Maybe you don't need more time
Inertia — 224
There are mornings, evenings, conversations, even dreams that remain vivid in my memory. Despite how those memories affected me, I hope I never lose them. At sixteen years old, I woke on the tarmac with my bike slightly folded down the middle. But I couldn’t see it. Because it was impossible to open my eyes or move.
I set out for what should’ve been an ordinary ride before meeting friends to watch movies. But one impatient act turned into seconds of slow motion that pulled the curtains over my eyes before I could process what happened. Metal against flesh, momentum wrecked into stillness. A struggle to understand that a fundamental shift had begun and would encumber me until the other side of a year.
That year taught me something about healing, which was further articulated by a great therapist my school arranged for me at the time. Trauma recovery is more than what we feel as time passes or the opening and closing of wounds. It’s how our nervous system will believe in safety again.
My body carried different memories against my mind for a while after the accident. Whilst my consciousness said that cycling was statistically safe, that the collision was an aberration, my nervous system catalogued a different truth. It wouldn’t affect me exclusively when I got near a bike, but also when I sat in the family car past any traffic junction—my heart rate would spike. My breathing would float. My body would operate from evidence I no longer consciously endorse.
The archaeology of fear is that trauma lives beyond our thoughts. It becomes encoded in our physiology, crafting pathways like water through a rock, that treat past danger as present reality. The nervous system, with its ancient wisdom, prioritises survival over accuracy; it would rather keep you safe from a threat that no longer exists to a risk exposing you to potential harm.
But here’s what I learned, through necessity rather than choice: the same system that learns fear can learn safety. It simply requires new evidence.
Past pain can calcify and deteriorate you if you allow it. Out can sprout endless analysis and painful rumination. The mind turning over fragments like a bone fracture you urgently need to fix. But what you need is the courage to show your nervous system deliberate exposure to the very experiences that trauma is desperately trying to teach you to avoid.
Graduated courage
My return to cycling didn't happen through talking about the accident—though that certainly helped. It happened by rebuilding trust between my conscious intentions and my unconscious responses. Standing next to a bike until my nervous system recognised it as benign. Then, sitting on one whilst stationary. Short rides around the neighbourhood. And then my first ride outdoors. Three hours long. I remembered what my mind had never forgotten: cycling was joy, not danger.
Once I learned it in practice, I repeated the pattern to help with different traumas. Living around family tensions taught me that relationships were unpredictable, but rebuilding a consistent connection was the remedy. Romantic betrayals convinced my nervous system that with vulnerability came a 99% chance of danger, but we simply needed a more gentle exposure to trustworthy intimacy.
On each occasion, healing came through curated experiences, working by contradicting my nervous system’s timid narratives with the use of time as added evidence.
It’s on us to recognise when our protective mechanisms are imprisoning us, when the systems designed to keep us safe start to keep us small.
Our nervous systems are remarkably honest. They respond to what happens, not what we think should happen. But while all the rational understanding in the world cannot override the somatic memory of danger, new experiences can.
Slowly, gradually, with the forbearance that healing needs.
The morning I completed that long ride without my chest tightening, without scanning every car as an imaginable threat. I learned something about recovery that was going to keep me safe for decades to come: you don’t need to forget what happened, but you need to teach your body that what happened then doesn't determine what happens now. You do.
Because it can be the lies we tell ourselves that create further suffering. There is such a thing as emotional rubbish—pain from a time that has long since passed and is no longer useful. Your body is keeping the score, but it's also keeping track of the new stories you write for it.