It started with 200 steps. Not a plan. Not a programme. Not a therapist's recommendation. Just a decision — made at 3am on a kitchen floor — to move when everything else had stopped working.
I had been sober for eleven days. My body felt like it was made of wet concrete. My mind was a loop of shame, regret, and a very specific kind of silence that only people who've been through it will recognise. The silence of a life that has gone completely quiet.
I didn't go outside because I thought it would help. I went outside because I couldn't stand being inside anymore. There's a difference. One is hope. The other is desperation. And desperation, I've learned, is often the more honest starting point.
The first walk was around the block. Twice. I counted every step. Not because I was tracking progress — I had no concept of progress at that point — but because counting gave my mind something to do that wasn't destroying me.
What I didn't expect was what happened to my body. The cold air. The sound of gravel underfoot. The way the light looked different at that hour. Something in my nervous system — something that had been locked in a permanent state of fight-or-flight for years — began, very slightly, to release.
This is what the science now confirms: rhythmic bilateral movement — the left-right, left-right of walking — activates the same neurological processes used in EMDR therapy. It helps the brain process stored trauma. It regulates the nervous system. It moves stuck things.
But I didn't know any of that then. I just knew that after the walk, I slept. And that felt like a miracle.
Over the following weeks, the walks got longer. Not because I was disciplined. Because I was addicted to the only thing that was making me feel human again. I started walking the coastal paths around Cornwall. The cliffs. The sea. The wind that doesn't care who you are or what you've done.
There's something about walking in nature that strips away the performance of being a person. You can't perform for a cliff. You can't impress a wave. You're just a body moving through space, and that — it turns out — is exactly what a broken nervous system needs.
Street Therapy wasn't born from a theory. It was born from those walks. From the realisation that movement is medicine. That the body holds the answers the mind can't access. That sometimes the most therapeutic thing you can do is put one foot in front of the other and trust that the path will show you something.
If you're in the early stages of recovery — from anything — I'm not going to tell you to go for a walk like it's a cure. It isn't. But I will tell you this: the body remembers how to heal. Sometimes you just need to give it permission to move.