Even as I lay there, I knew that I would shortly have to get up off the floor. I even knew that, with the right coping skills, it might be OK in the end. But I also knew something else. I knew that unlike most adults, I didn’t have any coping skills.
We learn to feel long before we learn how to make sense of those feelings. Babies laugh and cry, and get angry, yet can’t tell us why. But as we grow up, we develop the methods we need to help us deal with stressful or traumatic events. Our teenage years are often spent feeling frustrated and confused, but we eventually gain insight into ourselves, and we learn how to better deal with mature emotions. We take these tools with us into adulthood, where we refine them and grow to develop a clearer understanding of how to face our own personal challenges. At least, most of us do. But right up until the moment I found myself lying on the floor, I had spent a lifetime running away from my problems. Anxious even as a very small child, I had let my worries fester, take control, and dominate my life. Mental-health problems had stunted my own growth, leaving me too scared to take on challenges, trying to rigidly control the environment around me to prevent any possible hurt. Quitting things when they got hard. Turning down opportunities that would push me, or give me independence. Being small.
I got used to hiding my head in the sand from a young age, and using magical thinking to ward off bad things. Instead of recognising I was ill, I’d come up with ways to cope with my worries and irrational thoughts, none of them successful. I’d spit if I had a scary idea, or blink hard to expel it. I’d avoid certain numbers, letters, colours, songs and places. All as a way to ‘compromise’ with my brain, in the hopes that the bad thoughts would go away if I just stuck rigidly to my little mechanisms. Nothing worked, and my anxiety mushroomed. My coping skills were all false friends and, as a consequence, I was agoraphobic, prone to panic attacks, intrusive thoughts, hysteria and depression. By the time my husband walked out on me, I’d had years of this. I (honestly) couldn’t make it to the supermarket on my own, much less navigate my way through a break-up of this magnitude. I knew I had to get off the floor but I didn’t know what to do next. Everything was draped in fear.
Anxiety is a slippery, sneaky thing. It’s an illness that manifests itself in so many different ways that it’s often not diagnosed until the sufferer is absolutely desperate. You might spend years having panic attacks you don’t even recognise as panic attacks. You might assume that you’re seriously unwell, as though you’re having a stroke or a heart attack (like I did aged eighteen in a nightclub, much to the hilarity of my drunken friends), or research high blood pressure obsessively. You might be so ashamed of your intrusive thoughts that you never dare confide in anyone, let alone allow yourself to think you show signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Instead of dealing with the horrible images and ideas that pop into your mind, recognising that they’re just thoughts and can’t hurt you, you might spend years trying to neutralise and silence them. All of this can make you severely depressed, as if you don’t have enough to cope with. It made me cry hysterically, it made me stay in bed for hours. It made me sleep away days. It made me watch more daytime TV than a happy person should or would. It made me lose all hope far too young.
By the time they reach this stage, a person with an anxiety disorder will likely have come up with their own mechanisms to deal with such frightening thoughts and sensations. Those coping skills will be rigid and hard to challenge, never mind break down. Almost none of these will be helpful in the long term. More often they provide some instant relief, but ultimately serve to tighten the bonds of the worry they’re having. With me, these tactics included never returning to a place where I’d had a panic attack. Sensible plan, I thought, to avoid the same horrible situation happening again. Except I ended up putting an invisible cordon around most of London, including my local high street, the park and most shops. This later widened to include planes, lifts, motorways, anywhere too far away from a hospital, and the Underground (I was a lot of fun at parties). The immediate comfort this gave me was deceptive, since I quickly found myself trapped – unable to go anywhere that my mind had designated to be ‘unsafe’. Though it’s clear to me now that I’d been in the grip of anxiety for many years, I was so used to my own shoddy bargaining methods that I didn’t seek effective help with it until these tactics had a vice-like grip on me, and I was at a standstill.
If ever there is a trigger to make you try and change something, it’s the shock of your marriage collapsing before you’ve even made it to a year. Given that people who get divorced in the UK have usually managed about eleven and a half years before they pull the plug, tanking your vows as spectacularly as I did felt like quite the feat. Any longer and it might just have been seen as sad, unavoidable, or chalked up to ‘young people not sticking at anything anymore’, but eight months? It would be unwise not to question your life just a little bit after that.
And even without the added inconvenience of a marriage breakdown, I already knew that I had reached a crunch point. I’d avoided everything I found scary for so long that my world had shrunk to the point where I felt like I was suffocating. Despite all my careful management and precautions (read controlling everything and employing wildly irrational thinking – like I say, fun at parties), the worst had happened. The framework I’d been building for myself since I was a child hadn’t protected me from harm or humiliation. In fact, it had greatly contributed to it.
After my husband walked out, I’d spent several days weeping and drinking after my sister forcibly pulled me up from the foetal position I had adopted on the floor. Forgive me if I don’t give any detail here – I can’t remember a thing about those moments. I’m grateful to my brain for that, one of the only times it’s served me well. There must have been talking, sleeping and food but all I can remember is watching an entire season of Game of Thrones and my sister getting angry that I’d binge-watched it without her.
I took one day off work and then went back to the office, alternately crying in the toilets (my husband worked for the same company, that was fun) and sitting mute at my desk, listening to bagpipe music on my headphones in a strange attempt to find some mettle whenever I saw him walk by. As an aside, this was strangely effective and I would recommend it to anyone needing to feel strong. Start with ‘Highland Laddie’.
I felt stagnant, aware that I had to endure these painful and difficult emotions, but also worried that I might never feel truly better. Life continues around you, no matter how much your own world has been shattered. I could see normality heave into view and I didn’t want it. I was back at work, and I suspected that within a few months I might be over the break-up but still locked in my small space, anxiety and depression my only real bedfellows.
It’s easy to behave like nothing is wrong, even when you have a mental illness and feel like you’re going to be consumed by it. Even at my most miserable, I was good at holding down my job, cracking jokes, going out just enough so I wasn’t seen as a hermit. Many people become experts at this, even tricking themselves. I could probably have gone on like this forever, living half a life, pretending that I was OK with it. But something had broken, and I couldn’t do it anymore. I’d done it for so long, and it had become exhausting.
I saw myself exposed as a fraud – a cowardly kid play-acting as an adult, with no business being there. J. K. Rowling says that rock bottom became the foundation upon which she built her life – that because her worst fears had been realised, she had nowhere to go but up.[1] As it’s her, I can allow the cliché and even grudgingly admit that it fits. In Rowling’s case, she went on to create a magical world of wizards which helped her to become one of the richest women in the world. In mine, rock bottom spurred me on to go for a jog.
One week into my newly single life, I had the idea to run. There’s a moment in The Catcher in the Rye[2] when Holden Caulfield runs across the school playing fields and explains it away by saying: ‘I don’t