I used to be the person who held things together. For most of my working life I was an engineer and project manager on rigs and projects around the world, and in time I built my own engineering business. Long days, hard places, and I loved being trusted with them.
2010
In 2010 a car accident damaged my spine. I was scanned at the time, and nobody told me anything was broken.
About two years later my back gave way and I couldn't stand. I was put on strong painkillers and sent to a pain clinic. Then I did what I've always done. I carried on.
For more than ten years I worked offshore and abroad, quietly living with it. Pain with no name does something to you. You stop mentioning it. You start wondering if it's you. And you reach for anything that gets you to the next hour. For me that was gambling, drinking, shutting down and lashing out. None of it fixed anything. It just added to what I was carrying.
Finding out
In 2023, while I was offshore, an X-ray finally showed what had been there all along: stress fractures in my spine and a slipped vertebra. Thirteen years after the crash, it had a name.
I kept working right up to the day before my spinal surgery, in December 2024.
After
The operation was meant to be the end of it. It wasn't. Recovery has been long and hard, the nerves didn't come back the way they should have, and my body no longer works the way it used to. In 2026 they found a second problem in my spine.
I lost my career and my income. In 2025 I lost my family life as I knew it, and then my home. I spent nine months on a friend's sofa, time in a motorhome and stays at my grandmother's, all while trying to keep being a dad. It took me to the lowest place I've ever been.
The part that doesn't show
An X-ray can show a broken bone. It can't show what the years did to my mind. That has scars and wounds too.
Being resilient has a cost. I kept going, so people assumed I was fine. Some needed to see me suffer before they'd believe it, and even then they didn't see that I was. Carrying on left me open to exactly that.
The pain is real, and it's my brain that makes me feel it. I can't switch that off. But I don't have to let it run me.
The brain will make us feel the pain. We learn to harness the symptoms.
What I did with it
I taught myself how the systems work, because I had to. I wrote everything down. I kept asking, and I kept getting up.
And I found something I never learned on a rig: strength isn't never breaking. It's what you do after.
There's a Japanese craft called kintsugi, where broken pottery is mended with gold. The cracks aren't hidden. They become the most beautiful part of the piece. That's what I'm trying to do with my life. It's what Step Into Stability is for.
It's been very difficult, and I've struggled. I still do. But I'm still here.
If you want to talk, write to me at hello@stepintostability.com. I read every email myself.
Jason
