Health & Resilience

The Recovery Position

You got hit. You’re down. Maybe it’s physical — injury, illness, exhaustion. Maybe it’s psychological — failure, betrayal, collapse. Doesn’t matter. The question is not why it happened or whether it was fair.

The question is: what now?

The First Move

When you’re down, your brain will offer you two bad options. The first is denial: pretend it didn’t happen, push through, refuse to acknowledge damage. The second is surrender: stay down, declare yourself broken, make the pain your identity.

Grief Is an Endurance Event

You have been told that grief has stages. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. A clean sequence. A road with a destination.

This is a lie. Well-intentioned, widely believed, and false.

Grief is not a sequence. It is a landscape. You do not move through it in a straight line. You cross and recross the same terrain. You find yourself in anger on a Tuesday morning and acceptance by Tuesday night and denial again on Wednesday. There is no map and there is no destination and no one can tell you how long it will take because “it” does not end.

Your Body Keeps the Score, So Listen

Your mind will tell you that you are fine. Your mind is an excellent liar.

Your body does not lie. Pay attention to it.

The Signals

The jaw that clenches in meetings. The shoulder that climbs toward your ear when you open your email. The sleep that comes in fragments, full of the tasks you did not finish. The appetite that vanished, or the appetite that became the only comfort left.

On Getting Back in the Arena

The first time they tried to kill me, I did not see it coming. I knew the risk, but risk is abstract until it arrives. There was no time for fear. There was the order, the volley, the dark.

The second time was different.

The second time, I knew exactly what was coming. I had felt the arrows. I had felt the blood. I had spent weeks in a dark room, healing, remembering. My body carried the memory in its muscles, in its scars, in the flinch that came whenever I heard a sharp sound.

The Myth of the Natural

Every time an athlete makes something look effortless, someone in the crowd says: “They are a natural.”

No. They are not.

What you are watching is the result of thousands of hours of repetition performed in rooms where no one was watching. The fluidity, the ease, the apparent effortlessness – these are the products of practice so deep that it has become invisible.

There is no such thing as a natural. There is only work you cannot see.

Burnout Is Not a Badge

There is a culture – and it is a culture, not just a habit – that treats exhaustion as proof of commitment. The later you work, the less you sleep, the more you sacrifice, the more serious you must be about what you do.

I have been shot with arrows by professional soldiers. I know something about sacrifice. And I can tell you: destroying yourself is not sacrifice. It is waste.

The Arrow Is Not the Story

Everyone wants to talk about the arrows.

They paint me riddled with them. They build statues of the moment I was shot. They remember the image: the body, the wounds, the spectacle of suffering.

No one paints the morning after. No one builds a statue of a man pulling barbs from his own flesh, cleaning the wounds with what he had, and deciding – before the sun was fully up – that he was not done.