After a life lived in varying degrees of fear, once you feel as though you’ve managed to find an even keel, you guard it fiercely. Any normal sign of panic or a fleeting feeling of doom can knock you off your perch – making you worried that you’re going to be sent straight back to square one, do not pass go. In those moments, I would step up my routine – putting on my trainers twice a day, pushing myself harder. At times like this I hated running. I felt like a hamster willingly signing up to a new wheel, but now unable to get off. I might have continued in this vein, were it not for something catastrophic that happened less than a year after my husband had pushed off. The woman that I loved as a second mother, the woman who gave me my first job, and taught me how to be an adult, and hugged me and laughed at me and screeched at my gossip: she died. She died far too young, and she took with her a joy that I haven’t seen in anyone since. In the days and weeks afterwards, as those left behind began to understand just what had been taken from us, we were enveloped in sorrow. I ran, hoping to ameliorate the grief, hoping that my fail-safe would do what it had been doing for the past nine months. And it helped, it truly did. You find it hard to cry when you run – for one thing, I think you’d end up feeling like you were in a music video from the nineties, weeping as you dashed through a downpour wearing something bedazzling – and running forces you to understand, in the most literal sense, that the world keeps moving even when you think it shouldn’t, even when you’re furious that it does. I’m not the first to use running to try and get over a great loss – the world’s oldest marathon runner, Fauja Singh (a sprightly 107), started running in his late eighties to get over the loss of his wife and children.
But while running provided a balm, an event of such horrible magnitude also showed me that it had its limitations. And that was something I needed to learn. I’m loath to say that the loss of a much loved friend can bring about anything positive. It just can’t. But I did come to understand that you should not fear real sadness, nor try to shy away from it. And that doesn’t mean that you’ll fall down the rabbit hole of mental illness again, nor that you’ll never recover. You can’t fully insulate yourself against true sorrow, but you can learn to recognise the difference between a natural and worthy emotion like grief, and an irrational and unhealthy one, like panic. I scaled back my escalating running schedule and allowed myself to feel sad sometimes. By doing that, I remembered why I had come to love doing it so much.
Running is not magic beans and I now know that I can’t expect it to inure me to the genuine sadness of life. But throughout tough periods in my life, and without realising it, I had finally acquired a coping skill, one that has helped me every day since I found myself on that floor, wondering how I’d ever get up. It’s something that has taken me out of my self-made cage, propelled me towards new jobs, new experiences, real love and a sense of optimism and confidence that I can be more than just a woman with crippling anxiety. It has given me a new identity, one which no longer sees danger and fear first. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I ran myself out of misery. It has transformed my life.
I’m running a loop of three local roads. I can’t go any further in case I have a panic attack. I have to stick near safety. I’m so slow that I’m overtaken by a dog walker as I go, and I stop every minute or so, as my lungs burn and my shins ache. Voices in my head whisper conflicting things: ‘Go on, this run is going better than yesterday.’ ‘Why are you bothering to do this? You’re really bad at it.’ And the meanest of all: ‘This won’t make your husband love you, you know.’ That one sticks and mutates: ‘You’ve failed. Anxiety is your companion, stop trying to fight it off. Aren’t you embarrassed about how your life has ended up?’ I’m trying to shake these relentless thoughts off, but it’s hard. My eyes feel funny and my arms feel shaky. I ask myself my daily question – is this anxiety or something worse? I don’t know. I just know my body is hurting and I feel useless. My legs are heavy, and I feel jittery. I manage twelve minutes and go home, wondering if I can do it again when it feels so hard.
This book is not about a great love affair gone awry. Writing it many years after the breakdown of my marriage almost feels fraudulent, since it was so brief, and in hindsight, such a huge mistake. Viewing it from a decent distance, I see it as a blip, and not even a blip I think about much. But it wasn’t something to totally regret, because it forced me to acknowledge that something much bigger and much worse needed to be tackled. It was merely a catalyst to get me to deal with anxiety, so I’m grateful for it in a way. In a very weird, weird way. It’s also a different kind of love story – cue swelling music – one about loving myself.
Since much of this book will be about anxiety, it might be helpful to look at just what that word means. What it really means. Because the worries you have on an idle Sunday evening do not constitute an anxiety disorder. And that’s no bad thing! Feeling anxious from time to time is totally normal, we all worry about a whole host of things every day – jobs, relationships, money, Donald Trump being president of the United States. But anxiety as a disorder is a different beast. And while I’m happy to see it talked about more with less embarrassment, sometimes I think the term has been diluted somewhat. It’s not a competition – if someone says they have anxious thoughts then you must respect that and listen to them, but I also think that the word is thrown around too freely at times. There is a sliding scale, for sure, but I suspect that if someone told you they were anxious, you might assume they just had a tendency to worry too much. In a bid to be more honest and less ashamed about my mad panic, I tell people more and more about what goes on with my anxiety – the past terrors and the remaining vestiges. But maybe I’m not blunt enough, because often I’ve told people and had a nod, a gesture of understanding, or sometimes just no reaction at all. It always amazes me, because I think if most people sat in my brain for a bit, they’d be shocked at how weird and intolerable it can get. The real release is talking to other people affected by it. A friend once called me to tell me that she’d decided that her neighbours might be out to get her. The anxiety behind this vague and weird thought was complex and impressive, but I got it. Because we both have weird and scary thoughts, we were able to fully spill all our irrational obsessions without the fear of being judged.
I guess what I’m saying is that anxiety is complex, messy and dark. It’s not just panic attacks or a fear of crowded places – horrible things which are easy to understand by a general audience – but relentless obsessions, terrible thoughts, exhausting compulsions, physical malaise and deep sadness as a result. I think it’s important, as we make strides to talk about mental illness, that we also make sure we know how grim and plain weird it can be. Progress and acceptance are not only achieved by being able to talk in general terms about mental health, or by highlighting stories of recovery – true understanding means bluntly talking about the hopelessness, the fear and the ugliness of it all too. The writer Hannah Jane Parkinson has written about her life with bipolar disorder so honestly that it helps you to see the reality of her illness. She does this without any hushed tones, or half-measures. ‘There was the time I was sectioned and spent 22 hours in a “mental health suite” (read: a small, airless room with two chairs in it) waiting for a bed on an inpatient psychiatric ward (one was eventually found out of borough). There was being released from hospital after sectioning, therapy abruptly stopped, and having no continuing mental healthcare in place.’[20]
Anxiety doesn’t go away, it controls your life. It stays with you at parties, at work, when you’re with your loved ones on holiday, when you’re safe in your bed. It affects your day-to-day life in a way that normal worries don’t. If you’re worrying about a job interview, those nerves tend to go away after the meeting is over. An anxious person will have worries that will likely mushroom. The interview could go perfectly well but the worries will remain, expand, mutate. They’ve got a hold of you