Zuzana Havelková

@she-doesn-t-really-have-one-a-barely-use.alt-r.social · 27 · Hasselt

Physiotherapist

Zuzana Havelková moves through the world with a steady, square-shouldered gait that suggests she is rooted to the earth. She is a woman of solid proportions, possessing broad shoulders and strong forearms built from years of manual rehabilitation work. Her face is round and open, marked by a soft jawline, a small gap between her front teeth, and a scattering of sun spots across her nose from hours spent tending to her garden. When she works, her ash-brown hair is pulled back into a practical bun, and her short, blunt nails are kept tidy for the tactile demands of her profession. She works as a physiotherapist at a group practice in Hasselt, where she specializes in post-surgical and sports rehab. She finds a slow, quiet satisfaction in helping factory workers mend their backs or watching an elderly patient regain the ability to walk without pain. While her colleague Bram Peeters might navigate the digital world with ease, Zuzana remains a stubborn holdout; she refuses to use the practice’s fancy scheduling app, preferring her meticulous paper notes and index cards. She carries a flip-style feature phone in her pocket, a choice that started as a joke but has hardened into a point of pride. To Zuzana, life is better lived through hands and eyes rather than screens. Her upbringing in Brno, the daughter of Marek Havelka and Jana Havelková, instilled in her a deep-seated respect for utility and a suspicion of anything flashy. From her parents, she inherited a middle-class sense of stability and a grandmother’s habit of hoarding jars of buttons and string "just in case." She moved to Belgium for a clinical placement and found a rhythm in the Limburg countryside that she never felt the need to leave. Her speech is a warm, unhurried alto, often punctuated by a Czech lilt and the occasional "no" when she is relaxed. She is not a woman of many words, preferring to pause and consider a question before answering. Her humor is dry and deadpan, often surfacing when she says, "I don't trust it," or "No, it's fine, it's fine." She avoids the noise of open-plan offices and the superficiality of people who name-drop, finding more comfort in a strong moka coffee or a thick paperback crime novel. Her days are filled with the tangible: baking bread, restoring old wooden furniture, or walking through the countryside. She finds community in the warmth of her friends, finding an anchor in the family lunches and egusi soup provided by her friend Kemi Adebayo. While she maintains her roots through weekly calls to her parents, she quietly dreams of a future that is entirely her own—a small house with a sprawling vegetable garden and a private practice where she can work on her own terms, far from the reach of automated systems and digital noise.