Keep Your Chin Up
A transgender motorcycle rider reflects on humiliation, resilience, rage, and the strange discipline of keeping your composure while life repeatedly tests your patience. Sometimes survival looks less like peace and more like holding your chin up while internally plotting arson.
Are You Still Watching?
My sleep schedule has become absolute chaos. Couch naps turn into fake responsibility, fake responsibility turns into sleeping with the bedroom light on, and somewhere in the middle of all that nighttime nonsense I somehow manage to write a few pages before dawn drags me back into the world.
I Hope They Get This In Time
The proof copies for A Survivor’s Guide To Survival finally arrived, and for the first time since the accident, this chapter feels complete. This book was designed for people waking up in hospital beds after trauma: scared, hurting, disoriented, and alone. If these words help even one person find their way back to themselves, then the book has already done its job.
The Road Beckons
After betrayal, trauma, and months of emotional chaos, a simple email from a distant friend became something unexpectedly grounding. A reflection on motorcycles, human connection, healing, and the irresistible pull of the open road.
Necroptic Vision
Ever since the accident, people seem smaller to me. The ones I used to fear. The ones I thought were powerful. Maybe death changed my vision. Maybe I developed some kind of necroptic sight that lets me see through bravado and ego straight into the fragile little souls underneath.
Thunder Therapy
There’s a moment when a motorcycle stops being transportation and becomes therapy. The rumble settles your nervous system. The throttle clears your mind. And for a few perfect hours on a New Mexico morning, nothing exists except speed, sunrise, and the violent reassurance that you’re still alive.
They Should Walk Away Knowing They Mattered
There’s a moment in every project when it stops being an idea and becomes real. Not in some abstract way, but in that gut-level, holy shit this is actually happening way. That moment hit me this week when I opened the first full proof of A Survivor’s Guide to Survival.
The Ones Who Get It
Some people don’t do small talk. They don’t skim the surface or fill silence with noise. They go straight to the things that matter. When you find one of those people… you know.
Closer to Closure?
I didn’t call her for revenge. I called because I wanted to finish something. To look her in the eye and say the words that would finally let me walk away.
Pain, But Progress
They fixed it. That’s the truth. Nerve endings waking back up, sensation returning to places that have been dead since October. That part is a win. But healing isn’t clean. It’s not gentle. It’s sharp, throbbing, and relentless. This is what progress actually feels like.
When You Start Questioning Your Own Mind
I wasn’t crying because of pressure. I deal with pressure every day. I was crying because, for a moment, I thought my mind was broken and I didn’t know if I could trust myself anymore.
Running South
I’m coming up on five months since the accident. Five fucking months. And just when I thought I was clawing my way back, life decided to remind me that sometimes the hardest hits don’t come from the road… they come from people.
Goddamned Appointments
I survived the crash. I survived the hospital. Now I’m just trying to survive the goddamned appointments long enough to get back to being me.
The Word I Didn’t Know I Needed
She said I was pretty. Just like that. And it hit harder than it should have because I didn’t realize how long it had been since anyone had seen me that way, or how long I’d stopped seeing myself at all.
The Part I Can’t Remember Still Won’t Let Me Go
I don’t remember the accident. That’s the part that still eats at me. The details are gone, but the questions aren’t, and every new inference feels like reopening a wound that never fully closed.
Two in the Morning, and Not Done Yet
The lawyers are done. The insurance companies ran their formulas. The paperwork closed. But four months after nearly losing my life, my body isn’t finished. Healing doesn’t move at the speed of settlements. It moves at the speed of scar tissue. In the meantime? I build.
I Think I’m Afraid of the Dark Now
I don’t remember the accident, but my body does. And when the sun goes down and the headlights start moving faster than trust can keep up, the dark doesn’t feel neutral anymore.
Four Months
Four months can hold a lifetime. Concerts. Bikes. A brand-new tire that never got its second chance. Hospital photos I didn’t remember taking, but my body remembers living. Trauma doesn’t change you slowly, it rewires you overnight. You wake up different. And then one day, you have to walk back into your life and see who’s still there.
Some Days the Words Don’t Come, But the Ride Does
Some days I wake up with stories clawing to get out. Other days, my wrist hurts, my foot protests, and the words stay quiet. On those days, I ride. And somewhere between cold air, torque, and movement, my soul remembers who the fuck I am.
You Don’t Get to Be More Afraid of My Recovery Than I Am
I survived injuries that kill people outright. Every minute since has been a fight, and I fought. Two months later, I got back on my bike, not because I forgot what happened, but because I refuse to let the person who hit me define the rest of my life. What surprised me wasn’t fear. It was the judgment for getting up.