When Movement Returns

Cappadocia, Turkey

For the first time since my traumatic brain injury, I am beginning to picture a future outside the day-to-day commitments for recovery. I hadn’t noticed how small my world had become until it started to open up again. For years, these commitments restricted my focus to the urgent: medical appointments, neurological milestones, pain, exhaustion, never-ending paperwork, and the daily challenge of inhabiting a body that no longer moved as it once did. Recovery consumed all my energy, allowing little room to wonder about what might come next.

Until recently, I did not have the capacity even to recognize myself, to name it as something purely emotional or psychological, because survival narrowed my view. But after a few weeks of lymphatic therapy, I am starting to wonder if something deeper is shifting. Lymphatic therapy intends to help fluid flow more freely through the body. Since my injury, swelling has weighed me down, making me feel both heavy and confined. With this therapy, I have become attuned to the sensation of slowed movement—not just in my body, but in my perception. Now I wonder if the physical stagnation I have felt has also infiltrated the way I envision my future.

For a long time, my thoughts stayed trapped within the narrow borders of the present. My questions were urgent and practical: How do I get through today? Will my body allow me? Can I make it to my next appointment? Will I have enough energy for this one task? I rarely looked beyond these daily hurdles. It wasn’t that I had stopped dreaming altogether. The demands of survival consumed my imagination. There is a world of difference between wishing to be elsewhere and truly imagining a different life. Wishing is a longing to escape; imagination is the first step toward building something new.

Lately, something inside me has shifted. I envision where I might live, the opportunities I could pursue, the landscapes I want to explore, the people I hope to work with, and the projects I want to create in the coming years. What surprises me most is not just that these thoughts have returned, but how they have changed. They no longer feel like far-off fantasies or unreachable wishes. Instead, they have become real, practical questions.

I am researching, comparing, planning, and weighing possibilities. For the first time since my injury, I am actively creating my future instead of simply waiting for it to unfold.

I am starting to see agency in a new light. I once thought it was simply the power to make choices, but now I wonder if it starts even earlier. Agency begins the moment we can imagine that choices are possible. When our bodies, circumstances, or surroundings become confining, it is not just our movement that shrinks; perhaps our notion of possibility contracts as well. Does survival take over the space in which imagination formerly thrived, making the future seem smaller?

This may be another way to understand recovery. We often define it as regaining physical abilities, but it may also be about recapturing possibility. Not certainty or promises, but simply the capacity to imagine a life beyond what is right in front of us. As movement gradually returns to my body, I feel movement returning to my thoughts as well. My future no longer feels like something that happens to me; it is something I can move toward. For me, this is one of the clearest signs that recovery is not only about mending the past; it is also about discovering that I have a future worth imagining.