So...now what?
Jun 14, 2025 | Rachel Yu
Today I had my first physiotherapy session.
My physiotherapist taught me some rehab exercises to do at home to speed up my recovery. He told me that I have a lot of potential to make a speedy recovery and get back into “my normal life” soon.
Throughout my recovery journey, I have always ached to get back into powerlifting, working in the kitchen, backpacking, things that make me who I am. I am very grateful to be able to work from home and having the freedom to work on my projects. However, being sedentary, I don’t feel like myself. I struggle to maintain a good body image, I miss being strong.
So, when my physiotherapist told me I will be back to normal real soon, I should have been over the moon, right?
Right?
For some reason, I felt the opposite. I felt fear.
Although it has only been three months since the accident, my recovery felt like an eternity. The world keeps moving while I stayed frozen in place. Time moves differently. Slow, stretched, uncertain. After 3 months, I have just gotten used to my new life at home, not being able to do the three things that used to define me.
Right now, the destination of being normal again is no longer a vague vision in the distant future, I am getting closer I can almost touch it. The strange familiarity of it all is confusing to me.
Will I ever be able to get used to it again?
What if this time around, I fail to adapt?
What if I’ve gotten comfortable being at home recovering, I become too weak and fragile for the “normal” life that everybody else lives?
After the physiotherapy session, I went to the gym I used to train at to visit my friends.
It’s so good to see my training buddies again, since it’s been half a year since I’ve last trained there. But watching all of them training really hard, lifting big weights and making insane progress only amplified my insecurity. I know when I eventually get back into powerlifting, I will have to start from the bottom. Or worse, below the bottom due to the lost of my baseline strength, not to mention the aftermath of strength and mobility imbalance from my left side having to compensate for my right. I guess in a way, I am ashamed to be a beginner again. The prospect of starting over terrifies me, and this fear grows stronger with each step on my road to recovery.
Then, my dad and I went to a restaurant for lunch. The restaurant has an open kitchen setting. We were seated on the bar, so we could see the kitchen team working right in front of us the entire time. During the whole meal, my mind barely registered what I was eating. My attention was fixated on everything going on in the kitchen. I saw the familiar equipments, heard the dialogs between the chefs that still ring bells in my memories, inhaled the slightly unpleasant yet comforting smoky scent from the oven. The young line cook working in front of us was getting some meat prepped for sous-vide. He paid no mind of the indistinct chatters in the room. He had his nose pierced on the right side just like me, the number 2004 tattooed on his neck, which means he is probably close to my age. He reminded me so much of myself. After all, I was in that exact same position whEn I wAs HiS AGe. (can’t believe this line is coming from me. Well, I suppose I am probably about one year older than he is, and I was indeed a line cook doing the same kind of prep a year ago so…valid statement.)
I close my eyes and I see myself being on the opposite side of the bar, apron on my waist, hand towel on one hand, tongs on the other, being in the flow of a busy service.
I miss working in the kitchen. Though at the same time, I am heavily doubting myself if this is what I can still handle. Before, I worked very hard to prove to my older, male coworkers that being young and female doesn’t make me any less capable on the line. I can lift heavy oil tins just like them, I am not afraid of blood, I can handle the heat and the occasional burns and cuts. Now, looking at the lovely people doing the same things I used to do, day in, day out, I imagine myself being one of them, and all I could think of was all the possible scenarios that I would have messed things up in the service. My brain laid out a whole selection of the times I screwed up in prep or during service, and played them out like a black-and-white silent era movies. The words of that one toxic superior that I used to work with is being played over and over and over again in my head, telling me that I am not good enough for this place, for being a slow learner, that I am better off being a waitress than a line cook…I am still indecisive about the direction I want to take in the next half year, but everything seems so out of reach and scary.
Well, that was me being vulnerable. I spent three months adapting to the nomad lifestyle being on the move, then spent another three months teaching myself how to live with immobility. So, going back to the question: so…now what? My answer to myself would be: Now you start adapting, once again.
After the storm, after the stillness that follows, is when something new starts to emerge.
To be continued.