Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

Goggins describes growing up in a beautiful home in a beautiful neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Despite this seemingly good fortune, life was brutal. “Hell,” Goggins writes, “was a coroner lot on Paradise Road” (9). Goggins had one older brother and both parents in the household. His father, Trunnis, was the cause of prolonged suffering and trauma for the rest of his family.

Goggins relates how he constantly fell asleep in class in elementary school because he had to work through the night with his mother and brother at his father’s skate rink and nightclub. At school, he felt relatively safe because his father was away, but he was still nervous. He couldn’t let his teachers see all the bruises on his body from his father’s abuse lest he receive even worse punishments at home.

He tells the story of how his father hustled to open businesses and then met his (much younger) mother, wooing her with fake religiosity and charm. According to Goggins, his father used his family in service of his greed. Goggins writes of the afternoons and nights spent as a six-year-old laboring in the skating rink, eating from portable electric skillets, and going with very little sleep. On the one hand, Trunnis was a popular local leader and friends with celebrities like Rick James. On the other, he beat his children and treated his wife terribly, refusing her a salary or bank account.

Goggins then relates an incident in which his mother caught his father cheating on her with a sex worker at the skating rink and how a security guard urged her to leave him. Having no independent means made this a very difficult prospect for her. That night, Trunnis and Goggins’s mother got into a violent altercation. Goggins and his older brother wake up and see Trunnis assaulting their mother. Goggins, then a young child, was overcome by hatred and attacked his father. His mother sounded an alarm, and the police arrived. They did nothing, taken in by Trunnis’s lies. Goggins writes of his father, “His evil was too real and my hate gave me courage. I refused to give that motherfucker the satisfaction” (19).

Goggins describes other incidents including getting taken out of Cub Scouts and being brutally beaten, an ear infection that got so severe he nearly lost his life, and an incident in which his older brother pointed a gun at him. In the last incident, he recalls feeling no concern about whether he lived or died (at age eight). His mother, Jackie, had had enough. “My mother’s every day was a lesson in survival,” Goggins writes. “She was told she was worthless so often she started to believe it” (20). Jackie and a well-meaning neighbor hatch a plan for escape. They leave Buffalo and head for a small town called Brazil, Indiana. The car breaks down along the way, but they eventually make it.

In Brazil, Goggins repeats second grade and learns to read with Sister Katherine, who takes extra time to get him to the second-grade level. This relocation freed them from abuse but entered them into poverty. Of this Goggins says, “I vividly recall one night we were so broke we drove home on a gas tank that was near empty, to a bare refrigerator and a past due electric bill, with no money in the bank” (27). This would be a continuous struggle for many years. In the third grade, Goggins develops a speech impediment.

At the end of each chapter, Goggins offers a challenge to his reader. They compel the audience to engage with his ideas beyond bare intellectual apprehension. For Challenge 1, Goggins asks his readers to create a journal entry documenting (in excruciating detail) their past traumas and anything that has held them back from being their best selves. This list is to function as an inventory useful for future challenges. He writes, “You will use your story, this list of excuses, these very good reasons why you shouldn’t amount to a damn thing, to fuel your ultimate success” (32).

In Chapter 2, Goggins introduces Wilmoth Irving, a man engaged to his mother. Wilmoth, Goggins writes, “gave us permission to exhale” (33). He was a friendly, paternal, welcome father figure for Goggins. Sadly, Wilmoth was murdered the day after Christmas when Goggins was in the eighth grade. Goggins and his mother had been planning to move with him to Indianapolis. Goggins and his grandmother go to tell his mother about Wilmoth’s murder, but she is in denial. Goggins recalls watching footage of Wilmoth’s murder scene on the local news that night and realizing “there would be no reprieve” (37). His escape from trauma was not coming anytime soon, if ever.

Shortly after returning to school in Indiana, Goggins witnessed a young child run over by his school bus. Goggins recalls being ordered off the bus with all the other children and then being overtaken by morbid curiosity. He looked under the vehicle for the body of the child and saw the carnage. Goggins then recalls developing a feeling of depressed removal from life. He writes, “I was beyond the pale. Nothing mattered to me. I’d seen enough to know that the world was filled with human tragedy and that it would just keep piling up in drifts until it swallowed me” (38)/

In the wake of Wilmoth’s passing, his mother decided they should move to Indianapolis anyway, and Goggins gained admittance to a college preparatory high school after cheating from another student on his entrance exam. Because of tuition costs, Goggins left the school after one year. He went to a larger public high school at the beginning of his sophomore year but describes falling in with the wrong crowd. His mother had had enough and moved them back to Brazil.

In Brazil, he was one of only five Black adolescents in the entire school, and he embraced a hip-hop-influenced style of dress different from the other students. His feelings of isolation deepened. Goggins describes his love for basketball and the difference in basketball culture in Brazil and Indianapolis. At this age, he noticed overt racism in his hometown, which he hadn’t when he was a young child. He describes an incident of threatening racial violence while walking home from a party. A man in a truck yelled a racist slur at him and his cousin out of his car window then got out, pointed a pistol in their faces, and asked what they were doing in Brazil, Indiana.

He describes other incidents of being referred to by the n-word, including in a public place in front of a girl he admired. In Spanish class, he found a racist drawing of himself hung by a noose. He was slandered repeatedly with racial slurs. One incident entailed the n-word spray painted on the side of his car. In reaction, Goggins adopted Black cultural stereotypes.

Despite the hardships and his issues on the basketball team, he writes that he had “one more dream left” (47) That dream was to join the Air Force, inspired by his grandfather’s long career of service. One summer, Goggins took a week-long course learning to parachute into dangerous situations to rescue downed pilots. He heard the story of an officer who had crash-landed from a freefall and nearly died. The doctors told him he’d never be on the job again, but he defied the odds and got back to work in a year and a half. This story greatly inspired Goggins. He then describes miserably failing the aptitude test for admittance to the Air Force, falling far below minimum requirements.

Goggins’s mother became ever more emotionally distant and worked long hours day and night. Goggins eventually moved out of the house until she informed him of a letter from the school, which stated that he was in danger of failing out. He felt the possibility of becoming an Air Force officer, his final dream, slipping away. At this point, Goggins created the “Accountability Mirror,” a strategy he uses to motivate himself for hard work and discipline.

After Goggins’s first encounter with the “Accountability Mirror,” he started to behave differently at school. He no longer found it important to be liked or popular. He started working hard. “I brainwashed myself into craving discomfort,” he writes (56). He started spending all night studying over six months and rose from a 4th- to a 12th-grade reading level. Knowing that he did this and was able to graduate school gave Goggins a different perspective on himself. He writes, “By the time I graduated, I knew that the confidence I’d managed to develop didn’t come from a perfect family or God-given talent. It came from personal accountability which brought me self-respect, and self-respect will always light a way forward” (58).

Challenge 2 comes at the end of Chapter 2 and involves adopting an Accountability Mirror of one’s own. Goggins recommends using post-it notes to visualize every goal and then to speak to oneself in the mirror, even unkindly, to instill the drive to realize those goals step-by-step.