Once I went to bed in Orlando and I woke up in Atlanta. I have no idea how that happened.
Growing up in a Canadian household that was more British than Big Ben, I dreamed of flying to England myself and visiting the places my family never tired of talking about. I always woke up before the plane landed.
I woke up an hour before I was supposed to, and started going over the mental checklist: where do I go from here, what do I do? I don't remember eating anything at all, just going through the physical, getting into the suit. We practiced that so much, it was all rote.
It's been like a bad dream I never woke from.
I woke up on May 15, 1991, the day of my Barnard graduation, and I said to myself, 'By the end of today you will decide what you want to do with the rest of your life.'
The question I asked when I woke up was not how am I going to live without legs - but how am I going to do all the things I want to do without legs? There was no doubt that I was going to do them, I was just curious to find out how - but I knew I was going to find a way.
You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, 'I'm a writer,' it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.
Black Lives Matter started from a post that I put on Facebook after the acquittal of George Zimmerman. I woke up in the middle of the night sobbing, just trying to process what had happened and wanting to find community around being in a lot of grief and having a lot of rage.
I once made myself black out by pulling G too quickly while flying an F-18. Being unconscious in a single-seat airplane is not good. Fortunately, I woke up in time. I learned how to better plug-in my anti-G suit.
I had a full 11/10, out of body of moment when I drove the Ferrari FXX K. That woke me up proper sideways.
