What the Resistance Left Behind
Image by @sxoxm from Unsplash
There is a word that gets misused rather often. Resistance. We tend to reach for it when we mean conflict, or retaliation, or the stubborn refusal to cooperate. But that is not the resistance I mean here.
Think of it differently. Think of the gym. Think of the athlete lifting weights, pressing against something heavier than is comfortable, something that pushes back. That pushing back — that is resistance. And without it, the muscle has no reason to grow. The body, left unchallenged, simply maintains. It is resistance, applied with intention, that builds something stronger than what existed before.
I have had two fractures in my left ankle. Same spot, both times.
The first time, it was a shock. The second time, it felt almost cruel — a reminder that some vulnerabilities do not disappear just because you have already dealt with them once. Each time, after the cast came on, I watched my left leg slowly shrink. Not dramatically, not overnight, but quietly. The muscles, no longer needed in the same way, began to recede. The body is efficient like that. It stops maintaining what it does not use.
When the cast came off, the contrast was startling. One leg familiar and strong; the other smaller, tighter, uncertain. Even walking again felt strange. You do not dare to add back the weight your ankle used to carry without thinking. Every step is a negotiation.
The recovery involved exercises that were uncomfortable in ways I had not expected. Everything felt tight. Sore. Unfamiliar. The physiotherapist used resistance — gentle at first, then gradually more demanding — to coax the muscle back to its original strength and mobility. Without that deliberate resistance, the ankle would not have recovered fully. It would have remained fragile, prone to the same injury again. The very thing that felt like strain was, in fact, rebuilding.
I am grateful I did not need surgery either time. That gratitude sits alongside the memory of pain rather than cancelling it out. It is not a comfortable kind of thankfulness. It is the kind that comes when you realise how much worse it could have been, and how much of the recovery was yours to do regardless.
That is the thing about resistance. It does not care whether you feel ready for it. It simply arrives and asks what you are made of.
There were moments during my recovery when I wanted to rush the process — to walk normally before I was ready, to prove to myself that I was fine. But the ankle would remind me, every time I pushed too far, that the process had its own timing. Resistance is not something to be outsmarted. It is something to be respected and worked through consistently, day by day, rep by rep.
The lessons that came from those recoveries did not announce themselves. They settled in quietly. A deeper awareness of how I move through the world, literally and otherwise. A recognition that certain vulnerabilities — once revealed — require ongoing care, not a single fix and then forgetting. My ankle is still more prone to injury than it was before. I know that. I carry that knowledge not as a burden but as information, a quiet prompt to be more mindful than I might otherwise be.
What resistance leaves behind, when you work with it rather than against it, is not just strength. It is a particular kind of wisdom that can only be earned through the doing. You do not read your way to it. You cannot observe it from the sidelines. You have to press against the weight, feel the discomfort, and keep going — not recklessly, but deliberately.
And sometimes, when you look back, you find that what the resistance shaped was something you could not have imagined at the start.
That is enough. That is more than enough.
This Friday, I am grateful for the resistance that rebuilt me — and for the grace of not having to do it alone
