We love a comeback story. We celebrate the moment someone gets back up, reaches the summit or finally succeeds. What we rarely talk about is the bit in the middle, the slow, frustrating and often very ordinary process of rebuilding your life when the old version of it no longer exists.
There is something very appealing about a before-and-after story. We see where somebody started, we see where they ended up, and we draw a neat line between the two. Social media has made us particularly good at this. We see the photograph on the mountain, the person crossing the finish line, the new business, the new relationship or the moment somebody finally achieves what they have been working towards. What we don’t see quite so often is everything that happened between those two photographs.
I know this because people sometimes see photographs of me climbing mountains and understandably see achievement. They see the crutches, the biomechanical KAFOs, the ropes and the mountain and recognise that getting there probably wasn’t straightforward. What the photograph can’t show is everything that had to happen before I became the person in it.
My life didn’t change because I climbed a mountain. Long before those photographs existed, I had to work out how to live again.
When Your Old Normal Doesn’t Exist Anymore
When my circumstances changed, some of the things I’d previously taken completely for granted suddenly became things I had to think about. Getting dressed, moving around the house, cooking, travelling and navigating places I’d known for years all became different. A doorway was no longer just a doorway. A pavement wasn’t necessarily something you could simply travel along. A shop I had visited countless times could suddenly become somewhere I had to think about before entering.
Then there were the bigger things.
My independence had changed. My career changed. My finances changed. The way other people interacted with me changed. Perhaps most difficult of all, the way I saw myself changed.
Before all of this, I knew who I was. I was independent. I worked hard. I was capable. I was someone other people could rely on. Then suddenly I was dealing with a reality in which many of the things I’d used to define myself had either disappeared or looked completely different.
I wanted my old life back.
I think that’s a very natural response when something significant changes. We talk about recovery as though the objective is to return to a previous version of ourselves. We want to get back to normal, get back to work, get back to how things used to be.
But what happens when you can’t?
At some point I had to confront a difficult possibility: perhaps rebuilding my life wasn’t going to mean recreating the one I’d had before.
There Is Nothing Glamorous About Rebuilding
In Get Back Up “Climbing Through The Storm”, I write that “there is nothing glamorous about rebuilding your life.”
I believe that more now than ever.
Rebuilding rarely happens in one enormous, courageous moment. It happens through hundreds of decisions that seem insignificant when you make them. It happens through conversations, appointments, mistakes, small victories and days when you make progress followed by days when it feels like you’ve gone backwards.
Sometimes rebuilding is learning how to do something differently because the way you used to do it isn’t available anymore. Sometimes it is accepting help when every part of you wants to prove you can manage alone. Sometimes it is taking a job you never imagined yourself doing because right now you need to pay the bills.
Sometimes it is simply getting through the day.
None of that makes a particularly impressive photograph.
There is no dramatic soundtrack playing in the background. Nobody is standing there applauding while you work out how to navigate a doorway, manage your finances or accept that something you were once very good at is no longer part of your life.
But that is where rebuilding happens.
I Had to Stop Trying to Become the Old Me
One of the hardest things about major change is identity.
When circumstances strip away parts of your life, it is easy to believe they have stripped away parts of you as well. If your identity was connected to your career, what happens when you can no longer do that job? If independence mattered enormously to you, what happens when you suddenly need support? If you were always the person helping everybody else, what happens when you become the person who needs help?
For a long time, I measured progress against the person I’d been before.
Could I do what I used to do?
Could I get back to where I was?
Could I become that person again?
Eventually, I realised I was asking the wrong questions.
The old Jamie had lived a different life under different circumstances. Trying endlessly to recreate him meant judging everything I was becoming against something that no longer existed.
The question needed to change.
Instead of asking, “How do I get my old life back?”, I needed to start asking, “What can I build from here?”
That change didn’t solve everything overnight. There wasn’t some wonderful breakthrough where everything suddenly made sense.
But it gave me permission to move forward instead of constantly looking backwards.
Rebuilding Differently Isn’t Failing
We put enormous pressure on ourselves to recover in the “right” way.
We create timelines for ourselves. We compare our progress with other people. We imagine where we should be by now and then punish ourselves when reality doesn’t match the expectation.
I have learned that progress rarely behaves like that.
Sometimes progress is fast. Sometimes it is painfully slow. Sometimes you make enormous strides and then discover something else needs to change. There are setbacks, wrong turns and moments when the thing you were convinced would work simply doesn’t.
That doesn’t mean the rebuilding has failed.
It means you’re rebuilding.
When I look at my life today, so much of it exists because things didn’t return to normal. The mountains weren’t part of the original plan. Neither were many of the opportunities, experiences and people that eventually became important to me.
That doesn’t mean I’m grateful for every difficult thing that happened. I think we need to be careful with that idea. We don’t have to pretend adversity was a gift in order to recognise that something meaningful can still be built afterwards.
Some things I would happily have lived without.
But I cannot change that they happened.
What I can influence is what I build from them.
The Person in the Photograph Came Later
When you look at a photograph of me climbing now, you’re looking at a later chapter.
You’re looking at somebody who eventually discovered mountains could become a place to test himself, think differently and challenge assumptions about what was possible.
But that person wasn’t created in one heroic moment.
He was built through all the unremarkable ones.
Through learning.
Through frustration.
Through asking for help.
Through getting things wrong.
Through finding adaptations.
Through starting again.
And through slowly understanding that a different life did not automatically mean a lesser one.
That’s the part of resilience we don’t celebrate enough.
We celebrate people once they have rebuilt. Perhaps we should pay more attention to the courage required while they are still standing amongst the pieces trying to work out what comes next.
Your Next Chapter Doesn’t Have to Look Like Your Last One
You don’t need to experience disability or climb a mountain for any of this to apply.
Life changes people in countless ways. A relationship ends. A business fails. You lose somebody. Your career changes. Your circumstances change. Something you thought was permanent suddenly isn’t.
When that happens, there can be enormous pressure to get everything back to how it was.
Sometimes you can.
Sometimes you can’t.
And sometimes, eventually, you realise you don’t actually want to.
Rebuilding gives us an opportunity to ask different questions. What still matters to me? What have I learned? What no longer belongs in my life? What do I need help with? What could I do differently this time?
You won’t necessarily have all the answers.
I certainly didn’t.
You don’t need them all before you begin.
You need somewhere to start.
Getting Back Up Doesn’t Mean Going Back
This is something I’ve come to understand more deeply over time.
Getting back up isn’t the same as going back.
It isn’t about erasing what happened or pretending you can return to exactly who you were before. Some experiences change us too much for that, and there is nothing wrong with acknowledging it.
Getting back up is deciding that what happened doesn’t get to write every chapter that follows.
You might rebuild slowly. You might need support. You might change direction several times. You might create something that bears almost no resemblance to the future you once imagined.
That’s okay.
Because the objective isn’t to recreate your past perfectly.
It’s to build a future you can live in.
When I look at where I am now, I can see that so much of what eventually became possible started in moments that didn’t feel remotely inspiring at the time.
They simply felt difficult.
That’s rebuilding.
It isn’t glamorous. It isn’t linear. And it certainly isn’t easy.
But brick by brick, decision by decision and sometimes day by day, you begin creating something again.
And one day, you might look back and realise you didn’t rebuild the life you lost.
You built the life that came next.