It was in the years just before I sought help for my increasingly depressive episodes when body dysmorphia had its strongest hold on me. I was only nineteen years old when BDD eroded my life to the extent that it consisted of me staring into a small, round mirror, propped up on a tatty windowsill in a student bedroom. Of course, I knew then that my mental health was wavering and I was perilously hanging off a cliff over the deepest abyss, but I had no idea of the condition I was suffering from along with my bipolar, depressive states.
Like then, life feels to have fallen into a dark, helpless place. I’m not able to run, and I don’t yet have a plan for managing the demons rampaging through my mind. I simply go from day to day in a fog of confusion, desperately wondering when my ‘normality’ will return. And what’s worse is that the small, round mirror which sat and bewitched me on my windowsill in my teens has now magically transformed into a large, fancy Farrow & Ball one which lives above the fireplace in my front room. It has come back to reacquaint itself with me, and I’m completely devastated that it has.
* * *
I’ve been told to make sure that I’m in a ‘quiet, safe space’ and to ‘allow anything up to two hours’ for my chat with the psychologist from the Karolinska Institutet. I’ve made sure that I will have the house to myself – I’ve tidied up the attic bedroom and told my Other Half in no uncertain terms that I must not be disturbed between the hours of 1 and 3 p.m. I’ve washed – and excessively straightened – my hair, and given myself every opportunity to maximise this chance: the chance to finally get help in dealing with the monster under my skin.
I feel anxious, as though I’m about to put myself in front of a NASA space flight panel selection interview. I’m pacing around the house. I’ve been to the toilet as many times as I possibly can, and I’ve walked up and down three flights of stairs at least fifteen times – no doubt against my physiotherapist’s advice – to check on my overly-straightened hair before my scheduled video assessment call with the unknown Dr G.
A man’s face suddenly appears on my screen: he has dark hair and warm, intelligent eyes. I can feel my heart beating fast in my chest as Dr G introduces himself to me. The first thing I notice is that he looks much younger than I expected, and he has a strong American accent. Today is only an assessment, but I feel distracted. There is a small screen in the corner of my MacBook in which I can see myself.
FUCKING HELL, THIS IS THE WORST POSSIBLE START!
I’m too acutely aware of how I may look to him somewhere in the highfalutin medical research centre over in Sweden.
Surely this is proof enough that I’m consumed by this bastard thing?
I can’t even have a Skype video call without being haunted by my own image staring back at me from the corner of a screen. But things move on at a rapid pace. First, Dr G needs to establish whether I suffer from BDD as I claim, and – if I do – then he needs to assess the severity. His questions begin in swift succession.
Q: ‘Do you compare aspects of your appearance with others? Please select from the following: not at all; a little; often; a lot; all the time.’
A: ‘Yes. A lot.’
Q: ‘Do you check your appearance in mirrors and other reflective surfaces? Please select: not at all; a little; often; a lot; all the time.’
A: ‘Yes. A lot.’
Q: ‘Do you avoid mirrors and other reflective surfaces, or looking at photos and/or videos of yourself? Not at all; a little; often; a lot; all the time.’
I’m becoming confused. The questions seem to contradict each other. Yes, I check in the mirror far too often, but there are also times when I will actively avoid looking at myself in photos or videos for fear of what I may see. I have a mini flashback to some advocacy training I was required to do as part of my legal qualification. I suffered a panic attack over being filmed for the final assessment, and refused to watch the video back, almost failing the module as a result.
The questions continue, I get more confused, and my mind is becoming tired with the rapid-fire interrogation, and the complex questions I am answering over and over again. I’m no longer thinking fully about my answers – I don’t have any time to work my way through the confusion. Monosyllabic, instinctive words come out of my mouth in response to Dr G’s relentless probing, and I scan desperately around the room to see if I have a glass of water somewhere, because I have a banging headache and my mouth is dry.
‘Thanks so much, Rachel. That’s the assessment complete.’
I glance at the clock and realise that I’ve been under the prying, assessing eyes of Dr G for almost exactly two hours, now. It feels like I’ve been put through a fast-spin cycle in the tumble drier but at least I’ve stopped focusing on the small square in the corner of the screen with my own face in it, tying myself in knots at my many dubious facial expressions. I no longer have the energy to care – maybe this is all part of the therapy.
We end the call and I’m honestly too tired to even mind whether I get accepted onto the programme or not. And I wonder: Is this what the therapy will feel like?
6
THE CACKY-BROWN CYCLING SHORTS
2009
Maggie is standing at our front door. She looks every bit the keen cyclist, dressed head-to-toe in colour-coordinated high-vis Endura cycling gear, along with her Merry Band of Mountain-Biking Women, who are gathered, chatting away, with their fancy bikes flashing like Christmas trees on our driveway. I, meanwhile, am wearing an ancient pair of Chris’s oversized cacky-brown cycling shorts, the crotch swinging loosely somewhere around my knees, and a dodgy old Regatta raincoat. His helmet feels (and looks) like a colander on my head.
‘OK, Rach, you ready to go?’ Maggie asks, before I’ve even had a chance to explain to her that I DON’T HAVE A BIKE OF MY OWN; I’VE BORROWED CHRIS’S BIKE … AND I DON’T KNOW HOW TO RIDE IT. Just one thing,’ she says before turning to join the rest of her Lycra-clad girly gang. ‘Do you have anything hi-vis you can put on? It can get a bit dodgy on the climb up to Stoodley Pike, and you’d be best wearing something bright to make sure you can be seen.’
Chris suddenly dives into a plastic bag which is hanging behind the front door and hands me a couple of snap-on illuminous yellow arm bands. I snap them onto each arm, and then I know with absolute certainty that I now look like a person who has never been on a bike before, and possibly one who will never go on one again. But I don’t care about aesthetics, just now. On hearing the words ‘Stoodley Pike’, everything else stops. You see, I know exactly what that is. It’s a famous local monument which dominates the Calder Valley skyline. It also happens to be placed on top of a 1,300-foot mountain, which – it would appear – I’m expected to be cycling up tonight with my newfound group of girlie cycling friends. Worse still, I’m fully aware that the route to the summit of Stoodley Pike is not tarmacked. Not at all. It’s a rough, unsurfaced, rocky, lumpy track scattered with boulders, potholes, tree roots and a million other obstacles which I know with absolute certainty I have NO CHANCE of cycling up/over/around or across … least of all IN THE FUCKING DARK!
Just as I feel myself about to fill my borrowed oversized cacky-brown cycling shorts, the offensively coordinated Girly Cycling Clique are making a move. Everyone, and every bike, suddenly begins to flash and then move. I quickly hop on board my loaned Specialized man-sized mountain bike, and instinctively start to pedal. I’m immediately aware that my handlebars feel to be so wide that I now have a virtual wingspan.
We haven’t cycled further than a few steady ‘chatty’ miles through the local village and onto a main road before we turn off and into the climb. My heart begins to race, and I feel my eyes widen like a field mouse on sudden alert of a sky filled with circling, impending doom. Do I have special night vision? I wonder. I have never noticed how sharp my vision is before. That said, Chris’s centrally-mounted expensive LED light is bright enough to replace all the bulbs in the freezer aisle at Sainsbury’s. oh well, I may be completely out of my depth on this ride, but at least I c
an see!
With one blessing, however, comes a curse: I can see … absolutely everything. We are now climbing up an off-road, loose, gnarly track. All the ladies in the Girly Cycling Clique are ahead of me, and they’re chatting away up in front. I vaguely tune into some diatribe relating to a recent dinner party which required a change of location for each of the five courses. ‘We made pea and goat’s cheese risotto for starters,’ Kathy chirps from somewhere in the distance, ‘but I was disappointed with it, to be honest.’ I drift in and out of the conversation as my new Night Vision eyes seem only able to fixate on the largest boulders in my path ahead. When ι stare at the most gargantuan obstacle in my way, without fail it guarantees my front wheel then seeks out that very thing. I wrestle my wheel from collision with a large rock, and the bike skids to a halt. My big toe mercifully touches the ground before my knees do, but the Girly Cycling Clique haven’t noticed.
‘… But how AMAZING was your salmon en croute, Penny?’ Kathy shouts across to her friend, who appears to be riding over entirely smooth terrain, and not the endless, wretched obstacle course I’m faced with on every revolution of the wheels. ‘You must give me the recipe. Me and Pete were totally pissed after that bottle of fizz! God only knows how we even made it across for Maggie’s crème brûlée!’
Meanwhile, I’m now off my bike. All I can see ahead of me are lumps, bumps and boulders. The others are cycling along, still chatting. My arms and shoulders ache from holding them in the permanent wingspan position, and my arse is beginning to feel sore from sitting on Chris’s saddle, which is actually a blade. Every time I think about jumping back onto it, I see another boulder or tree root in the near distance, and my confidence nose-dives once more.
And then it goes completely dark: the battery in my Sainsbury’s freezer-aisle LED light has died. Chris has (wrongly) assumed that there would be enough charge left in it for a short ‘girly’ ride, but this isn’t one of those. It’s a prolonged, off-road, technically challenging night ride with a bunch of women who are completely oblivious to the fact that I’m struggling to ride with them whilst they natter on about how pissed they were for the cheese course of last weekend’s Come Dine with Me-inspired supper crawl. Personally, I cannot think of anything worse than trudging from one house to another feeling increasingly nauseous as the risotto churns with salmon, which in turn collides with the crème brûlée and is all washed down with a gallon of Zinfandel and overpriced, fizzy pink stuff, left over from a badly attended Christmas party. Least of all whilst I’m struggling to remain upright on a bike.
‘MAGGIE! KRISTIE!’ I call out to the illuminous flashing lights bobbing up and down some way ahead of me, and gradually disappearing into the distance. They all come to a sudden stop.
‘Rachel? Are you OK? What’s going on?’ Maggie calls down from her position as leader of the Girly Cycling Clique peloton.
‘It’s my light. The battery’s gone, and I can’t see where I’m riding!’ I holler back up to her. I hear a few muffled words, and then one of the girls calls down to me: ‘Come and ride with me. Stay close, and you can follow my light.’
So that’s what I do. I stay close to Kristie – or at least I try to – but once again I seem to attract every bastard tree root and pothole on the track, and Kristie can barely keep moving forwards twenty feet before she must stop and wait for me to wiggle and wobble my way over more loose rocks.
‘Try to stop looking at the boulders,’ she says, on the fortieth pause she has had to make in the space of five minutes. ‘If you focus on the obstacles, then you’ll gravitate towards them – that’s what’s happening!’ she continues, beginning to sound a little exasperated that she is the one having to literally guide me up the rocky track on a dark night, with one shared light between us. She has definitely pulled the short straw. ‘Trust your bike to roll over the ground, Rach, and look a little way ahead of you, not down to your wheels.’
So I take her advice literally, and it works. I feel slightly more confident looking ahead rather than down, and I’m not so panicked by every single loose rock I now refuse to set my eyes on. But I also feel frustrated and humiliated. Frustrated because I couldn’t just hop onto Chris’s mountain bike and ride with the Girly Cycling Clique as I’d hoped. I have no idea what made me imagine that I could ride with them without any kind of skill, knowledge or mountain biking experience whatsoever, but I had put that pressure on myself. And I’ve failed to live up to my own ridiculously high expectations. Worse still, I feel humiliated – like I’ve been set up to fail. Rightly or wrongly, the Girly Cycling Clique seem to have presumed that I have a level of biking knowledge and ability which I simply don’t possess. I have misjudged everything about the ride, and I arrive home in a state of semi-shock that I’ve just experienced the Bike Ride from Hell, with a group of other women who seemed to find it a doddle.
‘Bloody hell, Rach!’ Chris says, standing in the porch with the front door wide open as I finally return home. ‘You look – erm – are you OK?’
It’s nearing 10 p.m. on a cold, dark Wednesday night in mid-November. And I’m not OK.
‘The lights failed,’ I whimper back, but I simply can’t go into any further detail about the horror I’ve just experienced. ‘The batteries died.’
‘Oh God! I had no idea you’d be out for that long. I wondered what had happened to you. Where the hell did you go?’ He looks genuinely concerned.
‘No matter. I’m back now,’ I say, trudging up the stairs to bed. ‘I won’t be needing to borrow your bike again, either.’
My final thoughts before falling into the deepest sleep: I fucking hate cycling, and I will never cycle again.
I’m too tired to notice or care that I’m still wearing Chris’s cacky-brown cycling shorts.
7
DENIAL
Desperate for some inspiration, I’ve been fixated on reading world champion obstacle racer Amelia Boone’s recent blogs about her recovery from no less than TWO fractures to her femur (the thigh bone, and the strongest bone in the body) whilst at the very peak of her elite obstacle racing career. For the unenlightened, ‘Tough Mudders’ are ten- to twelve-mile muddy obstacle course races, where participants overcome various unpleasantries such as submerging themselves into pools of icy water, climbing up fifteen-foot rope ladders, jumping into clay pits and scrambling up impossibly muddy banking on the other side.
In my own mini, pathetic soap opera of a personal disaster, it’s helping me to know that someone like Amelia has been hit a hundred times harder, has fallen from a far greater height, and has somehow managed to pick up the pieces from a broken heart of shattered racing dreams.
HALLELUJAH! It is possible!
And here I am, with a niggle to my left calf from which I am – at times – seemingly inconsolable. What does that say about my so-called ‘inner strength’, my ability to handle even mild adversity, and the state of my already questionable mental health? I feel mentally weak right now, but I’m encouraged by her story and so I focus on the possibility that I can come back from this sad place.
My BIG goal for today is to run: I will try to run two measly, painfully slow miles. Just like a heat-seeking missile, that is my only aim.
Once Mini Me and her last few remaining chicken pox scabs are collected from school, I plan to drive down to Copley village. I will park next to the canal and, surreptitiously, get changed under a winter coat whilst squirming around in the driver’s seat, trying hard not to sit on and therefore release the handbrake. I will then head off running – one mile out along the canal – and then one mile back to the car. Even writing it down sounds so ridiculously easy.
I park up and a few well-timed contortions later, I’m changed and ready to run. My nerves are building as I ask myself, ‘Am I ready for this? Is my leg ready to run yet?’
Sadly, I already know the answer, but denial is a cruel and powerful thing.
Ignoring everything happening around me, I set off running. But every step is laboured, and the
pain in my left calf is now precisely that – there is no confusion with tightness.
‘Are you all right, love?’ a kindly dog-walker asks as I hobble along the canal, tears streaming down my face.
‘Yes, thank you,’ I manage to squeak in response before arriving back to the safety of my car, where I sit at the steering wheel and sob uncontrollably because I know for certain that this isn’t just about the running, it’s about so much more than that. This is about my ability to manage the Bastard Chimp who is now rampaging through my mind, and is actively setting out to destroy all the progress I have made over the last seven Prozac-free years. In fact, this is now making me question whether I’ve progressed at all.
‘I think my running is over!’ I send my Other Half a WhatsApp message as I sit, devastated, at the wheel of my car, which is strewn with clothing, and feels to be a messy, chaotic mirror of my flailing mind.
‘Don’t be silly, Rach. You’re catastrophising! Your leg just needs more time to recover, you know that,’ his message back to me reads.
I appreciate that he’s being as rational as he possibly can be without being offensive, because I know that in my current highly distressed state, I’m very easy to offend. I also realise that I’m being melodramatic, extremely emotional, and I’m lacking any sense of logical reasoning whatsoever. But in this moment, that’s precisely how I feel: I’ve lost a part of myself, and I can’t even imagine getting it back.
Later that evening, my Other Half decides to give me his Valentine’s Day gift. He desperately wants to cheer me up following my earlier disappointment down by the canal. I know that he’s planned something special, and he waits to give me his gift when I’m not otherwise occupied reading bedtime stories to a scabby young child. Still fragile and fatigued from today’s emotional roller coaster, I have absolutely no idea what is coming.
A Midlife Cyclist Page 5
