It’s Saturday, December 1, 2022.
Brie and I had gotten married a few months prior and we were living in Phoenix, Arizona. We spent our honeymoon that October kayaking in Antelope Canyon, hiking the Grand Canyon, and rock climbing in Sedona. Thanksgiving was spent backpacking in the Superstition Wilderness, star gazing and enjoying the shade of the oases that sprung up in the middle of the desert, fed by the underground springs that bubbled up seemingly out of nowhere.
Riding high on the new freedoms--and unemployment--of my life after academia, and starry eyed with optimism in a new trans male body, I was preparing for a jiujitsu competition in Phoenix. The competition was scheduled for mid-December.
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I had recently switched gym affiliations and was newly training with Jay Pages’ gym. We had competition training at the gym every Saturday morning.
“Slap hands and go,” came the instruction from the coach.
The timer started, the music blaring. We engaged first in hand fighting–grabbing the wrist, then the forearm, then the tricep. I used my forehead to bore into my opponents’ head, then I controlled their hips, went to the left and then the right. We were immersed in a tangle of limbs and sweat. My brain turned off. There was nothing else that existed in the world except for my breath and the pressure of our bodies against each other, which was strangely calming, simulating murder but in the most loving and playful way you can imagine.
Competition training meant that the session was focused on stand-up (wrestling and judo, something that normal jiujitsu training rounds didn’t always include); higher intensity (faster pace with more muscle leverage involved than a normal training session); and playing for points (this meant keeping positions for the required 3 seconds, switching positions as often as possible to rack up points, and making sure that positions met the requirements for points, things you didn’t normally pay attention to when you were just training for fun or exercise).
That day, December 1st, I let out a sigh of relief when I was paired up with a blue belt female. She was the only woman in the class that day and the only person close to my size. She was kind and friendly and a good jiujitsu player, someone I had trained with before, someone I felt comfortable going hard with because we were about the same strength level.
We started the session with some wrestling rounds aiming for a take-down: getting the opponent off their feet, either on their back or with their knees and hands on the mat. Round 1. She took me down and I took her down.
Round 2. She came at me hard with a double leg, where you wrap both arms around your opponent’s legs and use your shoulder to push into their ribs to bring them to the ground. She came in for the kill, made contact with my lower ribs with great force and my foot got caught on the mat. She plowed through me like I wasn’t even there and as she fell on top of me, I felt something snap in my ankle. Pain seared through every molecule of my being and I saw a flash of white light.
Before I knew it, I was face down on the mat. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk. I just felt tears leaking out of my eyes against my will. But in seconds, I got my bearings. I heard voices yelling as my partner stood over me.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” I said. “Just twisted my ankle.”
Training resumed and I crawled over to the side of the mat. A few minutes later, my partner re-appeared with some Advil and a big bag of ice. “I’m so sorry!” she said, looking concerned. “I just ran to the corner store to grab you these.”
“Thank you so much,” I choked out, still breathing heavily. “I’m okay, just in shock. I better sit out. You guys keep training.”
With a couple of Advil in me and a bag of ice on my ankle, I sat for the rest of the practice. Nobody paid too much notice. In jiujitsu, injuries aren’t uncommon.
At the end of training, I tried walking and quickly collapsed in pain. One of the guys offered to give me a piggy-back-ride out to my car. I obliged, my arms wrapped around his neck and my legs wrapped around his hips, feeling silly and childish but thankful all the same. I drove home with my left foot, my right leg useless and flopped like a dead fish to the side. I laid on the couch for the rest of the day. Brie came home a few hours later.
“I hurt my ankle at jiujitsu,” I said. “It’s bad. I think it might be broken.”
“It’s not possible to break an ankle. You can sprain or tear an ankle but unless you shatter the ankle bone you can’t break an ankle,” B replied.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said.
“Do you want to go to urgent care?” B asked. “If we go to the ER, we’re going to be there for the next 8-12 hours, just think about that.” It was 7 pm and I didn’t want to be at the hospital all night.
“Yeah, let’s just wait and see if it gets better,” I said. “I’ll call the doctor on Monday.”
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I texted my friend who had crutches from a knee injury a few months earlier and asked him if he still had them, and if so, could I borrow them? He brought them over and I hopped to the front gate of our house to retrieve them when he arrived.
“Sorry, I’m on my way to an event, I can’t stay long! Hope they’re helpful!” he yelled over his shoulder as he slid back into his car.
Brie was gone all day on Sunday and I walked my dog with the crutches. At one point I slipped and put weight on the hurt ankle, only to be met with that bright white light and searing pain again. I gasped and went back to hopping with the crutches.
On Monday morning, it wasn’t better and had swollen to twice its normal size. I found a foot and ankle doctor via Google and they had an appointment open for Tuesday. On Tuesday, I drove myself to the doctor, again using my left foot, my right foot collapsed in uselessness. They took an x-ray and reported, “Yeah, it’s very, very broken. Shattered. You’re going to need surgery unless you want to be handicapped for the rest of your life.”
It turned out that I had broken my fibula (not my ankle exactly, and for this Brie was partially right). It was a bone I’d never heard of before, never having taken biology or anatomy (the fibula is the thin bone located on the outer side of the lower leg, parallel to the shinbone).
I was on board. No way did I want to be handicapped at age 33. By some miracle of God, I was “blessed” to have health insurance that year (or was it extreme structural inequities that health care is not guaranteed in this country? The bill later would read “$65,000” just for the surgery alone, not to mention the doctor’s appointments and supplies needed before and after. Without my insurance, I don’t know what I would have done.)
“OK, when can I get the surgery?” I asked.
“Right now it’s too swollen to operate on,” the doctor reported. “You’re going to need to elevate and ice it 24/7 for the next few days to get the swelling down and then we can do surgery on Friday.”
So that’s what I did. Foot propped above my head and encased in ice, I slept and felt sorry for myself for the next few days. My parents and in-laws were scheduled to come visit that weekend, so I called them and cancelled. On Friday night, the only time the operating room had an opening, I went under the knife at 11 pm. Known as an ORIF (Open Reduction and Internal Fixation), it was a surgical procedure used to repair severe bone fractures. They put in 2 metal rods and 12 screws to put the bone back together and secure my leg in place.
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The nurses warned me that it was “one of the more painful types of surgeries we know of.” The next month was a taste of hell. Only given five days of opiates (“It’s for your own good, the addiction risk is too high and those drugs lower your pain tolerance, resulting in more pain long-term and overall,” explained the surgeon), the rest of the time I was in pain 24/7. Especially at night when the pain demons seemed to emerge just to cackle at me from on high while I laid in bed and stared at the ceiling, in so much pain that I couldn’t stop the tears from flowing. The one thing I needed to heal was sleep and that was what I couldn’t seem to get.
Brie and I were moving back to Colorado the next week. But I was SOL, and not allowed to be weightbearing on that leg for the next 8 weeks. The following days were a blur of TV shows and audio books, totally dependent on Brie for everything from eating to brushing my teeth. My parents flew in from North Carolina to care for me while Brie packed up the house and drove the car and the dog to Colorado where we were moving.
One day in the midst of my parents visiting, I opened my email to find a rejection letter for a job application I had filed the previous month: “We regret to inform you that you will not be chosen to interview for this position.”
The room started spinning and the air caught in my throat, my chest heaving. WTF? Not to be cocky, but…the position was for the director of a teacher training program in Asian Studies at CU Boulder. Not only had I graduated from there with a PhD specializing in Chinese Politics and Culture, but I personally knew the current director of the program, who had invited me to apply. I had worked for them in the recent past and I had thought that for sure I would at least get the chance to interview.
That night, over grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, I cried like a little kid who had been chosen last for kickball at recess, my tears dripping down my face and onto my sandwich. My parents sat dumbfounded, not sure what to say, at a loss for how to comfort their grown adult child in a world they always knew was cruel. They gave their feeblest encouragement but mostly just stayed quiet.
I had been unemployed for a year at that point and my hope that I could somehow make a living using my degree was dwindling as fast as a paper towel in a fire pit.
It was that night that I decided I needed to start a new life using the skills I had. No more of this idealistic dreaming bullshit.
I learned how to code and started looking for data analyst jobs. In January 2023, I found one. It was in the consulting industry with the what everyone told me was a "best case scenario": helping non-profits with their environmental work, especially in regards to public transportation, climate change, and animal and land conservation. What could be better than that?
Yet I found myself miserable sitting in front of my computer day after day, feeling like a waste of life and a waste of space. Wake up, eat, work, sleep. Wake up, eat, work, sleep. The following months passed in a blur. I gave up on publishing my book. I was too exhausted to work on it.
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Before, I had a vision of how my life was going to be. I was going to be successful. Use my Chinese language skills to set myself apart from the crowd. Use my writing skills to add creativity and communication to whatever job I got. Spread my knowledge by teaching the next generation. I was going to one of the rare few that knew how to have a healthy and successful work-life balance.
If I didn’t make a lot of money, at least I would be happy. I’d have a fulfilling career spreading the joy of learning about other cultures and politics, especially in Asia, to other people. I’d write books about all the things I was thinking about: culture, politics, theory, inequality of globalization and capitalism.
But rejection after rejection eventually wore me down.
Nobody really cared. Nobody really wanted to hear what I had to say. Most people just needed to get through the day and make a little bit of money in the meantime. Soon that became my path as well.
There was no broader purpose for my life, no broader meaning, no broader message that I was meant to share and pass on. Life was short and cruel.
“Life sucks and then you die,” said Mrs. Evans, my tenth grade chemistry teacher whenever we complained about the homework. It turns out, she was right.
My dreams about changing the world--or even making an impact--were very, very wrong.
After all, "the higher you climb, the harder you fall." I had poured myself into learning Chinese, earning a PhD, writing a book, and carving out expertise in a niche corner of Chinese politics. When I was faced with the reality that none of it held any value in the world of tech and capitalism, the blow landed hard. It felt as if all of that time and energy I had spent had been for nothing.
So now, when I wake up and immediately feel the existential dread of life, the doom and gloom hovering over the work day ahead, and on Sundays when I’m filled with anxiety about the next week, when I just barely make it through the day without a nervous breakdown, when I rely on pots of coffee just to make it to 5 pm, I have to wonder, what’s the point?
But it also gives me empathy. Who has time to appreciate art and learn about politics when you’re just trying to make it through the day?
