The Day My Body Said No

Over Christmas, Mark and I set out to walk the Old Ghost Road.
Five days. A proper hike. The kind of thing I’ve always been able to do.

I’ve walked the Heaphy.
The Abel Tasman.
Waikeremoana.
Kill Devil Track (yes, the name should have been a clue).

Walking has never been the thing that stopped me.

That’s what made it so unsettling when, three and a half hours in - mostly uphill, my body simply refused.

Not just tired.
Not sore in a way I could explain.
Just a full, immovable no.

The kind of no you don’t argue with.

I tried anyway, of course.
Because that’s what we’re taught to do.

Slow down. Push through. Try harder.
Rest for a minute and keep going.

But grief doesn’t negotiate.

It doesn’t respond to grit or mindset or past achievements.
It doesn’t care how capable you used to be.

So we turned around. Walked back and hitchhiked to the next town (an adventure on it’s own).

And then came the part that really rattled me.

For days afterward, I could barely walk.
The pain didn’t match the effort.
My body was reacting as if I’d done something far bigger than I had.

That’s when it hit me.

This wasn’t fitness.
This wasn’t age.
This wasn’t “needing to train more”.

This was grief.

We talk about grief as if it lives in the mind.
As if it’s something you feel, think about, cry through, and eventually file away.

But grief lives in the body.

It lives in the nervous system that never quite stands down.
In muscles that stay braced long after the danger has passed.
In a body that has learned, at a cellular level, that the world is not safe.

Grief is not a moment of loss.
It is a long-term physiological load.

And bodies that are carrying that much weight will eventually reach a limit.

The hardest part is how shocking that limit feels.

You don’t ease into it.
You hit it.

One day you’re walking up a mountain thinking I’ve done harder than this,
and the next your body is saying, No. Not today. Not like this.

And suddenly you’re forced to reckon with a truth we’re not prepared for:

You cannot push through grief the way you push through fatigue.

Because grief is not tiredness.
It’s not weakness.
It’s not a lack of resilience.

It is your body doing the maths before your mind has caught up.

Turning around that day felt like failure at first.
Like losing another version of myself I thought I still had.

But the longer I’ve sat with it, the clearer it’s become.

Stopping wasn’t the failure.
Listening was the shift.

The old rules no longer apply.

The body you had before loss followed different physics.
Different thresholds.
Different expectations.

This body has been changed by love and rupture and survival.

If you don’t recognise your body anymore, you’re not imagining it.

If your energy disappears without warning.
If your strength fluctuates.
If pain shows up without explanation.
If your capacity is unpredictable and non-negotiable.

This isn’t you doing grief wrong.

It’s grief living where words can’t reach.

Your body isn’t broken.

It’s telling the truth before you’re ready to hear it.

And sometimes the bravest thing you can do
is stop pretending you can push through
and let your body say no.