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It was the summer of 2006.
I had just been in college for a little over a month. I was 17, turning 18 that November.
I was a young girl filled with dreams, hopes, and the feeling that there was so much I wanted to do. I wanted to conquer the world like all teenagers perhaps and studying was only one part of it.
I wanted to do theatre. I wanted to perform. By then, I was already teaching Latin and ballroom dance over the weekends. I would go to college during the week, take my dance classes over the weekend, and somewhere in my 17-year-old head, I was convinced I could balance everything.
And I tried. I mean, I did a pretty good job of it because I had so much energy back then. Usually, after finishing college around four or five in the evening, I would stay back for theatre practice. It was the first time since school that I had enrolled myself in a theatre group, and we were rehearsing for an Independence Day play (I don’t remember the exact date anymore).
But there is one visual from that day that has never left my mind. We were rehearsing in the foyer of our college. I still remember the grey marble floor. There must have been at least 10 of us girls there, and we were enacting a fight scene. Now, there was water on the floor somewhere and nobody noticed it. While we were performing the scene, I slipped on it, fell, and hit my head really hard. I was out for a few seconds, and when I came around, my head was hurting like hell. I eventually called it a day and went home.
I had no idea that those few seconds were about to change the course of my life.
Over the next week, I started developing severe headaches and blackouts. Within the next 10 or 15 days, I was in bed and my neck had completely lost movement. I couldn’t turn left or right. I was put in a neck collar and started physiotherapy and just like that, theatre stopped. Dance stopped. Everything came to a halt.
Everything I had imagined I would do in college suddenly had to take a back seat. It took three or four months of rehabilitation and physiotherapy before the brace finally came off. I regained some movement and was eventually given permission to return to my dance classes.
So, of course, I did. For a few months, I thought perhaps that chapter was over, only to realise later that it was just the beginning. Six or eight months later, I began noticing something strange. My upper back would become incredibly tight. It would hurt, it would burn like it was on fire, and slowly, things that should have been completely ordinary started becoming difficult, like writing, eating, carrying my college bag; even dressing myself became like an impossible task.
Eventually, there were days when I couldn’t lift a spoon to feed myself. I couldn’t raise my arm. I couldn’t write. Forget dancing and other things!
And then began the journey familiar to so many people living with chronic illness—going from one doctor to another, trying to understand what the hell was happening to my body.
There weren’t many answers.
One rheumatologist finally told me that what I had was called fibromyalgia. I distinctly remember being told that it happened to “intelligent and sensitive people” and that there was no cure.
The 18-year-old me had absolutely no idea what to do with that information and I didn’t understand whether my intelligence and sensitivity were a compliment or a curse!
So I did what I knew what I could do. I fought. I kept trying to attend college, to go back to dance, manage my work. I kept trying to make my body cooperate with the life I had planned for myself. Besides, I didn’t have any option or maybe I had two options: to stay on medicines and rot or fight even if it felt impossible. Anyway, nothing was working. Things kept getting worse. Until eventually, one neurologist said something to me that I probably wasn’t ready to hear: “Sometimes you just have to surrender. So surrender.”
And I did, even though it shattered not just my heart but my soul into a million pieces. I surrendered to the fact that life would now never be the same and that my dreams, ambitions would have to change.
For years after that, there was no clear treatment, no magical medication, no solution that suddenly gave me my old body back. I struggled, suffered, yelled, screamed, cried myself to sleep every night and woke up the next day to do the same, and amidst all this somehow managed to at least do my basics like education to begin with.
It wasn’t until 2013 that I found a physiotherapy centre started by a German doctor where, for perhaps the first time, I felt that somebody completely understood what was happening to my body. They understood fibromyalgia and chronic muscle fatigue and explained what was happening. They told me that what I was experiencing wasn’t in my head (because by now I had heard the word psychosomatic so many times that I could murder someone!).
It was real. Of course there were deeper emotional and psychological reasons as well, but therapy and inner work alone wasn’t going to cure me.
And they also told me something else: there was no cure. The goal was to make me as functional as possible, and in many ways that has remained the goal ever since.
I live with a whole constellation of symptoms like chronic fatigue, muscle tightness and stiffness, difficulty taking load, exertion setting my body off, sleep issues, and symptoms that occasionally appear out of nowhere and leave my physiotherapist and me trying to make sense of what my body has decided to do now. Along the way came PCOS, surgery, and other health struggles.
But there was another battle happening alongside all of this. I was determined not to look ill.
I wanted to show up as perfectly as possible. I wanted to lose weight, look a certain way, work, function, achieve, and take care of myself. I didn’t want anyone looking at me and thinking that I was dysfunctional in any way, and to be fair, the entire purpose of years of physiotherapy, rehabilitation, and exercise has been to keep me as functional and independent as possible.
I know what it feels like to be unable to lift a spoon and feed yourself. I know how horrible dependence can feel. So independence became incredibly important to me. But when I look back now, I can see something else underneath it too.
I was deeply afraid of vulnerability. I didn’t only want to be functional. I wanted to look perfectly functional to the world, and perhaps I succeeded a little too well because one of the comments I have heard over the years is some version of “Looking at you, you don’t seem like someone who could have so many health problems.” It’s both a compliment and not a compliment.
On the one hand, I understand what they’re saying. I have worked extremely hard to get here. I have spent years in physiotherapy and rehabilitation. I train. I work. I lift things. I travel. I show up. I take care of myself and others too.
I have worked toward being able to do as much as I possibly can without having to depend on another person.
One of my treating doctors once reminded me of what I looked like when I had first walked into their centre. “You were like a pretzel,” they said. “Now you have some form.”
So yes, when somebody tells me they cannot tell that there is something wrong with me, a part of me takes it as a compliment.
I accomplished what I had set out to accomplish. But I can also sometimes sense the disbelief underneath it, and that’s where the comment can become insensitive, because chronic illness doesn’t always announce itself. Someone can look perfectly fine while negotiating something you know absolutely nothing about, and perhaps living on the other side of that assumption has made me far more compassionate toward the invisible struggles people carry.
It has undoubtedly influenced my work as a psychologist too.
You simply never know the full story of the person standing in front of you.
Twenty years later, I don’t think I would romanticise what happened to me. I wouldn’t tell you I’m grateful for every painful day or that illness was some beautiful gift wrapped in a terrible package. It’s not!
But I can only say that my body has humbled me. And somewhere along these 20 years, it has taught me things I don’t know if I would have learnt otherwise.
1. My body taught me what boundaries actually mean.
Since getting more deeply into spirituality, I have encountered the belief that, at a soul level, we choose certain experiences—the situations, people, and even illnesses we encounter. At one point, I remember thinking, “What the hell was wrong with me at the soul level that I chose this ordeal?!” It was partly philosophical questioning and partly a rant directed at the universe. But strangely enough, an answer eventually came to me. If my body had not been the way it is, I would have pushed myself far beyond my limits, because that’s what I did. I overgave, overdid. I overrode my own limits at every chance possible. Yes, a lot of it was because there was no other way. I had to learn how to keep increasing my threshold to be able to function. But, I didn’t have to do it every time. And if my body hadn’t physically pulled the brakes, I’m not entirely sure I would ever have learnt how to do it myself.
My body taught me about boundaries long before I truly understood them psychologically. A boundary isn’t only something we establish with another person. Sometimes, it’s the point at which your own body says enough. And your job is to listen.
2. Slowing down doesn’t mean I’m wasting my life.
This is one I’m still learning. I come from a space where if I’m not working, constantly pushing myself, operating in high-energy or high-drive mode, some part of me immediately asks, “What the hell are you doing?” If I want to laze around, be a potato, watch something, and do absolutely nothing productive, guilt and shames still show up. For a long time, I also felt as though I had to compensate for the time I had already “lost” and the time I continued to lose because of my health. So when I could do things, I wanted to do everything, except that I’m slowly becoming okay with not doing that.
Slowing down isn’t wrong. Sometimes it’s exactly what my system needs. And when the critical voice in my head tells me otherwise, I’m learning to recognise that voice for what it often is: stupid conditioning! Rest doesn’t make me lazy. Slowing down doesn’t make me less ambitious, and I don’t need to exhaust myself to prove that I’m making the most of the life I have.
3. I had to stop chasing the “perfect” body and start respecting the one I have.
My struggles with PCOS and weight brought another battle with them. For years, I wanted my body to respond the way a body was “supposed” to respond. If I ate healthy, exercised, stayed disciplined, and did everything right, surely my weight should behave accordingly. Except my body doesn’t always follow neat equations. There is only so much my nervous system and body can take. My weight fluctuates. Sometimes it responds, sometimes it doesn’t, and for years, I interpreted that as something being wrong, that I wasn’t doing enough, I needed to work harder. I needed to be thinner and my body was like a broken piece of furniture that needed to be fixed.
My mindset toward all of that has changed tremendously in the last few years. Do I want my health parameters to be good? Absolutely. Do I want to look fat? No. I’m human. But do I care about some perfect number on the scale anymore? Not really. What was missing all those years wasn’t another diet or another attempt at perfection. It was respect for my body. Whether I’m bigger or smaller, leaner or not, whether my body currently looks the way I would ideally like it to, it doesn’t matter in quite the same way anymore. It’ll happen when my body is ready. My body is going to do its thing. My job is to support it.
4. I learnt to appreciate functionality because I know what it feels like to lose it.
It’s easy to criticise a body when it’s functioning. The stomach isn’t flat enough, arms aren’t toned enough, the number on the scale is wrong, something needs to be smaller, something needs to be bigger, and so on. But I know what it feels like when the hand you’re criticising cannot lift a spoon. I know what it feels like when your body cannot do the basic things you took for granted. And perhaps I had to lose some of my functionality to understand how extraordinarily valuable it is. Without a functional body, I wouldn’t have written my books. I wouldn’t have built my practice. I wouldn’t have been able to travel, however much I have. I wouldn’t have attended trainings, participated in events, been part of social groups, worked with people, or kept moving closer to the dreams and aspirations I’ve continued to carry since I was that 17-year-old girl. My body has made all of that possible.
This supposedly difficult, stubborn, imperfect body is doing an extraordinary amount of work every single day to keep me alive and functional. At some point, I realised I needed to stop beating up the very body that was working so hard to carry me through my life.
5. Not everybody has to understand what I’m going through.
Perhaps this has been one of the biggest lessons of living with an invisible condition. People may understand, people may not. Actually, most people will not, no matter how much they love or care about you. Somebody may look at me and think, But you look perfectly fine! And that’s okay. It really doesn’t matter whether everybody understands my struggles. What matters is whether I understand them, whether I can show up for myself or not.
I need to know when I’m reaching my limits.I need to give myself what I need without waiting for someone else to validate that need first. I don’t have to prove my pain for it to be real. I don’t have to look unwell to justify taking care of myself, and I don’t need everybody else to understand my body in order for me to honour it.
6. Invisible struggles taught me compassion.
When people tell me that I don’t “look” like somebody with chronic health issues, I’m reminded of how little we actually know about the people we encounter every day. Someone can look healthy and be in pain or look successful and be barely holding themselves together. Someone can be laughing with you while carrying something incredibly heavy. My illness has made me more compassionate toward the invisible struggles people face including my own and that has helped me tremendously in my work as a psychologist too because we as human beings are so much more than what is obviously visible.
Sometimes, the person who appears to be functioning beautifully has simply become incredibly good at functioning alongside what hurts.
7. I am learning that my body and I are on the same side.
For years, I treated my body like something I needed to manage, fix, discipline, push, make thinner, stronger, more functional, and so on. It was like we both were at war with each other.
But I think the biggest shift has been realising that my body isn’t fighting me. It never was, only I was too busy thinking about it like that to actually notice everything that it was doing to keep me going. When it shuts down, forcing me to sleep and rest it out, it’s only so that I can recover from everything that I have been doing. It is trying to keep me going. Sometimes the fatigue and pain is information. Needing to slow down isn’t my body betraying me; it is my body asking me to pay attention. I still want to train. I still want to be strong. I still want to work, write, travel, build things, experience life, and remain as independent as I possibly can.
But I no longer want to do all of that despite my body. I want to do it with my body and that requires a different kind of relationship. Twenty years ago, my body forced me to stop. I didn’t, and maybe I couldn’t also in some ways, and I did pay the price.
Today, I’m trying to learn how to stop before it has to. I know that going forward I have to be more careful and more sensitive toward it because this is the only vessel I have. And every day, I am learning to honor it and dance with it, for it, not as an act of rebellion against my body but out of love and respect because it worked hard to get me till here.
And the one thing I would want to leave anyone reading this with.
Please try to treat your body right.
It pains me sometimes to see how easily we make a mess of our bodies in the name of productivity, appearance, enjoyment, ambition, or simply believing we’ll deal with the consequences later.
Of course, not everything is within our control.
Bodies age. Illnesses happen. Genetics exist. Accidents happen—I know that better than most.
Taking care of yourself doesn’t guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong.
But perhaps that makes caring for the body we have even more important, not less.
I understand that today because, at one point, I lost so much of what I had taken for granted.
I lost my ability to move freely.
To write.
To carry things.
To feed myself.
And perhaps I had to lose some of that to understand the value of what my body quietly does for me every single day.
So these days, I’m less interested in asking whether my body is perfect.
I’m more interested in asking whether I’m treating it with the respect it deserves.
Because maybe this body was never something I needed to conquer in the first place.
Maybe I simply needed to learn how to listen to it.
And perhaps you don’t need to wait for your body to break down before you begin listening to yours.
Maybe your body is already speaking to you in smaller ways.
Through the exhaustion you keep pushing through.
The sleep you keep sacrificing.
The pain you keep ignoring.
The hunger you keep overriding.
The stress you keep normalising.
The rest you keep postponing until you’ve “earned” it.
The way you keep criticising your body for how it looks while barely acknowledging everything it does for you every single day.
We spend so much time asking our bodies to perform for us.
To look a certain way.
To keep up.
To work harder.
To recover faster.
To carry more.
Perhaps every once in a while, we need to ask a different question:
What does my body need from me?
Not when it becomes unbearable.
Not when illness forces us to stop.
Not once we have exhausted every reserve.
But now.
Maybe respecting your body doesn’t always look dramatic.
Sometimes it means sleeping.
Sometimes it means eating properly.
Sometimes it means moving.
Sometimes it means not moving.
Sometimes it means saying no.
Sometimes it means accepting that today you simply don’t have the same capacity you had yesterday.
And sometimes it means looking at the body you have spent years criticising and recognising that it has been carrying you through every single day of your life.
You don’t have to love every part of it.
You don’t have to feel grateful for it every morning.
But perhaps you can begin by not being at war with it.
Because whether your body is healthy, healing, struggling, changing, ageing, or simply tired, it is still the only home you have to live this life through.
Treat it like one.
~
author: Damini Grover
Image: Author's Own
Editor: Lisa Erickson
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