In December 2024, I join the gym for the first time in my life. Fed up of the dark days and constant rain that inhibit my walks and daily movement, I sign up at three in the morning. I’ve been kept up because of restless legs, a condition that’s bothered me ever since my mid-twenties, triggered by years of SSRIs – a side effect that has lingered long after the others have disappeared. My body knows when I haven’t walked enough and reminds me of it in the best and worst ways that are impossible to ignore. I sign up with the intention that, at the very least, I’ll walk on the treadmill. Until COVID, I would have called myself a moderately physically active person. However, lockdown and many bouts of illness thereafter had made my movements restrictive. My body was no longer the same as in my twenties when I’d practice yoga for two hours and walk five miles in the same day. Therefore, I had naturally been thinking about “movement” – restricted, free, permissible, forced, staggered, inhibited, unintentional – and its consequences for a long time.

As South Asian people, our first introductions to movement are often through migration, personal or familial; through awareness of the Partition or witnessing mass movements of people elsewhere – often forced and displaced. I have my own story that sits neatly within these narratives; it defines my own difficult relationship to the concept of movement, as it is the reason why mine is “jagged” – rough, uneven, irregular, punctuated by doubt and hesitation, as opposed to fluid and unafraid. The latter arises out of “scattered” or “dispersed” movements of people under colonialism, as often referred to within postcolonial frameworks. Lately, I have been thinking about the ripples that it has cast on my everyday movements, where putting one foot in front of the other or exercising my limbs has become a way to break out of an inhibited state of being. Where these acts ground me to the present and remind me of my sovereignty despite a history of state-controlled movements.

After we settled in the UK, my mum was afraid of traversing out of the parameters that had been defined for us, and that fear trickled down into me. We had moved so far from everything she had known – involuntarily. We lost control over our movement, and were told that it was wrong, and the resulting experiences that came thereafter, which varied from class struggles, bad mental health, to isolation and racism, only confirmed (even if inaccurately) that this movement was bad and unwelcome. That things had been better before it. And so, she told me to stay put – to not move from this place that we had finally settled – or been settled upon.

As I got older, this morphed into agoraphobia – and a fear of venturing into unknown, undiscovered places. Of leaving the perceived safety of a familiar boundary to explore and see more. I divided my places into “safe” and “unsafe” depending on my familiarity with them.

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Movement being gendered also factored heavily into this – girls don’t go out alone, or late, or far. Men move through the world, unafraid, unburdened by this advice, this fear, this warning.
In a solo walk to a nature reserve, I am unnerved when I turn around to see the man who has just walked past me in the opposite direction now turn around and walk behind me in the same direction. I wonder if men also have partners on standby to call on solo walks to hidden nature reserves in broad daylight.

As women, we are often also not allowed to be present in our bodies – messages of shame and modesty create a physical disconnection. Growing up, to be too present in the world was not humble – to walk a certain way, to lift our heads up, to speak without being spoken to, to look someone in the eye, to put our foot forward first. Actions that connect us to others and the world and to ourselves were and still continue to be regulated.
Movement, then, becomes a privilege gained by gender, the colour of your skin, passports, languages, class, and the access these things give you to certain spaces. Who is allowed to move through spaces and places unrestricted, and who is prohibited?

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Often when I have found myself going through a difficult time in life, or feeling stuck or lost, I have taking up a skill or hobby that has incorporated some form of dynamism, which features a transferal of one state onto another. One of these was learning to drive, which I did after an unexpected but inevitably good breakup that coincided with the end of a job contract. Despite choosing to learn, I would begrudge each lesson that disrupted my self-isolating, static depressive state, unaware at the time of the impact that learning to navigate a familiar place in new ways was having on me. Of how I was learning a new form of movement, an independence that I feel to this day every time my hand is on a steering wheel. This shifting of a psychological state onto a physical one not only disrupted something negative but also became a reminder of our never-ending capability to learn to move forward and begin anew.

Another time, I learnt dancing, which I do to this day, although badly, and mostly within the private confines of my room, where I untether from everything, and swing my body around in such جوش و خروش within the soft, golden hues of a space only lit up by lamp light, blurring the edges of the defining walls into the shadows as I expand outwards and become unrecognisable to even myself. In those moments, there is a liberated velocity to my movements that resembles what may be labelled as “animalistic” by the colonial gaze that uses these words to reduce and orientalise our embodied ways of expression, thus inhibiting us further.

I think of how, in Sufism, جھومنا signifies an elevation to a spiritual state and way of being, of letting go of individual worries and giving in to something greater that is at once divine and entangled with the universe, the whirling dance mirroring the Earth’s spin. And although my dancing is nowhere as close to being graceful, it is something close to this that I feel when I am in that state.

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In December 2024, my movements within the gym are more irregular. I am uncertain within this space where there are unspoken rules of engagement with the apparatus and its users. A right or wrong way of doing things – a rigid binary that has always confused me. Often, I find myself floating, trying to chart my way through an unfamiliar terrain, conscious of my body not so much due to its visual appearance but of what it can outwardly appear to be capable of doing. I remind myself that I am not here to reach a visual goal, but something beyond that. A shifting of something that feels as heavy and immeasurable as the winter night, and isn’t reflected in the numbers I see dotted at every corner, or in how fast I run, or how long I walk, or how heavy I lift, but in the way I feel afterwards – the taller I stand, the more composure and focus I gain, the more I return to myself.

Around the time I join the gym, I come to the end of a three-month course of CBT for panic disorder. For twelve weeks, I have been surrounded by people afraid of movement – from trains to aeroplanes, to leaving their houses to go to the shops. In one of the final sessions, the therapist asks us to pick an action manageable within the space of the room that speaks to our larger fears. She calls this a “behavioural experiment” which will bring to the surface the underlying belief and fear that inhibits us individually, which, if faced within a controlled and safe environment, will hopefully encourage us to face and handle better in the real world.

When it comes to me, she spins me around and around on an office chair for one minute. I am afraid of this spiral, because I know that it results in a loss of control over my body, which I am afraid I may not regain. It is the same fear that has been sending me into panic attacks every time I have caught a train, leading up to this diagnosis. Thirty seconds into the spinning, I start shouting FUCK FUCK FUCK and the therapist keeps going asthis is not the safe word we agreed on. When the chair does stop after the minute mark, she tells me to stand up immediately. I hesitate, but she tells me again. I listen, ready for my body to stagger in different, uncontrollable directions, for my stomach to turn and for the nausea to kick in. But I am less dizzy than I anticipated. She stands, calm and collected, waiting for me to regain my balance – which I must do without support. When my head eventually stops spinning, she asks if I’m okay and whether I need anything. I nod. We debrief some more. I expect to feel triumphant at this successful experiment, but this is different to other forms of achievements that I have been striving towards my entire life, which have often been external performance to convince others of my worthiness, but never myself. No, this achievement arrives as a quite internal settling that seeps gently down to my bones rather than a firework. I instead cry. Even though I’m not afraid or in panic.

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What are our modes of movement and what do they do to us? How does a train, a car, a boat, a dinghy, a bike carry us and how do they inform, interact with, or influence our movement? How do they accommodate able and non-abled bodies? How do they preserve our dignity and connection to ourselves?

Movement is always conditional. Access is often hindered by requirements. For a long time now, I have needed support that I haven’t asked for in order to be able to get into places. This lack of speaking up and advocating for myself and my health has cost me not only access to places, and work, but to people connected to them.

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In August 2025, I expand my movements. A core principle of both writing and physical exercise is that muscles weaken without use. To repeat (not mimic) is to strengthen. For the first time, I solo drive the same route that I have been driven on by others but have been afraid of doing so alone by myself because the journey is thrice longer than I have driven alone before. I don’t know when or how often I will repeat this, but I take small victories that signify a deeper and more personal shift. I realise that being static within certain places makes my body like stagnant water, accumulating bacteria and fears that aren’t mine. I realise I am slowly unburdening myself from my limitations. They continue to exist in other forms – and often in ways that are beyond my control – but this equips me with ways to challenge those. Movement becomes a reclamation, which feels important at a time, when still, the far right rally against black and brown people’s movements, which continue to be controlled and under surveillance and always conditional. When we are STILL told that our movement is wrong or told to “go back to where we came from”, with ignorance of the fact that migratory patterns have existed throughout humanity and since the birth of our planet.

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I had been aware that my relationship to how I navigate (or don’t) navigate spaces physically has been informed by trauma but only vaguely. While the trickle of “therapy speak” into popular culture has given us language to put on a feeling, it has often failed to define it in practice. Words have done a lot of heavy lifting for us. It took me years to realise that my body has been stuck in a fight or flight state resulting from violence and control over my movements. In the book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel van der Kolk mentions how “traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies”. It is why anxiety and panic attacks had been showing up physically in the form of palpitations and fainting and breathlessness everytime I had to undertake a journey. It is why all the advice that said “mind over body” failed me because it created further disconnection. It is one of the reasons why so many people mental health issues aren’t taken seriously or accommodated.

We come to movement through trauma. Regulating our physical response returns us to ourselves and transforms us. It disrupts negative cycles and equips us with the tools to form deeper connections with ourselves and our bodies. It undoes the disembodied response that is created from trying to survive within structures and spaces and past and present realities that keep us trapped within a stress response. It asks us to consider what it looks like to live – not just survive – beyond that.