I was a man with a list. Learn to fly. Make the music. Build the thing, then build the next thing. I was a student pilot with big dreams and, frankly, zero limits — the good kind of delusion, the sort that actually gets things done.
Life was loud and going somewhere. I assumed it always would be. That's the thing about being well. You never once stop to be impressed by it.
Then my brain ruptured. I'll spare you the medical poetry.
One day I was building a life. The next I was on a table while people far cleverer than me opened my skull and went looking for the problem. I came through the part that kills most people who have it.
And then came the part nobody warns you about.
I had to learn the basics again. The small, stupid, fundamental things a grown man assumes he will never once have to think about. It was slow. It was humbling. It was, on occasion, genuinely funny — and you laugh, because the alternative is the other thing.
Music was the way back. One track, then another. A radio station built out of a city I carry around in my head. A comedy club for bikers, because why not. And the aeroplane — still in pieces in a hangar, still mine, still getting finished.
I'm not cured and I'm not selling you a sunrise. I just got on with it. Still am.