Relearning the World

Living and learning | 7 min read

When Sasha Swinfield ’25 reflects on her years at University College Utrecht, she does not begin with her achievements in molecular biology or her A– thesis in bioinformatics. She begins with the moment everything stopped.

“I was on the brink of death for numerous days,” she recalls matter-of-factly. “When you see death so close, it fundamentally changes you—your values, your systems.”

What followed was not simply a return to health, but a profound unmaking and remaking: intellectual, physical, emotional, and spiritual. In conversation, Sasha speaks with the calm self-possession of someone who has lived, at only 23, through an experience that reorganises a life from the inside out. Her story is one of extraordinary perseverance, but also of discernment: a young scientist rebuilding her capacities, and in doing so redefining what she wants to do with them.

A Year of Relearning Everything

In the middle of her thesis year, a sudden brain injury left Swinfield unable to move, speak, read, or write.

“Everything needed for a successful academic life simply vanished,” she says, not in bitterness, but with an almost anthropological clarity, as if describing someone she once knew. "It was a very frustrating process—thinking that I was learning to move and read again while my classmates were writing full-blown academic theses. It was heartbreaking,” she admits. “But I was grateful to have friends who propelled me forward. Seeing their successes hurt, but it also motivated me. I told myself, I will be there sometime.”

She spent the next year in full-time rehabilitation: eight hours a day, five days a week. Speech therapy, cognitive training, swimming, painting, biking, clay work to retrain her fine motor skills. She learned to imagine her nerves and muscles firing before her body could follow, visualising movements she couldn’t yet make. “It’s such delicate work,” she says of those early exercises. “You repeat it every day, and you hope something reconnects."

Slowly, it did.

The rehabilitation center introduced her not only to her own limits, but to a community of patients whose lives had also split into “before” and “after.” Some could not speak; some were relearning how to hold a cup. She bonded with a 60-year-old man who had survived two heart attacks and three strokes; she remembers his presence, not his medical chart.

And she will never forget one particular woman.

“She was born one week after the Second World War,” Sasha says. “She could not speak, and she could not raise her hand. We didn’t share a language, as she only spoke Dutch, but we understood each other perfectly. We had no need for explanations.” 

It is that kind of connection, she says, that changed her understanding of intelligence, expression, and what it means to be fully human.

Reclaiming Her Academic Voice

Eight months into rehabilitation, Sasha decided she was ready to return to her thesis. With her supervisor’s support, she rebuilt the entire project: a computational analysis of senescent cells using single-cell proteomics in R, a programming language she had to relearn from scratch. “I often wanted to throw in the towel,” she admits. “But eventually, I fell in love with debugging. I loved figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it.”

Finishing the project, and finishing it well, matters less to her now as a credential than as a marker of self-trust. “My intelligence didn’t disappear,” she says. “I just express it differently. It comes from a deeper place.”

My intelligence didn’t disappear. I just express it differently. It comes from a deeper place.

A Scientist with a New Kind of Curiosity

Before her injury, Sasha imagined a clear trajectory: a master’s degree in cancer research, perhaps a PhD, a career in biomedical science. She still loves biology, how nerve pathways regenerate, how neurotransmitters help the body regulate stress, but her injury introduced her to another discipline entirely: body-based trauma therapy.

In her sessions, she recognised glimpses of the physiology she once studied, translated into a different kind of language. “There’s science in it—muscles, nerves, the nervous system,” she says. “But there is also intuition. Regulation. Presence.”

She now feels called toward that intersection. “I want to spread the word about nervous system regulation and trauma healing,” she says with conviction. “It benefits everyone.”

Learning to Listen, Then Deciding for Herself

Perhaps the most striking change in Sasha is not her recovery, but her clarity about agency. “People my age often follow what adults tell them—parents, teachers,” she reflects. “For the first time, I wanted to ask: What do I want?”

What she does not want, at least right now, is a traditional scientific master’s program. When people encourage her to continue down the conventional academic path, she listens—and politely declines. “I’ve had a major experience of what life is,” she says. “I’m not easily swayed by other people’s visions of my future.”

She still envisions a life filled with thinking and writing, but she wants those pursuits to come from intention, not momentum.

Looking Eastward

In February, Sasha will leave for a six-month journey through Southeast Asia—Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, Bhutan, Indonesia. She calls the region “the home of spirituality and energy.” She hopes to meditate, study, and continue the inner work that began in the hospital and continued through clay, code, and the mountains of the Balkans during a recent solo trip. She plans to journal. She plans to observe. She plans, above all, to stay open.

Love is the Answer

She returns to an idea that now anchors her sense of self: “Even if I lost my speech again, I would still be confident in myself.” 

It is not bravado. It is earned. In her early twenties, Sasha  learned that intelligence is not speed, articulation, or even memory. It is presence. It is discernment. It is knowing what matters, and what does not. “I discovered that I can still think critically, even when language fails,” she wrote after graduating. “I learned to rely on my inner intelligence and wisdom.”

In the end, Sasha’s greatest transformation has been inward. She speaks quietly, but with certainty, about the lesson that now shapes her days. “The answer is always love,” she says. Before her injury, she remembers moving anxiously through life, “running around doing lots of unimportant things.”

The answer is always love.

Now she approaches her mother, her partner, and her friends with a deliberate gentleness, letting love guide her actions rather than urgency. She has learned that this shift is common among those who survive near-death experiences: the realisation that almost nothing matters in the way we imagine it does. “Only love,” she says, “really remains.”

That wisdom is palpable. And as she steps into the next chapter, it is clear she carries not only the resilience of someone who has relearned the world, but the serenity of someone who knows exactly how she wants to navigate it.