Healing Really Is Not Coming Back to Your Starting Point

Coming back to the starting point really isn't what happens when you break and heal your leg. It is not hysteresis because you will never be that person again. Some of the ways you are different post-injury are 'objective'—they show up in an xray or some such, and so they are legitimate. (Being snarky here.) The bone isn't as strong, or the tendon didn't attach again as well or maybe actually now with that insert you have a super-leg. And maybe if the mending of the bone could happen in a day, then it might make sense to think of you as returning to your previous point. Instead, the experience of the break, the surgery, the PT, the pain, the crutches—these all change you. How you organize your movements will have changed. Your sense of confidence might have changed. Your way of interpreting pain almost certainly will have altered. Finding a way back to your before-accident self is not really in the cards. And why should it be? Maybe the goal is to move forward—to learn forward—rather than going back.

[this will eventually join the Predictive Processing (PP) dell, to be written. And that will fuse with CAS and strange attractors and learning systems. I'm interested in how humans can set their environment up to be more learning-ish]