Step by step

They told me to think of my recovery like assembling Ikea furniture: one confusing piece at a time, a handful of Allen keys I didn’t know I owned, and a manual that might as well be written in ancient Swedish. I remember standing in the physiotherapy room, two parallel bars glinting under fluorescent light, and feeling like a man who had shown up to a dance-off with two left feet and a broken rhythm.

“Okay,” said Mara, my physio, tapping her clipboard as if she were about to cue music. “One step.”

It sounds ridiculous now, but in that moment “one step” felt like a headline. A headline about failure. I had come back from a stupid, glorified adrenaline decision—a badly judged skateboard trick at thirty-four—and my knee had written me off for a while. The surgeon was nice; the surgeon had a better bedside manner than most therapists have jokes. I had crutches, an overpriced brace, and a bruised ego. My idea of progress had looked cinematic in my head: heroic montage, triumphant run across cliffs. Reality smelled faintly of antiseptic.

So I did what you do when a grown adult is asked to do something small but terrifying: I overcomplicated it. I cocked my hip, grimaced like I was about to sneeze, and pushed a foot forward with the kind of theatricality usually reserved for Shakespearean defeats. The foot landed, wobbled, and then slid to the side like an uninvited guest at a wedding. I thought the room had witnessed a tragedy. Mara tapped her clipboard, sighed, and said, with the exact patience of someone who’d seen this a dozen times, “Try again. Smaller.”

Smaller. It was a word that rewired me. Smaller means less pressure, less performance, less waiting for the applause that never comes. Smaller means you can breathe. So I tried again, and the second time the foot obeyed. It held—just enough. Not a victory parade, not even a ripple. A foot had moved and stayed put. I wanted confetti. Mara handed me a sticker instead: a tiny gold star that made me feel like a child who had finally remembered to put the bin out.

Over the next weeks, the steps were unglamorous: stepping off a curb, walking to the end of the street, climbing the first flight of stairs without hyperventilating. I learned the choreography of patience. I learned how to celebrate in increments—a cup of tea after a longer walk, a text message to a friend that read, “Made it to the corner shop.” The trick was not to measure progress by the finish line but by how many times you stood up and tried again.

There were comedic episodes. Once I misjudged my balance while trying to be clever with a grocery bag and executed what I can only describe as an interpretive dance involving a leaking jar of pasta sauce. The old woman across the hall applauded like I had meant it. Another time I attempted stairs wearing headphones and discovered that losing your playlist mid-step is a legitimate existential crisis. Those moments, mortifying in real time, became the stories I told later—proof that life had not stopped being funny just because my knee was sulking.

The real lesson, though, happened off the parallel bars. It happened when I realized that “step by step” was as much about asking for help as it was about putting one foot in front of the other. I had spent years trying to be the person who fixed things alone, the one who didn’t need help finding the right tool or admitting confusion. Being on the other side of the cane forced me to phone friends, to accept rides, to let someone else carry a shopping bag—or a wounded pride. There’s a peculiar humility in letting others scaffold you. It reveals who wants to stick around not for your highlight reel but for your rehearsal footage.

Months later, the day came when a wedding invitation asked for dancing. I had a choice: decline and continue polishing my dignity, or go and risk a slightly less coordinated version of myself in front of people who would clap anyway. I went. I wobbled. I laughed when my best friend tried to lead me into a salsa step I didn’t remember learning. For a minute, the world was only music and someone else’s hand pressing mine forward. I learned that the steps you dread are often the ones that end up feeling like a kind of freedom.

Now, when someone asks me for advice, I keep it embarrassingly short. “Make the step small,” I say. “Then, make another.” People always expect a life hack or a three-point plan about resilience. I have none of those tidy formulas. What I have is a scar on my knee, a drawer full of crumpled physio leaflets, and the memory of a tiny gold star stuck in a notebook. The star is ridiculous. The star is perfect.

We measure a life by milestones—graduations, promotions, moving days—but the parts that matter are the micro-moves: tying your shoe, calling a friend, saying sorry, showing up. Step by step isn’t a pep talk. It’s an inventory system for hope. It asks for patience instead of proof, for small, steady confidence instead of fireworks.

I still trip. I still overestimate the firmness of supermarket steps when I’m thinking about something else. But the difference is I don’t view each stumble as a verdict. I view it as rehearsal. And rehearsals, if you do them enough, make room for the occasional perfect take.

If you are staring at a parallel bar of your own—literal or not—start where I started: very slightly. Push a toe forward, feel how the floor answers, and let your body and your stubbornness get used to the idea that moving is allowed. No montage, no medal. Just a foot. Then another. Then, if fortune has kept you honest and kind, you might find yourself dancing when no one is watching, just because you can.