I looked up a well-known business leader in London who was on the board of a growing microfinance organisation with extensive activity in India. At the end of the meeting he asked me if I would like to go there and see how I could contribute, and within two weeks I was on a plane to Chennai.
I ended up among some of the world’s poorest women and children. The children crept up in my lap and gave me eager hugs. The women lent me their children across borders of skin colour, language, religion, culture – and I was incredibly thankful for that. My heart couldn’t defend itself. They just crept right in, and I decided that I would process what I had experienced and turn it into light, for other people. It could begin here, with these people.
After a while I became CEO of the organisation in London. The world was my field of work, and I gained many insights into life and fates far beyond what I could have imagined. It gave me completely new perspectives, a completely new sense of humility.
During this time, I learned a vast amount about our complex world. I was able to do hard things, big things, and work with exceptional people from all backgrounds.
I met poor and vulnerable women in India, South Africa and Kenya and got to see the female power that helped give them the energy to start businesses to earn money for food and clothing . . . similar women, although with different skin colours, all over the world.
One day in Swaziland, the little mountain kingdom that lies in the blue haze of the southeastern corner of South Africa, I stood in front of a self-help women’s group where all – yes, all – of the women showed traces of abuse. It was so common in the village that no one reacted to a black eye, or even a broken arm. The women came with bowed heads to the self-help group that we supported, and they left with backs that were a little straighter than before. I didn’t even have words in my vocabulary to describe the struggle in their lives, the sorrow for those who became infected with HIV when their men had returned from working in the mines of South Africa.
It was huge and mind-opening to see all this. One day I was talking to donors at the world’s largest banks, and the next day I would meet with the world’s most vulnerable people. I got to see everything – all the great and wonderful things, all the fighting spirit but also the vulnerability and awfulness. All in the same week. I learned an incredible amount and gained perspective, and things fell into place.
But it took a hard toll on my body – all these constant long trips that were often taken in the middle of the night, on a plane to or from Asia or Africa, as the only woman and sometimes the only European. I visited airports in cities that I barely knew existed just a few years before.
On a midnight flight between Chennai and Doha, I met Indian guest workers who were on their way to Qatar to build roads and football stadiums. One man told me that they were treated almost like cattle and worked under extremely hard conditions. Several of his comrades had died in workplace accidents. Their eyes were desperate, their bodies sunken. I will never forget that night.
In this context it felt a little shameful to think about my own body, so I stopped thinking about it. I didn’t have time to think about it either, and with irregular meals and sporadic exercise, life began to wear me down. But just like with those oxygen masks – if you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t help anyone else either.
My first back strain came just like that, after three weeks of travel. I couldn’t get out of bed for three days. A few years later, I had constant back pain. I walked around with little pillows to tuck behind my back when I sat and wrote. There were little wedge-shaped pillows in my bag, a manifestation of my new old-lady life. Not that I had anything against old ladies – just the opposite. But I was only fifty-two, after all. What would the rest of my life be like?
And exercise? It had dissipated, turned into an unengaged, unconstructed kind of activity.
‘What was I going to do here?’ I might ask myself when I arrived at the gym and drifted around randomly among the machines. A little cycling here, some weights there. It wasn’t a catastrophe by any means. It just wasn’t me anymore.
It was simply as if a grey fog had draped itself over my life. The children were getting older, and a couple of them had already moved away from home. It was empty. Who was I now, without children at home?
Sometimes the thought came to me that life would never be really sunny again. Was it menopause? Or was it that I couldn’t move the way I used to anymore, now that my back had begun giving me trouble? The kids? I looked for explanations and had a hard time expressing what was missing. I just had a general feeling of malaise and depression.
That’s how my life was starting to go.
And now we’ve arrived at New Year’s, 2013. The moment of truth.
After the long trip home from Kenya, I can barely walk up the steep stairs in our house in London. I hoist the suitcase upstairs by swinging it, and my legs, in front of me step by step. This is the last straw. I lie down on the floor and put my legs up against the wall. Something has to be done. I send an emergency signal up to the higher powers and ask them to show me the way. It doesn’t take long for the answer to come, in my own head.
‘Why don’t you get in touch with that woman named Rita, who trained the blogger Tosca Reno?’
I Google Rita Catolino and find a number of pictures. Rita is, let me just say it, a blonde beauty with wonderful blue eyes, an open smile and an incredibly well-trained body. What strikes me most of all is that she’s glowing with health and strength. She has thousands of followers on social media. I myself have neither Facebook nor Instagram. It feels like a stretch for me to contact her.
A few years earlier, I had heard a good metaphor for inner dialogues – that inside every person is a struggle between two completely different beings. Or more specifically, it is the same being but different parts of the brain that are activated. One is the ape inside us, or the old parts, from an evolutionary standpoint, that lie in the centre of the brain. The ape is governed by basic reflexes. We react to threats, stay with the flock and take care of our offspring. We act on instinct, and catastrophe is always nearby. The other being, who acts inside us at the same time, is the human being, our higher self, which is guided by the frontal lobes, or outer parts of the brain. That’s where those skills are located that human beings acquired later in their evolution. That’s where we can use our good sense and plan ahead, but also interpret feelings in an empathetic way and withstand impulses that we know are confused or even dangerous for us.
My ape and my human being are now having a pretty heated inner dialogue.
‘She’s not going to want to take you on,’ says the ape.
‘Why not?’ says the human being.
‘Because you aren’t sharp enough. A hardworking career woman and mother with cellulite, fifty-two years old, doesn’t belong in her fitness world.’
‘That’s exactly why you need her,’ the human answers inside me. ‘She knows new things that you don’t know yet.’
‘But it’s expensive.’
‘What’s the cost of having a ruined back?’
‘What if she says no?’
‘What if she says yes?’
Finally, I send my email. And I get an incredibly friendly answer. I have to complete a long questionnaire, and Rita also tells me to keep a journal of everything I eat for three days.
It’s interesting to see what slips into my mouth during these days, especially one day when I have an early flight followed by a hard workday, and finish with a plane trip back in the evening. Hmm, let’s see . . . olives, nuts, rye crackers, a piece of chocolate, a little bottle of wine . . . When I read through the food