He was a medic in the Mexican national army and a graduate of Harvard Medical School—and he was holding my right foot. I never imagined that I, at 40, would be relearning how to walk.

I was not the athletic kid at school. Far from. Perhaps a little too smart for my own good, I picked sports that I was just good enough to play, just bad enough to never really have to play, so I could be accepted into university. By high school I knew that all of life was orienting us towards jobs and I would not need to know how to run. I walked the mile when required, and the senior captain of the basketball team called me a “big baby.” I had flat feet. Who cared about running.

Tell that to 38-year-old me, and she, in her leggings and Adidas Ultraboosts, would’ve laughed. I somehow learned to love running. I loved it so much, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. A meditative state I entered made it my happy place, and time seemed to stand still and slip away at the same time.

This new love challenged my ideas of how I saw myself in a specifically positive way, and I liked that. I had never seen myself as someone who ran, and suddenly, I ran and ran, despite my flat feet. Nothing would stop me, I thought. And I figured if something was going to, then I would run right towards it.

A knee injury seemed to come out of nowhere one afternoon, two days before my husband and I left a tiny beach town off of Puerto Vallarta. We were there for my 39th birthday. I would be driven around the town’s cobble stoned streets for the next day in a golf cart, until we went home. The thing that was meant to stop me, finally did.

“The foot is characterized by two arches,” Dr. Martín Blancas said, roughly translating from Spanish. Kindly, gently, he walked me through everything that was wrong with my foot, showing me how the left was a little better—a little more curved, a little more high, with several less bunions. My right foot looked swollen and you could just tell by looking at it that it simply ached to be rubbed and set down. 

“The feet are supposed to be like talones,” he said, using the word for talons in Spanish. He explained how, like animals, humans are supposed to be able to use their toes, to clench, to grab, to stand. He said that in beach towns, maybe you see more of this as more people walk barefoot for more time. But city people have this problem of underused toes, the muscles are weak. He asked me to clench my toes—and I simply didn’t know what he meant. My toes do not move that way.

In his direct, military-style of speaking that the autistic in me liked, he gave me some exercises to do, the stretching and clenching that at that moment my feet could not do. Would I do them, despite not knowing how? Despite not being able to currently move that way? Yes I would. The human body is capable of more than we give it credit for and I figured if mine could contort this way, I would find out how.

Working with my physiotherapist, Dr. Seward, I have been working to strengthen my gluteus medius, gluteus maximus, quads, hamstrings, and basically everything that supports the feet, such that eventually, my feet should raise, and I should have an arch. 

Dr. Seward has helped me do it before, and all was mostly fine before I dropped the physical therapy at the first sign of improvement. And here was Dr. Blancas, telling me to work the muscles in my toes. Same work tackled from the opposite side. Funny huh?

This is what most of life has looked like lately, turning 40. Learning to walk all over again.

The things I thought I knew—the things I thought I learned a long time ago—are the things I am relearning. Life feels decidedly ungrounded. I’m not so sure of what’s behind me, and even less sure of what lays ahead. I am truly questioning the things I thought I knew for sure, and trying to parse through them. Where is the truth? What is real, about me and the world?

What is it, really, that makes me tick? What is time? How do I actually most enjoy spending my time? What is my personal favorite way to learn, to work, to create? What do I want to create? How do I want to spend my time on this earth?

To the outsider, I may be describing a mid-life crisis and I am okay with that—leave it to the English language to create a term to shame people reconsidering their lives half-way through it.

To the insider however, this has been a complete destruction of my life and my idea of self, first involuntarily, through seemingly random, outside forces. And later, completely voluntary, with a great deal of passion, rigor, and heroism on my part—to burn the whole thing down, instead of fighting the reality of the ripping apart that was happening in my life.

I say this lightly, but it was not light, finding myself choosing between bearing the burden of continuing to carry the crushing weight of being “myself,” unchecked for years. Or, choosing the hard way—the way of dousing myself with figurative gasoline, and lighting a proverbial match, and seeing what’s left in the ash. 

Who are we after we burn? 

This year, I have burned. The Chinese elements dictate that after fire comes air—a space for a clearing. I am in a clearing now, I think, a neutral place perhaps.

In some other opinions, what comes after fire is water—a purification. 

Since I am Muslim, I have never been baptized, at least in that way. But I have jumped into the blistering cold sea of Oaxaca in the winter, right after sunrise, more days than I care to count. At some point it became a ritual for me—I couldn’t stop myself if I wanted to. Without noticing much, I would wake up those days my husband and I were in that touristic pueblo at the end of December, and without any thought, march to the sea, and jump in before my mind had a chance to protest.

This was my purification, my baptism with the sea. But what was I cleansing? My own failing and inadequacy as a person, most of which I still believed was mine, after a great crash in my life that knocked me off my feet. The year leading up to 40 was characterized by me feeling small, insignificant, and unsure of my place in the world.

I had mostly resisted when the universe threw me into the fire, a chance to burn away the illusion, that I did not initially embrace. So, returning home to Mexico City from that town after the new year, I declared that I would test myself—I would make myself so uncomfortable, there would be no way to become complacent and mediocre while also rising to the occasion of all the things I decided to do.

The things that are hard for me, are different from the things that are hard for others. It’s funny because I found out autistic people are possibly more prone to flat feet. Autistic people have “trouble with proprioception, the awareness of body position and movement in space. They face challenges with balance, coordination, and gross (large) motor skills. All of these challenges can change their gait patterns—the way they walk or move their limbs while walking.”¹

I always say that in my experience, the Autism Spectrum Disorder has a sense of humor. It potentially can give you superhuman skills in some things, and leave you at a deficit in things many people find easy and natural, apparently like walking. To challenge myself, to make myself burn, I decided to learn sewing and Brazilian jiu jitsu.

One of these activities I have always wanted to learn, the other I just started doing one day, not knowing I signed up to do it forever. The activities became so much more. Both offered me lessons on courage, connection, rawness, authenticity, vulnerability, limitation and where to push it. At least on one occasion, each activity made me cry profusely. Coming out the other side, I found…nothing.

You can imagine my initial shock after all that growth to find the world around me to still be the same one. On my 40th birthday, I woke up feeling like this was it. Today was the day I was going to understand the big, important thing! And as the day went on, and I felt nothing, it finally hit me.

This is it. THIS is it. Looking around me at my life, I suddenly saw it, as if for the first time, as that which was happening all around me, changing, flowing and at times crashing, as time and space moved around me. This is it—this that I am standing in the middle of. This is my life!

I oscillated for a bit between finding this a capacitating breakthrough or sad mirage for several weeks. Until I realized it was sort of neither. It was just what it was, just like right now, my life is what it is. The element after fire is air. Air can be nothing, but it can also be the filling of empty space. It can be that which is present through the perception of absence. It is the clearing.

Thunk thunk thunk go my new cushy house slippers—doctor’s order. Both Dr. Blancas and Dr. Seward agreed that toe spacers are the way to go, and I am doing different kinds of toes stretches. The toe spacers conveniently fit in the house slippers Dr. Seward said I needed, but mostly, I’ve been at home resting lately, trying to give my foot a chance to recuperate. 

“Recuperarte para transformar,” read some polite new graffiti I spotted in my neighborhood on our way to my appointment with Dr. Blancas. I spotted it from the back of my husband’s motorcycle, and it was written in an elegant black cursive, as if it were just for me. 

The latin prefix trans-, I learned recently, means “across, beyond, through, on the other side of; go beyond.”² It also can mean “in chemical use indicating ‘a compound in which two characteristic groups are situated on opposite sides of an axis of a molecule.’”³

When you think about the words transmute, transform, transfer, or really any word that starts with the prefix trans-, this sort of changes the meaning altogether. It signifies a movement to the opposite side of something, to the perfectly opposing axis. A complete flip, not just a change. In the clearing, suffering is transmuted into its horizontal counterpart, absolution. Maybe even joy, I think.

The latin prefix re– means “back, back from, back to the original place;” also “again, anew, once more.”⁴ The words that use this prefix, like reset, restore, rejuvenate, recuperate, and relax, all indicate a state that is supposed to be a starting point which is returned to, to do something again, presumably exert ourselves. That means to be reset, restored, rejuvenated, recuperated, and relaxed are natural states. 

To move beyond, across, through, or on the other side of an experience to the complete opposing end, one must go back where they started. One must recuperate, relax, reset, restore, restart, rest. This is an essential part of doing anything, and an essential part of life. 

Rest, restoration, relaxation, and resetting are things that in American culture, one must earn. To learn that rest, restoration, relaxation, recuperation, and reset are necessary to move through any experience—rest must not just be earned. It also must be learned. We must move back into those states, ideally as often as we want to exert ourselves.

My social calendar has dwindled lately with my new foot problem, and it’s been a welcomed change. I have been a little too whirling at a dizzying pace between my life in my head—in my inner world—and my life in the outer world. My foot problem has presented itself as chance to touch the earth, to get grounded. To reset. To be able to do something again. Maybe even to transform again.

Here I am, standing in the space of my own fire, taking a moment to really look at the clearing left behind. There’s soot and ash, and a smoldering, still hot in some spots. There are remnants of things I used to know are here, but really, it’s all just tender blackness, loose signals of who I used to be, and at the same time, nothingness. There’s nothing to cling to. The space is welcoming, and I like the smell of fire. I always have.

Here I am, relearning how to do the most basic things humans are supposed to do. Relearning to rest. Relearning to walk. 

You have to walk before you can run. So, I will rest. And I will walk again. And one day, I’ll run again too.

1. Woods Healthcare. (n.d.). Podiatrist for special needs patients: Links between autism and foot problems. Retrieved June 8, 2025, from https://woodshealthcare.org/medical-care/podiatrist-for-special-needs/autism-feet/
2. Harper, D. (n.d.). Trans-. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved June 6, 2025, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/trans-
3. Harper, D. (n.d.). Trans-. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved June 6, 2025, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/trans-
4. Harper, D. (n.d.). re-. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved June 6, 2025, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/re-