INTRODUCTION: The Score – Truck 1, Mollie 0

As the great 20^th century philosopher Ferris Bueller once said, “Life comes at you fast.”

Boy oh boy, he wasn’t wrong.

The day was an unremarkable morning in Bali. Clear skies. Sunny. And after a four hour scooter ride the day before to Besakih, the Mother Temple of Bali, I was back to my normal routine and on my way to the gym.

No sense of foreboding. No concerns. No feeling that I should pay extra attention because this ordinary Wednesday was about to divide my life into Before and After.

I was simply going to work out.

Instead I got run over by a truck.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

In the space of a few seconds, I went from planning my workout to wondering whether I would walk normally again. Terrified that I night not walk at all.

I didn’t know it then, but the truck would take far more than my mobility for a while. It would shrink my world to the distance between my bed and my bathroom. It would make me afraid of things that had never frightened me. It would force me to depend on people in ways I never had before. It would teach me things about friendship, trauma, recovery, and identity that I had spent fifty-seven years never needing to know.

Because getting run over by a truck turned out to be the least interesting thing that happened to me.

PART ONE: ENTERING THE COUNTRY CALLED “TRAUMA”

CHAPTER ONE: Everybody Loves a Sick Person . . . For About Forty-Five Minutes

At first there are texts, calls, heart emojis.

“OMG what happened?”
“You’re a beast. You’ll be back in no time.”
Offers to help. People briefly auditioning for sainthood by bringing soup. Everyone insisting you let them know if there’s anything they can do.

And they mean it.
At least at first.

Then, assuming you inconveniently fail to bounce back in no time, things start to shift.

People want updates. Progress. Improvement. A timeline.

“Are you feeling better?”
“How’s the healing going?”
“You’ll be back to yourself soon.”

And after a while you start wanting to throw your phone through a wall.

At first you answer politely, then less politely, then with a kind of blunt honesty that surprises even you.

No, I am not feeling better.
No, I am not back to myself.
No, we are not “healing” in any clean, linear sense.

We are still discovering new and occasionally horrifying ways that parts of my body have been damaged.

Because not all injuries are set it, cast it, and move on. Some damage takes time to reveal itself. Time to contain. Time to understand. Time. Lots and lots of time.

The problem is that healthy people tend to think about recovery as a story with a clear structure: something happens, then you get better, then life resumes its shape. Patients are living inside the middle chapters, where nobody knows how the story ends and there is no guarantee it ends the way anyone expects.

People ask for timelines because timelines make uncertainty feel manageable. Patients want timelines for the same reason, because uncertainty is exhausting. Unfortunately, the body does not consult a calendar. It heals when it heals. Complications appear when they appear. Scans reveal things when they reveal them.

One week after my accident I thought I was improving. By week two my leg and hip had swelled to the size of a Christmas ham. I was in a lot of pain, and increasingly uneasy.

What I thought was healing was actually a problem quietly expanding beneath the surface.

Who knew?

Certainly not me.

And this is where the mismatch begins. People are still living in a world where time moves normally. A week passes, so things should be better. Two weeks pass, so recovery should be underway. From the outside, progress is expected to follow the calendar.

But serious injury doesn’t obey that logic. It creates a split reality.

You are still in your life, but your life has narrowed. Suddenly everything is organized around things most healthy people never think about: pain levels, sleep, medication schedules, appointments, the state of a wound, whether you can shower, whether you can walk, whether tomorrow will be better or worse or simply different in a way you cannot predict.

Meanwhile everyone else is still living forward. Talking about vacations, work, dinner plans, pickleball tournaments, normal things that assume a body that is not currently under negotiation.

Neither side is wrong. You are just no longer in the same world.

And something strange happens over time. Support doesn’t usually disappear. It changes shape.

The first wave is emotional.
The second wave is practical.
The third wave is attrition.

People slowly return to their lives. Not because they don’t care. Because they can. Because healthy people are supposed to move forward.

The problem is that patients often can’t, at least not at the same speed.

So while everyone else gradually returns to normal, you remain suspended in a reality measured in appointments, pain levels, and recovery milestones. And that can feel unexpectedly lonely.

Not because people abandoned you.
Because they recovered faster than you did.

Eventually you learn something important.

Most people mean well. Almost all of them.

The problem is not lack of compassion. The problem is imagination.

Until you’ve lived through serious injury or illness, you simply don’t have a framework for what it feels like from the inside.

I know I didn’t.

Now I do.

I just didn’t yet know what I had learned.

CHAPTER TWO: The World Gets Small

People think recovery is about getting better.

It isn’t. At least not at first.

At first it’s damage control. But people don’t know that so they keep asking how the healing is going.

The healing? What fucking healing? We haven’t even finished discovering what’s broken.

At first I thought I had gotten away with something, when the construction truck came out of nowhere on my right side, coming into my lane like I wasn’t even there. But I was very much there. Along with several scooters around me and a line of parked cars to my left. Trapped between a literal rock and a hard place – the truck and the pack of scooters. Maybe if my skills were better I would have figured a way out of this. Instead I felt the undercarriage of the truck grab the scooter, felt it being wrenched out from underneath me, and found myself thrown to the ground on my right side, the tire of the truck parked squarely on my right thigh.

Literally.

Cool, classic Crossfit workout I thought, just need to flip this tire off me. Ha. Not so easy when the tire is still attached to the construction-sized dump truck, the back filled with guys on the way to a work site.

Once I had stopped screaming, reality set in. Holy fuck, what’s broken? My leg, my pelvis, my spine?! The doctor who came upon the accident thankfully hopped off her scooter and after a quick assessment, later confirmed by x-rays in the emergency room, told me nothing appeared broken.

Nothing broken, not paralyzed, just some road rash.

Just.

As in Crossfit, just is a dangerous word. It makes it seem like the skill you’re trying to learn – or the damage you’re assessing – isn’t difficult, is somehow easy. It’s “just.”

But there would be nothing easy about the injury I really had. As my ortho later told me, breaks are much easier. And the kind of damage I have, much slower and less linear to heal.

Nobody tells you that serious injury changes the timescale of your existence.

One week after my accident with what I thought was just road rash, I thought I was recovering well. I was walking, I was happy, I was joking around and sending videos to my friends of the massive bruise on my thigh. By week two my leg and hip had swollen to proportions usually reserved for livestock competitions. An ultrasound showed fluid, blood, swelling, and assorted unpleasantness, but nobody seemed especially alarmed.

I was alarmed. Mostly because it hurt but also because my (ahem, male) ortho surgeon didn’t seem in the least interested in my pain.

Then an MRI ordered by my second (ahem, female) ortho surgeon revealed a massive hematoma, torn fascia, and enough damage to earn me an immediate trip to surgery. Turns out what was happening while I was taking fun videos of myself and making witty remarks to amuse my friends because I thought I was healing was actually an active disaster quietly developing beneath the surface.

And yet people kept asking how recovery was going, because time had passed in the normal world and people assume healing moves at roughly the same speed as the calendar. They’d heard from me on a Monday that I was injured. They expected I would be on the road to recovery by the following Monday. I mean, that’s a work week and a weekend for heaven’s sake, right?

Healthy people often assume change happens much faster than it does.

Over the past year of traveling, I’ve occasionally mentioned to my best friend that I had a cold. Just in passing. Nothing dramatic. The sniffles. The kind of thing you forget you even said five minutes later.

And yet it would sometimes trigger a level of follow-up that felt completely out of scale with the event. Because I was halfway around the world and we were about fifteen hours apart, concern settled into this odd rhythm of overlapping days that never quite reset.

When she woke up and I was winding my day down: “Are you feeling better?”

Then when I was waking up and she was winding her day down: “How’s the cold? Better?”

Then again. And again.

As though something meaningfully different should be happening in that window.

And I remember thinking: For fuck’s sake, it’s just a cold. It doesn’t need constant, ever-vigilant monitoring.

And no, I haven’t magically gotten better in the last eight hours.

Because that’s the mismatch. Not in care, but in calibration.

Some people track change in hours.

Some things don’t move on that timescale at all.

Serious injury certainly doesn’t move like that. It shrinks the timescale of your existence.

Your world gets small. Very, very small. Not spiritually small. Literally small. Healthy people live in weeks, months, and years. Patients live in much shorter units of time.

Can I get comfortable?

Can I sleep?

Can I make it through this dressing change?

Can everybody please stop touching me for five goddamn minutes?

Meanwhile everyone around you continues living in the future.

“When are you leaving Bali?”

“What kind of physical therapy are you doing?”

“How long will recovery take?”

“Will you need another surgery?”

Friends mean well. They are trying to understand. Trying to help. Trying to build a roadmap. But there are periods of illness where the future becomes completely inaccessible.

Not emotionally inaccessible. Functionally inaccessible.

You cannot think about six months from now when you’re just trying to get through the next hour without committing murder. Or screaming. Or crying.

The modern world loves to tell us to “live in the present.” Usually from yoga mats, productivity podcasts, and people selling journals. Be with the dishes when you are washing dishes. Be present when you’re folding laundry.

Injury strips away this luxury version of mindfulness and replaces it with something much more primitive.

One day at a time is no longer wisdom. It’s survival.

Sometimes one hour at a time. Sometimes five minutes at a time.

Get through the dressing change.

Get through standing up.

Get through the walk to the bathroom carrying enough tubes, drains, and pumps to qualify as light industrial equipment.

Being a patient is simply exhausting.

Being touched constantly.

Examined constantly.

Observed constantly.

People entering your room to check vitals, deliver medication, draw blood, change dressings, empty drains, clean wounds, and discuss your body as though it were both deeply important and entirely separate from you.

There were days when something as minor as a bandage change left me so overwhelmed that I slept for hours afterward. Not because of pain. Not because of medication. But because my system had simply reached capacity.

Eventually parts of your personality start going offline.

You are no longer witty on demand. No longer emotionally available for group chats. No longer interested in Karen’s pickleball drama or Chad’s abundance manifestation journey.

(For the record, I know no Karens or Chads but I do know pickleball players, and at least one person who uses the word “manifesting” without irony.)

The names are fictional. The phenomenon is not.

The point is that while the rest of the world continues living its ordinary life, you are suddenly living somewhere else entirely.

Your world narrows.

Even getting up to use the bathroom becomes an operation.

First, lower the foot of the bed. Raise the head. Pause to see whether changing position makes you dizzy or nauseous.

Now, scoot to the edge of the mattress, pushing against the bed rail with a hand already hurting from an IV, one leg trailing drainage tubes and pumps. Stand. Pause again. Wait to see what happens. Does the leg hold? Did you pull a stitch? Are you dizzy?

Then, gather the detritus of your condition. Unplug the pain pump and listen to it begin its constant warning beep. Hoist the collection bulbs for the drains off the floor and hook them onto the IV pole. Tuck the pump under your arm.

Only then do you attempt a step.

This is your world.

This bed.
This room.
This hour.
This dressing change.
This small victory.
This breath.

Not forever, hopefully, but for now.

And for now, getting through today is enough.

CHAPTER THREE: The People Who Stayed

If getting run over by a truck reminded me of anything, it was this:

People are everything.

Not achievements. Not money. Not productivity. Not plans.

People.

Within seconds of the accident, strangers stopped. The truck driver stopped. Bystanders stopped. People I had never met suddenly became part of one of the worst days of my life, and instead of walking past it, they stayed inside it with me.

There was a woman doctor who stopped as well. She calmed me down enough to convince me I wasn’t “broken,” and that it was safe to let a group of strangers gently move me off the road. At that point I had a death grip on whatever wrist I could reach, mostly because my brain had decided that letting go meant something worse would happen. She didn’t rush me. She just kept talking until my body believed her more than my fear did.

That pattern kept repeating.

Friends arrived at the hospital carrying phone chargers, drinks, food, stuffed animals—anything that made the sterile environment a little more human. One friend had to be actively talked out of getting on an international flight that very day. Once I was home from the emergency room, my Russian neighbors, people I had only exchanged a handful of conversations with, and had already complained about for stomping too loudly across the floor, showed up with a care package that was small but deeply thoughtful in a way that mattered more than size. Nurses remembered things I didn’t think I had said out loud. People sent messages. People called. People worried. People showed up.

I spent most of my life believing I didn’t need much from anyone. And for the most part, that’s been true.

But that’s not the same thing as never asking for help.

And that’s where things get confusing.

Because I doask for help. I always have. I ask for help with things that make sense in my life. Things I actually need another person for, things that are obvious to me as “this is help.”

For example, I ask my best friend for advice about investment properties, because she owns multiple and has been managing them for years. I ask her to help me make sense of the strange, inconsistent logic of human behavior, because she is one of the few people I trust to think clearly about it with me. I literally demanded she come to Arizona to help me with a garage sale of all my things before I left last year.

That is me asking for help.

But somewhere between what I experience as asking for help and what other people recognize as asking for “help,” something doesn’t translate. My friend would say I never ask for help. In fact, she has said exactly that.

I hear it, and I genuinely don’t understand what she means.

I’m not asking friends or strangers to manage my life. I don’t need help getting through the basics of daily existence. I can do that. I have always been able to do that. Sorry, not sorry.

So when people say I don’t ask for help, what they often seem to mean is: I don’t ask for help in the way they expect help to look.

But I’m not sure what they expect it to look like.

There’s a mismatch there I still don’t fully understand.

Because from my perspective, I am asking. From theirs, I’m not.

And both of those things can be true at the same time.

But how you define help doesn’t matter once you’re injured. Because injury and recovery aren’t independent experiences. It is a group project pretending to belong to one person.

And needing help wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable for me as most people seem to assume it would be.

At some point, somebody helps you stand. Somebody helps you walk. Somebody changes a dressing. Somebody brings food you didn’t prepare. Somebody slips a bedpan under you and takes it away again. Somebody carries things you can’t carry. Somebody opens doors when your hands are full of tubes, drains, and everything you didn’t choose.

Recovery is not something you do alone. It just gets labeled that way.

And that is where things get complicated.

Because one of the hardest parts of all of this wasn’t receiving help—it was the friction in how people wanted to give it.

I had a friend here in Bali who is, by nature, a fixer. The kind of person who shows up because they want to solve something. And he couldn’t. Not this. Not in the way he understood solving.

That created tension neither of us could really resolve. Because he wanted to show up in a way that made sense to him, and I was living inside something that didn’t have a fix.

And that’s where things really start to shift.

Because not all help is about fixing.

Sometimes it’s just presence.

The people who mattered most during all of this weren’t the ones who solved anything. Most of them couldn’t.

They were the ones who stayed anyway.

Stayed in rooms where nothing could be fixed. Stayed in silence when there was nothing to say. Stayed when discomfort didn’t have an exit.

And there were others too—people who never tried to force their way in. Who waited patiently on the sidelines for me to be ready. No pushing. No demands. No guilt. No taking it personally when I wasn’t.

People who understood that support doesn’t always mean proximity.

People are everything.

Not because they repair what breaks.

But because they stay present inside what they cannot fix.

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR: Fear Is Not Pain, But Your Brain Doesn’t Know That

People think pain is the hard part. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.

But there comes a point where pain stops being the main event and fear quietly takes over.

Not fear of what hurts, but fear of what might hurt.

That difference sounds small. It isn’t. It changes everything.

Pain is information. Fear is anticipation. And anticipation can become its own form of suffering.

Pain occupies your brain. Fear occupies your brain. Medical logistics occupy your brain.

Healthy people often assume recovery is primarily physical. I certainly did. If the wound is healing, the infection is gone, or the scan looks better, then life should gradually return to normal.

What they don’t see is the constant stream of decisions, interruptions, worries, and uncertainties competing for the same mental resources you once used for work, relationships, hobbies, and ordinary conversation.

What they don’t see is that your nervous system gets stuck in threat mode.

A nurse walks into the room and your body reacts before your conscious mind, your eyes, even register that she’s arrived. It’s not thought. It’s reflex. The sound of footsteps, the shift in air, and suddenly your shoulders are already tight. You are already scanning, already bracing. Before a word is spoken, before a question is asked, your body has made a decision:

Something might happen now.

Something bad.

Someone says, “We’re just going to take a look,” and your stomach tightens in a way that has nothing to do with logic. You know, intellectually, that this could be nothing. But your body has already remembered every time “just a look” turned into something else.

You are not responding to the present moment.

You are responding to every version of this moment that has ever gone wrong.

Every movement requires analysis. Every new sensation requires interpretation. Every unusual feeling triggers a full congressional hearing inside your brain.

What’s that?

Was that normal?

Did I pull a stitch?

Is the fluid back?

Is this swelling?

Was that pain always there?

I became deeply suspicious of corners. Of turning too quickly. Of sleeping in unfamiliar positions.

My mere existence began to feel vaguely unsafe. Unsafe in my own body, my own person, my own being.

Fear is not pain.

But your brain doesn’t know that.

Pain teaches vigilance. Extended pain teaches hypervigilance. Eventually the body starts reacting not just to pain itself, but to the memory of it.

Turns out IVs are inefficient little buggers that get blocked by small blood clots on the regular. So nurses flush them, some expertly, some not so expertly. One nurse pushed too hard to flush an IV on the back of my hand and I hit the roof. When I tell you that the pain of pushing a blockage through an IV into the teeny tiny wee small veins on the back of your hand hurts more than a truck parked on my thigh, I do not exaggerate.

And for a full ten days after that experience I would grip the IV line in my hand before every single medication change, and they would happen every few hours, just because of a single bad experience. And every time that nurse walked into the room I would tense up, regardless of whether she was coming to change IV medications or not.

One bad experience. That was enough.

After that, every medication became a potential threat.

So did she.

Not because it hurt.

Because it might hurt.

The same pattern shows up everywhere. Dressing changes. Movement. Procedures. You begin carrying the memory of pain into situations where no pain may actually occur. The body learns quickly.

Sometimes too quickly.

At some point recovery becomes a series of negotiations with your own nervous system.

Get through this dressing change.

Get through this medication change.

Get through this doctor’s visit.

Get through the next wave of fear before your brain decides catastrophe is imminent.

What makes this exhausting is that fear costs energy. Real energy. Physical, emotional, cognitive. You spend hours preparing for things that last minutes, and then you recover from the anticipation as much as you recover from the event itself.

There were times when a dressing change barely hurt at all, and yet afterward I would sleep for hours.

Not because of pain.

Not because of medication.

But because my body had been running a threat response for so long that it simply shut down when it was over.

I would lie there afterward staring at the ceiling, fully aware I was safe, and still unable to settle my breathing.

Like my system didn’t get the memo that the event was over.

Even when I knew intellectually that I was perfectly safe, tears would start quietly streaming down my face when the doctor arrived for a dressing change or a nurse walked in carrying another IV medication.

That’s what people miss.

Injury, trauma, panic: they are not only defined by what can be seen—the scars on my thigh that look like a quilting bee, the drains and pumps running out of my leg—but by what the nervous system has had to carry, and what it has decided now constitutes danger.

And what the conscious mind thinks and what the nervous system thinks can be two very different things.

I once had a CrossFit coach who had served three tours overseas as a combat medic. On paper, he was exactly the kind of person you would assume had already made peace with pain, fear, and pressure. He had seen things most people never will, but he was kind, patient, and stalwart.

But he had panic attacks.

He just refused to call them that, or really even acknowledge they existed.

He would describe them as “weird episodes” or “just stress,” but they had all the markers: the racing heart, the sudden spikes of fear, the physiological collapse into alarm without an obvious external trigger.

What he couldn’t reconcile in his conscious mind was that nothing visible was wrong. He had come back intact. No missing limbs. No obvious damage. So in his mind, there was no acceptable reason for his body to be reacting the way it was.

He wasn’t dismissing other people’s suffering. He was trying to stay consistent with a rule he had absorbed in a very different environment: if it can’t be seen, it doesn’t count in the same way.

And for him, to acknowledge it, to look at it any other way, would feel like a betrayal. Like it was disrespectful to the people he had served with to act like he had been “damaged” when he still looked whole.

But what he didn’t understand, and what most people don’t understand when they say someone should not park in a handicapped spot because they “look fine,” is that the nervous system doesn’t check appearance before it responds. It doesn’t care whether the injury is visible or whether there is permission to call it real.

It only records what it has lived through.

Visible or invisible.

It doesn’t matter whether you look fine.

It only matters what has been running underneath it all, every day, without a break.

Leave every light in your house on twenty-four hours a day, and eventually something burns out.

CHAPTER FIVE: The Ones Who’ve Been Through It

There is a particular kind of loneliness that follows injury or illness.

It isn’t the loneliness of being physically alone. In fact, people often rally around you. They text. They call. They bring food. They ask questions. They care.

But there is still this quiet, cavernous feeling that no one really understands.

Not the way you do. Not the way your body now insists on reminding you, every hour, that something fundamental has shifted. There is a gap between concern and comprehension, between kindness and experience. And at first, that gap feels unbridgeable.

Initially, I thought I was going to be okay.

So I did what I always do. I made it funny.

I posted on Instagram with humor and bite and the usual snark. If I could turn it into a story, make it sharp, maybe even make people laugh, then perhaps it hadn’t completely swallowed me yet.

But injury has a way of setting its own terms.

As it became clear this wasn’t a short interruption, something shifted. The humor didn’t disappear, but it stopped being enough on its own. It became a companion to honesty rather than a shield against it.

I moved to Facebook and started writing more openly about what was happening. Still me. Still funny. Still sarcastic. But also vulnerable and real in a way I rarely intend to be.

And in doing that, I accidentally gave people a place to meet me.

At first, it was just a comment here and there. A private message. A friend of a friend suddenly becoming very specific.

“I had a spinal injury.”

“I’ve had breast cancer three times.”

“My husband was electrocuted and suffered a catastrophic brain injury.”

“I was a quadriplegic for a year.”

A quadriplegic. For a year. WTF?!

The perpetually cheerful cat sitter casually dropped that fact into conversation as though she’d say she was changing jobs or moving apartments.

The sunny runner friend I knew as a source of positivity revealed she’d endured three bouts of breast cancer, a bilateral mastectomy, and reconstruction.

A dive acquaintance suffered almost my exact injury one month after I did.

The stories just kept coming.

And suddenly my mind, which had quietly convinced itself that my experience was rare and isolating, had to recalibrate.

Because these aren’t the obvious stories.

We all know the public narratives. The outspoken cancer survivor. The person who had a stroke. The inspirational stories that come with races, ribbons, and awareness campaigns.

But this was different.

These were people I had known for years without knowing. People carrying entire hidden histories inside their bodies. People who had experienced catastrophic things and somehow folded them into ordinary life so completely that you would never know unless they told you.

They show up to dinner. They’re late for brunch. They walk their dogs. They complain about traffic. They laugh at inappropriate jokes.

And somewhere in there is the fact that their body once completely betrayed them and they had to figure out how to build a life again.

There is a moment when awe takes over.

Not inspiration. I hate what we’ve done with that word. Not the flattening of people into life lessons.

Awe.

Because what people survive is incredible.

And because so many of them seem… okay.

Not untouched. Not unchanged. But okay.

They are not waiting to become who they used to be. They are already living. Fully, imperfectly, sometimes hilariously.

And perhaps most unexpectedly, these are the people who know how to show up.

When motorcycle riders pass each other on the road, there is an almost imperceptible nod or a flick of the hand downward. Not a conversation. Not even really a greeting.

Just a signal.

I see you. I know this road.

This is like that.

There is a recognition among people who have been through something catastrophic. They somehow know one another.

Those of us who have lived long enough all know someone who has been through something terrible. My mother had a stroke. I watched it happen. I lived alongside it. I worried. I grieved. I helped.

I thought I understood.

I didn’t.

Not really.

I understood stroke from the outside. I understood fear and caregiving and loss. But I did not understand what it feels like when your own body suddenly becomes unreliable, when the future contracts, when every ordinary movement becomes a negotiation.

There’s a difference between witnessing suffering and inhabiting it.

And that’s the difference between sympathy and empathy.

Sympathy says, “I’m so sorry. Tell me how you’re doing.”

Empathy says, “I know there may not even be words for this. I’m here anyway.”

One isn’t bad and the other good. They’re simply different. But when you’ve crossed into this strange country of injury and recovery, you become acutely aware of who is speaking from the shore and who has actually been in the water.

These are the people who don’t ask the questions that can make you want to crawl out of your skin.

How’s the healing going?

What’s next?

When will you be back to normal?

Those questions aren’t cruel. They come from care. They come from sympathy.

But sympathy still stands outside the experience. Sympathy wants updates. It wants progress reports. It assumes a timeline and a destination.

Empathy is different.

Empathy knows there may be no timeline.

Empathy understands that “better” is sometimes a complicated word.

Empathy sits beside uncertainty instead of trying to solve it.

The people who’ve been through it don’t ask for a progress report.

Instead they say things like, “There are no words for this.”

And then they say, “I’m thinking about you.”

That’s it.

No expectation. No need for reassurance. No subtle pressure to perform wellness or provide evidence of improvement.

Just recognition.

Just presence.

Just the small downward flick of the hand from someone else who’s ridden this road.

And somehow, that changes everything.

Because you realize you are not the only one in the room carrying something heavy.

You never were.

Most people simply don’t lead with their hardest chapter.

So when it finally surfaces—yours or theirs—it feels less like a confession and more like recognition. Like discovering an entire hidden community that has been around you all along.

There is a strange gift in that.

Not the injury itself. Never that.

But the sudden, almost disorienting awareness that behind so many ordinary lives are extraordinary recoveries.

And that the vacuum you thought you were living in isn’t empty after all.

It’s full of people quietly nodding as they pass, letting you know they know this road too.

 

PART TWO: LEARNING THE LOCAL CUSTOMS

CHAPTER SIX: I Hate a Wheelchair

For years, my parents refused to use any type of mobility device.

Despite both of them being enormous fall risks, I could not find a way to convince either one to use a cane or a walker. My Aunt Mouse was the same way. She would rather fall on her ass in a baking-hot Arizona parking lot in the middle of summer than use a cane.

Why?

Seriously, why?

It was something I never understood.

They all wore glasses without hesitation and had for decades. Mom, and eventually Dad, wore hearing aids. Although Dad was such a cheapskate that when one broke, he would buy random hearing aids online and swap out parts to repair them himself.

Here’s a helpful tip: hearing-aid parts are not one-size-fits-all.

Surely it was vanity.

But even that theory never fully held up.

There was nothing about any of them that would have led anyone to mistakenly assume they were not old.

Aunt Mouse had so many wrinkles she looked like one of those shrunken apple-head dolls we made as kids.

My dad was basically the poster child for Old Man. His daily uniform consisted of an ancient fishing vest with every pocket stuffed full of pens, receipts, spare watches, mysterious scraps of paper, and things no human being had any business carrying around.

And his eyebrows.

My God, his eyebrows.

Long. Bushy. Stark white.

They hung over his glasses and announced to the world:

“In case you were wondering, yes, I am absolutely somebody’s grandfather.”

Did he fall?

Constantly.

He lived with me for six months, during which time I received excellent deadlift training from repeatedly picking him up off the floor. Although according to him, he never actually fell.

One day my cleaning lady called me from his office and said, “Your father has fallen.” I walked in to find him sitting on the floor. “I didn’t fall,” he informed me, “I slid out of my chair.” “Interesting,” I said, “does that mean I don’t have to pick you up?”

I could never understand why someone would choose to live in a constant state of wobble rather than simply use a cane.

Then I found myself using a wheelchair.

Not because I couldn’t walk.

Not because I was paralyzed.

Not because anything was broken.

I was simply on restricted walking after surgery(s). My doctors wanted me moving as little as possible while my leg and hip healed.

So to get from my villa to the street, I used a wheelchair.

To get from the hospital lobby to physiotherapy, I used a wheelchair.

To run an errand at the mall, I used a wheelchair.

And I hated it.

Not mildly disliked. Not found inconvenient. Hated.

Viscerally.

What surprised me was that it wasn’t vanity. I had previously used a cane with absolute glee. I happily hobbled around under my own steam, completely unconcerned with whether anyone looked at me. Or thought of me. I simply didn’t care.

The wheelchair felt different.

The moment I sat in it, I stopped being a capable independent person and became a project. Someone else’s project.

People rushed to help.

They pushed me. They pushed me slowly. Not regular slowly. Painfully slowly. Like “did we stop moving?” slowly.

They locked both brakes every single time the chair stopped moving, as though I might unexpectedly roll into traffic if left unsupervised for three seconds.

They positioned me where they thought I should be. Unfortunately, that was almost never where I actually wanted to be. Someone would roll me up to a reception desk and park me beside a chair rather than move the chair out of the way. My feet would be pointed at the desk, but I couldn’t reach the paperwork, the payment terminal, or anything else the staff needed to hand me.

And then, I would stand up and walk around the obstacle.

And everyone would look mildly shocked.

A miracle.

No.

I was perfectly capable of walking. I was simply trying not to per my doctor’s orders. But I did not feel compelled to explain that to every single person. When I tried to wave off help, to say “it’s fine, I don’t need it” it felt almost mean. Like I was taking away someone’s good deed for the day.

But that distinction seemed to disappear the moment I sat in the chair. And that was the lesson. The wheelchair wasn’t limiting me nearly as much as people’s assumptions were.

We’ve done a decent job as a society about recognizing disability, accommodating disability, and reducing some of the stigma around disability.

That’s a good thing.

But somewhere along the way, many of us started assuming that a mobility aid tells us everything we need to know about the person using it.

It doesn’t.

A wheelchair tells you someone is using a wheelchair.

That’s it.

It doesn’t tell you whether they can walk.

It doesn’t tell you whether they’re in pain.

It doesn’t tell you whether they’re permanently disabled, temporarily injured, recovering from surgery, exhausted from treatment, or simply conserving energy.

And the opposite is true as well.

Just because someone looks healthy doesn’t mean they are. How many people have been told they should not be parking in a handicapped spot because they clearly “look” fine, not disabled in anyway.

One of the strangest things about illness and injury is how quickly you learn that appearances are often meaningless.

The person in the wheelchair may be capable of standing. The person standing may be barely holding themselves together.

And the older people in my life who fought so hard against canes and walkers?

For the first time, I think I understand them.

It wasn’t vanity.

At least not entirely.

It was identity.

Because the moment you start using a mobility aid, people stop seeing what you can do and start making assumptions about what you can’t.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Walking Was Never the Finish Line

After what has quite literally been two months of uncertainty, surgeries, MRIs, IVs, panic attacks, and being confined to walking only between the bathroom and the kitchen of my villa, I finally got the words I had been waiting for from my surgeon:

“You can walk.”

Today, I got clearance.

I can walk. Huzzah!

No cane. No wheelchair. No restrictions beyond common sense. Just… go walk.

And not only walk. Squat. Use my glutes. Start moving normally again. The hope is that activating the muscles will help push out the remaining edema. Assuming, of course, that next week’s MRI doesn’t reveal that the Morel-Lavallée lesion is still open.

By all rights, I should be overjoyed.

So why am I not?

The truth is, walking was never really the finish line. It’s just the start.

Let’s face it: technically, I’ve been able to walk since the day after the accident. The night it happened, I had to convince the ER staff to keep me overnight because they were ready to send me home once they saw nothing was broken. After every surgery, I was back on my feet the next day. Granted, “back on my feet” mostly meant gathering drains, pumps, IV poles, and shuffling my way to the bathroom like some bizarre medical marionette, but I could do it.

Walking is only a milestone. One of many yet to come.

That being said, my friend Sam took me to the mall today to celebrate, and we had an absurd amount of fun with one of their sport wheelchairs. She pushed me around while we laughed ourselves silly. It was probably the smarter way to bridge the gap between bathroom-distance walking and trying to cover a mile on day one. And honestly, it seemed prudent not to go from a maximum daily distance of thirty feet to a mile on the very first day.

But walking?

Walking I could always do.

What I want to know is whether I can squat again.

Not physical-therapy squat. Not cautious rehabilitation squat.

I mean really squat.

Under a barbell.

With weight.

Right now, seated leg extensions with a few kilos of ankle weights feel like legitimate work. Three sets of ten, holding each extension for eight seconds, leave me feeling like I’ve completed a serious training session.

What’s even more humbling is my left leg. Either it has lost an astonishing amount of strength, or it has simply decided to go on strike after carrying most of the workload for the last eight weeks. I couldn’t do a single hamstring curl at thirty pounds.

Not one.

The gap between where I am and where I want to be suddenly feels enormous.

Because walking isn’t my sport.

I don’t dream about being able to comfortably stroll through a shopping mall.

I want CrossFit.

I want weightlifting.

I want pickleball.

I want to load a barbell and wonder whether I’ve added too much weight. I want sore muscles from training instead of soreness from healing. I want to complain about workouts instead of MRIs. I want my body to feel like something I can challenge again rather than something I have to constantly protect.

Maybe that’s why today’s clearance feels less like a finish line and more like the first step onto a very long road.

Everyone around me hears, “You can walk again,” and assumes the story is over.

But for me, the story isn’t about walking.

It’s about returning to the life that existed before all of this.

Today wasn’t victory.

Today was permission to begin.

CHAPTER EIGHT: Walking Is Hard

For most of my life, walking ranked right up there with breathing and complaining: something I did without conscious thought.

Then I spent two months not doing it.

Technically, I walked. I shuffled the thirty feet from bed to bathroom. I made the epic expedition to the kitchen. Occasionally I ventured to the patio. Because feral cats don’t consider my recovery timetable relevant. But every step took place on surfaces that were safe and that I knew intimately. Flat. Smooth. Predictable. The lighting never changed. No surprises lurked around corners. No scooters threatened my existence.

My world had become a carefully controlled laboratory experiment.

Then I got cleared to walk.

I assumed I would simply stand up and resume being a person who walks.

Apparently that’s not how any of this works.

The first thing I discovered is that the brain and body are not separate systems engaged in a polite partnership. They are more like an overprotective parent and a reckless teenager trapped in the same vehicle.

The body says, “Let’s go for a walk.”

The brain says, “Abso-fucking-lutely not! Have you seen what happened the last time we trusted you?”

Rude.

Much of this comes down to proprioception, which is a fancy medical word for your body’s internal GPS. It’s the system that tells your brain where your feet are without looking at them. It’s how you can walk through your house in the dark and not have to visually confirm that your left foot is, in fact, attached to your left leg. It’s how you can step off a curb, climb a staircase, catch yourself when you stumble, or stand on one foot while putting on pants (usually successfully.)

Most of us never think about it because it works quietly in the background.

Until it doesn’t.

The repair for a Morel-Lavallée injury is basically a violent interruption of normal communication. Nerves, fascia, muscle, skin, and connective tissue all get disrupted. Then surgeons come along and make long incisions to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Those incisions heal, but healing takes time. Nerves have to reconnect. Signals have to find their way home.

The result is that the information highway between brain and body gets a little… glitchy.

Not broken.

Just less trustworthy.

Imagine driving a familiar route while your GPS occasionally freezes and announces, “Proceed to the highlighted route,” without showing you the route. You still get there. You just drive more cautiously because you no longer entirely trust the instructions.

There’s a classroom exercise where kids are asked to write instructions for something simple, like making a peanut butter sandwich or walking across a room. The results are always terrible because nobody consciously knows all the steps involved.

That’s what walking feels like right now. Not painful. Conscious. Very conscious.

Like somebody handed me the instruction manual for walking and the pages are out of order. Like a marionette whose puppeteer is still learning which strings to pull and in what sequence.

And then there are the sidewalks of Bali.

Or what Bali generously describes as sidewalks.

The first morning I ventured beyond the villa, I stood at the gate feeling oddly exposed. For two months my world had been measured in feet. Bed to bathroom. Bathroom to kitchen. Kitchen to patio. The same surfaces. The same lighting. The same predictable environment.

Outside was different.

Outside was information.

A LOT of information.

I made it about fifty yards before realizing I was staring at the ground like I was searching for a contact lens. Every crack in the pavement demanded analysis. Every change in elevation required a risk assessment. I would move forward and the sidewalk would slope sideways. Then half a block later it disappeared altogether. One section consisted of loose gravel and when my foot slid an inch, I came to a complete stop to determine whether I had just destroyed two months of repair. Another section appeared to have been designed by someone with a personal grudge against ankles. There were drainage channels, uneven paving stones, surprise holes, patches of broken concrete, and the ubiquitous little offering baskets filled with flowers and incense.

Beautiful. Sacred.

Also located with remarkable precision exactly where my next footstep wanted to land.

Meanwhile scooters buzzed past from every conceivable direction. The tropical sun cast hard shadows that disguised changes in elevation. A dog wandered across my path. A delivery truck appeared. Someone emerged from a shop carrying boxes.

None of these things were dangerous.

My brain, however, had other opinions.

My brain looked at all this and essentially filed an emergency motion for immediate suspension of walking privileges because it concluded that we were participating in an elaborate assassination attempt organized by pavement.

I was immediately downgraded from “reasonably athletic woman” to “elderly Victorian widow crossing an icy street.”

As a result, I don’t walk like me.

I walk like someone borrowing my body. My cadence is off. My steps are tentative. My hips don’t seem to shift at quite the right moment, like a musician coming in just a beat behind. I move cautiously, slightly bent forward, like my body and brain are still negotiating the terms of our agreement.

Objectively, I’m doing fine.

Subjectively, I feel ninety-three years old.

What’s fascinating is that very little of this is actually weakness. Some of it is, certainly. Two months of limited movement takes a toll. But much of what I’m experiencing is my nervous system relearning trust.

But it’s not just the mechanics of walking that have changed.

It’s the way I move through the world.

People get too close and I instinctively angle my body away from them. Not consciously. Not dramatically. Just enough to protect the injured leg if they stumble, turn suddenly, or fail to appreciate the amount of personal space I currently believe I deserve. If someone brushes past me in a crowded area, I feel a flash of irritation entirely out of proportion to the offense. I assume the worst-case scenario and make my decisions accordingly.

It’s not fear exactly. At least not the dramatic kind.

It’s more like hypervigilance. My brain has become that overly cautious friend who insists on reading every warning label and purchasing the optional insurance. Risk assessment has become a full-time occupation.

And maybe that’s part of recovery too. Not just teaching my body how to move again but convincing my brain that not every interaction with the world is a threat.

The good news is that the only way to restore confidence is to keep accumulating successful experiences. Every walk teaches the brain that the body is capable. Every obstacle navigated safely updates the internal software. The process is frustrating because I remember exactly how I used to move. My brain has archived decades of effortless walking and keeps comparing today’s performance to the old highlight reel.

Of course, all of this raises a bigger question.

What does this actually mean for recovery?

The optimistic answer is straightforward. Nerves heal. The brain adapts. New pathways form. The communication system improves. The timing returns. Walking eventually becomes automatic again.

At least that’s the theory.

But does that happen on its own?

Or does the brain need specific challenges and specific inputs to rebuild those connections?

Do I simply need time?

Or do I need training?

And if I need training, am I getting the right kind?

One of the odd things about recovering in Bali is that most of the people helping me are absolutely competent at getting patients back to normal life. The problem is that my definition of normal life may be slightly different than theirs. For many people my age, success looks something like:

Can you get in and out of a car?

Can you carry a bag of groceries?

Can you climb a flight of stairs?

And those are perfectly reasonable goals.

They’re just not my goals.

My goal isn’t to comfortably navigate Costco.

My goal is to deadlift 305 pounds again.

My goal is to do a twelve-minute AMRAP that leaves me sprawled on the floor questioning my life choices while simultaneously feeling delighted about them.

My goal is to dive from boats, scramble over rocky shore entries, hike uneven trails, carry luggage through airports, chase sunsets, and generally continue behaving like someone who has not received the memo that fifty-seven is supposed to mean slowing down.

The challenge is that those goals require more than simply functioning.

They require confidence.

Power.

Balance.

Explosiveness.

Coordination.

Trust.

Not just trust that I can walk across a room.

Trust that my body will respond correctly when I ask something difficult of it.

And honestly, I don’t yet know whether the path from here to there is mostly patience, mostly training, or some combination of both. I do know this: I need someone who understands not how to get a fifty-seven-year-old woman back to Costco, but how to get a fifty-seven-year-old CrossFitter back to being herself. That’s a very different assignment.

For now, I don’t have the answer.

What I do have is the next step.

Literally.

Walk a little farther.

Move a little better.

Give my brain another successful repetition.

Teach it that the world is safe.

Teach it that my body is capable.

And then see what becomes possible after that.

So for now, I shuffle a little. I wobble occasionally. I stare suspiciously at uneven pavement. I move slower than I want.

And every day I’m teaching my brain something it doesn’t yet believe:

that my body is capable

that the world is mostly safe

that walking is, in fact, just walking again.

CHAPTER NINE: Nervous

I am now a nervous person. I have never been a nervous person, in fact, most people think I am fearless. But as I venture back into the world, back into my world, even ordinary things come with a thin layer of hesitation.

Not terrified. Not panicked.

Just… wary.

A friend here in Bali had been absolutely lovely and endlessly patient, waiting to see me until I was ready. Every few weeks he’d check in, no pressure, just letting me know the invitation still stood. That he would be on my side of town, if I felt up for it.

Eventually I ran out of excuses. A date was set. A time agreed. Coffee scheduled.

And I found myself nervous.

Which makes no sense.

The usual Mollie, the pre-accident Mollie, can talk to a telephone pole and make it her friend. Small talk has never been my problem. I’ve made friends while walking down a road in Bali, while climbing onto a dive boat in Bonaire, and by posting on Facebook asking for scooter help. Engaging people in conversation has never been my problem.

So why was I nervous?

Because I’m not that Mollie right now.

The smart-ass, quick-witted, fast-banter version of me is still in there somewhere, I think, but she’s been temporarily overshadowed by Injured Mollie.

Recovering Mollie.

The Mollie whose world has become surprisingly small. Days that used to be spent running between the gym and pickleball and coffee with friends and language classes now revolve around whether I’ve slept, whether I’m hurting, and whether I can sit in one chair for an hour.

When your days revolve around doctor’s appointments, physical therapy, pain levels, sleep, recovery, and trying to figure out whether that sensation in your hip is normal or catastrophic, you discover you don’t have a lot of fresh material.

You become the person who only talks about herself because, unfortunately, herself is the only thing she’s been doing.

Even more than that, I have absolutely no interest in performing.

The people I’ve met in Bali mostly know one version of me. The adventurous version. The energetic version. The woman who moved across the world, dives with sharks, plays pickleball, does CrossFit, and is always planning the next thing.

And I just don’t have the energy to be her right now.

If these were lifelong friends, they would have seen all the versions. Or at least a few over the course of years. They would have seen exhausted Mollie, sad Mollie, grieving Mollie, grumpy Mollie.

The version that suddenly hits a wall and leaves.

Old friends have seen all these versions of me and know none of them are permanent. Long friendships build up credits in the trust bank. You’ve earned enough history together that one bad mood or early exit isn’t taken personally. But newer friends? They don’t have that history, the trust bank is not yet as deep.

And they also didn’t get the preparatory briefing from my best friend Sandra.

As Sandra explained it to the members of my posse showing up after her:

“Mollie’s not really Mollie right now. Her energy is limited. Her interest is limited. She may literally stop talking in the middle of a conversation and be done.”

The thing is, Sandra can say that and accept that behavior because we’ve known each other for almost two decades. Because we’ve been through things together, traveled together, seen each other at our best and our worst. Because Sandra loves me.

But I don’t know how to say “I’m done” to newer friends without sounding rude. It seems no matter how carefully you explain, “It’s not you,” people sometimes hear, “It’s you.”

So I worried.

Then coffee happened. And it was actually lovely.

My friend Sam provided a perfect buffer. She’d recently had Bali Belly and, unlike me, appears physically incapable of being alone for more than twelve consecutive minutes. So she was beyond excited to be released from her hotel room after what she described as being cooped up “FOR . . .EH. . .VER!!!!” For Sam, forever turned out to be approximately two days.

But we all talked and laughed and visited.

And then I hit the wall.

In part because my body was getting uncomfortable sitting in one position for so long and in part because my brain was getting tired. My friend Mark had launched into a story involving complicated lawsuits and increasingly detailed explanations that required me to follow along as he searched for details, adding more facts, notes, and plot twists as he went.

At some point I felt my attention simply power down. Like a laptop battery reaching 2%.

No warning.

No negotiation.

Just done.

So I called it, hopefully not too abruptly and not rudely. But I called it nonetheless and the nicest surprise is that nobody batted an eye. Goodbyes were said, people stood to use the restroom, rides were called and off Mark went with his girlfriend Monique without so much as a fuss. Granted we were standing between them and lunch at this roast chicken place they adore, so they might have been looking for a way to call it.

I think what makes these social things nerve-wracking is not that I don’t know my limits, because I certainly do. And if I forget them, my body is more than happy to remind me. It’s more that I don’t trust I can explain those limits and, even more importantly, that those explanations will be met with grace.

Maybe that’s really what feels so foreign about all of this. I have spent most of my life moving through the world as someone who is capable (maybe too capable according to some of my friends who think I might ask for help more often.) I am someone who gets things done, who solves problems, who tackles life head on. I know how to make friends. I know how to walk into a room full of strangers and leave with invitations to dinner. I know how to travel solo, navigate foreign countries, solve problems, and adapt. I know how to go to the gym. I know my body. I know myself.

But suddenly I am doing all the same things while feeling uncertain, slightly fragile, and dependent on grace I am not used to needing from other people or myself.

It isn’t the activities themselves that make me nervous. It’s doing familiar things while I am not feeling familiar.

A similar thing is happening as I go back to the gym.

Not because working out is scary. Working out is one of the few things that still feels like home. The gym has always been my happy place. The place that welcomes me. Challenges me. Centers me. The place where my people are, who speak my language, one that consists largely of squats, deadlifts, suffering, and complaints about burpees. The people who somehow share the same inexplicable joy of grinding ourselves into the dirt together every day until we are left in a sweaty puddle on the floor gasping for breath.

But now even the gym feels slightly different. Not because I’ve forgotten how.

But because now there is risk attached that wasn’t there before. Sure, the gym has always carried risk. Muscles tear. Ligaments strain. Barbells get dropped. But those risks feel known and, to some extent, manageable. Now every movement carries a new question.

What if this is the rep?

What if this is the movement that’s one inch too far?

What if I hear a pop?

Feel a tear?

Get sent all the way back to the beginning?

The fear isn’t the workout. The fear is losing the progress. The possibility that something so ordinary could undo so much.

When I walked back into the gym for the first time I moved like a little old woman. I moved cautiously around equipment I’d spent years navigating without thought. I looked down before every step. I thought about every pivot. I calculated every reach.

The gym that once made me feel powerful suddenly made me feel fragile.

That’s not me.

So I find myself nervous in places that never used to make me nervous.

Coffee with friends.

The gym.

Normal life.

Not because I can’t do them. But because I’m learning how to be this version of myself in the world. A version with limits that arrive suddenly and without negotiation. A version that needs grace from other people and, perhaps hardest of all, from herself.

Maybe that’s recovery too. Not just healing the injury.

Learning that I can honor those limits without apology and still be fully myself.

PART THREE: TBD

CHAPTER TEN: The Women Who Came

One of the stranger things you learn as you get older is that friendship doesn’t always look like you think it should.

In my twenties, I thought a real friend was supposed to be your friend for everything, at all times, forever. I held people tightly, sometimes too tightly, smothering relationships under the weight of my expectations. Like baby chicks in a toddlers hands.

As I got older, I learned that friendships come in different forms. You have the friend you call for a movie, the one who loves a long cocktail and conversation, the one who says yes to a hike, the one who can make you laugh when life is heavy. Not every friendship has to be everything to be meaningful. Different people occupy different spaces in our lives.

But if I’m being honest, friendship can still confound me.

I still expect the people closest to me to know me better than they often do. I still assume they will understand what hurts me, what matters to me, what I need, without my having to explain it. And I still find myself surprised when they don’t. Maybe that’s unfair. Ok its absolutely unfair. Maybe most people are simply mired in their own complicated lives, rarely intending to hurt anyone and often having no idea that they have.

At fifty-seven, I understand friendship better than I did at twenty-five. But do we ever figure it out completely? I doubt it. If anything, age has simply given me a longer list of evidence that friendship obeys none of the rules I once thought it did. The people I expected to stay haven’t always stayed. The people I thought would drift away sometimes became indispensable. Some friendships require constant tending. Others somehow survive years of neglect. Distance matters less than I imagined. Proximity guarantees nothing.

Distance, for example, turns out to be a terrible measure of friendship.

One of my closest friends has lived thousands of miles away from me for nearly the entirety of our friendship. We met on a cycling trip in France twenty years ago. Two weeks of riding, wine, laughter, and conversations with someone I found instantly easy to be around. But also way too sweet and genuine and naïve to possibly be a long term friend with my sarcastic, snarky self.

So at the end of the trip, we hugged goodbye, and I assured her that I had enjoyed meeting her but that I doubted we would see each other again. We lived in different states. We had separate lives. The math simply didn’t support a lasting friendship.

Turns out, I caught up with her the next day when my flight home was cancelled.

Over the last two decades, we’ve repeatedly found our way back to one another. Visits in each other’s home states. Domestic trips. Foreign adventures. Long stretches apart followed by immediate familiarity. In the past year, as I’ve traveled the world, we’ve somehow grown even closer.

We talk almost every day. Morning and night. Sometimes it’s complete drivel: complaints about weather, stories about a weird interaction at the grocery store, a photograph of something ridiculous. Other times it’s intensely personal. Politics. Grief. Fears. The parts of ourselves we don’t often show other people.

We’ve learned more about each other this year than I thought possible after twenty years of friendship.

Distance didn’t weaken the relationship.

It concentrated it.

So much for the theory that proximity is what makes people close.

Then there’s another friend. One I’ve fought much harder for.

I’ve admired her almost since the day I met her. Intelligent. Articulate. Thoughtful. Even-keeled in a way I have never managed to be. We briefly shared a house two decades ago and have orbited each other ever since.

I have spent years trying to stay on her radar and I’m not entirely sure I can explain why. Her emotional intelligence was something I aspired to (and have still not achieved), and our conversations always required me to stretch my thinking, to rise to meet her. Not many people make me do that.

And so I chase her. Through marriages and divorces. Through breakups and career changes. Sometimes she leans in. Usually when she’s working on herself. Or single. Or nursing the wounds of a relationship that has just ended. Then she recedes again.

It has always felt like a tug-of-war, except I seem to be the only one holding the rope.

In recent years, she engaged more. Worked less. Joined me on travels. Reached out to me as much as I reached out to her. I thought perhaps we’d finally arrived at something more balanced.

Then she suffered another difficult breakup. I was there for her, as I always am. As I had been through the several breakups she had gone through with this woman. Everyone advised her to walk away, but we’ve all loved someone we should have left. And so I lost her again.

Eventually she resurfaced. We chatted. She talked about doing a Hyrox event. As a staunch Crossfitter I was compelled to joke that Hyrox was for losers.

A week later she messaged me and said she was being vulnerable and that the joke had hurt her feelings.

For fucks sake I thought. The idea that I would intentionally insult her about this struck me as absurd. Inane, ridiculous. I have been one of her biggest supporters, cheering her return to triathlons and endurance accomplishments with genuine enthusiasm.

But none of that mattered.

She was my friend and I had hurt her.

I apologized immediately.

And then I told her I’d been run over by a truck.

She never checked back in.

Nothing.

No follow-up. No check-in.

You have to be fucking kidding me.

I thought about ignoring her forever. I thought about telling her off. Instead a week later I wrote my own “vulnerable” text and told her I was angry.

She apologized immediately.

But the hurt and the doubt stayed.

I have spent years trying to understand that friendship. Maybe some relationships are never balanced. Maybe we keep showing up because certain people call forth parts of ourselves we like being in the presence of, even when the exchange isn’t entirely even.

And then there are the people whose love language is not words at all.

We met almost 15 years ago in a running group. She is all movement, she goes and goes and goes as if stillness might catch her if she ever slows down. She is incomprehensibly intelligent, with a breadth of understanding of the education system and science that is daunting to follow at times. Watching her can be exhausting.

Loving her is not.

She is the kind of friend who squeezes in a trip to see you in Honduras for three days to celebrate your fiftieth birthday (more travel, more movement). She expresses affection through action – washing dishes, jumping up to get the light before you can, showing up at your doorstep after a breakup, not to hand you tissues but to take you for a bike ride.

Ever the perpetual motion.

And then there is another woman entirely.

For years, we lived in the same town. A friend of my perpetually-in-motion friend. I wanted to know her better. Whenever our mutual friend was in town and we saw each other I suggested we get together beyond those visits. Coffee. Lunch. Walks. The occasional outing. Nothing dramatic. Just the ordinary ways friendships are built.

She never really picked up what I was putting down.

So I eventually stopped trying.

And then I left the country.

Somehow, with an ocean between us, we’ve now become friends. One small exchange at a time.

Then there’s another friend, a newer one.

Five years ago, we met and, quite literally, fell in love with each other on sight. Not romantically. Something else. She had a huge personality and a thousand-watt smile. She seemed fearless. She loved to travel and to dive and to eat well and, most of all, to socialize.

I thought she would be the first person on a plane to see me during my travels.

Instead, I got excuses.

First it was the cat.

Then it was the dog.

Meanwhile she talked excitedly about trips elsewhere, animal care apparently no longer presenting an insurmountable obstacle. I was hurt. I told her so. She apologized and promised to explain but never did. I wrote her off.

Eventually I learned the truth.

Years ago, on her way to Thailand with a girlfriend, she’d suffered a severe panic attack that lasted 10 hours. Since then, she has been terrified of traveling alone and hasn’t taken another long international flight by herself.

I understand that. Now.

Fear is real.

But understanding someone’s explanation doesn’t necessarily change how their absence feels.

And then there is the friend who simply vanished.

Sixteen years of friendship. Shared trips. Shared history. Shared memories.

The kind of friendship that becomes woven into the fabric of your life until you stop questioning its permanence. And then, in 2016, she stopped talking to me. Not gradually. Not after a fight I can remember.

Just… stopped.

I reached out repeatedly. Asked if I’d done something wrong. I tried to repair damage I couldn’t identify. Offered apologies for offenses I couldn’t name. Made jokes that I hadn’t slept with her husband, stolen her money or tried to kill her, so whatever it was, surely we could talk it out.

Nothing.

No response. No explanation. Just silence.

By then I was old enough to know that sometimes people leave and don’t provide an exit interview.

Until the morning in January 2021 when her mother called. My friend was very ill and her mother was looking for her will. Which meant it was bad. And I was booking a flight across the country while her mother was still on the phone.

I hadn’t heard from my friend in five years. She had effectively erased me from her life. And yet my first instinct was to go.

I spent five weeks helping her die.

I never understood why she left.

I never stopped loving her.

Because love and loyalty don’t always expire simply because someone else’s feelings for you apparently have.

By now, I had accumulated a fair amount of evidence that I understood friendship less than I thought I did.

Then I got run over by a truck.

And four women got on airplanes.

No hesitation.

No agonizing over money.

No elaborate discussions.

My best friend quietly orchestrated an international relay of care behind my back because she knew me well enough to understand that if asked, I would likely decline.

They organized themselves to arrive one after another so I would never be alone.

Sometimes the highest form of love isn’t asking what someone wants.

It’s understanding what they need and doing it regardless of what they want. I had no choice in the matter.

My closest friend Sandra arrived, and when I was sufficiently coherent after surgery to engage and understand, informed me that the others were coming. She had already prepared them: don’t expect the Mollie you know. Meet her where she is. Let her show you what she needs.  

An odd plan, really, considering I have a profound talent for solitude and only a limited appetite for company even in the best of circumstances.

I wanted to be alone.

But I didn’t want to be alone.

Both things were true.

By now, I should know better than to think friendship follows rules. People disappoint you in highly specific ways. They overlook your pain, misunderstand your needs, disappear without explanation, make excuses, and reveal uncomfortable truths about themselves and about your place in their lives.

And still, when its most needed, they get on airplanes.

Friendship, I’ve learned, is not a clean ledger. People are rarely all in or all out. They are inconsistent and complicated and wounded and distracted and often disappointing.

And yet, when it mattered most, they came.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: What Counts as a Day?

Today I walked.

That’s all.

Ok well that’s not all I did. I went to the gym, and stopped into a nail salon (or three) before I could find someone willing to fix the one nail I had broken. No I do not want a full manicure or a massage, thank you love.

Then I wandered into a jewelry store and, after much internal back and forth over whether I needed it and could I justify it given I didn’t wear the rings I already owned, coughed up the $13 for a new little ring.

I walked to the mall, looked for some nail glue for the aforementioned broken nail, got talked out of the haircut I want, and have wanted for decades, but got a haircut nonetheless. I walked through a few shops, bought some socks.

I walked back down from the mall and stopped for lunch at a place I had been before and completely forgotten about and was happy to reacquaint myself.

Then I walked on to look at my new apartment, walked the five floors to my new unit, and back down. And eventually wandered home. About two miles in all.

Seven hours disappeared.

And at the end of the day, and at no time during the day, did I think “well that was a waste of time.”

Which is odd really. Because a few days ago I spent four hours writing. Completely engrossed. Time disappeared the same way. But when I finally looked up my first thought was, “Well, there goes four hours, what a waste.”

Why? Why is a day writing a waste and a day strolling and doing nothing much in particular no such thing.

It’s tempting to say it’s because writing isn’t productive. Except that’s nonsense. If one of these days is ever likely to produce something tangible – a manuscript, money – it’s the writing, not the wandering around Sanur getting a haircut.

So it isn’t money. The day was not a waste because it didn’t drive towards money.

Maybe it’s movement.

There is something deeply satisfying about covering ground. Even if I accomplish nothing measurable, walking from here to there somehow feels like progress. Sitting in one place—even creating something—doesn’t always.

Is that me?

Or is that my culture?

I grew up on the East Coast where achievement was practically a religion. Good schools. Good grades. Respectable careers. Doctors. Lawyers. Productivity. Accomplishment.

But that explanation doesn’t quite fit either. I’ve spent my adult life walking away from successful careers. I left law to travel for three years. I walked away from consulting. I built a successful business, sold it, and left the country. If I were completely defined by that culture, I wouldn’t have done any of those things.

Then again, I showed up this way. Four-year-old me didn’t need encouragement to join the swim team. Nobody had yet explained résumés or promotions. I simply wanted to do things.

Maybe I’ve always been wired to engage.

Which brings me to another thought.

Right now I can’t dive. I can’t play pickleball. I can’t throw myself into CrossFit. The accident has temporarily shut down most of the ways I usually expend that energy.

So perhaps writing isn’t some surprising new interest.

Perhaps it’s where the energy had to go.

The drive didn’t disappear.

It just found another outlet.

I don’t know the answer.

I only know that I still seem to measure a day differently depending on whether I moved through the world or sat still creating something.

Maybe that’s me.

Maybe it’s biology.

Maybe it’s fifty-seven years of conditioning.

Or maybe the distinction isn’t between walking and writing at all.

Maybe the real question is simpler.

Maybe this wasn’t a day of miles of workouts or adventures.

Maybe it was simply a day not wasted.

CHAPTER TWELVE: The Long Goodbye

No one tells you when recovery ends.

Not because you’re healed. Not because you’re back to yourself. Recovery ends because everyone else quietly walks away.

For months your life has been measured in millimeters. Every new ache, every twinge, every strange sensation gets catalogued and analyzed. Is that normal? Is the swelling worse? Is the fluid pocket smaller? Does that pain mean healing or damage? Hospital stays. Follow-up appointments. Physiotherapy. MRIs. Compression garments. Bandage changes. Questions. Endless questions.

Then one day, it’s over.

The surgeon looks at you and says there’s nothing more she can do.

The physiotherapist says there’s nothing more he can do.

You walk out carrying an ongoing reminder of what you walked in with: a small pocket of fluid that wasn’t part of your body before and may or may not ever disappear. A hip and butt that have swollen to Joan Holloway proportions, although decidedly less glamorous, that may or may not ever shrink back to normal.

Medicine has reached the end of its checklist.

You haven’t.

The strange thing about surviving something significant is that one day you simply stop being the interesting patient. Other people have been injured. Someone else has been diagnosed with something unexpected. New emergencies have arrived. You are gently moved from the “watch closely” list to the “good luck” list.

Which is exactly as it should be. And yet

It’s also strangely lonely.

Because you’re still not you.

The minute you get a few feet away from everyone signing off on your recovery, another feeling settles in.

Fuck it.

Not the reckless kind. Not the “I’m going to ignore medical advice” kind.

More the, I’m just not worrying about it anymore kind. Enough wondering whether another flight of stairs is one too many. Enough calculating whether the walk to the cafe will worsen the swelling. Enough treating your body like it’s made of glass.

So you go.

If it hurts, you stop and back up.

If it swells, you adjust.

If nothing bad happens, you go a little farther next time.

The training wheels come off, because they’ve told you that you can. That’s when the real recovery begins. Not the dramatic part. Not the surgeries or the hospital or the drains.

The boring part. The slow part.

The part measured not in weeks but in months.

Other people celebrate because you’re back in the gym. They hear of you lifting again and see think, ‘She’s recovered.’

But for you, lifting a little weight, even an amount of weight other people don’t see as little, was not the thing. You’ve done a small test of deadlift and are pleased it didn’t end with something snapping, ripping, or popping.

But you know you’re still hundreds of pounds away from where you once were.

Recovery doesn’t end when the doctors are finished.

It ends when you stop comparing who you are to who you were. It ends when you walk into a gym and go to Crossfit and don’t think twice about a box jump or a deadlift or walking lunges. It ends when you are finally allowed back to play pickleball which will then cause a host of qualms and concerns.

I’m not there yet.

Today was simply the day everyone else declared victory.

Tomorrow, the rebuilding starts.

A Note About AI

Since someone will ask:

Yes, I used artificial intelligence in writing this book. The horror!

No, artificial intelligence did not have a scooter accident in Bali, get turned into road rash and ham hock-sized limbs, spend months navigating surgeries and uncertainty, or cry in the shower.

I did.

I wrote the stories. I lived the experiences. I supplied the memories, journals, social media posts, medical updates, observations, bad jokes, and occasional (frequent) profanity. Every emotion in these pages belongs to me.

What AI did was something different.

Think of it as an extraordinarily patient, occasionally insightful, never-tired editor with no social life.

I used it to organize sprawling thoughts, untangle repetitive sections, identify themes I couldn’t see because I was too close to them, and occasionally ask, “Does this chapter make any sense whatsoever?” I used it to brainstorm, tighten language, suggest transitions, and sometimes challenge me when I was being unclear or wandering down an emotional rabbit hole.

From time to time, it also wrote passages that made me stop and think, “Damn. That’s pretty good.” (And also, it’s creepy how much this bot sounds like me.)

Those passages still existed only because I fed it thousands upon thousands of words of my stories, reflections, humor, grief, perspective, and voice. The machine did not invent my experiences. It did not invent my voice. It responded to them.

The credit, therefore, is shared in much the same way a sculptor shares credit with the chisel.

The chisel matters. But the chisel didn’t decide what to carve.

Also, for the record, AI never once complained about my endless revisions, my contradictory instructions, or my tendency to say things like, “I fucking hate that passage. It does not sound like me. At all.”

Frankly, that alone may be the strongest argument in favor of the technology.

And yes, ChatGPT wrote this disclaimer in its entirety, based on my absurdly long, highly specific, and probably over-engineered prompt. With a bit of editing.

So there. Now let’s all move on.