Talk 2: Why physiotherapy called me

 

I was fifteen when my father asked what I wanted to become. I told him, a drawing teacher. I used to take my drawing board into the forest and sit there with the trees.

 

He asked if I was going to make money with that. He wanted me to have my own income, not depend on a man for it. He was a traditional man, in many ways, but there was something underneath that advice, maybe something he'd seen in his own mother. He wanted me to always have a way out, if I ever needed one.

 

I listened. I was an obedient daughter, and somewhere in me, it made sense, even though money had never been my driving force. We'd grown up comfortably. My father ran a grocery store, and in his free time he renovated houses, selling one a year.

 

I was always sporty, so physiotherapy felt like the right direction. I did the course in four years, which few students managed. I finished with a semi-cum-laude presentation.

 

From there, I went to work in the United Kingdom, twice, across four different hospitals, eventually becoming a senior physiotherapist. Later, I took a position in a large hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. That's where the desert first entered my life, long before I ever imagined living in one by choice, in the mountains of Spain, building something called an oasis.

 

It wasn't the path I dreamed of at fifteen, drawing board in hand. But it gave me something just as important. It gave me a way to understand the body, and, it turns out, it planted the very image my life's work would later be named after.