I believe in consistency: I hold my sixth form’s record for most consecutive late detentions. I check the Wigan Athletic scores every weekend because I used to love their name. I rewatch Blades of Glory annually. And four years apart, in 2020 and 2024, I walked into Room 12 at the Spire Hospital to await the same surgery.

Some call me a revolutionary. The sheep amongst us choose to measure success with conventional markers—degrees, marriage or children. I reject such normalcy. Nothing says progress to me like meeting the eyes of your longest committed relationship and having him ask if you returned to football after he repaired your first ACL tear. “I’m afraid not, Dr Kalairajah.”

 

My first ACL tear, in hindsight, changed my life, not least because I could no longer claim to be the poster child for the kid who cried wolf. All my previous medical run-ins were merely fiction: my reported “headaches” to the primary school nurse were bids for an early home time, and my “ankle sprain” at basketball camp was a poor cover-up for my first hangover. Until the age of 14, I considered crutches not a medical necessity, but the biggest flex a kid could offer up to the playground. They were battle scars, war souvenirs and, best of all, sick fencing swords. Sorry to Huw, whose crutch became a key prop in my enactment of The Princess Diaries. Please accept my Facebook request.

 

By Year 10, however, a recent onset of anxiety saw me trade faked primary school ailments for parent-sanctioned “mental-health breaks.” I was allotted one day off school per term for whenever it all felt like too much—my parents’ answer to the one therapy session that hadn’t worked. I turned to football, spending hours in the garden doing kicky-uppies, a visible symbol of my desire to boot my uninvited stress far over the fence and inevitably be too scared to ask the creepy neighbour for it back. A 1,061 keepy-uppy record is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it represents how anxiety can take something that starts as an innocent coping mechanism and turn it into a toxic representative of the obsessive nature you are trying to escape. On the other hand, dope party trick. Bet you can’t do 1,061 keepy-uppies.

 

A year later, I got cut from my basketball team. It was then that I decided to make the Troy Bolton-inspired jump (minus the constant bursting into song) from basketball to acting, when my mum became head of The Abbey teen theatre troupe. You’re welcome, theatre. You have my old coach to thank for the raw talent that I bring to your stages. A quick check of his Instagram reveals him to now be the head of the Welsh International Men’s Basketball Team. I see they didn’t make the Olympics this year. Karma’s a bitch.

 

I have since learned that Ambika Mod, star of One Day, used to be a member of the very same theatre troupe. I wonder if she too first tried her hand at acting out of spite for not being good enough at basketball.

 

In retrospect, it’s no surprise that I am now fully committed to drama. My favourite part of football was missing a penalty (a tragically common occurrence) and getting to do that thousand-yard stare with my hands linked around the back of my neck while the crowd goes “ooohhhhhh.”

 

In 2020, I tore my right ACL at my first football session after the initial lockdown. Four days after Boris announced that Christmas was cancelled, my surgery date rolled around- 29th December, 2020. Dear readers, I did not have a happy new year. The holy post-Christmas ritual of polishing off mince pies and reading the newest Diary of a Wimpy Kid was stolen from me. I swapped out Greg Heffley for a weepy father and a clinical hospital room. I thought my dad’s tendency to cry in moments of stress would make me feel spoiled and special, but it just made me nervous.

 

The succeeding two months were not fun. I, like many other teenagers, was well aboard the lockdown rollercoaster: that summer brought the highest of highs, and that winter brought the lowest of lows. January; bed-ridden; no social contact. It was never going to be rosy, was it? My anxiety reached its height by my 17th birthday, and it was then that I decided to really and properly seek out a professional therapist.

 

My mum procured a woman whose main appeal, to me, was the New York skyline view from her window. I spent our entire first session covertly googling the financial reward for a career in therapy. Imagine my outrage when, four sessions in, she glitched and the screen revealed a quaint home office with a sign reading “Damn Right I have Two Therapists- Mr Ben and Mr Jerry!” on the wall. Despite her clear taste in decor, I was less than impressed. I thought therapists were meant to cure trust issues, not instil them.

 

Her name was Mona. After the initial struggle to get over the Pretty Little Liars trauma associated with that name, she turned out to be fantastic. After four sessions, I felt confident enough to step back from therapy and test out my newfound coping mechanisms in the big bad world. While I’m still having to remind myself that my anxiety hasn’t entirely said ciao and fucked off, it’s taken a comfortable backseat, no longer attempting to grab the wheel. Months go by where I don’t think about it. Maybe it’s tied up with those Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. They’re real thinkers.

 

Four years later, disaster struck again! Despite the generous sacrifice I made to Asclepius’ temple at the Acropolis when I was 16 (the God of Medicine, for all you non-Percy Jackson fans), my ski collided with a block of ice, and my knee hyperextended, causing my left ACL to tear. Now, don’t get me wrong—the day I found myself in a French hospital, facing a deluge of angry demands to pay a medical bill I couldn’t afford, still won’t go down in my top ten. There is something beautiful in the parallelism at play, though. At 16, isolated from my friends, separated from the sports I believed to define me, I felt terribly alone. At 20, refashioning a ski pole for a crutch to depart for the club (not recommended medical practice) after a day spent learning lines, I realised this injury had not taken anything from me this time. Except my ability to stay in that club. Apparently, ski poles are a “hazard” when you drunkenly use them as javelins, aiming for that dickhead who cut you off in the chair-lift queue two days prior.

 

There is an obvious irony in treating my ACL surgeries as markers of my progress. On paper, to be sat in Room 12 at Spire Hospital, up to my elbows in deja vu, is a symbol of stagnancy. Back where I started. And yet, I wasn’t. My hospital room, this time, was furnished with everything I had gained since my last surgery. My girlfriend. The most painful event of the day was not my surgery, but when the nurse asked if we were sisters. My dad, who cried four times when I was in the theatre. Quite an intense first time meeting him for Alice. My mum, who predictably checked her emails and reminded me that this was a piece of piss compared to her 11-hour mastectomy. The pile of plays on my bedside table that I had to read for next term’s paper. In 2020, the minute my dad was forced to leave at 9 pm, I burst into tears and spent the night watching Friends to stop my anxiety from overwhelming me. In 2024, when 9 pm rolled around, I was out like a light. In that same room, with that same injury, but no longer scared of shadows. Also definitely no longer able to perform 1,061 keepy-uppies. The biggest tragedy in my life to date is only managing to produce 37 at the “skill-sharing” section of a recent casting audition.

 

All this joyful recollection aside, I’d appreciate never tearing an ACL again. Nine-month recoveries are fucking long.∎

 

Words by Susie Weidmann. Image courtesy of Susie Weidmann.