My friend Johnny has one helluva story.
In many ways, it’s a story you could likely relate to — especially if you, too, grew up in the performance-based pressure cooker of an upper-middle-class suburb, an overachiever born to overbearers who expected you to somehow find your way into a Wall Street boardroom or Capitol Hill courtroom without ever moving out of your childhood bedroom.
In other ways, it’s a story you couldn’t possibly imagine.
Johnny and I met as incoming freshmen to Johns Hopkins, both of us baseball rats fresh from wrapping accomplished high school careers at opposite ends of New York City’s outer boroughs — he accomplished two city championships as the spark plug for Staten Island’s Tottenville High; I accomplished setting my team’s all-time record for slowest time from home to first1 at Horace Mann in the Bronx.
He was the kind of kid built for first impressions: megawatt smile flashing pearly white against a perma-tan, all hair gel and bear hugs, tight shirts and strong cologne. Even his name ricocheted around your auditory cortex upon introduction — “Johnny Benedetto” — its paradiddle of syllables beating an indelible neural pathway between “Gina Lollobrigida” and “Joey Buttafuoco.”
Johnny B. was the life of the party, and after falling out with the Hopkins coach and falling into a frat, he kept the party rolling right through graduation week, while somehow hitting enough books to stack a 3.85 GPA and secure a Mechanical Engineering degree with honors.
That degree landed him at Boeing building helicopters outside of Philadelphia — with an eye towards Seattle and his dream job on the Dreamliner — but parental pressure called Johnny back to the Big Apple in search of a bigger salary, which he found going down the road of a new finance career he never really wanted.
It was in the beginnings of this early burnout that Johnny found himself down the Jersey Shore for July 4th, desperate to decompress with beers and bros. But what was supposed to be a carefree holiday weekend with the boys ended up a bedside vigil in the intensive-care unit, where Johnny was rushed after a violent wave threw him headfirst into the beach, breaking his C6 vertebra, leaving him paralyzed below the waist.
Listen to the episode to hear Johnny tell the rest of his story, but spoiler alert: that accident turned out to be life-changing in more ways than one.
I appreciate Johnny’s vulnerability and generosity in sharing his journey to what he describes as his “liberation” and “rebirth.” Along the way he learns how to establish badly-needed boundaries with his family, how to counterbalance his prodigious IQ with a commensurate EQ, how to access and express his authentic self and sexuality, how to handle his haters and shake his FOMO — a mental condition more crippling than his physical paralysis — and ultimately, how to live his life on his own terms, unapologetically and without permission; a life that’s completely free, and forever free wheelin’.
90 feet in 5.6 seconds — Johnny could have beat me with a piano on his back.
