The most memorable detail in the Crash Reel for me is that towards the end of the film, Kevin mentioned that he and his paternal family members all have severe dyslexia. Therefore, snowboarding became an escape route for him to thrive outside conventional school settings that posed barriers for children with learning disabilities. His successful pro snowboarding career thereby serves to hide his learning disabilities and to sustain the privilege of “materialistic anonymity” (Garland-Thomson 596) that allows him to pass as “normal”, as this is something that may be difficult to achieve in conventional education and career. As an athlete, not only does Kevin “fit” in, he was also idolized as “more capable” than an average human. His athletic career therefore embodies Garland-Thomson’s writing that “When we fit harmoniously and properly into the world, we forget the truth of contingency because the world sustains us” (597).
Later, during his recovery, Kevin did not fully understand the impact of the TBI on his body, his identity, and his family until he realized he was not sustained by “the world” around him anymore. This lack of sustenance is caused by the misalignment between his athletic ambition and reputation and his physical capability to snowboard, or as Garland-Thompson suggests, a conflict between the environment and the body. It was interesting for me that while he had close contact with death, went through complex medical diagnosis and surgeries, lengthy rehabilitation, and he was aware of the emotional burden and trauma his injury caused for his family and closed ones, none of these experiences catalyzed his coming to terms with his post-injury body as much as when he realized he couldn’t snowboard well anymore despite diligent effort. When Kevin felt self-defeated about losing his snowboarding ability, he also lost his “materialistic anonymity”: he came to see himself as “misfitting” in the snowboarding community and realized his “vulnerability” due to the misalignment between the social expectation (from his corporate sponsors, supporters, and himself) and his body. This realization ended up helping Kevin better connecting with and supporting other athletes who had brain injury through empathizing on “fragility of the material body…to wounding, injury, pain, suffering, dying” (Garland-Thompson 600). Kevin’s development thus echoes Butler’s idea that the “common condition of our injurability as our bond to one another” (Garland-Thompson 599). I found it thought-provoking that Kevin’s journey from camouflaging his “misfitting” to making the “misfit” more visible allows him to both relief emotional distress and gain political agency from it (a quick Google shows that he later founded the Love Your Brain Foundation, a non-profit organization for improving life for people affected by traumatic brain injury).