Yesterday I had a procedure under general anaesthetic.

When I got home, tired and still a little foggy, I found myself thinking about something I hadn’t really put into words before.

Since I became ill in 2022, a huge part of my life has been dedicated to getting better. At the beginning, I had no choice. My world became very small and every step forward felt like a victory. Little by little I fought my way back to things I had lost. I walked further, regained some independence and learned how to adapt to a reality I had never expected to face.

Looking back, I realise that for years I have been working towards a very specific goal: becoming the person I was before I got sick.

It sounds reasonable when I write it down. In fact, it sounds so reasonable that I never questioned it. Of course I wanted my old life back. Of course I wanted my old body back. Of course I wanted my old energy back.

But yesterday, lying there and thinking about the last few years, I realised something that felt unexpectedly liberating.

What if I stopped measuring my life against a version of myself that belongs to the past?

Not because I have given up on improving, and not because I have stopped caring about my health. I will continue to look after myself and do everything I can to feel better. But I am starting to wonder how much time I have spent waiting to become someone I used to be.

The truth is that life has not been standing still while I wait. Life has continued happening around me, and I have changed along with it. My interests have changed, my priorities have changed, and the person writing these words today is not the same person who existed before 2022.

And maybe that isn’t a tragedy.

Maybe that’s simply life.

For a long time, illness occupied a huge amount of space in my mind. Even when I wasn’t attending appointments or reading about treatments, there was always a part of me trying to solve the puzzle, trying to improve, trying to fix, trying to get back to where I had been before.

What I realised yesterday is that I no longer want recovery to be the centre of my identity.

I want living to be the centre.

I want to make more room for art, music, creativity and curiosity. I want to spend more time paying attention to the world around me. I want to notice the sounds of the city again, collect ideas without knowing where they will lead, and take photographs simply because something catches my eye. I want to fill notebooks with thoughts, sketches and half-finished projects. I want to spend an afternoon making something completely unnecessary and love it anyway.

These things may seem small, but they are the moments in which I feel most like myself. They remind me that life is not only about fixing problems or reaching goals. Sometimes it is about being curious, being present and allowing yourself to be surprised by what you find.

For a long time, so much of my energy has been dedicated to understanding my health, managing it and trying to improve it. That journey has been important, and it will continue to be important, but I no longer want it to occupy all the available space in my mind.

I still want to take care of myself. I still want to get better wherever possible. But I don’t want every decision, every thought and every future plan to revolve around the question of whether I will ever return to who I was before.

Maybe I won’t.

And for the first time, that thought doesn’t feel frightening. It feels peaceful.

I don’t know exactly what my life will look like from here, and for once I feel comfortable admitting that. I don’t have a detailed plan and I don’t know where all of this will lead, but I know that I want my days to contain more creativity, more meaningful connections, more exploration and more opportunities to make, learn and discover.

Perhaps that is what I realised yesterday. I have spent years trying to find my way back to a previous version of myself, when maybe the real challenge is learning how to fully inhabit the life I have now. Not the life I imagined, not the life I used to have, but the life that is already here, waiting to be lived.

Because perhaps the goal was never to become my old self again.

Perhaps the goal is to become fully myself, exactly as I am now.