The Accident That Changed Everything

I'd meant to post this as an Instagram post, but alas, one thing led to another, and suddenly I'm turning my whole story, going back from 2019 to 2023, into an essay. I've always preferred long-form writing anyway. It gives the story proper justice as opposed to being cut unnaturally short and succinct just because a certain platform's algo demands it.

When I first shared it on Instagram, the response was overwhelming – nothing like I'd expected!

So I thought I'd post the full story on here. 

This is also a story that's a long time coming, and I'm sharing this in hopes that if you're navigating a rather annoying injury that you're unsure what to do with, I hope it makes you feel less alone.

Plus! I've been really encouraged to share more real stories of travel tales on the road. After all, I've got over 10 years and 50 countries worth of stories I never share, because it's not what readers are searching for!

Let me tell you something they don't put in travel brochures.

Adventure travel has a price. Not always in money — sometimes in flesh, in bone, in the quiet grief of watching the life you've built dissolve around you while you're stuck on a sofa with a bag of frozen peas strapped to your leg.

This is that story. And I'm sharing it because if you're someone who refuses to live small — someone who has ever been told you're too much, or that's too risky, or why can't you just be normal — I think you'll find something in here for you.

But First, A Little Context

I grew up in Singapore, which — if you've never been — is a masterclass in order, efficiency, and doing what's expected of you. A city where success has a very specific shape: good school, good job, good flat, good life. Full stop.

I never quite fit that mould.

I was raised in a deeply Asian household — others first, keep the peace, don't make a fuss.

But somewhere inside me lived this loud, restless, why-not energy that felt more at home in a hostel dorm in Medellín than a boardroom in the CBD.

Being a solo female traveller and a full-time traveller from Singapore wasn't just unusual — it was practically revolutionary. People genuinely didn't know what to do with me at dinner parties when they asked “so, what do you do?”

And still, I went. I kept going.

Over the years, I collected places like other people collect stamps.

8 months in Japan gave me an obsession with precision — the way a bowl of ramen could be a meditation, the way every detail mattered.

2 months in Hawaii slowed my nervous system down in a way no yoga class ever had.

4 months in Costa Rica, it handed me pura vida like a gift I didn't know I needed — the art of simply being alive and calling that enough.

Latin America cracked me open entirely; living a year through a pandemic in Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru — not as a tourist, but as someone in it, sitting in local kitchens, pet-sitting in Bolivia at altitude, watching the world pause while life somehow still moved.

You absorb all of that. It becomes you. And then you don't quite belong anywhere — not fully back home, not fully anywhere else. It's a particular kind of beautiful loneliness that most long-term travellers know but rarely name.

I was building an identity that didn't have a category. That part? Nobody really talks about.

New Year's Day, 2019. Japan.

Picture this: fresh powder, a mountain I had no business being on at that speed, and then — the kind of tumbling at an angle that happens in slow motion and fast motion simultaneously.

There I lay, immobile, my legs sprawled sideways and outwards like a pretzel. 

I heard it before I felt it. The sound of a pop in my knee. Happy New Year to me. The rescuers came in skiis with a stretcher. I was rolled onto it, and skied back down. That certainly is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. 

Disappointingly, the ski resort released me as if they didn't want to do anything to do with me. With much challenge, I finally found a hospital that'd do an X-ray for me since most were closed on New Year's Day.

When the doctor said “no bones are broken” through Google Translate, I was cast away again, zero F given.

I remember most of my days spent spent bingeing on Game Of Thrones, contorted while showering and feeling sorry for myself while immobile. Luckily for insurance, I was flown back in Premium Economy on SQ.

A partial ACL tear, they said back in Singapore. Not a full rupture — which meant I had a choice.

Surgery now, or manage it and keep going.

I chose to keep going.

(Of course I did.)

Feb 2019. Bhutan.

The doctor's face when I told him I was going hiking in Bhutan the following month was a picture. Wide-eyed, lips pressed together, the universal medical expression for I cannot stop you, but I want you to know I disagree. I went anyway.

Rhododendron forests, monastery trails, altitude and all.

Watch: Bhutan Trip - A 7-Day Itinerary

2019-2021: The Years I Pretended I Was Fine

That never stopped me from doing the things I love – hiking, rock climbing, bouldering, skiing. I even summited a 6000+m mountain in Bolivia – Huayna Potosí, 6,088 metres above sea level – crampon-strapped and breathless, with a knee that had no business being up there.

To this day, one of the proudest moments of my life.

I was so deep in the belief that I could outrun this injury through sheer willpower and enough physio that I almost convinced myself it was true.

Until the day I jumped off a bouldering wall.

A normal, unremarkable jump. The kind I'd done a hundred times. I landed on the mat — clean, controlled — and then heard it.

Pop.

Something shifted. And my knee was never the same again.

What It Actually Feels Like To Lose Trust In Your Body

I want to describe this properly, because it's not just physical.

Squatting — even to pick something up off the floor — sent a sharp, warning ache through my joint.

My knee would simply give way mid-rally on a tennis court, like a traitor.

Surfing, something I loved for the freedom of it, became an exercise in anxiety — every wave carrying the possibility of a bad twist, a wrong landing.

Running? Every single footfall hurt. Not a background ache you can tune out. An active, insistent “this is not okay.”

I tried everything, just to explore the possibilities of a non-invasive solution. Dry needling in Bansko, Bulgaria. TCM in Singapore. Gua sha in Bali. Massages in places I can't even properly pronounce.

I did a full MRI in Greece — which is, objectively, an extremely dramatic place to do a knee scan, and I respect myself for it.

But the turning point wasn't a treatment. It was a thought.

A quiet, clear-eyed realisation that arrived one morning:

This compromised knee is always going to be in the way of the life I want to live.

Not sometimes. Not occasionally. Always.

Bali, Feb 2023: The Incident That Finally Forced My Hand

Dramatically enough, I fell into a hole.

Not metaphorically. An actual hole in the ground, in Bali, with rusty rods inside it that introduced themselves to my other knee.

I'll spare you the graphic details, but the stitches were real, the limp was real, and the universe's message was extremely hard to misread at that point.

I flew from Bali to Ho Chi Minh City — because I had an SEO conference to attend, because of course I did — and a cancelled onward trip to Koh Samui later, I finally, finally, limped my way back to Singapore.

The diagnosis? A torn patella tendon, all from an uneventful fall into a hole…

My knees were filing a formal complaint. I had to listen.

Summer 2023: The Summer of Cramming Everything In

Surgery was coming. I could feel it in my bones — quite literally.

But between agreeing to the surgery and actually getting on the operating table? I had trips I wanted to do + collaborations to complete before bidding goodbye to my active travel lifestyle for a bit – to Iceland, the UK, Thailand, Indonesia, Croatia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

Mischievous, I know.

But here's the honest truth: I genuinely thought going under the knife meant the end of my travel life for at least a year. So I did what any reasonable, slightly unhinged freedom-seeker would do — I crammed as much living as possible into the remaining months.

August 2023. Under the knife.

The Part Nobody Prepares You For

People assume the hardest part of ACL reconstruction is the pain. The surgery, the incision, the long rehab. And yes — waking up from general anaesthesia to discover that your hamstring has declared itself your enemy is genuinely one of the more unpleasant surprises of my adult life. Zero ability to bend my knee. A searing, screaming protest from muscles I'd always taken for granted.

(And the inability to pee unassisted — listen, no one warned me, so I'm warning you. Portable potty. It's humbling.)

But the pain I wasn't prepared for was quieter than that.

It was the grief of having to say goodbye to the life I had just started building in Bali. The friendships that had grown roots. The rhythm of mornings there, the people, the version of myself I was becoming in that place. You don't just leave a location — you leave a whole ecosystem. And I had to do it with a surgical deadline and no soft landing.

They say it's all about timing. Timing sure has a dark sense of humour.

The Road To Recovery

Now the real recovery journey looked a little like this. I documented everything. Every session, every milestone, every small victory — bending the knee one more degree, taking one more step without the crutch. Progress is invisible until you look back and realise how far you've come.

Throughout it all, while the speed of recovery is relative, I don't think I would've made such a speedy recovery if not for my family who stood by me throughout, and the friends near and far who sent me cute gifts, flowers and chocolates that arrived exactly when I needed them. :')

My physio sessions, which I genuinely began to look forward to — not because they were easy, but because they showed me, week by week, that my body was fighting for me even when I wasn't sure I deserved it.

I'm also just… grateful. For a body that absorbed the shock of all of this and kept healing anyway. For a fitter baseline that I'd built through years of mountains and walls and waves — it gave me something to recover into.

Why I'm Telling You This

Travelling boldly, living adventurously, following your truth — it comes with costs. Real ones. It's not a highlight reel. It's a partial ACL tear on New Year's Day. It's rusty rods. It's a lonely recovery sofa far from the life you love.

But here's what I know: the alternative — living cautiously, hedging everything, shrinking so nothing can go wrong — that has costs too. Ones that don't show up on an MRI, but are no less real.

If you're navigating something similar right now — a setback, a surgery, an injury that's making you question whether the life you want is even possible — I hope this story finds you at the right moment.

You're not alone in this. And your body, your story, your wild and improbable life? It's worth fighting for.

🫶🏽