A Lot Can Change in a Year

Today I found myself reflecting on the last year. Exactly one year ago today, I had spinal fusion surgery. They fused my L5 and S1, and while people often ask if I was nervous about the surgery itself, I honestly wasn't.

I was terrified of what came after.

Recovery as a mom? Holy cow, it was hard.

My girls were three and six at the time. My youngest was (and let's be honest, still is) my Velcro child. She wanted to be picked up, cuddled, carried, climbed on... and overnight, I couldn't do any of it. I couldn't bend down to help with shoes, crawl into bed for bedtime snuggles, scoop up my crying toddler, or chase them around the park. The hard part is that some of those things had already become difficult because of my back pain. Surgery didn't take me from feeling great to struggling; it took me from barely functioning to needing help with almost everything. Asking for help has never been my strength. I'm very much an "I'll do it myself" kind of woman.

I don't think I realized how physical motherhood is until my body couldn't keep up. People see the big moments of surgery, but they don't always think about the thousands of tiny moments that follow. The laundry baskets, getting groceries, standing long enough to make a meal, sitting down, getting up, rolling over, even sneezing... every movement became a calculation. Was it worth the pain? Could I do it safely? Did I really need to?

For weeks, my world became incredibly small. I remember my daily goal was to make it to the corner of our neighborhood. Not a hike, not a workout, not even a walk around the block. I just wanted to make it to the corner. I'd slowly shuffle there with my walker, turn around, come home, and feel completely exhausted.

At the time, that felt like enough. I also remember this overwhelming feeling of wanting to heal faster. Patience has never exactly been one of my strengths, especially not being able to physically keep up or do things for myself. Stubbornness probably should have been my middle name. "Healing takes time." "Rest." "Pace yourself." That's what I heard over and over again. Rest? Honestly, that felt like such an absurd concept as a parent. Sure, we all get little moments of downtime here and there, but the idea of resting for an extended period of time seemed awful. What was I going to do with myself for weeks? There is only so much TV you can watch and reading you can do. I was bored out of my mind.

I wanted to push myself because I wanted my life back. I wanted to play with my girls without thinking about every movement. I wanted to stop depending on everyone else. I wanted to feel useful again. Recovery has a funny way of humbling you. You don't get to rush it. You can't check off enough boxes to earn your way through it. You just have to keep showing up. One step. One day. One tiny victory at a time.

As I sat thinking about this last year, I realized something.

The surgery almost feels like the smallest part of the story now. Yes, my back healed, but somewhere along the way, so did I.

This year, I walked away from a career I'd spent almost a decade building. That wasn't a decision I made overnight; it came with fear, tears, excitement, guilt, and about a thousand "what ifs." Somewhere during recovery, I started asking myself what I actually wanted my life to look like. I started my private practice. I found creativity and passion through this blog, a podcast, and working with horses.

I started saying yes to opportunities that scared me instead of talking myself out of them. I embraced passions that had been sitting quietly in the background for years, or that I didn't even know I had, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, I found myself again.

This week, I ran for the first time in over a year, and to be honest, it made me a little emotional. A year ago, my goal wasn't a race or a hiking trail. It was making it to the corner of my neighborhood without feeling completely wiped out. Today, I'm planning hiking trips and training for a half marathon. Looking back, I didn't notice the progress while it was happening. It came in tiny moments that didn't seem all that significant at the time, but those tiny moments added up.

That's the thing about healing: it rarely feels dramatic while you're living it. Most of the time, it just looks like showing up, one small step at a time, until one day you look back and realize you're living a life that once felt impossible.

Lately, several people have said the same thing to me.

"You seem really happy."

Every time someone says it, I laugh.

Partly because I wonder...

"Wait... was I really that grouchy before?"

I think I was carrying so much that I didn't even realize how heavy it had become. Physical pain, the mental load of motherhood, the pressure of a career that I cared deeply about, but that asked a lot of me, and the constant feeling that I needed to do more, be more, prove more. I was so used to pushing through that I stopped noticing how exhausted I really was.

Somewhere this year, I started giving myself permission to build a life that actually felt like mine. Not perfect, not easy, but aligned.

If you had asked me a year ago what I hoped this year would look like, I probably would've said:

"I just want my back to stop hurting."

I had no idea the year would hold so much more. I thought the biggest thing I'd be celebrating a year later would be that my back didn't hurt anymore. Instead, I'm celebrating a life that looks completely different than I imagined.

Life has a funny way of doing that. Sometimes the hardest season becomes the doorway to a completely different chapter, not because the hard thing magically fixes everything, but because it forces you to slow down long enough to ask yourself the questions you've been avoiding.

Who am I?

What do I want?

What matters most?

What kind of life am I actually trying to build?

If you're in the middle of your own hard season, whether it's surgery, postpartum, burnout, grief, anxiety, or simply feeling stuck, I know how tempting it is to believe this moment is your whole story.

I'm here to tell you it's not.

A year can hold so much more than you can imagine when you're standing at the beginning of it. A year ago, I was focused on surviving. Today, I'm focused on living.

If this year has taught me anything, it's this:

Healing isn't always about getting your old life back. Sometimes it's about creating a life that feels even more like you than the one you had before.