When someone hits their head, there’s a standard series of questions you’re supposed to ask them to assess their level of consciousness.

The first is pretty simple: Do you know who you are? 

Then you move on to place: Do you know where you are? 

Then you want to know if they’re oriented in time: Do you know when you are– what day, what week, what year? 

And finally, you ask them if they know what happened: Can you tell me about the events leading up to your injury? 

On the day of this story– this particular moment of literal impact– it was Friday, June 13th, 2014. I was nineteen years old. And I was sitting on a beach in the bottom of the Grand Canyon as I told a series of increasingly concerned river guides that I knew the answer to exactly one of those questions. 

“My name is Keven Griffen,” I could tell them. 

Everything else? A big old: “no idea.”  

Now, one out of four is not a great percentage: as a grade on a test, it’s pretty roundly a failing one. And something you need to know about me, before we move on, is that I hate failing tests. Prior to this incident, I hadn’t failed a test since the 5th grade, when I forgot about a quiz on Unit Conversion. The experience was so concerning to me that, a few months later, I got a 99/100 on a geography test and literally wept: not out of happiness, but out of disappointment that it wasn’t a 100. I was the Hermione Granger of Flagstaff, Arizona. 

That obsessive perfectionism only got worse as I got older. I followed it all the way through high school, and then 3,000 miles away to Vermont for college, where it became obvious that– rather than helping me succeed– my fear of messing up was beginning to become paralytic. I still expected perfect grades, but I was so scared of losing them that I wouldn’t risk taking classes that were more interesting, even as my English classes started to bore me. As an athlete, I was so scared of losing my personal bests that I started faking like I was sick or hurt to avoid trying, and failing, to hit them. It was the worst when it came to my body: I was so determined not to gain the “freshman 15” that I started obsessively exercising, counting every calorie in the splash of nonfat milk I added to my coffee and forcing myself to “balance it out” with a workout. 

I couldn’t keep up with myself anymore: with the constant expectations, the self-loathing, and the disappointment of not living up to my own standards. I could tell that something had to give, but I didn’t quite know how to move past it. 

And so I sort of limped home from that year, and I limped myself onto a river trip with GCY, because I figured that there’s nowhere quite as good for figuring your stuff out than the Grand Canyon. I was determined that this would be a fresh start. 

I remember the first day of that trip so vividly. I remember where we camped, and what we ate for dinner. I remember the sounds of someone playing guitar on the beach, and the low rumble of a downstream rapid. I remember the full moon coming up over the cliffs, and the way I drifted off to sleep, feeling like things were finally looking up. 

And then the next thing I remember, I’m sitting on a beach I don’t recognize, surrounded by people I don’t know, over and over admitting what I absolutely hate to admit: that I don’t know the answer. And really, it was even worse, because I found out later that we’d actually been sitting on that beach for hours, with me cycling through the same few questions over and over and over again. My brain was trapped somewhere in March of that year: I’d lost not just my memories of the accident and what happened after, but also of the few months leading up to it, and as we sat on that beach, for the first few hours, absolutely nothing new was coming in. 

Now, we’re here 10 years later, so with the benefit of hindsight, I can tell you exactly what happened that day.

As best as anyone can tell, I was clambering down from a ledge in Ryder Canyon when my foot slipped. My head got ahead of my feet, and I landed on my right shoulder, which fractured my collarbone. That shoulder acted as a kind of fulcrum, and all the inertia of my fall transferred to my big ol’ eight-pound head, which slammed into the ground right above my temple. The guides nearest to me came running when they heard the thump, and I apparently tried to reassure them that I was fine before I kind of paused, and looked at them, and said, “I’m sorry…I don’t know who you are.” 

You can imagine the chaos that caused.

 

We managed to get to a beach that was big enough for a helicopter, but it turned out to be too windy for the helicopter to actually fly, so we just… sat there. 

It must have been absolutely terrifying for those guides, and for the GCY office, and for my baby brother who was on the trip with me, but honestly? All I can remember thinking, as my memory slowly started to come back to me, was “oh my god, how humiliating.” 

I was so embarrassed, you know? I felt like I had screwed up. 

I remember feeling that way all through the night as the guides checked on me. I remember getting on the helicopter. I remember the ambulance ride and the ER, my parents’ faces as they tried and failed to look nonchalant. I remember shooting my folks a cheesy double thumbs up as the doctors came to wheel me into the MRI machine, checking that my brain wasn’t bleeding. 

And then suddenly the doctor was sending me home. I had a really bad concussion and a broken collarbone, but I remember thinking– and I know that everyone was thinking– that I was pretty lucky, you know? That it could have been so much worse. 

And as I sat at home, unable to really do much of anything, trying to let my brain heal, I remember realizing that I had a choice to make. 

My whole life, I’d been so scared of messing up, that I let my failures dictate how I lived. I avoided the things I was bad at, the things that were challenging, the things I had screwed up in the past. But I wasn’t willing to give up the Grand Canyon. I wasn’t willing to give up the river or the way it made me feel. As cheesy as it is, I felt like I’d been given this second chance, this hard reset, like someone had looked at my messy, anxious brain and said, “I dunno– have you tried turning it off and turning it back on?”

And I decided, basically: fine. Life is messy. Accidents happen. I am a floating speck, in a big world, in a universe that tends towards chaos, and on top of that, I am an enormous klutz. 

So maybe I should just give up on being perfect, you know? 

And oh, my god, how liberating that has been. 

Ten years later, I am a scientist because of that moment in the Grand Canyon. I allow myself to take risks. I allow myself to try, and to fail. I’ve chosen a life filled with questions I don’t know the answers to, and I love it. 

 

 

So today, although I don’t know all the answers, I am able to tell you this: 

My name is Keven Griffen. 

I’m in the Coconino Center for the Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona. 

It’s November 2nd, 2024.

And I am not perfect. 

But I am the happiest I’ve ever been.