rickshaws and the sex shops. I kept going, like a neurotic Forrest Gump, until I physically couldn’t go any further. And when I stopped, I wandered around. The pit in my stomach wasn’t raw, I wasn’t checking my breathing – I didn’t notice my body at all. I was able to take in my surroundings and enjoy them. I felt triumphant. I felt … happy.
When you do something that allows you a respite from misery, it can be hard not to get addicted to it. We all know that just as a person who uses drugs and alcohol can quickly become dependent on them, and in a different way, the same can be said of exercise. The rush I experienced that made me feel so happy that day in central London can be hard to say goodbye to, even briefly. Once you’ve found something that makes you feel halfway to normal, why would you not step it up? After all, exercise is healthy – we’re constantly being told to do more of it by our doctors, the media and now increasingly by Instagram stars and vloggers who preach about clean eating and physical exertion. But for someone who is looking for a crutch, or a way to feel less lost, exercise can move quite quickly from enabling you to dominating you. Although there are comparatively few studies on exercise addiction, one from 2012 found that 3 per cent of gym-goers fit the description of an addict, and another study suggested that number might be more like 25 per cent for amateur runners.[19] It can be extremely hard to notice when something that you feel is doing you good begins to take over your life.
Every person will have their own measure for how much is too much, but my criteria would include the following: Would you say no to a night out because you don’t want a hangover before a big workout? What about never having lunch with colleagues because you use that time to run? Or might you get panicky when there’s a weekend wedding coming up because you worry that you’ll miss a gym session? I would have to reluctantly say yes to two of these questions (I will absolutely run through a hangover, come on), because at times, running has unquestionably become an obsession for me. The utter joy I found in the absence of panic attacks, irrational thoughts and all the other symptoms that anxiety brings with it (there are over a hundred, just try to beat me) was intoxicating. Feel that heady haze often enough and it becomes easy to turn down other things. Online, you’ll quickly find countless stories of people who have made very real sacrifices in their lives to maintain their exercise routine – people doing workouts three times a day, those who would panic if they missed a cycle or a swim but became exhausted from the commitment. And this goes against what the person hoped it would do in the beginning. Running was something that allowed me to have a life – a real life, with friends and new experiences and even risk. It was a wonderful means to an end, but it was never meant to be my whole life.
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
