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My first warning sign should have been the stairs. Stairs are simple and safe, but these continued winding through the ragged remains of trees after a long winter. They seemed endless but it was hard to twist a knee with a handrail. When the stairs finally finished, I had a moment of joy that I was almost to the peak. It was easy to ignore the twinge in my knee. The air was fresh and cold and bracing. I felt accomplished. Coming to Korea had been an opportunity to reinvent myself. So I'd agreed to go with a colleague on a hiking trip. A small little mountain north of Seoul—it wouldn't be any longer than a day-trip, she'd told me. Here, I had thought, was my chance to become the person who wasn't afraid of pain. Then came the boulders. I was left alone to pull myself up and over boulders. The twinge in my knee became a throb but I wanted to focus on the stinging in my hands that gripped the rock too tight. When you've had chronic pain long enough, there's always the memory of pain guiding all of your decisions. Before the years of pain, I'd played soccer and done martial arts. I'd stepped off of the curb without looking down. Even after knee surgery though, I was haunted by the idea that one wrong move would send me into a series of doctors appointments all undercut by a constant excruciating pain. I'd returned to life without constant pain, but I didn't trust my body anymore. I finally reached the top of the boulders and a path emerged. Here finally other hikers appeared. In South Korea, hiking is one of the most popular hobbies but only the elderly had time to hike regularly. By this point, the throbbing in my knee had turned to a persistent tenderness and I knew without checking that my knee had swelled. I limped along, constantly passed by people 40 years older than me. The path turned around the mountain and what had been secure became nothing more than a narrow divot along a sheer rock face with a sudden drop on the other side. This high on the path, winter held on more securely and the path was filled with patches of ice and snow. I stepped out. I slipped. A grandfather rushed forward to help me up while an elderly woman dusted me off. I wanted to give up. I wanted to say I had a bad knee and I couldn't keep going. I gripped the rock-face again and stretched out my knee. If you don't let yourself look back, then all you can do is continue forward. I wasn't sure I could trust my body but I had to at least trust myself. I continued forward.