by Nick Duerden
What it seems ultimately to do is help you focus on an idea and reassess it. Jess says it has been a profound help to her in her recovery. She encourages us now to give it a go. After tapping, she says, we might feel that the problem has disappeared, or else reduced in intensity. Perhaps it – whatever ‘it’ may be – has moved to somewhere else in the body.
But my fatigue seems to me less specific than an ‘it’. It’s all over, so after I tap, nothing moves anywhere; I feel no different. I appreciate the intent, certainly: to look within yourself, to a deeper level than you have looked before. To take stock, to echo the literal breath with a metaphorical one, to change harmful thought processes, and to relax.
And it is relaxing, and I do it, over the next many, many weeks, because I am told to. While doing it, I ponder again on whether I am a particular Type, and whether some deeply buried denial is stopping me from seeing this, recognising it and working against it. I wonder again whether I might have depression. I do not believe myself to be the depressive type, but if I ever had cause to be depressed in my life, it is certainly now.
And so I go online and take a depression test.
Do you have difficulty falling asleep at night? reads the first question.
No.
How often do you feel tired and run down?
Right now, all the time.
In the last six months, have you gained weight or lost a lot (not due to dieting)?
No.
Has your sex drive become seriously diminished?
Not seriously, no. (Mercifully.) But diminished, yes, a little, because I am so often asleep these days.
Has a parent or sibling been diagnosed with a depressive order?
Diagnosed, no; depressed, yes.
Do you often feel like life is not worth living?
No.
How would you rate your daily levels of stress and anxiety?
In relation to fatigue, high; to everything else? Medium.
Do you experience delusions or hallucinations?
No.
Do you put on a happy face to hide feelings of sadness?
In company, yes.
Have you been through a recent traumatic event, such as divorce, death of a loved one, losing your job?
No.
Have you developed food cravings, particularly for carbs or junk food?
No.
Do you have suicidal tendencies?
No.
It concluded by saying: If you have answered yes to at least half the questions, then you might be depressed.
Though I imagine a doctor would conduct a more thorough test than a few simple questions posted online by God knows who, I take this to mean I am not depressed. But my mind undoubtedly resides these days in a perpetually anxious state, and so it is this I need to work on, in capital letters. STOP!
I am, initially, a diligent student. I STOP! all the time, dozens of times a day, though I never do quite manage hundreds, and I practice EFT frequently, but always privately. The self-consciousness over tapping parts of my body never quite recedes. Done alone in my room, I am fine; I go with it, hopeful and optimistic. But being caught in the act by a curious four-year-old does little to assist the positive affirmation on its way.
‘What’s Daddy doing?’ Evie asks Elena one day.
In time, what I am doing becomes my ‘thing’, as in: ‘I’m just going upstairs to do my . . . thing’. And if my daughters enquire as to what doing my ‘thing’ entails, I simply tell them ‘work’.
My affirmation is always the same: ‘I believe I am fully able to heal and recover’. I repeat it with as much sincerity as I can muster, but soon enough the repetition kills it, and the affirmation merely becomes repeated words. They start to sound empty, hollow.
On my third and final day at the clinic, I book the recommended additional appointment with the nutritionist. Nutrition is an important component to the maintenance of health, of course, but it is often hugely influential in the treatment of, and recovery from, fatigue-related conditions. My nutritionist is Tara, a lovely woman in her 40s, supermodel skinny, with long, flowing auburn hair and an appealing disregard for clock-watching. My costly session with her lasts an hour, but she is still asking me questions 90 minutes later. I point this out to her rather self-consciously, and she laughs. ‘Oh, I’m always running over,’ she says.
The sleepy IT guy in my group had recommended Tara. ‘She completely changed my diet,’ he told me in a manner I couldn’t help but receive as a threat: his lunch now was pulses, his drink, hot water. But then the IT guy had already boasted about his previously poor diet of liquid lunches and late-night microwave meals. He had had a lot of wrongs to right.
Tara says that my pre-existing diet is fairly decent. My mother’s lingering influence, I tell her. My formative diet was a belligerently healthy one. By the time I escaped her influence, first living with a girlfriend and then alone, I was cooking for myself on a Baby Belling, and forcefully rebelling. I had discovered Bernard Matthews’ chief contribution to a hungry world, Turkey Drummers, which I ate with potato waffles, neither of which took up much space in my compact freezer. My 5 A Day invariably comprised cherry tomatoes, five of them. Or, if sliced in half before serving, 10. After a lifetime of granary and wholemeal, Mother’s Pride was a daily luxury, and I had a weekend thing for pork pies, and, after drinking with friends, Chinese takeaways or KFC family buckets. Ben & Jerry provided dessert.
But by my early 40s, and laden with fatherhood, I happily fell under the influence of my far healthier wife, and back onto a diet of which my mother would have approved.
But Tara isn’t about to give me 90 minutes of her time without making recommendations, and there are plenty. She wants to know what I have for lunch, my caffeine intake. She suggests I cut down on bread and eat more eggs, perhaps with rye crackers. Porridge for breakfast, or some wheat-free muesli. She insists on fish. I do not like fish. Pollock, she lies, has a far more gentle taste than other fish, like cod or tuna. She tells me to buy oatcakes, hummus. No more crisps, but rather nuts, seeds. Broccoli, spinach, kale. If I ever crave soy sauce, have tamari instead, which is wheat-free. Protein shakes are terrific, boosting the immune system and supporting the liver with antioxidants. Plain yogurt only, no more honey. For the past few months I have been spoon-feeding myself manuka honey, which promises antibacterial and energy-boosting qualities, straight from the jar.
‘Yes, but what about your teeth?’ Tara asks.
I stop buying manuka honey. Agave, she says, is a good sweet substitute. Think natural, organic. Replace Sainsbury’s, even Waitrose, with Whole Foods, Food for Thought. Snack on pumpkin seeds, sunflowers, Brazil nuts, hazelnuts, walnuts, flaxseeds. Cut down on salt, sugar. ‘And no more alcohol, at least for the time being. Think you can manage that?’
Towards the end of the clinic’s three-day course, Jess tells us a joke. ‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.’
It isn’t funny, but then it isn’t that kind of joke. Instead, it serves as a warning, reminding us that if we really want to get better, then we have to work at it. It is up to us.
As she wraps up, I suddenly feel genuinely fond of everyone I have come to know these past three days. We shake hands, hug and wish each other well. Jess encourages us to keep in touch, saying it is useful to touch base frequently, to be there for one another. And though we all promise to do so, none of us quite manage to.
Unless, of course, they all keep in touch without including me? (Classic Anxiety Type.)
When I leave the building, on a freezing Friday night, Elena and the girls are there to greet me. I haven’t seen them for three days – incapable of the daily commute, I stayed with a friend who lived nearby – and I am so very glad to see them. Under my arm, I carry my folder, 150 pages I will have to read, then read again, in the hope that I have the mental capacity to take it all in.
‘What’s that?’ Evie asks.
Truthfully, I reply, ‘Work.’
The girl
s are hungry, so we stop at a nearby Pizza Express, me negotiating the walk from the car to the restaurant in my still customary maladaptive manner, stuck in a helpless fear that will keep me in a negative loop for many dark months to come. I order a pizza from what the menu promises is its new healthier range. It has a hole in the middle, into which is plonked a few leaves of lettuce. Less dough, new me.
The clinic’s 90 Day Programme does not promise a clean bill of health, normality miraculously restored, after three short months, but merely greater understanding of a process that takes time, focus and patience. And so what looms large in my newly aware consciousness right now is the elephant itself, its size and heft, how immovable it seems, how indigestible.
Eight
December 11
Still doing STOP!s and EFT. It doesn’t feel any more natural, and still feels weird, but I surprise myself by being entirely open to it, almost hungry for it. I do it as much as I can, always hopeful and positive, and not, I think, cynical at all. Which surprises me. Spent most of the afternoon watching the clinic’s videos online, in which they discuss how to get your head around the recovery process, and also to maintain it – which clearly isn’t as easy as it sounds.
The clinic’s folder, stuffed with information crucial to my well-being, sits tauntingly on my desk, next to my keyboard, underneath a pile of books, CDs and magazines, an empty coffee cup and a small bowl filled with pistachio shells. Unearthing it, much less opening it, requires effort. I browse its many pages – Mental Conditioning: The Need for Repetition!, Working with Your Emotions, Restoring the Balance – and in doing so lose the will to read further. There are too many distractions: new books on my bookshelves, recorded TV programmes to watch. I want to spend time with my children. All of it appeals more, so the folder remains hidden, deliberately, beneath the desk mess.
In the folder’s flyleaf, tucked into a little plastic pocket, are three pages of paper stapled together. These I do take out and read. They are headlined: The benefits of meditation. Since my first few experiences with yoga nidra I have rather let meditation slide. The pamphlet reminds me how it is a self-help tool crucial to reducing stress levels and inducing relaxation states, and how it can also be used as a gentle means of self-development. Meditation is a stress-buster, it triggers the relaxation response in the autonomic nervous system, which encourages the muscles to relax, digestion to improve and the heart rate to become lower, and also produces mood-enhancing endorphins while, at the same time, managing to quieten the stress hormones, the adrenalin, and all that cortisol, the steroid hormone released in response to stress. Cortisol increases blood sugar and decreases bone formation. In an ideal world, you want only to produce it in short bursts.
The pamphlet directs me to an online taster, and I watch a few minutes of guided meditation from a middle-aged woman called Linda Hall. Like Anandmurti Gurumaa, Linda has the voice and poise of complete tranquillity, and though I enjoy the experience, and also find that, at some instinctive level, I feel like I might want to practise meditation further, and go deeper, I am not ready, not yet, and so I click off. I am not sure why, and I do not articulate possible reasons, either out loud to Elena or to myself. All I feel, simply, is: no. Not for me.
I do not yet know that I will come back to meditation as my crisis deepens, and that Linda will become a soundtrack to my daily life. This is all still some way off. In the meantime, it appears that, despite the clinic’s best efforts, I am at the moment my own worst enemy, and on a steeply downward slide. Things are becoming worse, not better. The fatigue deepens, and my resolve plummets. Were I to do that online depression quiz now, the outcome, I fear, would be different. I am lost.
And so I find myself reaching for something I had previously thought was strictly the province of Other People: therapy.
I have always rather secretly been drawn to the idea of therapy. I like talking to anyone who will listen, forever lumbered with a perpetual case of verbal diarrhoea. And, having spent two decades asking people often rather direct personal questions for my work and being intrigued by their responses, the prospect of finally answering some myself appeals, even if I have to pay for it. I am intrigued by what I might say.
Part of the clinic’s 90 Day Programme is three follow-up conference calls, the six of us doing our level best not to talk over the other while Jess chairs the group dispensing advice and wisdom and support. It’s a nice idea, but the calls always feel awkward to me, each of us reduced to disembodied voices on an uncomfortably echoing shared line, Jess often being required to encourage each of us gently in taking our turn to talk. Some report modest progress, others less so. One or two – usually the students – don’t talk at all. At the end of one call, in response to something I have said, Jess suggests I stay on the line afterwards, ‘as the issues you are having require, I think, some one-to-one attention’. A chill passes through me as she says this, and before the others leave, one or two wish me good luck. This does nothing to ameliorate my sense of unease or the oddly déjà vu feeling of being asked to stay behind by the teacher while everybody else goes home.
My problem is not a particularly difficult one to unravel: I am not getting any better, and I have proved myself all too easily influenced. The three days spent in the company of those for whom fatigue has become a miserable way of life have impacted on my Anxiety tendencies so propulsively that any Achiever characteristics have flown the coop. By spending time with fellow sufferers, I have seen my likely prognosis and come away convinced that it doesn’t, cannot, end well.
Jess and I speak for another 10 minutes, one to one, teacher to pupil. She is kind and full of sympathy, and she concludes that I should have a few Skype sessions with her, each lasting an hour, each costing the equivalent of a flight to the sun on a budget airline.
The first session offers an uncomfortable revelation. I may well have been looking forward to what I might say in therapy – and by extension to what I might learn about myself – but my answers to her questions do not come easily. I had always imagined I would know exactly what to say in such a situation and that, given the opportunity to talk when I know that somebody is listening, it would prove difficult to shut me up. But Jess’s questions are hard. She says abstruse things like: What is blocking you from returning to life? I haven’t the faintest idea what she is talking about. There is nothing blocking me from returning to life outside of this illness, this condition. Is there? ‘You tell me,’ she says, and allows the expensive silence between us to stretch. A minute of not talking here costs me two pounds. I should not be focusing on this, the cost. And yet.
She asks those increasingly familiar questions, the ones regarding emotional fallout, bereavement issues, job difficulties, marital disharmony. What, she asks, is happening to me on a subconscious level? The answer to this last question is relatively easy and knee-jerk, almost a joke: I don’t know, because it’s happening on a subconscious level, isn’t it? Jess tells me that all sufferers of CFS are battling something, some kind of trauma. What is mine?
I want to answer her, I really do. I think hard, aware that my hands and feet are becoming oddly cold. I want to conjure something up, a buried revelation, but fail. I um and er, my mind aware only that the clock is ticking. £30 already. I could buy three and a half books for £30.
Successive sessions mirror this pattern, and we skirt around the big, frustratingly elusive issue, neither of us making any obvious headway towards it. And so our conversations become circular and repetitive.
One time, she asks me: ‘What if I told you you have to take a train tomorrow, for work – to Manchester, let’s say. What would you say?’
The answer is instinctive, and I flush with embarrassment when I respond, truthfully: ‘I’d say no. I couldn’t do it.’
We speak once a week. It is always good to talk, and it does feel incrementally beneficial, but there is no breakthrough, and each session finishes with me feeling guilty for having made the previous 60 minutes so clearly frustrating for
her. At the end of one, she makes a suggestion. She thinks it might be useful if I speak to another of her patients, somebody further along the recovery process. If I have reacted so badly to being around people still so mired in their own fatigue, then perhaps I would react more positively to those on their way back to full health. I like the sound of this, and readily agree. She says she will contact the other patient, a man my age, and an appointment is made for us to speak on the phone in a week’s time.
It is, for me, a comparatively busy week. I have several commissions, and one morning travel to East London for an interview. I decide, in the spirit of taking things forward, that it might be good for me to go there by public transport rather than cab. The only way to confront my fears is to do so head-on. Elena drives me to the station, and I stand on the platform anticipating the train’s arrival in a way I haven’t before. I feel a thrill when I see it come snaking around the bend, almost like when my favourite band walks on stage. It arrives, the doors open, and I step into unexpected nostalgia. I sit in what had once been my regular space, the first set of four seats from the door. It is mid-morning, the carriage is mostly empty, and I have them to myself. I stretch out and, instead of reading, as I would normally do, I look out of the window, enjoying the view I had previously thought humdrum. Now it is novelty: the drab suburbs gradually becoming the city, the tower blocks, Battersea Power Station, the London Eye. I haven’t made this journey for almost 18 months. I have missed it. Commuters get on and off, the train fills up, and I become reacquainted with the noise of other people’s headphones, the sheen of their T.M. Lewin shirts, the backpacks so many are so careless with, bumping into heads and shoulders on their way out before the doors close, deaf to the mumbled complaints that follow in their wake. The adverts in my carriage are new, and on the wall by the door is a kind of barcode that we are encouraged to scan with our smartphones for access to exclusive content. Exclusive content to what? My five-year-old BlackBerry constitutes anything but a smartphone these days, and if it does have a scan facility, then this is a secret it has kept from me.