TLDR: I was broken. Prizefighter saved me. So I made a thing as a reminder to never return to that cave. 

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Some of you may already know this first part of this as I dusted it when first coming home from the ICU after my attempt, bear with me…

In 2023, I had an accident that left me paralyzed from the chest down.

In 2024, I was placed on mandatory bed rest, and that bed rest is only now finally ending next week. That much time alone stuck in one room, gave me too many hours to stare down my past and forever.

On March 23rd of this year, I reached a breaking point. I did not want to make it to the three-year anniversary of my fall. I did not want to keep dragging my wife’s possible life down just by being here. I know now that those thoughts were distorted, selfish, and foolish, but in that moment they were as real to me as anything. I took a large amount of medication I had been stockpiling, went unresponsive and woke up in the ICU. They thought it was sepsis. For a while, I let them it so I could get out and try again. 

After 2 days they couldn’t sort out what was wrong and my mental capacity wasn’t turning. When asked what year it was, surrounded by modern machines, I supposedly answered: 1879. So I asked the nurse about confidentiality policies and if they were obligated to tell my family. Satisfied with the answer, I came clean. 

When I finally told the nurse and doctor what I had done, they assigned someone to sit by my side 24 hours a day to make sure I stayed safe.

I was fortunate that the first person who sat with me asked if I wanted to listen to music. I said yes. Mumford & Sons had just released their new album, *Prizefighter*, so he put it on repeat for me. I had always liked the band when I heard them and knew one day I would dive in head first as they spoke to my love of folk music, glint’s and glimmers of spirituality and allegorical lyrics. Anyway, I listened to the new album for the better part of the next 36 hours. Somewhere inside my gabapentin and Valium soaked delirium, the music reached me.

Sometimes it felt like the broken version of me, lying in that ICU bed, was singing to the future version of me who might somehow be better / healed... The song Here comes to mind.  Other times, it felt like that future version of me was singing back, trying to pull me toward him. Begin Again, for example. And at times my broken and healed self were singing back and forth in the same song. The Banjo Song, to name one instance. 

That music helped me let go of the things I had been holding onto that had led me to that point. It gave me the courage to tell my wife what I had done, and why I had done it. It gave me perspective. It helped me understand that this was enough. That I was enough. 

When I got home, I looked everywhere for a poster that was just the album cover with song titles, but I could not find one. So I made one myself.

Last week the frame arrived and my wife hung it on the wall. Right now, it is the only thing on that wall, which means it is the only thing I see when I sit up in bed.

It’s  a reminder to be a “Rubber Band Man” even “on the dark side of the earth, where the creatures are all out and I’m a man on the moon with midnight around my neck and sunrise on my breath.”

Prizefighter saved my life.