Hypermobility: What I wish someone had told me at 25

(Trigger warning: this is a blog about chronic pain. It's not graphic, but maybe it's not something you're feeling able to read right now.)

A few weeks ago, my son's sports day got cancelled because of the weather. Since my husband and I had already booked the day off, we went climbing instead — just at our local indoor wall, nothing dramatic.

Partway up, a memory suddenly hit me.

About 10–12 years ago, some friends were planning a climbing trip. I'd never tried it, and when I said I'd love to give it a go, they all looked at me like I'd lost the plot.

"Sarah, you can't possibly manage that."

I want to be really clear about something: they weren't being unkind, and they weren't being sexist. They knew what climbing involved. They knew me. They knew that my joints — especially my shoulders, arms, wrists and hands — were unstable, and that I was in pain most of the time. They weren't questioning my fitness or my determination. They were worried about my safety.

And honestly? At the time, they were right.

What "unstable joints" actually felt like

If you don't live with hypermobility, it's hard to explain what it's like to not quite trust your own body. Not knowing when another movement or another joint might suddenly become painful. Pain was standard, different amounts in different places, but a daily occurrence. Often I was exhausted. At this time I didn't yet know that I had Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and didn't understand why my body felt like it was falling apart.

I was in my mid-twenties, an age when most people are starting to feel like adults — building careers, making plans, trying new things. Who expects to be weighing up injury risk of a routine climbing wall trip at that age? I often felt powerless as so much of my body felt completely out of my control. I couldn't predict it. I couldn't always trust it to do what I asked. Saying yes to climbing in that state genuinely could have meant injury.

I remember the disappointment and frustration of that moment so clearly. Not just about climbing — about everything it represented. Another thing I couldn't do. Another door that seemed closed before I'd even tried to open it.

The bit nobody tells you about hypermobility: it's not linear, and it's not fast

Here's what I wish someone had told 25-year-old me — not instead of what my friends said, but alongside it.

They were right about where you are *right now*. But "right now" isn't forever. Bodies can change. Understanding changes. What's unsafe for you today might not be in ten years — not because of some miracle, but because of slow, unglamorous, often invisible work.

For me, that work has looked like building stability around joints that were never going to be naturally stable, strengthening the muscles that support them, learning to move in ways that protect rather than strain them, and slowly, slowly building trust in my own body again. As a Pilates instructor, this is something I now help other people with too, but I lived it first as someone trying to feel safe in my own skin.

It wasn't a straight line. There were periods of real progress, and then setbacks that felt like going right back to square one. Flare-ups that knocked my confidence as much as my body. Times I genuinely wondered if anything was actually changing, or if I was just getting better at managing the same problems.

But 12 years later, I've now been climbing three or four times. No flare-up. No injury. No incident (touch wood — I know it could happen to anyone, and I'm not pretending otherwise).

I'm not good at it. I do very basic introductory walls. But being able to use my body that confidently — to trust it enough to climb — felt like an enormous milestone. Not because climbing itself was the goal, but because of everything it represents about how far my relationship with my own body has come.

Learning to read my body's signals differently

There's a second part to this story that I think matters just as much.

Climbing works your forearms hard. And the sensation I get there while climbing is so close to how my arms used to feel constantly when I was in pain — that same kind of ache, that same kind of tiredness.

The first time it happened, it frightened me. I thought a flare-up was coming. I braced for it.

It didn't come.

What I'm slowly learning is that this same physical sensation, which used to mean something worrying, can now just mean: *you've worked that muscle, and it wants a break now.* Exactly what it would mean for anyone else who'd been climbing. Nothing more sinister than that.

It sounds like such a small thing. But separating "my muscles are tired" from "I'm about to be in pain" has been a huge deal. For years, those two things were the same signal. Untangling them — teaching my nervous system that tired doesn't automatically mean dangerous — has taken deliberate practice.

If you're where I was at 25

If any of this is resonating with you, here's what I'd want you to take away:

Change is possible. But it's rarely fast, and it's almost never a straight line. You might have long stretches where nothing seems to move, and then setbacks that feel like everything has gone backwards. Both of those are normal. Neither of them means it isn't working.

Your friends, or your doctor, or your own caution might be completely right about where you are today. That doesn't mean it's where you'll always be. It just means today isn't the day for that thing — and that's okay.

Twelve years ago, climbing wasn't safe for me, and the people who said so were looking out for me. Today, it is — not because I pushed through anything, but because of years of patient, often boring, often discouraging work that slowly added up to something.

If I could go back and tell 25-year-old me anything, it would be this: you're not stuck. You're just not there yet. And "yet" is doing a lot of work in that sentence — but it's true.