Recovery Requires Surgery
Sometimes the body says what the mind refuses to admit.
And when it does — you listen. Or it makes you.
For me, the message arrived in the middle of an ordinary morning.
A staircase. A missed step. Ten more missed after that.
By the time my body stopped falling, it had already begun telling a new story:
→ Fractured nose.
→ Shattered elbow.
→ Torn ligaments.
→ And — revealed by an x-ray meant for something else — an enlarged thyroid reaching where it shouldn’t. Years in the making. Years of stress made solid.
Recovery was not optional.
It was now the only work.
The first weeks blurred: surgeries, physical therapy, basic tasks that required help I didn’t want to need.
The worst part wasn’t the pain. It was the recalibration:
→ Of pace.
→ Of independence.
→ Of worth not tied to output.
I watched myself try to perform even while broken:
→ Flexing fingers in the ER to see if I could still type — as if typing my way back would be enough.
→ Planning my “return” before my body had even begun to heal.
→ Measuring my recovery in milestones, as if presence could be earned through progress.
It couldn’t. And it can’t.
Because here’s the truth:
Burnout isn’t cured by another sprint toward competence.
Presence isn’t rebuilt by perfection.
And leadership — true leadership — begins by honoring the body’s pace, not punishing it.
That’s where the deeper work began.
Recovery required more than surgery.
It required dismantling the career patterns that landed me there:
→ Over-serving.
→ Over-performing.
→ Offering my nervous system as a cost of entry to every role.
That is no longer an acceptable price.
Presence-first leadership means this:
→ My body is not available for burnout.
→ My energy is not up for extraction.
→ My pace is no longer dictated by urgency that is not my own.
It took surgeries to make this clear.
But I no longer need another injury to remember it.
This is the work now:
→ To lead from a calibrated nervous system.
→ To serve from presence, not depletion.
→ To build a career that aligns with biology — not betrays it.
And this work — it has no endpoint.
It is a daily choice.
An embodied practice.
One I will honor for as long as I lead.
This piece is part of The Edit — presence-first leadership narratives from The Co.
