The student looked at me in awe. “You were a vegetarian for years?” The idea amazed her.

I nodded, not quite sure where this deep admiration was coming from. Yes, I was a vegetarian for years. I would say for the majority of my 20s I was a vegetarian. Like many other people are, in fact.

I regarded her young, bright face and realized: at 19 years old, doing anything for years is justifiably mind boggling. I was a vegetarian for half as long as she has been alive. For me that is less than 20% of my life; for her, over 50%.

That right there is the sum total of aging: percentages.

I explained that to her and she laughed. “I guess, yeah, to you years is about the same as months are to me.”

She was frighteningly accurate.

And those percentages, I think, explains my desperation for change when I was young. Radical, all encompassing change was what I craved and what I thought I needed. It had to happen immediately and comprehensively, because my percentages were narrow. At 20, a single year was 5% of my whole life — an interminable epoch!

Be careful what you ask for, as the saying goes. I got my radical change in the form of my parents dying and losing my home and most of the things in it by the time I was 26.

By the numbers, now, my mother has been dead for a greater percentage of my life than she was alive. Change came and went in waves, not in a single explosion. Where it left me at 26 is still playing out at 50.

I think true change is measured the way Ents count time: stretched out across the horizon, buried deep in the roots, flowing through the underground waterways.

Eight years ago, a single event happened on a specific day which injured me so badly that I could barely walk more than a few yards without crying. These days, I am walking on average 14k steps a day, according to my fitbit. That translates to about seven miles, give or take, which even I find something of an accomplishment despite doing it nearly every day. There was no smooth transition between those two points.

It is easy for people to look at me, decide “she’s fat” and conclude that is why I had trouble walking. But I’ve always been a rather prodigious walker, going for hour long walks nearly every day for the majority of my life. I was never, ever athletic by any stretch, but walking? I could do that at every size and age. (Doing so never impacted my weight at all, much to my dismay, but I still kept at it with the old adage of “exercise more! Eat less!!!” preying on my mind.)

All of that came to a screeching halt in January, 2012. I was in the final semester of my master’s program at FSU and working part time at a couple of departments on campus, and somehow, I became a statistic: one of the victims of the now-forgotten but deadly, nationwide whooping cough epidemic that struck America that winter. Pertussis’ reputation as the “90 day cough” is underrated; while I did in fact cough for 90+ days, the exhaustion and general terribleness lingered well into the year.

That was bad enough, but worse? Far, far worse? Worse was the back injury I suffered from coughing.

I can’t put into words the absolutely horrific, catastrophic agony I felt on the morning of January 17th, 2012, when I tried to get up out of bed. It hurt so much that I collapsed onto the floor, crying, both in pain and so terrified of more pain that I refused to move a muscle. Of course, I still had to cough, this was early stages yet of whooping cough and I had just started my second round of antibiotics, and so I coughed…and cried.

An hour later I crawled on all fours like a baby into the other room to my computer in order to email my bosses that I was out for the day (I had not bought a smartphone yet, so I could only email from my computer). It was a Tuesday; I remember that clearly, now, although I don’t remember if I was out for the rest of the week or just a couple of days. I remember making it to the living room and trying to lie down on the floor in exhaustion. Coughing hurt; I could barely stand, much less walk; sitting hurt; laying down hurt.

Going to a doctor did me little good — I was given a mild muscle relaxer and told not to put stress on my back. Weeks later I made it to a chiropractor who x-rayed my back and confirmed that I had “blown out” a lower disc; basically, I coughed so hard that I put enough strain on my back resulting in the disc becoming swollen and inflammed.

I lived alone with a cat, and I was surviving on student loans and part time jobs. My options were limited. Those were weeks of crawling around the house on all fours, weeks of hobbling into work sweating and crying from the bus stop only one block away and using my tall walking stick (my father’s, in fact) to lean on. Weeks of friends doing my shopping and weeks of being unable to cook because I could not stand at the stove. Weeks of hand washing clothes because I could not make it to the laundromat without crying and I certainly could not lift loads of laundry in and out of machines and baskets. Weeks of sponge baths on the edge of the tub because I was simply too scared of trying to stand up in the shower.

I bought a rolling backpack so I would not have to carry anything. I bought Dansko clogs (the nurses’ choice!) to provide solid, matronly foot/leg/back support. I walked around campus like a gender-bent Gandalf with my walking stick and a wide-brimmed hat because it took me so long to walk from place to place that I would get sunburned on the way.

I expected recovery from both the back injury and the whooping cough to be linear, despite knowing better. I think I just thought I would power through it and get back on track.

(that cackling sound is the universe laughing at me.)

By the time 2012 ended, I was still in pain when I walked or laid down or sat up but it wasn’t agonizing, I wasn’t coughing, and I had (at least) graduated with my master’s. That was the sum total of 2012.

But change is inevitable and so here I am, in 2020, walking 3-5 miles a day (if only because I have to walk the dog!!!). It took years to get here. It was not fun. There are mornings when my back still hurts as I roll (not hop, or leap, or jump) out of bed, and I still can’t lay down for longer than 10 hours at a time without suffering for it (which makes being sick with a cold quite a challenge). Improvement was glacially slow, not helped by other life stressors. Up to 2017 there were still days I grabbed my (father’s) brass-top cane on my way out the door to work, too wobbly and in too much pain to deal with standing or walking without support. It still sits by the door, just in case.

I’m reflecting on those years because of how much better my quality of life is now, so much later, and yet still feels like barely any time at all. But in the end, a single day has affected over 16% of my entire life.

Change, even change born out of lightening-fast trauma, ends up taking a lot of time. The percentages are always bigger than we expect. I can look back now on years of being a vegetarian and even years of suffering a damaged spine which at the time felt like forever but they were mere percentages of a much longer tale.

My horizon, as of now, continues to stretch out for many years farther than I can see. I often say I plan on living to 144 years old, exactly twice my father’s age at his death. That means I’ve got approximately 65% of my life left to live, and honestly, I like those percentages just fine.

Like an ent, I am walking more slowly as I age; like an ent, that only means I haven’t fully put down my roots just yet.