Learning to Live Well With Chronic Pain Changed Everything I Believed About Resilience

The pain in my lower back and hip had begun at 24 following an injury during a dance performance - I had been dancing competitively in Bhubaneswar for twelve years by then - and had not resolved in the way that most injuries eventually resolve.

By 26, after two years of treatment cycles that produced temporary improvement and return to baseline, the medical consensus was what I had been resisting accepting: the injury had produced a chronic condition that would be managed rather than cured, and the management would require a permanent relationship with limitation that I had not previously had to develop.

I was a dancer who could no longer dance the way I had danced. The identity loss was not a metaphor - it was specific and daily and attached to a physical practice that had been central to how I understood myself since childhood.

The grief of that loss, which I had been deferring through the hope of recovery, arrived when recovery was no longer the operating assumption. What I found in the grief, and in the therapy I eventually sought to help me navigate it, was a distinction I had not previously needed: the difference between resilience as recovering to who you were and resilience as building something genuine from who you now are.

I had understood resilience as the former. My situation required the latter and the two things were nothing alike. I had to find new movement practices that my body could sustain.

I had to find a relationship with my body that was not based on what it could perform at its peak but on what it could offer with appropriate care. I had to renegotiate my identity around something broader than the specific physical expression that the injury had taken.

This took longer than any of the physical treatment cycles and was more significant than all of them. At 31 I teach dance to children, which is a relationship with the practice I could not have found without the limitation that forced me to look for it.