometimes as loud as the self doubt.

The following year, I slightly tore my left rear deltoid muscle in my shoulder. With limited mobility, I regularly have to get that area treated with osteopathic manipulation otherwise I can’t hold my son with that arm for very long.

A year later, I got hit with a .50 cal machine gun barrel to the left side of my head, leaving me with a lovely traumatic brain injury (TBI) and all it’s downstream effects, including memory loss, brain fog, and mood swings.

Around the same time, I also damaged my left kneecap. Stairs are fun.

But I resisted the pain. Not in a healthy way that would lead to growth, but in a method of ignorance that kept me trapped in unhealthy cycles for several more years.

I eventually went back the Veterans Administration and got reevaluated, and was able to mitigate some of the effects of the TBI. But not all.

Being able to think clearly again, I immediately signed up for school, and finished my BAIS at 31 years old, and went right into a MA program. I used to joke with my friends and family that with my military injuries, my left side was the broken one. I tried to do Spartan Races, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, but always had to be conscious of my injuries.

The last Spartan Race before the car wreck - I was going to do one two weeks later.

Later that year, I was in a near fatal car wreck. A man fell asleep at the wheel in his F250, and came across the line, completely in my lane. It was essentially a head on collision, if I hadn’t had the extensive amount of experience driving gun trucks training to avoid hazards on the road in the military I would have been crushed. But muscle memory kicked in with about a half a second and 20 feet to spare.

All the damage was directed to the passenger side, thankfully no-one was with me.

The dashboard came across and broke my right arm in the middle of my bicep.

The transmission housing smashed the right rear part of my pelvis.

I now have nerve damage, shrapnel, and arthritis in my right side, along with essentially no cartilage in that hip socket. Thankfully, I was able to rewire the nerves on my right side, and I can walk and type like I used to, but I’m at a constant level of pain that keeps my blood pressure elevated, even 3 years later.

So, how is this relevant to Nietchze, beyond the obvious, as well as publishing the first Compass Point?

Well, immediately after the wreck, I was very optimistic, very determined to “get back to who I was,”

I had already suffered plenty of injury, my most proud moment being overcoming some of the TBI issues. As the months went on, however, they came back. I allowed myself to be broken, for I believed myself to be a broken man.

I was never again going to be who I once was. I was resentful when I realized that while I could get around and do things similar to what I once did, the pain wasn’t going to go away. In fact, it would just get worse.

I became ashamed of my body, unwilling to be grateful for the life, love and mobility I still had. I was angry at the world. I didn’t want to inspire anyone. I didn’t want to have a story of drive and resilience.

I just want to be able to drive my family to the beach without having to stop every hour to massage my hip.

I want to be able to teach my son to throw a baseball the way my Dad taught me.

I want to hike for miles and not be physically devastated for a week afterwards.

Over time, my anger has lessened and my gratitude increased. But the past few days have been brutal. Thanks to the fever, every joint has ached, with stabbing pains in my back and ribs. Headaches, weakness, fever, fatigue. Everything a normal sickness does to my body is amplified tenfold.

So when the only thing I could do was type, that is what I did. I explored different facets of liminality in context to different scales of leadership given my mental resilience at the time. I embraced the abilities I can leverage in the face of pain.

And I published it knowing I wasn’t happy with it. But now you know why.

This is who I am and what I am capable of in this moment.

I’m resisting the pain in a healthy way. I’m finding ways to define who I am in spite of it. Our bodies and minds are not separate. So if one is being forced to sit tight, I’ll use the other one, and put forth my best effort at the time.

Whatever your pain is, physical or mental, I hope you can be inspired to turn it to an advantage, to inspire people that even in darkness, they can be a light, for themselves and others.

I believe in you.