Get Well Soon

by Nick Duerden

  It is all so familiar, but so utterly new, the world moved on without me. Is this, I wonder, and not for the last time, what it feels like to be old – rendered outdated by youth and the march of progress? I arrive into Waterloo station to find much of it under construction, the M&S gone, so too the WHSmith, scaffolding everywhere, and I walk haltingly, self-consciously, in the crowd, to the nearest exit, where a pre-ordered minicab awaits to take me four miles east, to Spitalfields, where I interview a singer who tells me about her love of India. She makes me coffee and offers me homemade carrot cake.

  She sees me off an hour later with a hug. ‘I enjoyed that, it was like therapy!’ she says, laughing. ‘How much do I owe you?’

  The sun shines, and life is good.

  But then it happens again, on my way back, the familiar sensations creeping slowly up to smother me, to drag my muscles down. The cab that has taken me back to the station has stopped further away than I would have liked (‘Too much traffic!’ he shouts), and the walk to my platform is longer than any I have taken in over a year and a half. My body hums its curious activity through all eight stops, pins and needles and deep, deep aches. I try to remember some of Anandmurti Gurumaa’s calming guidance, but summon up nothing. The train deposits me at my station, but at the far end, some considerable distance from the exit, something I hadn’t thought about previously, because who in their right mind thinks about which section of the platform they will get off at? The ticket barrier seems miles away. I walk, because what else am I supposed to do? Calm down, you fool. But my body is no longer in control, or perhaps it’s my mind, and so either, or both, conspire against me, everything I have learned in those meditation taster sessions gone. I’m all adrenalin and cortisol now, a lethal brew, and so whatever self-control I do possess puddles at my feet. It is all I can do to keep moving forward, to make it down the stairs, through the ticket barrier and out into the street beyond, where I flag down the nearest black cab and finally make it home, exhausted, furious, distraught.

  It takes a full week for the symptoms to even clear their throat preparatory to easing, a week I know that, once it is over, I will work quickly to put behind me, and forget, and start again. But while it lasts, it lasts forever.

  Eventually, the conversation Jess had arranged comes around. It is to be me calling him, and as I dial, I wonder what to say, and how to say it. Hello, I understand you have fatigue? Hey! Me too! What’s your star sign?

  What if we have nothing to say to one another?

  The first few moments are not unlike those on a blind date. He says hello, and I introduce myself. Well, I say. Yes, he says, and his laughter turns into a cough. I find myself wondering what he looks like, and also glad that I don’t know. I tell him Jess said it might be useful for us to talk, or rather for me to talk to him. She has suggested that his improvements have been encouraging, and from this I will take encouragement myself. You might inspire me, I say, cheeks flushing. She has told me that he is back on his bike now, and cycles up to two hours a day. I say that it has been a long time since I cycled two hours a day.

  I stop talking now, and wait for him to take over.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘it’s true, I am making progress physically, but . . .’ And here he stutters, and instinctively lowers his voice, as if imparting a secret. ‘. . . I’ve got to be honest with you here, mate. Emotionally, I’m coming apart. I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite as bad as I do now, with home, girlfriend, work, everything.’

  He goes on to tell me about it all, in detail, and I feel awful for him. I am hardly in a position to offer condolences, or support, but I try my best. I cannot quite work out whether it is the fallout of the fatigue that has contributed to his emotional crash, but there is clearly a link, and it’s one full of, for me, foreboding. I issue what I hope are not merely empty platitudes – I tell him how admiringly Jess has spoken about him, how brilliant his progress – and we part on good, friendly terms.

  ‘If you ever want to talk again, just let me know,’ he says, and then he laughs again. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  I put down the phone and stare at it, trying to imagine why Jess had thought he would be so useful for me to talk to. And I start to wonder whether what is happening to him is what lies in wait for me, too.

  Work is impossible after this. I mull over the call and its potential ramifications, and feel ill. Already catatonic with tiredness, I am now freshly convinced that things will get even worse, and that I too won’t be able to cope. I will let my family down, I will have to give up work in exchange for unemployment. And what will happen to me then, to all of us?

  When Elena comes home, I manage, carelessly and with needless cruelty, to start an argument, to which she responds with shock, confusion and hurt. My accusations are weak, but I’m angry, and scared, I want to lash out, and I’ve nobody else to take it out on. We never normally argue in front of the children, and seeing their faces as they witness this up close is not a good moment for me. I go upstairs – I would have liked to storm up them, furiously, but can’t, so trudge instead – and fling myself onto the bed in an explosion of snot and tears, all too aware of the ridiculous soap-opera moment I am creating, but unable to do anything, right now, to stem it.

  After our next session, Jess concedes defeat, and refers me to her superior.

  Meanwhile, London gets on with its business, and I can only sit at home and watch it on TV. Last year, it was the riots, which transformed the city in ways I had not seen before, and now it’s the Olympics. A dozen of Elena’s friends arrive from Spain, keen to soak up the atmosphere. They rent a house near us, and every day take the train into town, to the shops, the zoo, and over to the Olympic Park to mingle. My girls often go with them. I see them off in the morning, strapping their little backpacks to their backs, filled with snacks and water and suntan lotion.

  ‘Come with us?’ they ask.

  They arrive home much later, exhausted but happy, their faces lit up with all the adventures of the day, both of them falling over the other to be the first to tell me all they have seen: the new stadia, the cheery volunteers, the friendly faces all round, the hotdogs they had bought and only half consumed, and the Cokes, too, in huge cups, ‘and I finished it all, Daddy!’

  I pull both to me, and hug them tight.

  ‘You should have come with us,’ they cry. ‘It was fantastic!’

  Nine

  Jess’s superior is a lady called Anna. I see from her photo online that she is pale-skinned, with bright, lively eyes and corkscrew curls. She explains in an email that it would work best to see me face to face, but I explain that this is not possible right now, so we agree to Skype.

  But when the time comes, she calls to say that she is having a problem with Skype, so we must do our first session on the phone. ‘Not ideal, but,’ she says, and I can hear her shrugging. (The problem with Skype is mysteriously never rectified, and all our subsequent sessions remain via telephone.) Anna is one of the co-founders of the clinic, its Director of Psychology. She is a Cambridge graduate (albeit in linguistics) and, like Alex Howard, a former sufferer herself. She has a cool, crisp voice, alert and quick. If Jess resembled the primary school teacher she once was, Anna is more secondary school, and used to being in charge of wayward types who don’t pay sufficient attention, the difficult ones. Her words are quick and precise, and she always sounds to me slightly impatient. I am aware every time I talk to her that everything she says is worth making a note of. It quickly becomes evident that Anna is good.

  We begin. Anna talks about worry. The more we worry about something, she says, the longer the problem stays rooted in place. Worrying wastes energy, and I no longer have sufficient energy levels to be careless with. What I need to do now is explore how I feel about things in greater detail. I must work against the conviction I harbour that physical activity is in some way deleterious to me, because if I don’t, I will remain drained, and train station platforms will extend tauntingly before me forever more. And we do
n’t want that, she says. Instead, I need to reconnect with the belief I had before I got ill, that fatigue is merely temporary, and that the body is designed to recover. ‘Stop being so over-protective of yourself,’ she says. The less worried I am, the less anxious, the sooner I will become well.

  This all sounds so simple to say, and makes such resounding sense. Then why, I wonder, am I finding it so difficult to achieve?

  ‘We have a saying in the clinic,’ she says. ‘Your body isn’t actually holding you back, it’s holding you up.’

  She goes on. All the functions that can abruptly flip into malfunction can be reversed. At the moment, my mind is working against my body; I need to get both working in harmony, in tandem. ‘This is something millions of people around the world struggle with daily,’ she says, a smile in her voice. The kindly assurance here is that I am not the only one. We all struggle to extricate ourselves from a variety of unhelpful responses. It is often difficult to correct them, but it is not impossible.

  She asks me a question. ‘If the fatigue you feel has an emotional contributor to it, what would it be?’

  I am stumped. I understand each of the words separately, but together they don’t seem to lead to an obvious answer. An emotional contributor, you say? ‘Quite often, our emotional feelings can be expressed as pain,’ she says, adding that she worries I may be thinking too much, trying to be too analytical. ‘Stop with the analysis, and get more in touch with your emotions. Where are your emotions?’

  She explains that my trouble is that I have now set up a whole raft of negative associations. Because I have had so much fatigue, I now anticipate it coming. It has become an irrevocable part of my life.

  ‘But it has,’ I say. ‘That’s unambiguous.’

  ‘Yes, but there is a pendulum swing that exists between improvement and setback. So don’t worry, because they are temporary ones. Over time, the good begins to outweigh the bad.’

  Fatigue has triggered a strong anxiety within me. This, she suggests, is interesting, and surely pertinent. ‘Can you think why?’ she asks. I cannot, no. She suggests there is some kind of latent panic that has been lurking deep within my system, patiently, for years, possibly decades. It has now been suddenly set free. Why? ‘Can you think of any panic or fear in your life, in your past?’

  I think for a while, and come up with nothing. Anna is persistent. She wants to know about my upbringing, and I tell her about my single-parent family, my depressive mother, a younger brother who took their separation badly. ‘And did you?’ she asks. I say that after my father left, when I was 10, I was effectively promoted to co-parent. I think I did this willingly. It was required of me; my mother needed me. I loved my mother, but had never really got to know my father. He was always out, rarely at home, and when he was, he seemed tired, tetchy, quick to anger. He drank, there were arguments; a familiar story. I don’t believe I ever really missed him. In some sense, I was glad he was gone. The arguments had stopped, after all.

  Anna sounds relieved. I am at last talking.

  ‘And how does this make you feel now?’

  I shrug, before remembering to articulate the shrug for her benefit. ‘Well, fine, I suppose,’ I say. ‘It was years ago. I dealt with it.’

  ‘But not angry?’

  ‘I don’t think so, no.’

  She sighs. ‘Okay, try to imagine you are talking about somebody else now. If somebody else grew up in a similar environment to yours, single-parent family, mother depressed, a difficult relationship with a sibling, what kind of impact do you think that would have on the child? Would they feel safe, secure? Would they grow up, perhaps, with a lack of stability, a lack of the sense of solid ground?’

  I must have experienced a sustained level of fear, she says, because what children need most in life is safety and security. ‘Intrinsically, that kid would have to grow up with a lack of security, right?’

  She asks me to imagine that child all grown up. What picture might we see? ‘Basically, we learn the ways of coping in life when we are really young. If your way of coping with a lack of security as a child was to get everything right, to be as responsible as you possibly can, and then, in adulthood, to try to create a perfect life for your wife and your children, to not fall into the same trap as your parents, then this is the way you function in life.’

  She says that once we set down a pattern like this, which we tend to do at around the age of seven, we keep playing that pattern throughout the rest of our lives, whether it is sustainable or not. The fear or anger I must have felt then hasn’t gone away; I’ve just learned to squirrel it away. It wasn’t sustainable then – I needed to stay strong for my mother – and so I don’t have the vocabulary, or even the instinct, to verbalise it now.

  People choose all sorts of ways to try to deal with their life situations and what they are exposed to. But this way of functioning may become unsustainable, and once there is too much pressure placed on the individual, then, over time, it might only take a trigger – an emotional blow, for example, a nasty virus – to come off the rails.

  ‘Does this make sense?’ she wonders.

  She suggests that ‘with this hypothetical person we are talking about, we know that there must be a level of insecurity at his core. He may well be a very functional person, even high functioning; someone who has grown up knowing just how to operate in the world. But there are landmines, something that can set off, or unlock, all that inner insecurity.’

  She recommends I learn to understand what it is my body is trying to tell me. Something has come along to derail me, and in trying to get myself back on the rails, I panicked. Perhaps I am panicking now because I didn’t after my parents’ separation. Perhaps I am seeing emotional similarities between then and now. Was becoming ill and not recovering the trigger to send me into freefall, now terrified that my life would fall apart in a comparable way? That I would place undue pressure on my wife, my children?

  ‘Does any of this resonate?’ Anna asks me. ‘Look, you can logically accept that this might be true, but I think there is a fair amount of resistance in you. Am I wrong? I sense a disconnection at an emotional level here.’

  Because I have remained quiet, in fact silent, on my end of the line, she offers up a final analogy. If somebody is in a war zone, then while they are in it, they cannot really process what is going on. They cope because they have to. They do not develop post-traumatic stress until afterwards. We might be working with a similar pattern here, she says.

  ‘What you remember from when you were a child is learning how to cope, and you had to because that was your environment. It sounds to me that what you did at that age was to disconnect from your emotional responses because they weren’t helpful, and there was no space for them. You have to be strong and responsible. You have no opportunity to freak out, so you shut that away in a box. This is how we work, on an emotional level; it is what we do. We package things away, and get on with life.’

  And so why, I ask her, when my life is steady and happy, is it all coming to the surface now?

  ‘Precisely because you are so secure.’

  I decide I have misheard her. Perhaps I phrased my question wrong. But, no.

  ‘It’s ironic, I know, but people tend only to manifest all this stuff when they feel safe enough to do so, at an unconscious level. The rule of the unconscious mind is that we will only release things at the surface of our consciousness, bring things through, at a point at which we are able to deal with them.’

  ‘But I’m not dealing with them, am I?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting this is exactly what is happening to you, and I could be wrong, but my instinct is that it has triggered something deep in you. You stepped on a landmine, and it exploded. It has probably always been there, this fear, but nicely packaged away. Not any more.’

  I look at my watch. Time is up. She leaves me with an optimistic coda.

  ‘You will have a lot more resources now than you did when you were seven, trust me. So you will be abl
e to better deal with the issues. And it is all happening to you now so that you can deal with it now, so it won’t come along and bite you in some other way in the future. A little part of you simply needs help, and is bringing this to your attention, literally. Remember, this is all very normal, very psychologically accepted. It is also entirely surmountable.’

  It is around this time, and surely not coincidentally, that I find myself writing a newspaper article on the world of self-help books and the often self-appointed gurus behind them: who are these people, and why do they presume to have so many of the answers to life’s more enduring anxieties?

  I have never previously read self-help books, nor have I had any particular compunction to do so. I have browsed a few, but have always felt assaulted by the proliferation of exclamation marks, the goading bullet points, and the wearying proclivity towards indefatigable, and often nonsensical, optimism in the face of wretched adversity. For my piece, I speak to people for whom such books are bibles – ‘They are my bibles!’ one entrepreneur tells me, a woman who has read over 300 of them and is now running a mini empire as a purported result – and to others for whom they are not. ‘I have never had any faith in any of that self-help shit,’ says the offspring of one American giant of the genre, a man whose can-do books were global bestsellers for decades. As Dad was travelling the world imparting his family-centric motivational talks while having an affair with his masseuse, his son slid slowly but emphatically into heroin addiction, and later joined a death metal band whose canon includes songs with titles like ‘Wrong Whole’ and ‘Pre-Emptive Priapism’. ‘I guess I’ve always been drawn to playing really loud music,’ he tells me. ‘It’s therapeutic, cathartic. And I needed the outlet, because I don’t express anger all that well.’