She’s got the perfect angular jawline and high cheekbones to rock a shaved head, though she didn’t ask for this cut. A man in a Cadillac Escalade made that decision for her.
Early on a Monday morning in South Bend, Indiana, Michelle Graham was outside the local dive, standing at the open car door of a strangers’ Escalade. While no one is quite certain why, the driver reversed, dragged her body across the pavement, backed up over her torso, and drove away.
Michelle is 26 years and 155 pounds of passion and talent. She’s the front woman of an otherwise all male bedroom punk band called Julie — affectionately named after her tendency to smoke a Juul e-cigarette when she’s supposed to be singing. Her body is a canvas covered up and down with tattoos, many of which she’s done herself. She says her least favorite tattoo, which she did with a sewing needle after having a few beers, says “HOT FIRE.” It was supposed to represent being a “fiery bad bitch.” She hates it.
“Like duh, fire is hot, dude” she laughed. It demonstrates her perfectly though — fiery and bold, hard to tame, even under the weight of a 7,600 pound Cadillac Escalade.
After being run over, Michelle was rushed to the hospital with six broken ribs, a broken shoulder blade, three broken fingers, a fractured bone in her ear, two cracks in her skull, a bulged disk, internal bleeding and a traumatic brain injury. The doctors shaved off her mess of bleach blond hair in order to perform brain surgery.
They said she would die.
Then, after fighting through a four day coma, they said she would have the mental capacity of a toddler.
“There are so many things that could have happened from that accident that I narrowly escaped,” she said. “It shifted my mindset into a whole different realm of realizing that life is valuable.”
The first four weeks after the accident are cloudy, Michelle said. But these days, she’s just working on getting comfortable with her new hairdo. She was really insecure at first.
“When I lost my hair, I thought I lost my femininity,” she said. “It’s forcing me to find confidence and femininity in something other than such a trivial thing like hair.”
One of her biggest goals since the accident is challenging herself to keep her hair short until she feels the same amount of confidence that she did before it was buzzed.
“Scientifically, I shouldn’t be here,” she said, referencing the doctor’s predictions. “So I might as well just rock it for a while.”