What I learned when my face broke
Meditations on assault and injury
It was a cinder block.
Smashed across the left side of my face.
My skull.
Sun had not yet set.
I remember laying on the sidewalk as the sensation I soon identified as a foot, several feet, kicking my ribs until they cracked, thinking the blurring of my vision was an indication I had lost a contact or contacts.
My contacts were intact, albeit covered by blood.
The gore came from my brow’s cracking, as was my left cheekbone below that. I wondered in a timeless kind of time if there was a fire as I heard a siren. No. It was so loud. The first thought in my cloudy and oddly clear head being: This is an overreaction.
Then it stopped. My inner ear produced a scream before the drum popped.
Everything was so slow, boring even, and then, like magic, I was being asked my name from the back end of an ambulance.
That night was not a time for wisdom making. Nope, nearly ten years ago, less than eight minutes from my front door was not an instance of learning. Too dynamic a transition to allow for the catching of a self-improvement breath.
That is what the rest of my life is for.
The thing they do not tell you about victimhood is that it rolls out in weeks.
After the flowers stop arriving, cards cease hitting the mail slot, you find yourself sitting in your studio with two black eyes, a swollen jaw, neck brace, broken rib girdle, and these totally “square” shoes wide enough to contain ten broken toes, add to that a left lean limp when you, like any average American, need to get your ass to Trader Joes. This is a time of navigations. The stairs, the four-block walk a tedious traveling Freak Show. Crowded grocery a zoo.
All my prayers were put to praying for invisibility. Angry and exhausted, I started smiling back. Once, there was a child watching me at CVS. Honestly taking in my grotesque mask with wonder and horror, but not enough fear to turn away.
“Hey there. Some people beat me up, but I am OK.”
“Does it hurt?”
“All the time.”
“Oh. Sorry”
“Thank you.”
Four months of bruises and reconstructions, hospitalization, an investigation and year-long trial were an empathy boot camp. An un-welcome wonderland and Hell beyond measure.
From Final Girl central, I sit with little to offer but well-heeled context. Question: why am I sharing this self-exploitive insight today? For a reason similar as to what I do with all things in my business: strategy.
Roll with me and think of identity and professional storytelling. There are a lot of doors we can use to enter the space from which we offer our messages and therefore pitches.
In the time where my face, the baseline for how I was and am seen, was reforming, I had the pleasure of learning a great deal about appearance. Less about how we posture and more as to how we position. May we approach the “about me” storytelling quandary as an avenue to keenly expose and endure. A space to lay ourselves and brands bare all while building our communities to a space of relatability and engagement.
Mistakes I invite. Crisis, sure, why not?
There is a thing that comes to you from walking home at 9:30 on a Friday night, exiting the subway, on the phone with your Mom, when you are bludgeoned in the face and kicked until your ribs break and kidney’s rupture by four young women that I so wish to offer. Not to beget sympathy, but to unearth a shake-up and enticement to the terrific nature of a person’s trajectory, under the belly of privilege assumption, and dialogue of betterment.
I have a lot of things I’m grateful for which I owe to my assault:
● I know what fear feels like, and that it doesn’t actually influence much of what is happening;
● I got a rent break for that year;
● Eventually adopted my epic pooch, George;
● Took equity, diversity, and social justice education courses;
● Got a nice new profile;
● And took some time off;
● Left a juvenile relationship;
● Fell in love;
● Had my heart broken (later);
● Quit acting;
● Got a great role;
● Quit again; and
● Grew up.
My attack is not a baggage, it is a tapestry, a part of me both terrible, excellent, and mostly just a fact. It is just a fact. Integration is essential to keeping it there, in its place and no more monstrous.
There is a curious thing about sharing. As if once one does – and I judge like this, too – it speaks of agenda. And, I guess it does. We are animals and always looking for the most convenient in. Sure. So, using the amorality of that approach, my aim could be steered as such:
· I tell this story, and tell it HOW I do, to stoke, ground, and invite the reader to know that as we age it only gets weirder. Not just our skin, but our experience, and that who we are is a culmination of stimulus we can and can never control. The making us “better” part is all in the messaging.
· Less excitingly, as we look at how we position ourselves in relations and relationships – at home or work (these days those being the much the same) with others and ourselves. The ballet between who we are and how we posture, those track marks of our presents and pasts – former jobs, the hires, and firings alike; array of interests, pursuits, addresses, accreditations and educations – we are able to select the labels that suit us best. And we can do the selection process at any damn time!
Question #2: (this time to you)
How do words like failure or achievement serve or aid you?
Not just when referring to one binary experience, but any juncture or instance in your history?
Answer (s):
1) To close the book and think no more on striking instances hard to place and reckon with;
2) Manifest personal destiny and self-ascribed dictums;
3) Be the person one imagines someone or thing with power wishes for or rewards
Again (broken record here!) I steer you back to the idea of the Legacy Statement and the thinking of the impact you desire to make. The footprint on history, no matter how intimate that may be. Cock and shoot your memories and experiences with the power of a bullet, ever forward moving.
I am hero and courageous less NOT because of my touch with criminality. That is simply, sadly, circumstance. What takes objective misfortune to future looking fodder is HOW I use it. That could be seen as a bit of denial, but who is to say how one is to read their own realities? No one but – me. You. History may not come with an eraser, but highlighters can be useful.
Tracy Michele Bullock here, victim? Oh please, I mean, yeah sure, but what else?
