the supine morning: knocked out on the ascendant, blamelessly

The self-injury's real payoff is moral, not physical. Crippling himself "while still on the ascendant" converts the sorrow around him from disappointed to compassionate — an exit that reads as tragedy rather than failure, the faultless victim instead of the boy who quit or cracked. The chronic ankle becomes the one honorable door out of a machine that permits no honorable quitting. And he can't even name whose disappointment he'd cripple himself to dodge — the Moms's, Schtitt's, Himself's, his own — which is exactly how total the institution's claim on the body has become.