(This piece appears in the Kindle edition of my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia)



Here’s a story from my own life about reversing a curse.

When I was 19 years old, a stranger shot me with a gun. The attack happened on Duke University's East Campus in Durham, North Carolina. It was 1:30 a.m. on a night in May. I was walking from my friend's home near the campus to the Greyhound bus station downtown, where I planned to hop a bus to Philadelphia at 2:30.

Too bad I couldn't afford a taxi. My backpack was heavy, I was already sleepy, and the trek would take 40 minutes.

I had passed Baldwin Auditorium at the north end of the campus. As I looped behind Brown Residence Hall, two prowlers stepped out from behind a tree. They were both holding shotguns and stood less than 20 feet away. One spoke to me: "Do you know where the auditorium is?" I was petrified and confused.

A few moments later, I heard a bang, then felt a whoosh of tiny missiles piercing the right side of my buttocks.

I knew I was in trouble. Would they fire again? My questionable strategy was to fall on the ground and pretend I was dead. I hoped they would think they had killed me. There'd be no need to bombard me with more rounds.

Unfortunately, I collapsed in a way that I could not see them. I lay there in a heap, not knowing their next move. Were they creeping closer to pull the trigger again, or were they fleeing the scene of the crime? I worked hard to act like a dead man, trying to betray no motion. It was almost impossible to keep from shivering and avoid taking deep breaths.

After a few minutes, I couldn't bear the agonizing suspense. Were they still nearby? I pulled up my head and upper body to look around. To my relief, they were nowhere in sight.

I struggled to rise, feeling the stings in my flesh grow more excruciating and watching the blood drip from the holes in my jeans. To my surprise, despite the pain, I was able to move. I hobbled to the front door of Brown Residence Hall and entered. Behind a desk, a security guard was on 24-hour duty.

"I hate to alarm you," I told her, "but I've just been shot."

She called 911, and soon an ambulance was hauling me to the hospital.

With the help of X-rays, the emergency room doctor determined that 47 shotgun pellets were lodged in my flesh. They had narrowly missed a major artery, and my life wasn't in danger. Still, the doc thought that if he operated to remove them, he'd risk causing more damage than if he left them in. That's why, to this day, I harbor metal fragments in my body.

I spent just three days in the hospital, but the recovery time was lengthy. Even with painkillers, the suffering was debilitating. It was two months before I could walk right again.

Besides my physical well-being, the other casualty of the mysterious shooting was my long-term dream for the future. For months before the unexpected detour, I had been planning to relocate myself to Northern California. Working as a post office employee and a janitor in a community center, I had saved up enough money to migrate across the country and start a new chapter of my destiny.

But after the assault, I abandoned that vision. The grand adventure I had been planning faded and disintegrated. I was too weak and timid to travel. Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome gripped me, squelching my vigor with depression and apathy.

My life path changed forever. Violently diverted from my dream of California at age 19, I pursued adventures on the East Coast and in Europe.

Seven years later, I resurrected my original fantasy and migrated to Northern California. At age 26, I arrived in the paradise that has been my home ever since.

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Fast forward to the present time.

When the first version of my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia came out, I did a book tour. Among my stops was Durham, North Carolina, where my beloved body had endured the ghastly assault.

As I drove into town in my rented car, a challenging question welled up in me: If I really believed in the ideas I described in my book, then I should be able to discern elements of pronoia in my shooting. As I dived into this rumination, I realized that if I wanted to practice what I preached, it was my duty to identify the blessings that materialized because of the terrible event.

Having a couple of hours free before my appearance at Durham's Regulator Bookshop, I returned to the scene of the crime. I drove to Duke University and sat in the grass behind Brown Residence Hall, where I had been attacked years ago. "What were the pronoaic blessings that life brought me through the shooting?" I asked the wind and the trees and the sun.

During the next hour, healing messages arrived. I fell asleep and was visited by an extraordinary dream. I narrate the full story of that event in my novel, Lucky Storms, so I won't tell it again here. Instead, I will briefly summarize the revelations.

Because of the shooting and its consequences, the following wonders occurred:

1. I met one of my main mentors and friends, who eventually became the publisher of my books. (He wouldn't have become part of my life story if I had moved to California when I had planned to.)

2. I fell in love and consorted with two brilliant women. They influenced me in a thousand inspirational ways that still benefit me to this day. (Their destinies wouldn't have merged with mine if I had moved to California when I had planned to.)

3. I unexpectedly and accidentally launched a long, joyful music career, thanks to the persistent good-natured pushiness of my musician friend Al Dawson. Would I have eventually become a professional singer and composer without Al's driving influence? Maybe, maybe not.

4. I spent years in North Carolina and shorter stints in South Carolina and Georgia. In these places, I got the privilege of a deep immersion in African-American culture. That was a transformative experience essential to my development as a musician, performer, and writer.

5. I traveled extensively in Europe. Had I moved to California as a very young man and saturated myself in its seductive counter-culture, it's unlikely I would have made pilgrimages to the Old World, at least until much later in life.

And I suspect it was crucial to my education to get imprinted at a formative age by the people and cultures of France, Italy, Greece, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, the UK, and the Netherlands.

6. I love how California nurtured the iconoclastic insurrectionary dreamer in me. But I believe it was healthy for me to remain rooted in East Coast civilization for those extra years. It made me earthier, more well-grounded.

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This pivotal series of events in my life helps explain my unique understanding of pronoia: that life is a source of blessings working in unpredictable ways.

You can hear a pithy condensation of the message in my spoken-word piece, "Shadow Blessings." It's here.


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PS: The shooting ultimately delivered favors and opportunities that I appreciated. But I confess that's not true about all the pain I've experienced. Some of my suffering remains mysterious to me. Maybe even that will be revealed if I'm patient!


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If you're interested, the following pieces from my book also address the issues in "How Was My Gunshot Wound a Blessing":

How Pronoia Works

The Pronoia of Darfur