To Fly

"There is freedom waiting for you,

On the breezes of the sky,

And you ask 

What if I fall? 

Oh but my darling, 

What if you fly?" -Erin Hanson  

Worried about being late, I was pedaling quickly down a dark street. A van abruptly pulled out from behind a parked car. He crossed my lane as he made a left turn. I saw him coming, and felt his headlights on me. I swerved.

This happens to me frequently. The driver usually sees me and brakes, and I swerve out of the way just in time.

This time he didn't see me. The van collided with my body. I soared through the air, propelled forward by the inertia of my forward pedaling interrupted by the collision with the van. I didn't scream. I had only this thought:

I want to live. I have so much more that I still want to say.

***

You know when you've been working hard on the computer all day, the way your eyes glaze the page, but you're not taking in any information? You try to work on something, but your brain feels like it's shutting down for the day? That moment when you say to yourself, "I'm no longer being productive, I should probably go home"? So, then you go to happy hour and have a beer, or perhaps a puff of a joint, and you feel a little dizzy and confused and not quite in control of your emotions?

That was my brain. All the time.

My thinking was slow as if wading through a thick fog. The room wobbled as I walked. My brain felt as though it had been switched out for a slow and clunky old computer. In a cruel twist of fate, the one thing that I needed the most-sleep-was almost impossible to get. I laid in a bed that was floating. The room was spinning. My ears were ringing. My head was pounding. My stomach twisted with nausea.

***

Eventually I went back to my hometown, Pittsburgh, to recover. One day shortly after I arrived, I was home alone. I set to work checking off a long list of tasks. My rehab therapists were helping me get me back into reading again. They had instructed me to jump my eyes back and forth between various letters randomly displayed on a page. "The exercises are supposed to trigger your vertigo and nausea, that's how you know it's working," one of the rehab therapists had cheerfully quipped. I hated doing the exercises, but the to-do list…it lay there on the table on a bright pink Post-It note, mocking me. I couldn't leave it unattended. It needed me.

At one point in the afternoon, I briefly considered taking a walk through a nearby park treasured from my childhood. Despite the frigid temperatures outside, the sky was bright blue and the sun was shining. However, the to-do list loomed large in the back of my mind. Laid out in front of me remained a long list of assignments.

As I focused on the list, the day passed quickly and soon the sun was setting. It was too late to go to the park now. I still had one more item on the list: exercise. "Exercise is one of the most crucial parts of your post-concussion rehab and recovery, because controlled and monitored cardio can actually help speed up healing," the doctor had informed me, his chubby face too big for his small glasses. "You can use an exercise bike to start off with, since it won't involve the up and down motions of running, and side to side motions of swimming, which can cause dizziness," he had suggested.

I had tried this. Two weeks later, I had sat in his office burning with shame as tears streamed down my face. "I'm trying so hard to do what you are telling me, but I'm not making the progress I had hoped for," I had said, my voice garbled and shaky.

"Concussion recovery is definitely a 'two-steps forward, one-step back' process. You'll get there. You've made great progress already," he had insisted as he glanced over my chart one more time and left the room exactly 15 minutes after he had entered it. I didn't care if I had made progress. I wanted to be 100% again.

In Pittsburgh, I was determined. I found an old exercise bike in the house. I set off doing exactly what the rehab therapists had told me: intervals of five-minute sprints for five reps with five-minute rests in between each repetition. I pushed as fast and as hard as I could on the bike, going faster and faster each interval, sprinting as quickly as I could.

With my heart pumping, blood flowing, and legs burning, my mind went blank. I plowed ahead as vigorously as I could. The pedals on my feet, the air filling my lungs, and the pulsing of adrenaline felt so good. My rehab therapist was going to be so proud, I thought to myself.

I drank some water and started getting ready for bed. I was sitting on the edge of the bed when it started to hit me. Dizziness. Splitting headache. Throbbing like my head was going to explode. Nausea. Unfocused vision. I gripped the sides of the mattress. My concussion symptoms were coming back. What happened? I had followed the instructions exactly as my rehab therapist had recommended.

Suddenly, a thought crept into my brain. I remembered something he had said about the sprints. I should start out in walking speed, he had said. I should slowly work my way up to jogging speed, he had said. It was only after jogging speed in five-minute intervals that I should work up to actual sprinting. A pit formed in my stomach and my breathing started to quicken. 

Blame it on the memory loss. Blame it on the way I was distracting myself by focusing only on the item to check off on my list, rather than how my body was feeling and the common sense that I was pushing myself way too hard. I had majorly messed up. With a sinking horror of disbelief and shame, I lay down on the bed. Disappointment filled my chest as I felt my muscles contracting. I realized had taken five steps back in the recovery process. My jaw clenched in anger and hatred towards myself for failing.

Then hysterics overtook my body: tears flowed down my cheeks, and my sobs turned into rapid, gasping breaths. I was swallowing air like I was drowning in my own fear. My face got hot and my head throbbed as the blood flow quickened with each panicked breath, my adrenaline racing out of control as fear told the mind and body that great danger was present. For the next 72 hours, my body reeled with the consequences: headaches, nausea, and disorientation.

Never before had I suffered such damaging consequences from pushing myself too hard. I had always been rewarded for my hard work. Ever since childhood. With every acknowledgement of an accomplishment, my face burned and I looked down at the floor, but pride swelled like a balloon inside me.

No one had ever told me to slow down. Or maybe…maybe they had tried. My dad telling me to go to bed when he found me still up at two am studying. My high school teacher telling me, "you should probably take up yoga or something to deal with your anxiety." My friend lovingly telling me that I reminded her of a robot. The bags under my eyes that only grew bigger as each year passed. The curve in my spine that grew more hunched each year as I spent more and more time at my computer. The void of loneliness in my chest that only grew bigger each year. The kind of unshakable loneliness that forces you to hug yourself at night while tears squeeze through your shut eyes.

Now with the concussion I had no choice. The only thing I could do was wait and trust that my body would heal itself. Trust myself…Was it possible?

In the days that followed the exercise bike extravaganza, with nothing to do but lay on my back in bed and stare at the ceiling, I thought of my grandpa who had passed away six months earlier. He was a collegiate-level football player, and later a university professor of chemical engineering. He was also a workaholic--or so my mom tells me of the way he would regularly come home from work at three am.

He had suffered from severe memory loss for 13 years before he died. He undoubtedly had experienced concussions as a football player--even if they went undiagnosed at the time. In the last 13 years of his life, he had lived with my family and me while suffering from memory loss and confusion not so unlike what I was now experiencing.

I felt his presence with me as I laid on my back and the room spun. I remembered something I had heard recently: "Maybe the dead are meant to help the living find their path." Was he helping me find my path by showing me, through the only way I would listen, that I needed to slow down? Was an anxious, workaholic lifestyle of fleeting success in academia the course that I wanted for myself?

***

When I returned to Pittsburgh over Thanksgiving break almost a year later, I went to that treasured park from my childhood and walked down the heavily wooded and winding dirt trails. I felt the fallen leaves and gravel crunch under my feet as I walked.

The sleepy maple trees were brown and mostly bare in self-protection from the winter freezes. But it was early enough in the season that some held onto their bright red leaves with yellow veins, branches and leaves clinging to each other.

"Some stories are meant to end," I thought to myself, eyeing the dying leaves.

But even in death, there is so much beauty there. Beauty in the red and brown leaves that still cling to the trees, beauty in the green grass that sprouts even in the chill of autumn. I had missed it all the year before in my desperation to please the pink Post-It note calling my name for attention.

I reached a fork in the path.

"I should turn back," I thought to myself. "I should just turn around and walk back to the car." But something pulled me forward, and I thought, "Let me just walk a little farther to see what's down this trail."

I was a little nervous. I couldn't remember exactly where I was going. I felt like I was going farther and farther away from the car. What if it got dark? What if I couldn't find my way back? But I just kept walking.

Then, I recognized some landmarks that brought me back to the days when my sister and I ran this trail together. The yellow iron gate to keep cars out, the curve in the trail by the big tree stump, the thin muddy trail through the patch of grass, the slope at the top of the hill, the sharp curve to the right around the massive oak. I knew this trail well.

Birds chirped and dogs barked in the distance. In the near silence, my breath echoed in my ears as my lungs expanded and released: coming and going, filling up and letting go. Blue sky and puffy, white clouds. Breeze on my face. The wind biting my nose. A dream. I had dreamed recently of breeze on my face like this.

I was riding on a hang-glider, enjoying the blue sky with the breeze on my face and wind in my ears, the sun on my face, and my heart beating in my chest. When I had landed, my mom and grandpa wanted to ride on the hang-glider too. No! I had screamed. We're late for our flight! We rushed to the airport, but we missed our flight anyway. 

Can I imagine a different world? A world where I can share in the joy of the hang-glider with others, enjoying the ride instead of cutting it short because of the fear of an impending deadline?

Before I knew it, I had made a loop back to my car without even trying.

What are the possibilities that open up to you if you are willing to take the risk?

A picture of my second tattoo on my right shoulder, which I got in China in 2017. The tattoo was inspired by the concussion experience told above, as well as the Chinese proverb, 野火烧不尽，春风吹又生 (yehuo shao bu jin, chunfeng chui you sheng), which translated literally means, “A wildfire does not burn it all completely, there is life again when the spring winds blow.” Another more literary translation, which I got from the dictionary, says: “Even a prairie fire cannot destroy the grass, it grows again when the spring breeze comes.”