The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Well: Masking
"It took me a while to realise that is what I was doing, and how exhausting it was. At the time it was just surviving. In the only way I could work out how, to stay employed and still pay the bills."
[TW of suicidal thoughts]
Those around me this summer have heard me moan enviously about how everyone is in the Alps apart from me. ‘Who is in the Alps?’ a friend asked. So obviously not everyone, but many of my acquaintances. Either there on holiday, or many taking part in the UTMB races at the end of August, or other races, it seems that any time I open social media I saw their snow-capped mountains, as our summer rain lashed down on my windows in the Peak District.
In a few years, I hope to be able to have a trip there, but financially it’s not been something I could manage this year.
A photo of me in the Alps popped up in my memories though. It was 2019 and Marcus had a place in the 100-mile race, UTMB, one of the highlights of the ultrarunning calendar and a bucket list race for so many runners, including those I coach and know. It had been on my list once upon a time, and I had hovered above the entry page earlier in 2019, but Marcus then realised he had enough points to enter without the ballot, and it was to be his year. The race didn’t go well for Marcus. After a strong start, he was dropping places as I waited in the car outside Courmayeur, and he came in over an hour later complaining of a blister on his heel and that was his race over.
The next day we took a lift up into the mountains and took a little walk from the lift towards a glacier. What struck me was how normal I looked in the photos.
I was so ill at this time. Before April 2019 I was already feeling the fatigue creeping up again. I was waking in the early hours and couldn’t get back to sleep. Long runs had been cut short or missed altogether and I had slipped even further behind with work. At Easter, I caught a cold and almost overnight had become so much worse. Aching joints, a foggy head that couldn’t retain information, and waking up as if hungover and I had been hit by a bus each night. Even leaving my legal career and starting a job in an office hadn’t helped. It had made it worse. I was taking painkillers just to get out of bed, crying on the commute to the office because I felt so hopeless of ever getting better, barely being able to turn the steering wheel as my joints ached so much, and then having to find the energy to work out a new career and an office full of strangers each day.
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