8. Ryder
Ryder
The first PT session happens in my apartment two days later. Maya shows up with resistance bands, a printout of exercises, and an attitude that suggests she’s taking this seriously. She’s also carrying a bag from the campus health store.
“Shirt off,” she commands, setting everything down on my coffee table.
“Excuse me?”
“I need to see your shoulder. Range of motion, muscle development, how you’re compensating. Shirt off.”
I comply, suddenly self-conscious despite the fact that I change in locker rooms constantly. But this feels different. More intimate. Maya’s clinical assessment of my shoulder shouldn’t feel vulnerable, but it does.
There’s something about the way she looks at me, not like a trainer assessing an athlete, but like someone who understands what it means to have your body betray you. Someone who knows what it’s like when the thing you’ve relied on most suddenly becomes your enemy.
She examines the joint carefully, her fingers gentle but thorough.
Professional to a part. She presses slightly on the AC joint, watches my face for reactions, tests my range of motion with the kind of careful attention that makes me think she’s done this before.
Not just for herself, but for someone else.
“This is bad,” she says quietly. “Not as bad as it could be, but bad. You’ve been playing on this for how long?”
“Four months. Maybe five.”
“Jesus, Ryder. The damage you’ve done…” She shakes her head, and I can see genuine concern in her expression.
Not pity. Not judgment. Just worry. “The inflammation alone, you can see the swelling here, and here. And the way you’re holding yourself, compensating through your back and core, that’s going to create problems everywhere else. ”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because I don’t think you do. I don’t think you understand that your body is a system, not individual parts. When one thing breaks down, everything else has to work harder to compensate. And eventually, everything breaks.”
The weight of her words hit me, and I stare at her for a moment. “You’re not talking about hockey anymore.”
“No,” she admits. “I’m not.”
We’re both quiet for a moment, standing in my living room, her hands still resting gently on my damaged shoulder. I can feel the warmth of her fingers through the ache.
“Okay,” she says finally, stepping back and becoming business-like again.
“We’re starting slow. Very slow. Your body needs to remember how to move without compensating.
These exercises are going to feel stupidly simple, but they’re necessary.
We’re rebuilding foundation before we add anything else. ”
She pulls out the printout, shows me a series of movements that look like something from a geriatric rehabilitation program.
The exercises are simple. Humiliatingly simple.
Tiny movements, basic stretches, nothing that looks like athletic training.
Arm raises that barely clear my shoulder.
Rotation exercises that feel like I’m stirring invisible pots.
Resistance work with bands so light they couldn’t challenge a middle schooler.
“This is stupid,” I say after twenty minutes of what feels like the least athletic workout of my life. “I can do more than this. I should be doing more than this.”
“No, you can’t. Your ego wants you to do more. Your body needs this.” She demonstrates another stretch, moving with a grace that suggests she hasn’t forgotten everything her years of figure skating taught her. “Copy me. Exactly like this, slow, controlled, feeling every part of the movement.”
“I feel like I’m in senior citizen rehab.”
“You’re in stupid jock rehab. Different but equally necessary.
” She positions herself beside me, mirroring my movements so I can see the correct form.
“The hardest part of recovery isn’t the exercises.
It’s accepting that you have to start over.
That all your strength and training and years of experience don’t matter when you’re broken. You have to build back from zero.”
There’s something in her voice that makes me look at her more closely. “Is that what you had to do? After?”
She doesn’t pretend not to understand. “Yeah. Physically and mentally. Had to relearn how to trust my body. Had to build strength I’d lost. Had to accept that the person I was before, the athlete, the competitor, the perfectionist she didn’t survive. I had to become someone new.”
“Do you miss her? The person you were?”
Maya considers this, still moving through the exercises with me. “Sometimes. She had certainty. Purpose. Direction. But she was also destroying herself and couldn’t see it. So no, I don’t miss her enough to want to be her again.”
Despite my frustration, I follow her instructions. She’s patient but firm, correcting my form, making me slow down, forcing me to actually feel what my body is telling me instead of pushing through pain the way I’ve trained myself to do.
“You’re tensing here,” she says, touching my upper back lightly. “Relax. Let the shoulder do the work, not everything else.”
“Hard to relax when it hurts.”
“Pain means you’re doing too much. Scale back. The goal isn’t to push through pain, it’s to find the edge of discomfort without crossing into damage.”
“That’s very philosophical for physical therapy.”
“I had a lot of time to think during my recovery. Made me philosophical about pain.” She hands me a lighter resistance band. “Try again with this one.”
The exercises continue, and gradually, I start to understand what she means. There’s a difference between productive discomfort and destructive pain. Between challenging my body and breaking it further. It’s a subtlety I’ve never bothered to learn because in hockey, pain is just part of the game.
“Better,” Maya says after I complete a set without grimacing. “You’re learning.”
“Learning what?”
“That strength isn’t just about pushing harder. Sometimes it’s about knowing when to back off.”
“Why did you quit skating?” I ask during a water break.
Maya’s expression shutters. “I didn’t quit. I was forced to stop.”
“Injury?”
“Something like that.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I know.” She’s quiet for a moment, then: “I was seventeen. Training for nationals. I had a shot at the Olympic team, maybe. My whole life was skating, six hours a day on ice, school online, no friends outside the rink. My coach was… intense. Demanding perfection. Anything less was failure.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Yeah. I thought so too.” She fidgets with the resistance band. “I started having panic attacks on the ice. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. My coach said it was mental weakness, that I needed to push through. So I tried. Kept training, kept pushing, kept pretending I was fine.”
“What happened?”
“I broke. Completely. Tried to kill myself in my parents’ bathtub after a particularly bad practice where I fell on what should have been an easy jump.” She says it matter-of-factly, but I can hear the pain underneath. “Carter found me. Saved me and I haven’t skated since.”
“Maya—”
“Don’t. I’m not telling you for sympathy. I’m telling you so you understand why I won’t let you do what I did. Why I won’t watch you destroy yourself chasing perfection that doesn’t exist.”
I don’t know what to say. What can you say to someone who’s survived what she’s survived?
“Thank you,” I finally manage. “For telling me. For helping me.”
“Thank you for letting me help. For giving me something to focus on besides my own disasters.”
We continue the exercises, and something shifts between us. Some wall coming down, some understanding forming.
We’re both broken. We’re both trying to heal.
Maybe we can help each other figure out how.