A Neck, a Nerve, a New Life

I let out a yelp as my face crumpled into agony. My day began in bed—not rising from it as one would hope, but trapped within it.

With clenched teeth and a bitten lip, I propped myself up against the bed frame. The cool brass met my skin, but offered no comfort. The pain in my neck was beyond excruciating. My head tilted involuntarily, my right ear collapsing toward my shoulder, as though my body was trying to tell me something was deeply wrong.

As an aspiring performing artist, my solo dance recital was two months away. That was my first thought. Not the pain—the performance.

I did not yet have the language for what was happening to me. Only later would I understand that I was under attack by a belligerent bundle of nerves, staging its own quiet rebellion. At the time, all I knew was that something had seized me without warning.

I stared at the clothes I had carefully laid out the night before. Lifeless now. My body could not meet them where they hung.

I did not go to work for two weeks. Two months later, I did not take the stage.

My role as a teacher was paused. My long-awaited solo performance was shelved. And I was left trying to make sense of a diagnosis I did not yet understand—cervical spondylosis. A degenerative condition. At twenty-six.

“I’m back,” I would say lightly when I returned to work. “Just a twenty-six-year-old with the neck of a sixty-two-year-old.”

They laughed. I laughed.

It was easier than explaining the grief.

I don’t say that anymore.

Back then, I thought I had to make my pain palatable for others. Wrap it in humour. Keep it moving. But beneath that rehearsed ease was something far heavier—the quiet devastation of a life interrupted, and the growing fear that the version of myself I believed in might no longer be possible.

I told myself it was the death of a dream.

It wasn’t. But it felt like it.

The months that followed were filled with appointments—some necessary, others driven by desperation. Physiotherapy offered moments of relief, but not the kind that steadied the mind. I was learning, slowly and unwillingly, that pain is not only physical. It reshapes how you see yourself.

One day, after yet another appointment, I sat outside the orthopaedic clinic, exhausted and uncertain. A nurse approached me unexpectedly. She looked me in the eye and said, quietly:

“You be your own healer.”

She had assisted in my consultation earlier. She didn’t need to come out. But she did.

Those words did not transform me overnight. There was no sudden shift, no dramatic turning point. Instead, they stayed—soft but persistent. A quiet refrain that returned to me in moments when I felt most disconnected from myself.

Over time, they became something I could hold on to.

Not a solution—but a direction.

My pain did not disappear. It still hasn’t.

Some days, it feels like fire ants moving through my neck, spilling into my arm. I do not welcome it. I still have moments of frustration, resistance, even anger.

But I no longer meet it in quite the same way.

I have learnt—am still learning—to respond with a different kind of attention. With patience, sometimes. With reluctance, often. With a willingness, however fragile, to listen to what my body is asking of me rather than forcing it to comply with who I think I should be.

Looking back now, I see that what changed was not just my condition, but my relationship to it.

Having a condition does not mean living in constant fear of limitation. It means learning a different way of being. A different rhythm. A different language.

I am still a dancer.

The body I inhabit now is not the one I once trusted without question.

It interrupts. It resists. It demands to be reckoned with.

In the beginning, I fought it.

I met fear with force, frustration with defiance—

as though I could wrestle my way back into the body I once had.

Some days, that fight still rises in me.

I am constantly negotiating—how much to push, how much to hold back.

How close I can get to the rigour I once demanded of myself.

The truth is, I still want it.

The precision. The clarity. The certainty of a body that does not hesitate.

And it is hard—hard to swallow the disappointment when my body does not follow.

But I have also learnt, slowly and unevenly, to extend grace to myself in those moments.

Not instead of the frustration, but alongside it.

I live in it.

And I still dance with it.