I was seventeen, running around on a cracked concrete basketball court outside Ashton, Idaho. A large patch of grass had been removed decades earlier and a 4-inch slab of concrete poured on top of the ground. It was family reunion week, and I was in the middle of a game with my uncle, the firefighter.
I chased a ball that had bounced wild after I missed a shot. I wasn’t paying attention to where the edge was. My foot landed half on and half off the court. My ankle twisted hard, and before I knew what had happened I was on the ground. The swelling started before I could even sit up.
My uncle ran over to me and gave me a hand. I tried to put weight on my foot, but my ankle buckled. In First Responder fashion, my uncle immediately dropped to his knees and inspected my ankle. He felt around and could tell it wasn’t broken, but I couldn’t walk.
Of course, like any stubborn teenager would do, I told him I was fine, and tried to stand again.
I wasn’t fine.
It turned out to be a mild sprain, the kind my older brother seemed to collect every third week. To protect his ankles, he wore braces anytime he played ball. I, on the other hand, had never experienced this before. The shock of the injury was worse than the injury itself.
For two days, I hopped on one leg from the cabin to the dining hall, from the bed to the bathroom. The cabin my family stayed in sat on the opposite side of the property from the lodge where we gathered for meals, so I mostly gave up and stayed in. I read. I watched the others play. I hated missing basketball more than anything else.
The swelling went down, and within a week I was back on the court. That’s all it took. One week. A blip on the calendar. As a teenager coming up on the end of summer vacation, that week didn’t feel small at all. It somehow felt like I’d lost something important.
The way our bodies can heal themselves is miraculous, and perhaps a conversation for another day.
Healing often feels like that week in the summer I had to watch while my friends played ball. It didn’t feel like progress—only like I was missing out. You can’t feel the process of your body knitting itself back together. But you can certainly feel the frustration of not being able to move the way you want. You feel time crawling.
You feel left out.
Even then, I knew the pain was temporary. I’d watched my brother sprain both his ankles multiple times, so I knew what to expect. As expected, the pain faded as my ankle healed. But, like I said, while I was in it, I didn’t notice any improvement. I couldn’t see the swelling go down hour by hour. I couldn’t tell when the tendons started to hold again. I only knew I wasn’t where I wanted to be.
That’s been true of other kinds of healing too. Emotional wounds don’t announce when they’re closing. Some days I still feel like I’m right back where I started, carrying the same weight I’ve been hauling for years. But if I look back carefully, I can see what I’ve set down along the way. The burdens I don’t carry anymore.
More often than not, I have to catch myself before I stoop down to pick them up again.
It’s easy to forget that letting go is progress too. We tell ourselves stories about needing to power through, needing to arrive somewhere obvious, measurable, final. Healing rarely offers that. It offers something far more subtle.
You notice it when you realize what no longer hurts. When a word that once cut deep doesn’t sting as much. When you remember an old failure and find it doesn’t keep you up at night anymore. When you sit in the middle of an ordinary moment — folding a towel, reheating leftovers, waiting in the car — and realize you’re not bracing against pain the way you once did.
I’ve spent so much of my life trying to measure recovery like progress on a scoreboard. As though the only way to know I’m okay is to be back on the court, sprinting at full speed. But that’s not how most healing happens. It’s slower. Uneven. Often invisible.
Some days it feels like hopping on one leg across a campground, frustrated and tired. Other days it feels like sitting still when I’d rather be moving. But then there are the moments when I notice what I’m no longer carrying, what I can do now that I couldn’t do before. And that’s when I know: the healing has been happening all along.
It doesn’t feel like progress. But it is.
And that is enough.
Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .
I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.
If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along here on Medium. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.
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