When I regained my vision, I was head down in moist earth. It was raining. My left hand gripped soil. An electricity surged through my body and forced me to dart my eyes right, then left; the wreck of my car wrapped around a tree entered my peripheral. I moaned, turned on my back and closed my eyes again.

I was too concussed to remember most of that awful Saturday. My wife relayed the details to me Sunday once she convinced me to stay in bed. I had cursed out the first responders and good Samaritans who stopped to help me. I was obsessed about work; these were clear signs of head trauma. I could not stand and suffered drastic mood swings. At the hospital, I was incessant about my need for coffee; at home, I cried and went about cleaning. Anxiety faded to soreness come Sunday, and to boredom come Tuesday.

Bedridden, I could not pursue my obsessions. I could not go teach children. Taking a piss required a two hour nap afterward; an hourlong excursion outside ruined me for the next 72 hours. A stroll of two minutes made me sweat like a marathon runner hitting his wall. I could not surf the Web or play video games for more than a half hour until mental exhaustion overtook me. I often fell asleep reading.

So I slept and I thought. I stopped having nightmares about the crash after Monday. I began sketching the ideas for this post on Tuesday. What did my idea of black personhood have to do with this crash?

My personhood has been shaped by linearity. I have spent my adult life maintaining my escape velocity from poverty. From attending New York’s best public schools, to college, to Teach for America, to grad school—I felt I have always strove to live, at the very least, within the edge of the Talented Tenth. My raising of my heights has thus led to a profound fear of heights, of losing it all to a career misstep or some random encounter from the police. In this case, it was losing an altercation with a tree.

My recovery, in most senses, has shown me I have little to fear. I have purchased myself into a community where the first responders arrived within minutes, where I was in one of the city’s finest hospitals within the hour, and where my insurance was working through my automotive and medical claims within the day. I work a job with paid sick leave and the ability to do some tasks at home.

I have achieved all of this in defiance of where our political order states is the appropriate place for black people to be. I have suffered because of this. The random police stops as a teenager and adult. The questioning of my intelligence and credentials at my PWI college. The fighting for a fair mortgage rating when it came time to buy the house. The higher APR I suffered when I purchased my first car.

My life has been one of striving, punctuated by me fishtailing down the hill on Skyline Drive and colliding front-first into a tree. In an instant, I went from striving to writhing in the dirt; and I have been pondering about my life before the flash. Black personhood is shaped by the tension of striving versus exploring—of attaining security versus knowing that we have it already, and exploring our world with that security as our tailwinds. My blog is my way of exploring. And I have spent my convalescence wondering how I can do more of it.