shiny happy people

It’s been nearly 3 months since I updated this blog, and in that time I have written 3 posts that I haven’t published together with editing what might one day see the light of day as a book. I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to publish those posts yet, they were so painful to write, and so painful to read back that I think they need to rest awhile.

This is not my usual kind of post. Written across the space of just a few days, it is perhaps a less considered piece and more of a stream of consciousness ( well, more so than usual!). Prompted by a quote I came across recently ( I’m afraid I can’t remember who by) that said “We are a nation of unhappy people with happy photographs” – it really made me think. I don’t completely buy it, but I understand the sentiment. 

I was reminded of it this week when somebody I don’t know messaged me and said “I want your life”. And I thought, no, no you really don’t. I get those kind of messages every now and then. I don’t think they are ever sent with bad intention, but they are way off the mark. I’m guessing they are largely from people who have not followed me for long enough to understand the whole picture, of course, in part because I don’t write about all of the stuff all of the time.

24/7 emoting is possibly not a good look on anyone, and for many people I think social media is a place to escape and suspend reality, rather than meet it head on. I’ve written about this before, the tendency to curate what we share with the world and edit what we imagine is uninteresting, unattractive and showing ourselves in anything other than a favourable light. However. Comparison is the thief of joy. Perhaps for as many as are seeking escapism, there might be those who are seeking solidarity and reassurance that others are struggling too. There is a fear too, that if you share what is really going on, how you really feel -that you might make yourself vulnerable to the people that will tut and sigh and say – seriously, what do you have to complain about? 

For the vast majority of us, I don’t think it can truly be all bad, all of the time. Conversely it’s strange that we hold an expectation that things should always be great, that life should run smoothly, that we won’t ever experience challenges or hardship. Life isn’t like that is it? We all experience ups and downs every single day, and it’s all relative. A good day can be about big things – a new job, the birth of a baby, going on holiday – but it can also be about the small things – a long awaited flower coming into bloom in the garden, a walk in the sunshine, a postcard from a friend. The same is true of a bad day – they can be truly terrible – some devastating news, an accident, feeling really unwell, and they can consist of something seemingly inconsequential to others but comes as the final straw – recently for me it was the loss of a tenderly cultivated climbing rose. It was absolutely too much that day, and I took to my bed and wept. 

So what’s going on for me? It’s 6am on a Sunday morning and I am sitting at the dining room table with a bucket of strong tea and just the dog for company. The rest of the house is sleeping. I am so sleep deprived I genuinely wonder if I’ll ever sleep properly again. I feel demented by a lack of sleep and I have become obsessive about how little I am getting, which I am sure is adding to my sleeplessness. It’s an ever decreasing circle. 

Anxiety is never far away but it has really taken hold of me in recent months. The summer, for all of it’s lovely moments, was incredibly stressful in many ways. Anxiety has been horribly omnipresent, casting a shadow over most, but not all days. There have been days of vast and terrible existential angst, and there have been days of obsessing about the cleanliness (or not) of my kitchen, or whether my older boys will ever eat a vegetable ever again, or if the Hermes guy will ever come and collect that parcel. And pretty much everything in between. Taken together there are not many days when I don’t feel anxiety’s long arms tightening their grasp around me and pressing me into submission. Anxiety can make me go into manic overdrive, and it can paralyse me with fear. 

Eventually, living with pretty much constant anxiety bites you in the arse. Around two weeks ago, I was sitting in a Board meeting in London, somewhat inconveniently, right next to the Chair. One minute I felt fine and then suddenly, boom. I felt as if my heart was going to bust out of my chest. This has been happening on and off for around 18 months, but it has been coming more frequently, more suddenly, and more violently than before.

Like a switch had been flicked, I felt my heart racing, working overtime, like some sort of comedy moment in a cartoon where it was literally jumping out into the room. I could hear blood being pumped around my veins very clearly. I looked around, would anyone notice? I felt overwhelmingly sick. Shaking, I got my iphone out and took my heart rate under the table. Almost 150 bpm. Sweat sprang from nowhere, my hands were cold, so cold, and wet. I spoke quietly to the Chair, “I’m not well, I need to find somewhere to lie down”. The room was swimming.

Some forty minutes later I was wired up to an ECG machine with two paramedics asking a flurry of questions. My heart rate had dipped slightly, but every time they asked me to try and sit up it jumped again. Up, down, up, down. My hands and feet were alternatively full of pins and needles or a dead weight. My eyes couldn’t focus – I felt as if they were flickering and darting frantically around the room. I was hyperventilating and sweating and tears came and this time I thought, I am so frightened. I wake up frightened and I go to sleep frightened and I wake from sleep in the dead of night frightened and I am completely and utterly exhausted by it. It has just made me weep to write it. 

A colleague, Julie, an ex-nurse, was in the room with me, talking steadily and quietly in my ear, reminding me over and over to breathe. We have shared similar and yet different issues with our children and she understands how things have been. Quietly, insistently, in between the reminders to breathe came something else. Something has to give. You need to protect yourself, you can’t fix everything and you need to stop trying. I know, I said, I know. But how do you begin to stop?

A discussion. The paramedics decide that they are taking me to UCLH. No, I say, I’ll be fine in a while. I just need to rest. No, they say, and I am extracted from the building, as they call it, feeling like a prize exhibit. The building is old, like a rabbit warren, and I am on the second floor in what must be the world’s smallest medical room and they decide a stretcher is out of the question, a wheelchair being the only option to get me out of there. They bring it towards me and ask me to inch off the bed and onto it and as I do I feel a rush of something and tip headfirst towards it. They are of course prepared. One of them takes a call and gets the news that she has become a grandma for the first time. She looks about 38. She shows me a photo of the baby, which has just been born at UCLH, where we are heading, and I burst into floods of tears and say how happy I am for her and can only think of the unbridled hope that new life brings and just how far away from that I feel. 

We get outside and it’s as if all my senses are in a state of high alert. I can’t bear the bright sunshine and noise of Euston Road and the people, all the people. I’m aware that my jumpsuit is undone and I still have wires and pads all over me and for a second I laugh to myself and think of my dear mum saying “noone is interested in looking at you” and of course, she is right, in the main. Apart from mild curiosity in just a few, the world keeps on turning. The ambulance is in a side street and we navigate over bumpy cobbles before I am strapped to a stretcher inside. It seems like such a fuss. “This is such a fuss” I say, and they say, your heart rate is heading for 170 bpm, and my hands feel like lead weights and for once I shut up. Siren, lights, we head what turns out to be literally about 800 yards up the road to UCLH. “Oh” I say, “Oh”. I could have walked here. “No” they say, “you couldn’t” and they unload me and we set off through the ambulance entrance and they say, “look left” and I do, and I see what seems like half of London sitting in individual plastic cubicles in the waiting area and I feel overwhelmingly thankful to be strapped to a stretcher looking up at a strip light full of long expired flies.

All of life was in resus that day. I spent around six hours waiting for this result and that result, answering questions, not bleeding when they needed blood, listening to my heart whooshing in my ears. A wildly agitated woman was running up and down the unit, being chased by two police officers, periodically screaming “I know my rights, you can’t touch me. If you touch me I’ll have you”. Nobody turned a hair. It is clearly the usual backdrop to their day’s work. 

More police arrived and brought a woman into the bay next to me. At first unconscious, over the course of the next 6 hours, her life unfolded in front of me. Beaten unconscious and unrecognisable by her boyfriend, she had been found on the street by the police. She was later told that she was pregnant, then that she had DKA. I lay in the bed in the next cubicle, listening to her plead over and over for hours and hours in the quietest of voices, “please help me”. And I cried and I cried, for her, for her unborn baby, and for humanity. 

I cried for myself too, suddenly overcome with what felt like inappropriate self-pity, lying there in my smart work clothes with my laptop in my smart handbag. I felt like I was taking up too much space in resus, too much space in that hospital, too much space in the world. It didn’t feel like a legitimate use of NHS resources, taking up far too much space in an overstretched system that really didn’t need to be treating me for tachycardia brought on by anxiety. As if to demonstrate that point, a harassed junior doctor wonders out loud if they can get me to wait in a chair. Every single bed in the hospital was now full. The corridors were full. The trolleys were full. He looked at my notes. “Damn” he said, “she can’t sit up” and he squeaked off in his crocs to see who else he could weed out of a bed. They were full, full, full and the system was creaking. I was embarrassed by my occupancy of that bed. I thought about discharging myself but I knew I wasn’t steady enough to be able to walk out of the ward, let alone get back from London. So I lay there listening to the utter bedlam going on all around me and let my thoughts overwhelm me again. Hours of asking what have I achieved? Not in the sense of what do I have to show for myself, but more, what contribution can I actually say I have made in this world? It came back again, like it always does, you have failed as a mother, so what else have you got? I think of little M, just starting secondary school and already in counselling for anxiety, still sleepless at night and roaming from room to room. He’s caught it from me – I think – and I know that this is at once ridiculous but also that it rings true – for what else has he witnessed for a good deal of his life? A mother on the edge of reason for much of the time, a mother stretched far too thin, a mother barely clinging on. 

In that moment I was reminded of Julie, whispering to me as I was in that medical room – “you are doing too much. What can you give up? When will you put yourself first?” and of course, we don’t, do we? We are conditioned to give.  

Except I am starting to think that something really does need to give. If I was a friend advising me, I would tell myself unequivocally that I should put myself first. That it’s not selfish, but that it’s critical. That I cannot be on form to look after anyone else if I haven’t attended to my own needs. That it’s not my job to fix everything and everyone and make things ok. 

I am full. Full of worry, anxiety, fear, despair, hope, love, regret, duty, responsibility, anger. It’s a whole lot of feeling with little to no outlet, other than writing these words on this page. And so it manifests itself in insomnia, in throwing up, in my hair falling out, in tachycardia, dark circles under my eyes, nerve pain, the shakes. I feel about a hundred years old some days. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have good days, and good moments. Far from it, being so incredibly anxious means that I really can and do appreciate the times when the clouds part and I can feel the sun on my face. I love to laugh. It is one of the single most joyous things I can do. It’s possible to feel all of these things, perhaps not simultaneously but certainly in quick succession. We can be haunted by anxiety and yet have good days. We can be generally really resilient and yet have a panic attack. It’s so important not to label others, or to be quick to judge.

It’s now Tuesday. My heart rate hit 180bpm this morning before diving around 30 seconds later to around 80. It is following me around and once again, I had another paramedic this morning asking me what I think is causing this. Life, I say. In answer to the person who really wants my life, you almost certainly really don’t. 

So what is the purpose of writing this today? I guess for those of you who are lucky enough not to be plagued by anxiety, here is a window on my world, and that of many others. We are not brave, nor are we flaky. In fact, I think anxiety is the by-product of the relentless march and folly of continuing to soldier on. 

And for those of you who know all of this all too well, I see you. You aren’t alone.

“I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, will the earth turn as it was taught, and if not how shall I correct it? Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven. can I do better? Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows can do it and I am, well, hopeless. Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it, am I going to get rheumatism, lockjaw, dementia? Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang”. Mary Oliver