Bella Mackie - Jog On: How Running Saved My Life

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.WillamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright Isabella Mackie 2018

Illustrations by Anna Morrison

Cover design and illustration by Anna Morrison

Bella Mackie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008241759

Ebook Edition November 2018 ISBN: 9780008241742

Version: 2018-11-30

For George,
who was as brave as anyone I ever met,
and to whom I owe most things.

CONTENTS

I ran for three minutes today. In the dark, slowly, and not all in one go. Thats three minutes more than Ive ever run in my life. Im out of breath and Ive got a stitch and I already feel better than I have in years. Thats enough for a first attempt. Now I can go back home and have a cry. Or some wine.

Even as I lay on the floor of my sitting room, watching my husbands feet walking quickly towards the door, I was already thinking about what was to come. When a marriage breaks down, there will be unbearable sadness, awkward questions, sometimes embarrassment. I could imagine all of them. Staring down at the rug, my mind had jumped ahead, blurrily plotting out the impending future. I even started to vaguely compile the inevitable playlist of terrible songs that I knew would be belting out mournfully at 4 a.m. for weeks to come.

I have learnt now that the actual moment of heartbreak can be astonishingly brief. Its not always the drawn-out disintegration you imagine it might be as an adult, bits of love and comfort slowly breaking off over years, until theres nothing left to say at all. Sometimes it happens in a flash, takes you by surprise, gives you no time to prepare. Someone stands across from you, looks directly into your eyes and tells you that they are leaving you, that they no longer love you, that they have found someone else, that you are not enough, and you think: Oh, so this is the moment that I am going to die. I cant possibly get through this. Somewhere, something in your body has savagely ruptured, and all you can think to do is to lie down on the floor and wait to be invited to walk down the inevitable tunnel of light.

I dont know which way is worse. Both are hideous, most break-ups are. I once heard a story about a couple in a restaurant who ate in total silence for over an hour. When coffee came, the husband whispered something to the wife, who hissed back: Its not the coffee, its the last twenty-five years. A slow crumbling like that would be pretty appalling. But when youre given the surprise approach, the moment of impact feels brutally physical. Despite this shock, its also, weirdly, the easy bit. Because sooner or later, you realise that youre not going to die. And you cant even stare blankly at the carpet for too long because you have to pick up your kids from school, or walk the dog, or go to work. Maybe you just need to pee. Your pain doesnt even stand up to the most mundane demands of an idle Monday. And after this unwelcome realisation, you see the future quite clearly: youll stumble through this moment. But it takes such a long time. Heartbreak is brief. The way out of it is interminable, and sometimes you resent even having to try.

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 didnt 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 cant 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, Id come up with ways to cope with my worries and irrational thoughts, none of them successful. Id spit if I had a scary idea, or blink hard to expel it. Id 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, Id had years of this. I (honestly) couldnt 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 didnt know what to do next. Everything was draped in fear.

Anxiety is a slippery, sneaky thing. Its an illness that manifests itself in so many different ways that its often not diagnosed until the sufferer is absolutely desperate. You might spend years having panic attacks you dont even recognise as panic attacks. You might assume that youre seriously unwell, as though youre 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 theyre just thoughts and cant hurt you, you might spend years trying to neutralise and silence them. All of this can make you severely depressed, as if you dont 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.