Recovery Is Not a Straight Line

Recovery stories are usually written backwards.

Once somebody is doing well, every earlier event is made to look like a step towards that outcome.

Real recovery does not feel like that while you are living it.

There were good weeks.

Bad weeks.

Appointments I approached confidently and others I would rather have avoided.

There were periods where I could imagine leading an organisation again and periods where the idea felt distant.

Gregory Buck became an important part of that period.

Psychology gave me somewhere to process what had happened without needing to solve it immediately.

That mattered because problem-solving was one of the ways I had always managed uncertainty.

At work, if something was wrong, I made a list.

Who owns it?

What are the options?

What does it cost?

What happens next?

Psychological injury does not respond neatly to a project plan.

I had to learn that progress could be slower and less visible.

Eventually, though, the focus expanded.

Treatment remained important, but vocational rehabilitation started becoming more practical.

What could I do?

What roles suited my experience?

Which skills transferred beyond one employer or even beyond basketball?

Could I lead again?

Could I handle the politics of sport again?

Did I actually want to?

I began applying for roles.

I enrolled in professional development, including an AFL List Management course.

That was partly about broadening my knowledge and partly about reminding myself that my career did not have to be trapped inside one narrow pathway.

I had spent more than twenty years around sport.

Basketball was where most of my experience sat, but the underlying skills were broader: people leadership, competitions, commercial development, stakeholder management, governance, facilities, community programs, coaching, strategy.

The challenge was convincing employers of something I was still learning to believe myself.

I was employable.

I still had value. I wasn’t even 40 years of age after all.

The injury was something that had happened to me.

It was not my professional identity.