I miss it

was maybe half a kilometre into a walk through the forest near my house when I knew I was in trouble.

My ankle was already throbbing. I had another half kilometre to get home and I knew, with the specific certainty of someone who had done this calculation too many times, that by the time I got back I was going to be in serious pain. Not discomfort. Pain.

I was walking a trail I used to run.

There's a spot on that trail, maybe five minutes in, where the path rises into this perfect little bump. I used to sprint toward it. Every single time. I'd hit that bump and get serious air, that brief moment of being completely weightless, and then land and keep running without breaking stride. It was pure joy.

I walked past that little bump in the trail that day and felt the loss so clearly I almost had to stop.

God, I missed it.

The backstory is this: I broke my ankle in a climbing fall. My foot caught an edge on the way down and I obliterated my talus badly enough that the doctor put amputation on the table. Best case scenario, he told me, was chronic pain for the rest of my life.

I spent two years finding out whether best case scenario was actually possible.

What I didn't expect was how much of that process would have nothing to do with my ankle. I had trained in TCM. I understood injury and recovery. I knew what to do physiologically. What I wasn't prepared for was the identity piece. The slow, uncomfortable reckoning with the fact that "the adventurous guy," "the runner," "the climber" weren't just things I did. They were who I was. And I was walking through a forest in pain, unable to jog even ten metres, wondering if those versions of me were just gone.

For a long time, the goal was pain management. Get through the day. Walk without limping. Reduce the swelling. Sensible, clinical, appropriate goals. And I was fully compliant in the way that someone is compliant when they have no other choice.

I remember sitting in my living room one afternoon, deep in it, feeling sorry for myself. I said out loud: "I've tried everything." And some voice in my head came back immediately: "Have you REALLY tried everything?"

The answer, of course, was no.

I'd been so busy mourning what was behind me that I'd stopped looking at what was still ahead. So I stopped thinking about managing the pain and started thinking about getting back to that bump in the trail. Back to the feeling of being weightless for half a second over a forest path. Back to landing and keep sprinting.

I never missed a day of homecare after that. I actively sought out treatment. I stopped being a patient grinding through a protocol and started being someone with somewhere to be.

The goal didn't change what was broken. It changed everything about how I showed up for the work.

A couple of years later I was sitting across from a patient. Chronic illness, persistent low back pain, long complicated history. We'd been working together for a while. He was doing okay. Making progress by the numbers.

And then one session, quietly, almost in passing, he said he missed dancing.

Something hit me so fast I almost didn't catch it. Not a thought exactly. More like a recognition. I knew that tone of voice. I knew exactly what he meant by "miss." He wasn't talking about a hobby he hadn't gotten around to lately. He was talking about a version of himself he wasn't sure existed anymore.

He wasn't in my treatment room because he had low back pain.

He was there because he missed dancing.

Maybe I was projecting. Maybe I was reading my own forest walk into his words. But I made the shift anyway, right there in that session. My language changed. The way I framed the work changed. The whole energy in the room changed. Suddenly we weren't managing a condition together. We were working toward something he actually wanted.

He was so much more on board for doing what was required. The compliance that had been polite and moderate became genuine. Because the destination was finally real to him, or maybe it was finally real to both of us.

I've thought a lot about why that moment landed differently than a hundred similar moments before it.

I think it's because I'd said the same thing myself. Alone on a trail, walking past a bump I used to jump off of, with a throbbing ankle and nowhere to put the grief of it. I miss it. And because I'd lived in that feeling for two years and found my way through it, I recognized it in him before he'd even finished the sentence.

That's not something clinical training gives you. It's something life gives you, if you're paying attention.

Your patients are in your treatment room for a lot of reasons they haven't told you yet. Some of them don't know how to say it. Some of them don't think you'll understand. Some of them have already half-accepted the loss and are just hoping to get back to functional.

But underneath the complaint, in a lot of cases, there's something they miss. Something that used to feel like theirs.

When you find it, everything changes. Not the technique. The direction.

If this landed for you, I'd genuinely love to hear about it. Hit reply.

Best,

Dr. Jess

P.S. The ankle injury became the foundation for one of my most personal workshops. I took everything I did to rehab my own talus fracture, built it into a clinical system, and have been teaching it to practitioners ever since. I'll be running it in person in the coming months. If you want to be the first to know when dates are confirmed, hit reply and I'll make sure you're on the list.