I Got Knocked Down, but I'll Get Up Again

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On my way home from tour I slipped in a weird freak accident and dislocated my lower leg from my upper leg. It was gnarly. My kneecap was on the side of my leg, my lower leg was sticking out at a weird angle, and it was all I could do to not pass out just looking at my poor, broken limb.

I honestly can’t go into too many details about the injury, the ER, or the first week of recovery because I get a little swimmy just thinking about it. Anyway, it isn’t what I want to write about. What’s interesting to me now is what’s next.

The doc says I will likely be on crutches for 6-8 weeks and that recovery after that is still a big question mark. I will know more after I get an MRI and see the state of my sad ligaments, but I have to wait for the swelling to go down before that can happen. So for now all I can do is be here, with a cast on my leg and a heaping scoop of uncertainty and discomfort.

So many things happen in our lives that we can’t control. Sometimes they are immensely painful, catastrophic, and life-changing. While I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason, I do believe that we get to decide what we do with the tough stuff and that those moments define who we become.

When I was younger I felt constantly swept along by my emotions. Fear, insecurity, desire, rage, sadness all washed over me and carried me along like a stick in a stream. It took hard times and high stakes for me to learn how to sit still and let those emotions flow on by while I chose the thoughts and actions that best suited me.

So now I get to do that again.

There is a special hell in being forced to sit still. The cold hand of the grave reaches up and tickles that part of your brain that knows that we are just fragile meat suits. It would be easy to get depressed and feel that I’ve lost control of my body and my life.

Instead I am focusing my mind every day on what I can do. I still have control of so much and I am so incredibly fortunate to not have to worry about basic survival while I heal. I can still move. I can still think. I can still love. I can still delete Instagram to stop myself from doom scrolling.

All of these feeds into one of the fundamental principals that I hold sacred in my approach to training myself and my clients: celebrate and explore what you can do instead of lamenting what you can’t do.

In my discussions with fitness-curious folks who think about getting into working out but feel hesitant, the biggest reason I hear is that they are afraid of being bad at it. There is such shame associated with not walking into the gym and instantly being a ripped, confident, weight-slinging muscle machine that many of us will avoid doing something that we want to do and we know would make us feel better just to avoid that shame.

That shame is rooted in very real societal hierarchies that we see every day in the way we talk about and treat bodies. We ignore that body fascism exists in every level of the health and fitness industries and I definitely will continue to do that in my writing and teaching.

But we can also stand and face our own little internal body fascist who tells us that anything less than a perfect workout is pathetic and not worth doing.

I feel the pull of checking out. I spent a few days just laying on the couch doom scrolling through IG and feeling sorry for myself. My inner body fascist was already documenting the atrophying muscles in my right leg and telling me that if I’m not running and dead-lifting and holding a handstand I might as well give up.

Holding on to my own principals and doing what I can every day, no matter how small, is going to be my primary focus over the coming months. It is so much easier to say than to do, so I am my own test subject to find as many tools as possible to open that pathway.

Over the next few months I will be sharing my process, thoughts, and ups and downs. I will also spice things up with some more tips and my musings on the wild vagaries of the fitness industry.

Thanks for reading and, as always, feel free to pop me an email!

Happy Bendings,
Kristina