The Book That Weighed More Than My Leg

How pain teaches leadership

Photo by Navy Medicine on Unsplash

The book weighed more than my atrophied leg muscles could lift.

I was twelve, wrapped in full body cast, when my mother placed Anna Karenina on my hospital bedside table. She didn’t say anything; just set it down with the kind of quiet that holds everything unsaid.

The cover was worn smooth at the corners, the pages smelled like someone else’s kitchen mixed with my mother’s cold classroom, and the weight of it pressed into the blanket like a promise I couldn’t yet name.

I’d been in this bed for two months. Another seven stretched ahead of me like a sentence I couldn’t appeal.

Outside my window, girls my age were learning how to flirt and sneak cigarettes behind the gymnasium. Inside this room, I was learning how to endure the particular loneliness of a body that refuses to cooperate.

My rebellion didn’t look like theirs.

Mine came in hardcover.

The Inheritance I Didn’t Know I Was Receiving

My mother never told me she’d smuggled books into our freezing first apartment in Poland: the one where she wore winter boots to cook because the cold came through the walls like a living thing.

I didn’t know that on nights when my father worked double shifts and she was alone with an infant who wouldn’t sleep, she’d prop a book against the kitchen counter and read while stirring soup with one hand.

I didn’t know that her mother had done the same during the war, hiding books under floorboards because reading was the one form of resistance the occupiers couldn’t fully control.

Three generations of women, reading our way through impossible circumstances.

But I didn’t know any of this yet.

All I knew was that when my mother placed that book on my table, something in her face said: This is how we survive what we can’t escape.

Act I: Anna Teaches Me About Wanting

Anna Karenina is not a book for twelve-year-olds.

It’s long. It’s Russian. It’s full of aristocrats making terrible decisions at fancy parties while peasants suffer in fields I couldn’t picture and place names I couldn’t pronounce.

But Anna herself: Anna made sense to me in a way nothing else did.

She wanted more.

She looked at the life she was supposed to live and said: What if I refuse this?

I didn’t understand most of what she was refusing. I didn’t understand love or society or the weight of social expectation. But I understood the wanting. The ache of looking at your life and feeling like you’re suffocating inside a shape that doesn’t fit.

I’d look down at my body: useless, betraying, trapped in full body cast that dug into my ankle while doctors spoke about me like I wasn’t there; and think: What if I want more than this?

That question became my first act of leadership, though I wouldn’t know to call it that for thirty years.

Because here’s what I discovered, lying in that bed with Anna’s story pressing against my chest:

Agency doesn’t start with action. It starts with wanting.

With the audacity to ask: What if I deserve more than what I’ve been told is possible?

Decades later, I’d learn the neuroscience. That the prefrontal cortex: the part of our brain responsible for planning, decision-making, and imagining futures; develops through exactly this kind of mental rehearsal. That reading complex narratives activates mirror neurons, letting us practice emotional experiences we haven’t lived yet.

But at twelve, I just knew this: Anna’s wanting gave me permission to want too.

Even when wanting felt impossible.
Even when my body couldn’t follow where my mind was going.
Even when the doctors’ charts said one thing and my heart insisted on another.

Act II: Kundera Teaches Me About Meaning

By fourteen, my muscles had wasted from disuse.

But my mind? My mind was doing Olympic-level weightlifting every single night.

My mother brought me The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. I don’t know where she found it: books like this weren’t exactly easy to come by in communist Poland. But somehow, it appeared.

The title alone felt like it was written for my body: unbearably light, unable to bear its own weight. And my emotions: unbearably heavy, collapsing under the weight of stillness.

Kundera asked the questions my doctors never could:

What is freedom?
What is meaning?
What is the point of being, if everything is temporary and nothing can be undone?

At fourteen, I couldn’t walk. But I could think.

And those thoughts: wild, unanswerable, electric; became the only form of motion available to me.

I’d lie there, hip throbbing, and follow Kundera’s characters through Prague and Geneva and Zurich, through questions about fate and coincidence and whether our choices matter if we only get one chance to make them.

That’s when I learned something that would shape every leadership moment that came after:

When you can’t change your circumstances, you can still change your relationship to them.

Kundera was teaching me that meaning-making is a form of power. That the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening shape what becomes possible next.

Years later, I’d study how the brain processes narrative. How meaning-making quite literally regulates the nervous system. How when we can name what’s happening: ”This is temporary,” “This is teaching me something,” “This will be part of my story but not all of it”; the amygdala quiets and the prefrontal cortex comes back online.

But at fourteen, I just knew this:

I couldn’t control my body. But I could control what I made of this experience.
I could choose whether this was the end of my story or a strange, painful chapter in something larger.

That was leadership lesson number two, decades before I knew to call it that:

Context creates coherence. And coherence is what lets us keep moving forward.

Act III: Švejk Teaches Me About Laughter

By fifteen, I hit a wall.

Not literally: I couldn’t reach one, but emotionally, I was done.

Done with pain. Done with patience. Done with being the brave girl who smiled through physical therapy and never complained when the doctors were too rough or the nurses forgot I was twelve, not a case file.

That’s when my mother brought me The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek.

And for the first time in three years, I laughed until my surgical scars hurt in a completely different way.

Švejk is the story of a bumbling Czech soldier during World War I who obeys every military order so literally, so absurdly, that he turns the entire war machine into a comedy. He salutes at the wrong times. He marches in the wrong direction. He follows rules so precisely that the rules themselves become ridiculous.

He mirrored the world I was living in; the hierarchies, the medical protocols, the systems that treated humans like problems to be solved rather than people to be seen.

And he turned it all into something I could laugh at.

That was leadership lesson number three:

Humor isn’t denial. It’s the courage to stay human inside systems that aren’t.

Decades later, I’d learn about the neuroscience of laughter: how it releases endorphins, reduces cortisol, and literally shifts us out of threat response into social engagement. How shared laughter creates what researchers call “synchronized neural activity” between people, building trust and psychological safety.

But at fifteen, I just knew this:

When I laughed at Švejk’s absurdity, I wasn’t minimizing my pain.
I was reminding my nervous system: We can survive this. We can even find joy inside this.

The Weight That Never Left

I kept those books long after I learned to walk again.

They moved with me through apartments, across continents, through career changes and the birth of my own child. Their spines cracked and pages yellowed and covers wore smooth, but I couldn’t let them go.

Because they weren’t just books.

They were proof that when my body was paralyzed, my mind was still building something. That when I couldn’t move forward physically, I was still moving forward in ways that mattered more.

They were the first maps I ever drew for myself: teaching me about rebellion.

Sometimes it looks like refusing to let circumstances define what’s possible.

Sometimes it looks like a twelve-year-old girl with atrophied muscles, holding a book that weighs more than she can lift, and choosing to turn the page anyway.

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Next week: How a bedridden child’s rebellion became a leadership framework that transformed how I lead teams through their own stuck seasons.

Because here’s what I discovered decades later:

Every leader I’ve ever worked with has their own version of that hospital bed. Their own season of being trapped: by burnout, by fear, by systems that won’t bend, by self-doubt that won’t quiet.

And the ones who lead best aren’t the ones who never got stuck.

They’re the ones who learned what I learned in that bed:

That your mind is the first territory you lead.
That agency begins with asking for more.
That meaning-making is a form of power.
That laughter is integration, not escape.

That when you can’t move your body, you can still move your thinking.

🪞 Reflection

What book found you when you were stuck?

Maybe it wasn’t a hospital bed. Maybe it was grief, or a career that felt like a cage, or a relationship that was suffocating you. But somewhere in your life, there was probably a moment when you couldn’t move forward physically or emotionally, and words became the only motion available.

Share in the comments: What did you read, and what did it teach you about surviving what you couldn’t escape?

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