My Next Breath: A Memoir

by Jeremy Renner

It took time and courage and a dash of insanity to build this accord, to change how my body receives and understands pain, but this was the basis of what I came to describe as the Agreement. But once the Agreement was in place—an agreement that allowed both parties to be heard, understood, and then kindly told to fuck off—pain simply became a notification in my brain. I can honor what my body has to say and certai...

Pain is my bitch; I own it. It doesn’t own me or dictate my spirit. Being human is simple at times. Pain is just nerve pathways, which are language. Pain still exists, but instead of “pain” I use the wo...

painful. When we switch our dialogue and definitions we can tr...

Pain is simply a language, a barometer, an overprotective parent smothering its child with love and, like all languages, nothing is absolute and everything is open to interpretation. This is how I shut pain down and continue to work every day. Remember this: “It” only has value if you give it value

Creating these new neuro pathways gets easier if strictly continued for twenty-eight days.

New and positive habits are tough to create at first, but my body and mind conspired to make those good habits almost purely reflexive in time, just like breathing.

With the coming days of recovery all in front of me, I was now going to will my mind and body back together. A positive mindset had always gotten me through my lows and my setbacks. It’s no exaggeration to say that the road to recovery looked easy to me because it was a one-way road. There could be no distractions. One direction, one purpose. Don’t just get back to level, but aim always to be better than before.

Belief and love and excellence and failure and struggle and perseverance—these were my watchwords. There would be plenty of reasons to NOT go the extra mile in my recovery, but I chose instead a twenty-four-hour-a-day mindset to push myself.

Milestones are way better than a tombstone.

Though feeding the ego can feel good in a temporary way, in the end it’s fruitless, because it fails to acknowledge the collective energetic experience we are all a part of, a shared reality that will pull us through to a higher success if we get out of our own way.

So, would you rather contribute or vampire your way through life? I knew what the answer was for me. It was the easiest question I ever asked myself.

had very, very specific goals I set for myself, and as I’ve said I used my daughter as the motivation for them because she was scared, and I couldn’t live with that.

if I said to her, “I’m going to stand up on my own without anything, by your birthday in late March,” then I had reason to do it faster because it wasn’t just on my shoulders alone.

When I get better, they get better. So here we go. Next milestone. Bring it.

fact, I was starting to feel the first inklings of a kind of profound peace, a peace that had sometimes escaped me up to that point.

If I could walk in public and have only love and good wishes offered to me, then it was surely my job to reflect that love back, and double down on what was most fundamental about the incident and its aftermath: the triumph of love over death.

who’d had a similar tibia injury, started messaging me, saying he was inspired by me, whatever the heck that means. But I’ll take it—if

This was the first time that I had met my neighbor Barb after the incident, and I held on to her, and I didn’t let go. I sobbed so deeply with love and gratitude from every cell in my body, from my soul, from my entire family. This now was the most vulnerable and profoundly thankful I had felt since the incident. Barb broke down, too, crying into my shoulder, as Ava, the angel I was living for, wrapped her wings around both of us.

What had disappeared was the white noise in my life. In this new reality, I could so clearly see what I needed without extraneous and pinching distractions. Everything had been boiled down for me, distilled, brought to an essence. It made making decisions so much easier than before.

I now have such clarity with the white noise gone. Everything I do now is purposeful, everything’s intended. Before, the white noise could dominate my decision-making and blur what I want to give value to in my life.

And with that silence comes an even clearer sense of the reality of how deeply I love and care for the things I deeply love and care for—now, I focus and surround myself with only those things. This superpower of clarity is amazing. I no longer think, What should I do next as an actor? I don’t give a hoot about anything besides my physical health and my family, because the healthier my body gets, the more I am allowed to deepen my emotional and spiritual health so I can fully experience life with the people around me.

I’ve been “reduced”—actually, it’s “raised”—to being an eight-year-old again,

clear: I would highly recommend getting run over by a snowcat if you could guarantee that your life could turn out the way mine has in the last year.

I hope I live a long time, but however long I have, that life is going to be a much simpler one,

filled with love and honor and humility and gratitude.

People around me say things like, “Jeremy is softer, now,” and it’s true. It’s because I don’t have to fight off so much “grizzly shit,” as I call it. They say I seem happier, healthier, a “better version of himself.” I’m not so busy with life and all the busyness life entails;

“He glows,” as my sister Nicky recently put it. My healing body is fueling a softer, more peaceful kind of place for me to inhabit.

This is the best time of my life; it’s never been better. Being on a very clear path is something I’d wish for anyone. When we travel on unpaved paths in our youth—or whenever we do so—we wonder if we’ll ever see an open road where the life we want to lead is possible.

These days I can just work with people I love to work with.

You realize life is very short and can go away at any point. I don’t know exactly what I’d do in the same kind of situation you found yourself in, but I know now that I’d be inspired to fight to stay alive.”

“This is our chance right now in life. I’ve totally reevaluated my priorities, my core values and passions.

I used to give a shit about too many things and now I just don’t. I have to get better first and everything else is going to fall into place.

The only thing I can control in my life is my perspective. What I’ve come to understand is that life is simply my next step, my next breath. Perhaps some readers might think that’s too simple a philosophy, but I think life is that simple after all.

I feel like all those earlier roles prepared me for the role I was always meant to play: a father, a lover of people, a contributor to the well-being of my community.

So thank God for the glory moment. I now get to live a love-filled life, truly connected with people, trading handshakes for hugs. I’ve never been happier, never been more connected. Thank God I died; and thank God I get to really live.

I am better than I have even been, happier and more fulfilled and more deeply connected to those around me than I have ever known. I understand the privilege and the honor that brings, so I’m going to spend the rest of my years giving back the best I can. I remain keenly aware that I’ll never have a bad day for the rest of my life.

And to learn all that, all I had to do was die.