Why a Stress Fracture Messed With My Mental Health

If you haven’t been in the room with me lately, you wouldn’t know that last October I was diagnosed with a fibular stress fracture. You also probably wouldn’t know that over the course of the last year, running and being a runner became a core part of my life and my identity. I was working toward a huge goal, raising money for a charity I cared deeply about, and training to run 48.6 miles over the course of four days doing what is appropriately named the Dopey Challenge at Disney.

The thing with my stress fracture was, I didn’t fall. I didn’t crash. There wasn’t a single moment I could point to and say, that’s when everything changed. I was building intensity and mileage, noticing clear improvement, but also increased discomfort in my left leg. No loud boom. Instead, it was a slow, confusing erosion. It was a pain that wouldn’t resolve, training plans that kept unraveling, and a growing sense that something was wrong even when I wanted it not to be.

I made the shifts with my plan, adjusted approaches to races, did a shit pile of walking, and braced, PT’d and iced like it was my job. I ran my last races at the end of October and limped across the finish line, clear that whatever this pain was, my current strategy wasn’t working. I booked an orthopedic appointment for the following week and was told I had a stress fracture, and likely had for weeks. When my doctor told me this, my response was “no I don’t,” followed up with bargaining (which failed) and a final utterance. “Fuck.” 

I was gutted. Running wasn’t just something I did for my body, nor was it really about races or charities. It was how I processed emotion, discharged stress, regulated my nervous system, and reminded myself that I could move through hard things. Jokingly, I’ve said that it helps me get my ya-yas out. 

From a neuroscience perspective, running provides the body with bilateral stimulation: aka repetitive, alternating movement on either side of the body. This movement engages both sides of the brain, and can help with regulating emotions, integrating memory, and calming the nervous system. This is the same idea behind the wildly popular therapeutic modality EMDR.

Many years ago a therapist told me to use bilateral stimulation to help calm my anxiety when I was feeling dysregulated. She wanted me to cross my arms over my chest, and alternate tapping my shoulders with my hands. I snorted and said “I’m not doing that” (I’m a really great client) and then proceeded to go out for a run. She never told me that I was doing it with my running, and I appreciate that I had to figure it out for myself (and also sorry to my past therapist – it was a good recommendation and I was being a shit). 

When I lost running, I didn’t just lose fitness. I lost access to myself. Unsurprisingly, being a therapist can be stressful. I hold so much reverence for the work, and also, it can be tough.

This is especially true when it’s the holiday season, everyone’s families are grating their last nerve, the socio-political system is an absolute dumpster fire, and winter starts ushering in an increase in seasonal depression. Because while this is happening for my clients, it’s also happening for me and my friends and family. Losing the number one strategy that brought me peace during the most challenging part of the year left me feeling untethered in a way I was wholly unprepared for.

The loss wasn’t just about how it served me though. Yes, running was a coping skill. But it also became something that was so core to who I defined myself as. Runner. Athlete. 

There’s a particular kind of grief that comes with losing something you’re not supposed to be this attached to. I found myself minimizing my own loss. Telling myself I was being dramatic, that it was “just running.” But grief doesn’t care whether something looks important from the outside. It only cares about what it meant to you. And running? Running meant a lot to me.

Initially, I sought validation for my grief and was met with a lot of “well it could be worse” or well meaning (but poorly suggested) folks encouraging me to go through with running my challenge in January despite three doctors telling me what a terrible idea that was. I felt unseen, and so started to minimize my own loss. The reality is this: when we attempt to share our grief and are met with silver-lining, “it could be worse,” or pressure to move on, we don’t just feel dismissed, we start to internalize the message.

Identity grief is harder for people to recognize (therapists included) and can therefore just as easily be invalidated. Getting a stress fracture and losing my ability to run for 10 weeks reminded me of how often we dismiss the very things that keep people okay until they’re gone.

I understand trauma and I understand grief. I talk about it for a living. And still my body reacted before my logic could catch up. 

What this experience taught me (personally and professionally) is how easy it is to underestimate losses that don’t look dramatic from the outside. A stress fracture doesn’t come with casseroles. Losing a coping skill doesn’t come with rituals or permission to grieve. Identity loss rarely announces itself as grief at all.

And yet, my nervous system knew before I did. It reacted to the sudden loss of regulation, predictability, and safety in my own body long before I was willing to name what I had lost.

Being a therapist didn’t make me immune. If anything, it made me more likely to minimize my own pain. To intellectualize it, contextualize it, explain it away. Insight can be a powerful tool, but it can also be a shield. And in this case, it kept me from offering myself the same compassion I would have given to anyone sitting across from me.

I’m still rebuilding my relationship with movement. I’m still learning how to regulate without relying on a single strategy. And I’m still practicing something I ask my clients to do all the time: letting loss be real, even when it doesn’t look like what we’ve been taught grief is supposed to look like.

Because healing didn’t start when my bone healed. It started when I stopped telling myself it “wasn’t that bad.”