Nina’s life changed forever when she fell down a lift shaft at work. She broke her pelvis and back, resulting in multiple surgeries over three years. She has nerve damage from both the accident and subsequent surgery. The impact on her mental health and sense of identity has been huge. Nina now volunteers for Day One as a Peer Supporter, helping ensure others don’t have to go through their recovery alone.

Everybody wants you to be a hero.

Everybody loves to see you be brave and triumph over adversity. You’re such an inspiration.

And the road to recovery is crowned with post-traumatic growth.

I love that story, too. And human beings need stories.

But how hard it really is, that’s a bit of a taboo.

And that’s a problem.

I agree that a positive mindset aids recovery. And it’s necessary to have hope in order to walk that road. But you come to a point when the going gets very hard, and the fog lifts, and you see how bleak and stony the terrain is. And the view becomes dark, and then you are suddenly very alone.

Because it’s not supposed to be like that. And your hero’s story becomes a concrete block shackled to your feet.

Nobody likes pain. And our instinct is to make it go away. We run away. We help and try to alleviate. Because we don’t want to suffer, and we don’t want others to suffer. Especially those we are close to. So, I will hide my experience from you. I don’t want you to suffer. I don’t want to see how uncomfortable my trauma makes you. And I don’t want to have to deal with your trying to make me feel better. And now I’m even more alone. Because I carry this wasteland inside me that only I know about. I don’t want to live there, but it’s also the truest part of myself.

You asked about identity.

We all live in this belief that we can control life. Our own, other people’s, our environment.

Traumatic injury shatters that illusion. And that makes it so painful. To us, and to those around us. Everyone wants to have that picture together again. I do, too.

When I took a step backwards into the lift and there was no floor there, I knew in my bones that one day I really will die, and that day might be now. Nothing is finished, I’m not ready, it ends like this.

And for a long time, that troubled me the most. I felt I had looked behind the curtain and I had no idea how I could live with that knowledge.

I got into hospital, and I became a collection of parts. The orthopaedic surgeon knew me as a broken pelvis, the neurosurgeon knew me as a fractured vertebra, the pharmacist knew me as a potential future opioid addict, and matron knew me as someone who needed to get up and about asap because my bed was needed by someone more freshly injured. But I was lucky, and I had some nurses who saw a frightened soul who needed some affection and encouragement. And later, I had a physio who saw that all those broken bits were one organism that needed to learn how to walk again.

I never thought about having an identity until it shattered. And that didn’t happen when I was injured. That happened when I stopped recovering amazingly well and being an inspiration to everyone. When it dawned on me that there might be a possibility that despite my heroic efforts, I would not get back to who I was before. And I experienced as a failure that I couldn’t deal with.

I had always done physical jobs, and I also taught yoga. And I would no longer be able to do either of them. I had fallen out of life.

Yoga was my approach to life. The essence of yoga is exploring your mind through your body. And limitations are your greatest blessing, because that’s how you will learn to really understand. That’s how your practice stops being superficial and penetrates deeper.

For a while, I was fine. I took my teacher’s advice and approached physio with the same mindset I approached practice. And when I got stronger, I got out my yoga mat and had a panic attack.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand the dissonance between how my body remembered being in a posture and what I could actually do. And I realized how superficial my understanding of yoga was if I couldn’t put it into practice. And I felt a crushing humiliation. Who am I if I don’t have that?

I got into therapy and learned I had PTSD. I felt a little less alone when I realised there were explanations for how I felt. My mind had always done what I asked of it, and it was quite a revelation to find that it does things behind my back that I not only can’t control but am not even aware of.

I began to understand how much of my childhood identity had just trickled into adulthood.

I come from quite a conservative place, and I was an unconventional child. But I was also a straight A student, and things came easily to me, and being exceptional gave me greater freedom to be myself. And somewhere in the back office of my mind that flipped into “if you’re not doing well, you’re not safe”. It felt like a flash of insight, and I thought, how silly. To base my life on something that is no longer true – as an adult, nobody has that power over me, and I’m bending over backwards to avoid something that is just a mirage…

But it’s a mirage that has spawned half a century of habits, feelings and behaviours that reinforce it. And the fear, the shame and the failure are not less painful for knowing that they are based on a wrong perception.

My physio diagnosed me with chronic pain and put me onto a pain management course. I was not happy about this. But for the first time, I found fellowship. To be able to speak honestly without worrying about other people’s reactions, to be in a room with other people who understand what it’s like because they all carry inside them that secret identity that is born when things go really wrong for you, was a revelation and a source of strength for all of us. And in the end, I realized something – that my attachment to getting better, to being a hero, was rooted in my inability to accept what had happened. That my mind, unbeknownst to me, thought that if I worked really hard at it, I could make the accident not have happened. I would have a great story to tell, but everything would be as before. Because to accept that my life has changed course without my consent, that something happened against my will that took from me what I cherished, was such an insult to my idea about being in charge of my own life that my mind refused to go there. I had thought that to accept my physical state would be giving up, and now I understood that in reality, it’s the opposite. To admit what had happened was the only way I could move forward. I would have to learn to be where I was, no matter how much I didn’t want to be there, to overcome that paralysis.

I became involved as a peer support volunteer with Day One by accident – I was googling “how to heal from trauma” and found their website. The training was the first time I spoke to other people who had been through a traumatic accident. It is such a powerful experience to realize that we are so many. To be normal again for a little while, because we all share this lonely journey that nobody signed up for. I feel such a bond with everyone who has experienced trauma, there is a sense of recognition – we all carry this unsayable thing inside us that we can’t share with others. That part of myself I cannot communicate to you, they know fully, even when we do not know each other.

I no longer have that sense of isolation that is so painful.

And being a peer supporter is the first time that I was able to do something because of my trauma, not despite it. To find that I actually have something to give. To have to reflect on my experience. It’s not easy, and I couldn’t do it without the support from the peer support coordinators. But it’s been a path of recovery for me, to be able to cast some threads to connect myself back to life, with my trauma and my failures, not despite them. Not to overcome, not to be a hero, but just to be.

Nina originally wrote this as a speech about her recovery for the 2025 CMS UK conference. Nina also took part in the Dear me project in 2024 where she wrote a letter to her past self at an earlier time in her recovery journey. Read Nina’s Dear me letter >>