Complicated Feelings: Injury and Sobriety

Welcome to the final week of April. I hold April cautiously, like it is fragile, although I know that I am the fragile one. Warm weather is creeping in with its accompanying ache; the knowledge that it will quickly turn punishing and humid, into the kind of viscous heat that weighs a person down. Perhaps it isn’t helpful to preempt any joy I might feel about a perfectly temperate day by thinking too far ahead, but I am sensitive and unable to detach my gratitude at the turning of seasons from my anxiety about the future, especially as we turn away from climate protections and continue waging war.

I unwittingly and freely gave April a lot of power over me. I can feel it tickling me from underneath my skin. The very act of approaching it with caution turned its shadow into something loftier than is logical – I gave it my power. It’s funny; every year I learn something new and sometimes contradictory about what it means to survive.

Today, April 28th 2025, marks one year alcohol free for me. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to write about this, if I even wanted to write about it at all. A topic like sobriety requires a gentle approach because, in addition to being frequently tied up with trauma, it looks different for everybody. For me it has looked like sugar-free soda in a wine glass, long walks, cartoon reruns, and THC gummies – California sobriety. I went to a couple of AA meetings and am glad that I did, but did not feel, personally, wholly comfortable. The first step of twelve is to admit powerlessness, and I’m not sure that I believe a person is ever fully powerless. But it is all personal. Life is a repeating process of finding what works and attempting to ameliorate what doesn’t, and if something continues to not work we should leave it behind. Of course it is far more complicated than that, because, like most things, sobriety is about people, and people are complicated. So I’m going to talk about the past year from my point of view. I will be talking pretty frankly about a severe injury and debt. If reading about these things begins to feel heavy, please be gentle with yourself, and if you find reading this worthwhile, please feel free to subscribe or share. As always, you can find me on Instagram and nowhere else on the Internet for now.

I broke into 2024 in the throes of a brutal hangover – the kind that makes your top layer of skin feel like static humming on a broken television set and fills your head with smoke; the kind that makes you whisper apologies into an empty bucket clutched to your chest. At that point I had tried to cut down several times, which mainly looked like taking a full week off here and there. This reminder lurches out at me frequently as I look through old journal entries – there are only so many ways to write the words “I am going to quit drinking” and I think I’ve cycled through them all. In the swell of those hangovers that had begun to last several days I constructed vivid fantasies of coming out cleanly on the other side and seeing the world open up for me, of explaining in an interview that my success came effortlessly after overcoming that one small hurdle. Writing about this from a place where I feel very securely over that hurdle prompts a surprising mix of feelings. I’m glad I don’t feel that way anymore, that sharpened dread that sets in the day after. I wish I could dream smaller. It is sometimes hard to grapple with what was, in retrospect, quite obvious: in most ways my life is the same now as it was then. I often wonder if my relationship with alcohol is fixed now, if I’ve effectively hit the reset button, and I love the idea of having a glass of champagne at a wedding… but it has been going too well to try any funny business.

April 2024 came around like April always does for me, with a gentle dread in tow. It is a month that, though I try not to think of it as such, always seems sympathetic to grief; always lets it in when it shows up unannounced. Since April is National Poetry Month, I decided (halfway through it) that I would write and share a poem every day for the remainder of the month. I had also just gotten a second job. Not necessarily because I wanted to, but I was struggling to keep up with the cost of living in a city and paying off my debt. It was a couple of hours every weekday after finishing my 9 to 5. The new job had a storytelling focus. I figured it was good to have the experience, would give me a much needed income boost, and I’m young enough to handle a longer workweek.

I recall an early April night at a dive bar in the single-digit hours when in an instant I felt, intensely enough to burn through the drunkenness, the acrid grip of panic in the concave of my chest. I placed my half empty vodka soda on a counter and staggered out into the quiet of the night through a cloud of cigarette smoke. In an instant I was on a street corner two blocks from my front door, just on the fragile barrier between conscious and oblivion. It was a layered terror then to have just enough awareness to know how many tragic missteps one could take in the homestretch and inhabit a body that wasn’t fully cooperating. By the time I got home and closed and locked the door, my breathing had snagged on itself and panic began to bite me from the inside. I sat and tried to slow myself, I cried and told myself that something had to change. Because I didn’t like how I was treating myself or the people around me. Because on that night I knew that if I was only slightly farther gone I might have attempted something drastic. Because on that night I saw the end before it happened.

But that night wasn’t the end.

One year and one day ago I got blackout drunk, fell backwards on my way home, and struck the pavement, fracturing my neck and my skull. Somewhere along the way a piece of rubble tore a gash along my left eyebrow. I came to strapped to a gurney in an ambulance with two paramedics hovering over me. I carefully recited my sister’s cell phone number so that they could call her and then lost consciousness again. It happened on that same street corner where terror had caught me not much earlier.

At the Emergency Room, I regained awareness somewhere between my sister arriving at the hospital and a woman administering stitches to the side of my face. My sister, a physician herself, knew exactly what questions to ask and who to talk to to ensure I was seen promptly. The pieces of that night I still carry with me are fragmented and fuzzy in recall, like a well-loved VCR tape. I was experiencing the world through several filters, through drunkenness and through shock, awash in adrenaline and in pain. A dear friend of mine arrived somewhere in the first hour and wrapped my left hand up in her own. They wheeled me to the MRI room which felt like being sent to space, placed in the howling metal stomach of an unfamiliar beast and directed not to move despite not knowing if I even could.

From there I was transferred to a bed on the Trauma floor where I would spend what I think ended up being two days. By now, it was late Saturday evening. I remember at one point meekly suggesting to my sister that we keep this injury between us, as if she would, even for a second, consider doing that. My mother, father, and stepmother flew to the city the next morning. I kept making jokes which I imagine would have been much funnier under different circumstances. “This is just like what happened to Humpty Dumpty”, “it was nighttime, how did the wax melt?”, or, referring to the blood-crusted gauze covering half of my face, “I think I have a little schmutz… Is it obvious?”.

Those two days are also fragmented. The aftermath of an impact is saturated with fatigue, and I drifted in and out of sleep. Trauma wards assign volunteer chaperones to keep watch over their more “psychologically vulnerable” patients at all hours, so I would often wake to someone new sitting in the corner watching videos on their phone or listening to music. At one point we swung my legs over the side of the bed so that I could take cautious and chaperoned first steps like I was a freshly delivered fawn. The truth is I was tired of pissing in a plastic jug. The time came when I was deemed stable enough to be ushered back into the real world. Surely not I thought, maybe physically, barely. I was delirious and frightened and the thought of the real world made my stomach tighten; even worse, Monday was coming. My sister got in contact with my manager at each job and let them know I had been in an accident and would be out for a week. “Don’t think about work right now”, she said whenever I began to worry. “It will be there later. You need to heal first.”

It turned out there was a bed available on the Psych Ward which I could transfer to, just as soon as my insurance approved it. In the moment and in retrospect it’s grimly hilarious to have been entirely at the mercy of an invisible insurance representative’s evaluation of whether I was broken enough to merit coverage.

I spent a full week on the Psych Ward. Anyone who has ever spent any time on a Psych Ward knows that they come by their reputation honestly. There was an incident on my second evening. Between reading pages of “Blackouts” by Justin Torres, which I had been reading before the accident and which my sister brought to the hospital for me, and writing what felt like revolutionary poetry in a cowskin-printed notebook, I pulled a SCRABBLE set from the bookshelf in the common room. The shelf was cluttered with secondhand books, puzzles, and colored pencils. Most of the books had erratic and sometimes hilarious margin notes written on the pages that hadn’t yet been torn out. I poured out the Scrabble tiles and counted them, noticing the set was 9 tiles shy of the standard 100. I sorted them by letter in my near-catatonic haze as a commotion grew louder somewhere to my right. Checking your periphery with a broken neck is a full body movement; when retelling stories about my neighborhood walks I like to say that I looked both ways before crossing the street like C3PO would. A man began throwing fists in the common room. Something pierced his thin grip and he got violent. No one was seriously hurt but that was the last time I saw that man. That week was an Odyssey, there are stories I have written and stories I have dreamed that I still am not certain I will ever share.

In those early days my head was like a gunshot in slow motion; a thoroughfare explosion at my right side temple to be muffled but never fully quieted. There’s a great oddity in drawn out injury where the pain becomes such that it takes a phantom quality. I felt as though I had in fact been decapitated that night and my body in its drunkenness had wandered to find care and left my severed head behind. The overhead fluorescent lights were sharp against my beat-up brain so I would trace my way down the halls with one index finger against the wall to guide me. I was advised not to get the neck brace pads wet unless I had replacements, which were not provided for me, so every shower could only clean me from the sternum down. I would scrutinize my patchwork face and double-black eyes in the mirror as I picked dry blood from my filthy hair.

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Excerpt from the first draft of my manuscript:

“I still bear all the weight of my exhaustion – the suffocating heft of recovery; it feels like grief. I fall asleep and wake up from dreams with equally measured horrors and secrets and wipe beads of sweat and clumps of dried up blood from off my forehead. I swing my legs to reach the floor and float into the bathroom where I wash my face and meet my eye and listen to the water run.

I trace my ring finger in circles on the meat of my palm; I feel the sweat and the ridges. I reach up to my face and my still tender nose – I trace its outline down to my upper lip, the patchy stubble on my chin tucked between my skin and the padding of my neck brace, the face my mother gave me, a dead ringer for her father, a man I never met… but this nose is from my father, my Irish inheritance. The bruises around my eyes have softened and I can almost see them pulsing, deep and emerald green, yearning for an earnest ray of sunlight. I wonder what these eyes have seen and chosen to forget.

I never liked my nose before now. Growing up I always thought it was too large for my face; that it branched too broadly from too narrow a bridge and shouted louder than my other features could. Oddly, I think I look beautiful; beat-up and at my lowest, but stubbornly clinging on. My face is the culmination of generations doing just that – getting hit and falling down and retaining the absurd determination to continue fighting, inch by inch, to get to an unclear destination.

The gauze that frames my left eye has gone deep and maroon and is crusty to the touch. Gently, like I'm attempting surgery I locate its edge and lift it away from my still healing flesh, revealing the raw and sewn-up reminders of the fall.

The tail of my left eyebrow lifts off alongside my life-soaked bandage. I begin brushing pieces of dried blood from what remains of it, applying pressure with a dampened hand towel. I imagine myself digging my jagged nails underneath those raw pieces of skin and peeling it from my face. Would it reveal a fresh new face underneath or eviscerate me more? How many layers must I shed to become myself? What kinds of wounds are worn unshown by those I think I’ve always known?”

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It’s astonishing that I survived my injuries, even more so that I was able to recover fully. I was discharged from the hospital on May 8th. My father came back to DC to help me transition back into my home and slept on my couch for a couple of nights. We filled a pitcher with warm water and put a towel down on my back porch and he washed my hair, picking clumps of dry blood that somehow survived my half-attempts at cleaning myself in the hospital. My sister came by with a suture kit to clip and remove my stitches and clean my wound. As the sun set I played music from my phone speaker and we watched the sky turn tangerine.

I took another full week off of my 9-5 and told my manager at my second job I would not be able to return. I never told her the real reason. I never really told anyone the full extent of my injuries. What is a person supposed to say about breaking his skull and neck? It happened, it sucked, I survived?

For nearly a month I ate only turkey subs. I took contemplative walks to my local coffee shop where I would read and write a journal entry or a passage for my manuscript. Nobody really talks about this but everything is funny after a traumatic brain injury. I bought replacement pads for the neck brace and watched a few Youtube tutorials about replacing them and I took my first proper shower in weeks. When I felt the running water hit my face for the first time I laughed so hard I thought I might re-break my neck, I laughed until I had to sit down beneath the showerhead and cry. I laid down naked on my towel with my head on a firm pillow held stationary and laughed at how ridiculous I would look to an outsider, I laughed at how many ways that simple operation could have gone wrong. The first time I saw my alleycat friend Debra she rushed to my side, closer than she had ever gotten. She pressed her head into my leg and looked up at me like she had missed me dearly.

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Journal Entry: May 24, 2024

“There is a strange shame in injury – the chilling thought of being visibly broken. I’m trying to find the balance between my desire to be stoic and the true severity of my circumstance; the guilt, fury, thrill, and monotony of having survived. I walk around my neighborhood each day. I smile at the people walking by, they smile back. I wonder how they think of me; if I’m even still on their mind at the end of the day or just a specter in a neck brace. I wonder if they feel the magnificent burden of breathing as I do, having just been reborn again. But I suppose we are all just specters in our many accoutrements – floating along and hoping that, maybe, brokenness is something we all have in common.”

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The great American insult to those who survive is a swift and brutal price tag; first an injury, then a condemnation. For those with the audacity to be chronically ill and financially inept enough to have no trust fund, poverty is more than a guarantee, it is an insistent promise. I recall a moment about a week and a half into my recovery, shortly after I had returned home and my father flew back to Boston, where I got a notification from UnitedHealthCare that my claim had been partially denied, and that I owed $55,365.00 of what ended up being a $118,875.00 bill from the hospital. All I could really do in that situation was laugh.

Bills kept arriving at my house through December; from different departments of the hospital and from collection agencies, each directing to a different payment portal with a unique login. Debt is also an industry, and it is complex by design.

That’s before the therapy, before the meds, before the time lost.

I walk by the street corner where it happened every day. I’ve written and rewritten a hundred different versions of the events of that day and night, weaving together the fragments I recall and coloring in the blank spaces every different way. There are versions that end with paralysis, or with my own funeral, and there are versions where I wake up hungover having dreamt the whole thing. I don’t know that clarity would help in this situation, or why I keep passing by that same spot, as if I’ll come across a piece of me that broke off that night. Truthfully, those pieces have been coming back more and more every day – the parts of me that shine which I had muffled for too many years.

How do people cope in a world that feels like it's designed to break us? The day of the fall, I woke up feeling happy. I called both of my parents and did a load of laundry before going to brunch. I spoke with friends and reviewed my next lesson, but the whole time there was a buzzing in my ear… Because I knew there was a point in those weeks where I realized that I was drinking myself to death and decided that I didn’t care. Because there was a part of me that I wanted gone and I was willing to kill everything that surrounded it. Before the fall, I wrote a lot of poetry and after the fall, in the hospital, I wrote a lot of poetry, almost obsessively.. I wrote a lot more after getting home. The obsessive writing morphed into a meditative act which has played a vital role in my coping.

Writing and sobriety carry similar iterative processes of finding what works. I decided that while I was in the neck brace, no alcohol would pass that threshold. By the time I got cleared to take it off it was mid-June and I had just turned 27. I just kept going with sobriety until it turned into another practice I wake up and decide to continue with every day.

Talking candidly about the things we might prefer to keep secret, about our injuries and our wounds, is how we heal. It’s why I tell stories, it’s how I survive. It is the antithesis of this isolationist tech-centered hellscape the world keeps trying to become. It is human and imperfect and messy. It is Youth and its requisite recklessness; that is, if you're lucky.

There are incidents that change us, that change everything. And sometimes it's hard to accept when those changes don't happen how we want or how we expect. And sometimes it's hard to verbalize or even understand what could make things better. I used to be afraid that I could not get better; that something deep down was broken and every action I ever took was filtered through that brokenness and doomed from the start. But that's the thing about being fragile, you learn a great deal about pulling yourself back together in an oft-abrasive world. I am not ashamed to be fragile. My fragility is a testament to my resilience.

To end this piece, I’d like to share the poem I wrote on April 26th, 2024, the day before the fall.

This is “The Crash”:

I still feel it – the crash. I still wear its mark.

I feel it scratching at my temples, hear it worship in the dark.

The unrelenting ebb and flow unmuted, each crescendo undiluted.

Poured out on the pavement far below.

It’s the gray space placed between the lessons I refuse to learn and all the simple truths that I can never know.

The complex and divine dispute between the roughage and the roots.

The magic, the mundane, the masquerades.

But every word I write is wrapped up in my awful nights and tied together with my joys, my hopes, my fears.

Perhaps the most beautiful and frustrating part of being alive is that I’m not entirely sure how to do it.

Is anyone?

……..

Take care of yourselves.

With Sincerity,

J.K.