Pat's stroke: the best thing that ever happened to her — "demonstrated a willingness to try and…"
demonstrated a willingness to try and eat a rock when the founding Guy Who Didn’t Even Use His First Name told her to
Context
The theme's most extreme statement that catastrophe is the door to recovery. Pat spent her twenties failing at rehabs; only a near-fatal D.T. stroke at thirty-two — leaving her communicating in Morse-code blinks, her face half-rictused — finally broke her enough to Surrender, so that she can call the stroke "far and away the best thing that’s ever happened to her." And her willingness, armless, to "eat a rock" on the founder's order is Surrender rendered as literal absurd obedience: the readiness to do a senseless thing because you're told, which is the whole program's price of entry. Ruin is reframed as the necessary demolition; you cannot Surrender until you have been leveled.