Why I built this

I'm not a licensed clinical psychologist, I'm not an engineer, and I'm not a coder. I'm a survivor who had the opportunity to step back, look at exactly what my struggles and pain points were, and spend the time to put it together.

I served as an EFMB medic and paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division, and it was during that same stretch of my life, at nineteen, that I made some decisions no young man should have to make. I risked my military career and lost it, completely disappearing to hide from myself as well as from the people I'd let down. I got good at making those kinds of decisions, good enough that they eventually led to me getting robbed, beaten, and left for dead by twenty people. In the years that followed, nobody ever sat me down and explained what a traumatic brain injury actually does to a person over time, how it sits underneath everything else and quietly reshapes the way you carry the rest of your life. Nobody ever called it anything more than an assault, and it stayed that for years.

What came after cost me the better part of a decade. I climbed back out of it on my own terms. I built a name for myself as a DJ, earned a residency at the number one club in the country, in Colorado, and moved to Austin, Texas to start my own record label.

After finally starting to get established again, I was thrown into an incident that would end up being the most consequential experience shaping the person able to stand in front of you today. It happened at a professional DJ equipment release party. I can remember every second of it like it happened last night. I was talking to a woman I'd begged to come to the event, and to the owner of the residence, when a drink got spilled on me. I excused myself for a few moments. While I was cleaning up in the restroom, I heard a sound that still haunts me today.

The balcony had snapped on one side, catapulting everyone standing on it into the wall before it came down on top of them. I came back out to pitch black. Other people were screaming and running blind in every direction. I went over a fence alone while people were still trying to break through it, and I spent the next stretch of time pulling people out from underneath several thousand pounds of collapsed structure. The woman I'd invited was among those badly hurt that night, along with others who suffered compound fractures and broken backs. Everyone I found that night, hurt as some of them were, made it out alive. I still remember the details of it with a clarity most people would call a mercy not to have.

The man who owned the place ended up hurt too, sitting in what would have been my own seat when the balcony went. None of that ever showed up in any account of that night, and neither did what it cost me afterward to carry it.

I stayed at the hospital five days with no sleep, talking to people, helping people, while I was hurting just as badly as any of them. Nobody once turned around and asked if I was okay. What I got instead was that I'd saved everybody, that I was a hero, so what did I even have to be stressed about. A broken leg doesn't need anybody's permission to be believed. I had nothing like that to point to, so I got told how amazing I was until I stopped trying to say that I wasn't.

I wish I had a scar, a bruise, or a cast. Something so people could know I was hurt, or that I was getting better.

In the months that followed, that total lack of validation is what led to my first attempt to end my life. Nobody looked at me and thought, that man is hurt. Nobody was even willing to consider it might be true. I made a second attempt not long after, still in Austin. I tried Colorado for a while after that, and I couldn't hold myself together there either, so I went home to my father's house on the lake in Farmerville, Louisiana, and stayed in the back room for close to three months. I didn't come out even for food.

One of the first times I left that room, I went to a birthday party, and that's where I met my wife. What happened between us didn't feel like meeting somebody new. It felt like recognizing somebody I'd already known, across more time than the two of us had actually had together in this life. I don't fully have words for that even now, and I'm not sure I ever will, but it's the truest thing I can tell you about how I met her.

We built a life together over the years that followed, a marriage, a family, ground under my feet for the first time in longer than I could remember. Then, well into that life, I got hurt welding. That injury started years of surgery and isolation. My family learned to read me before I said a word, because they had to. I watched my wife and my daughter freeze like they were bracing for impact over something as small as me dropping my keys too loud, and I was home for years after that injury, tired of being the bad guy in my own house when I wasn't the bad guy. The injury was. Nobody could see the injury, so I stood in for it.

Once I could work again, though not weld, I started driving for Uber and Lyft. Strangers got in my car and told me things in twenty minutes they'd never tell the people who actually knew them. What I noticed, ride after ride, was that the same kind of event landed completely differently depending on whose body it happened to. My post traumatic stress didn't look like the next person's, and theirs didn't look like the one after that, and everybody kept getting measured against the same averages like we were all supposed to break the same way. None of us did.

I don't remember all of it, not even now. Some of the worst moments I only know because somebody who loves me told me afterward what I'd said or done. There are nights I'm lying there already dreading the nightmare before it's even started, knowing it's coming, with nothing to do but wait for it.

I hold onto control harder than almost anyone I know. The beating wasn't mine to control. Neither was the balcony, or the years either of them cost me, or what my own mind still does to me on a given night without asking my permission first. Control is the one thing that's actually mine now.

Most of us don't talk about any of this, and people mistake the silence for shame. It isn't. We know exactly how much what happened to us would cost the people we love if we handed it to them, and we'd rather carry it alone than watch that cost land on them.

And when it gets to the point where ending it starts to feel like an option, that doesn't come from selfishness, whatever it looks like from the outside. It comes from caring so much about the weight you think you're putting on everyone around you that some part of you starts to believe they'd be better off carrying nothing at all. I know that thought from the inside, and I built this for the people standing in it right now who have nobody who can see what they're carrying.

I've asked myself a hundred times why I'm the one who gets to build this, when I'm not an engineer and I'm not a clinical psychologist. The only answer I've found is that my whole life pushed me toward exactly this. I got good enough at rebuilding to do it more than once, but I never let myself get comfortable enough to stay still, and I got knocked down hard enough, more than once, that I had to relearn from nothing what it actually means to stand back up. I regret none of it. It's the same road that gave me my wife and my daughter, and it's the same road that put me in a position to risk everything I've built to help the people who are still standing exactly where I used to stand.

Nobody wants the first day paramedic. Nobody wants the negotiator who's never talked anyone down before. When it's your six on the line, you want the one who's already faced the monsters himself and picked himself back up anyway, because that's the only proof it can actually be done.

— Chad Smith, founder, Sixwatch, LLC. U.S. Army, EFMB medic paratrooper.