by Nick Duerden
I glance around the room. Everybody looks hopeful and enthused. We hug one another before we leave, and then we disperse into the winding, maze-like streets of Shad Thames. Elena had brought me here earlier by car, but now I walk. The sun is out, its glare bouncing off the harsh metallic sheen of the river. I stop at a café, where I plan to eat a light salad but order instead a large arancini ball, a cluster of rice deep-fried in breadcrumbs and filled with Bolognese sauce. While I work my way through it, I reach over and pick up the newspaper that has been left on the next table. Inside, I find a four-page article on Andy Puddicombe extolling the many wonders of meditation. How strange, I think. Coincidence or kismet? I resume my walk along the river, then up and over Tower Bridge, and onto a bus that takes me towards an East London market I used to visit regularly but now haven’t seen in three years. I feel unusually calm and, if not quite serene – never that, not me – then happy and hopeful that something has been invigorated within me. Just being here, out, alone, so far from home – all this is novelty. The market has undergone faceless regeneration in my absence, but the terrific bookstall is still here. I buy a book, then browse the other stalls on the way to meet Elena and the girls, who are waiting patiently for me in the car by the Tube station. Even simply doing this – me walking to them instead of them coming to fetch me – is new, a minor miracle. I find it difficult not to grin foolishly, a baby taking its first uncertain steps. Elena sees me through the windscreen, her smile so full of encouragement a lump comes to my throat.
It is a long day, and it should deplete me considerably, leaving me wiped out for at least the next week. But somehow it doesn’t. Somehow, I very nearly feel fine. Odd.
Is it working, then?
The answer to that is: yes, it is – to a point. But I have become so accustomed to my new, gradually changing reality that I still frequently fail to recognise it. Progress comes in fits and starts, full of one-step-forward-two-steps-back lurches that test my patience, mock my optimism and unravel my resolve. Bluntly put, I’m still knackered most of the time, quite spectacularly knackered, and still fearful that whatever I do to push my parameters will knacker me more.
Though this condition feels so palpably physical, targeting my by now weak muscles, I am increasingly aware of the mental grip it has on me. I want to get back out there again, I really do, but everywhere I look I see reminders of places where I have tried and failed, familiar roads which I can no longer manage, the impossibility of my getting from A to B without paying for it severely afterwards. There are too many memories here. I’ve no option, though, but to try. Because walking still seems to take so much out of me – the post-Vedic high on which I’d strolled through the market soon faded – and because the silent fear of it doing so ratchets up my cortisol to unhelpful levels, those times I do venture outside, I cycle. Cycling, I find, is easier, and requires less effort. I cycle the girls to and from school each day, and cycle to my local café for an afternoon break, where I sit still half-bewildered that I have managed the journey at all, and that I am actually outside among people. The amount of mental planning this all requires is considerable, and has forced me to become a kind of mathematician, forever working out the likely distance of every outdoor undertaking, and how I can undertake it with the minimum effort possible. On jobs into town, I cycle to the train station, the train takes me into the centre, and then, necessarily avoiding the mocking labyrinth of the Tube, I head instead towards the nearest bus stop and take the first bus that comes along. This will take me to other bus stops, at least one of which I will be able to change at and await another that will take me closer to my destination. All of this, it goes without saying, will have been pre-planned online the night before. If the distance from the bus stop to my eventual destination is sufficiently close, I will brave the final walk there; if not, I will have scouted out the nearest Boris bike docking station, and undertake the final leg on two wheels.
Either way, I arrive at my destination a little wired and greatly relieved. This is improvement, emphatically so, and I need to remind myself of it repeatedly. I ignore the still-present sensation of fatigue because, look, here I am, out in the world again and interacting with others, and I sit down to interview the person I have come to meet looking to all intents and purposes just as they seem to me: capable, ordinary, normal.
We start heading further afield at the weekends, too, into other parts of town – visiting shops, browsing markets, different parks – the change of scenery so much better than my habitual rest. I never accompany my family all the way, usually bailing out, puffing, at the nearest café in order to allow them to wander at will, because they are people who don’t count their footsteps, nor do they fear what those footsteps will bring.
Each Sunday outing ends the same way. The moment we get home, I make my way upstairs and attempt to meditate for up to 20 minutes, in the hope of lowering the cortisol currently firing around my system, and keen to calm the sense of foreboding at the now rapidly unfurling exhaustion climbing up my legs like vines and weighing with heavy familiarity across my shoulders and back.
It is impossible not to be acutely aware of just how palpably bad I feel at these times, but I know that this is the very time I am supposed to say my STOP!s, loudly and repeatedly in my head, in order to break the destructive thought patterns circling on a loop, and instead be returned to the moment, mindfully and meditatively, as instructed.
But this is where, for me, it becomes confusing. To be in the moment is to realise how I am feeling right now, which is dreadful, which leads inevitably to the concrete conviction that I will pay dearly for my exertions well into the following week. I mustn’t think like this, and so I STOP! once more, barring those intrusive thoughts and re-focusing on the here and now, but the here and now is clouded with heady fatigue, so – STOP!
And so, yet again, I STOP!, with a Tourette’s-like tenacity, a hamster in a wheel going nowhere fast, hoping against what feels like pointless hope that this is all merely temporary, that I will get through this eventually, and that, if nothing else, it is character building. Long term, I say to myself with a mostly straight face, this will probably do me the world of good, make me a better person. Right?
Fifteen
I plough on. The Vedic high may have settled, as all highs must, but the shift it effects within me lingers on. It does. It is a subtle shift, but I gradually accept that life is nevertheless inching back towards that elusive state of normal, and in its slipstream I resume ordinary citizenship. I bin the taxi-firm cards that come through the letterbox most mornings, assured I no longer have use for them, and delete their numbers from my phone. I invest in an Oyster card. I am out of the house more, freer. I am a veteran of this thing, almost two years now, but I am in recovery. If someone suggests we meet up, I am more likely to go.
‘You’re looking well’ is something I occasionally hear from the few friends I have left. They had expected, not unreasonably, to see evidence of the condition that had taken me out of the game, only to find me looking much the same. They are confused, but then they are not the only ones. The truth is I haven’t really handled the friend situation particularly well. I didn’t know how to. Just because I have always failed in sustaining those alpha male friendships in which conversation revolves around girls and football and cars doesn’t make me automatically comfortable in discussing my failing health with beta equivalents. I never know quite how to broach the subject, aware that it’s a mood killer, and so I don’t. And on those few occasions I try, I fail to relay the gravity of the situation. After telling one friend about it a month on from the initial diagnosis, she called the following week asking if I fancied going out for drinks. I tried to explain that my problem was more long term, that I wouldn’t be going out for drinks for some considerable time. I barely heard from her again. And to the old friend upon whom I unburdened myself one night – feeling it appropriate to respond in kind after he had told me of his own troubles (largely marital) – he responded with what
I thought was understanding, but then asked whether I was still cycling all over town and travelling regularly. Elsewhere, I resolved simply never to broach the topic at all with friends, and if they did, to summarise with an editor’s eye for the succinct, and move on.
We live in a world where we mostly get well soon or else we very dramatically don’t. If you occupy the uncertain middle ground, then it all gets invariably confusing. My oldest, and closest, friend empathised better than most, and accepted unquestioningly that things were suddenly very different for me now. She would make the effort to come and see me, and if we did meet in town, insisted on paying for the taxi home. She could not, of course, have realised that something far more dramatic was about to befall her, but when it did I was quick to respond in kind.
She was standing in her front garden one July morning pruning plants when she experienced what she later said felt like a heavy shovel smacking the back of her head. She collapsed to the ground, her three-month-old puppy confusing it all for a game. Her neighbour called an ambulance. My friend’s husband called me a day later, exhausted and emotionally spent, the unavoidable consequence of having to go through their address book and contact all her close friends to explain that she had had a brain haemorrhage, had almost died and may never fully recover, that the rehabilitation process would be slow and draining, and that she would not be fit for visitors for several weeks, possibly months.
Here was a proper death-dodging drama that put my problem in its long shadow. It was months before I saw her again, her husband necessarily over-protective and under doctor’s orders to keep her away from too much noise, too much light, too much activity, and children under the age of 10. She had neurological damage, and possible memory problems; she would require monitoring for the next several years. She was told that the life she had been living, an otherwise eminently ordinary urban adult life, was now too much for her. She needed emphatic change.
To my surprise, she did as she was told. A brain haemorrhage can have a chastening effect. She left London for the coast, her job for art therapy and, much later, Open University courses, and the daily commute for long walks on an empty beach with the dog, whose constant presence was likely key to her ongoing recovery. She was still the same person, and looked the same, but she had fundamentally changed. She stopped drinking, severed certain ties, and sought only tranquillity. Friends became a drain on her remaining resources, family members too. They didn’t much like this new incarnation, and even after patient explanation could never fully comprehend that the change was permanent, the ramifications of this considerable.
‘But it’s been two years,’ friends would say. She began screening her calls.
Her illness has brought us closer, even as geography has kept us apart. No more do we meet up every couple of weeks in pursuit of morning-after hangovers, and when we do get together, we observe strict codes of conduct our younger selves would never have seen coming. Her brain has been damaged, and so she requires handling with care: no noise, no alcohol, zero caffeine, a pass on dessert, an early night.
There is gallows humour to be found here, buckets of it. We find it because we have to.
*
The woman on my PC screen is telling me something that makes me sit up straight.
‘I’m going to communicate with your super-conscious mind now,’ she says.
She is doing this in an attempt to make me better, to cure me, via a process called Psych-K. No one has ever attempted to communicate with my super-conscious mind before. I am intrigued. But there is something called a permission protocol to go through first.
‘We never assume it’s okay to make changes, because there might be consequences,’ she explains. ‘We always have to check with the higher self that it is safe and appropriate, that it means no harm, that it’s in your best interest.’
She does this now by asking my super-conscious mind for permission to proceed. The objective here is to find out why the burnout I suffered, which left behind such long-standing consequences, occurred. The woman, whom I shall call Lucinda, says she might be able to fix me.
We are conversing via Skype. If we were meeting in person, she says, she would be doing muscle testing on me, or kinesiology, which is the study of the mechanics of body testing, a procedure that aims to find imbalances within the body by getting to the root of the problem, be it physical, chemical, emotional or, according to one website I encounter, ‘energetical’. There are several different strands of kinesiology, but at the heart of each lies the theory of muscle testing. Muscle testing involves testing a particular body part, usually the arm, for strength or weakness. The stronger it is, the more conviction in the belief; the weaker, the less. We have over 640 muscles in our body, all connected to different organs via neural pathways. By applying pressure to a muscle to gauge its response, a practitioner is able to read bio-feedback within that organ’s meridian, and so uncover the underlying causes of health problems and their symptoms. Treatment includes nutritional recommendations, acupuncture, lymphatic massage and emotional support.
Because we cannot do normal muscle testing over the internet, Lucinda tells me she is able to substitute it with something just as effective: a pendulum. The pendulum will rotate clockwise if my super-consciousness conveys strength and conviction, anti-clockwise if not.
Now Lucinda asks the higher self: ‘Is it safe and appropriate for Nick to learn the messages and start to release his fatigue?’ The pendulum is held up before her at eye level. It swings confidently clockwise.
‘Lovely,’ she says. Permission protocol has been granted, just like that.
‘Is Nick consciously aware of what the message is?’ she asks. The pendulum now swings anti-clockwise. ‘No,’ she says.
Earlier in our conversation, she had asked me about my life, my upbringing, my experiences as a child, events around the time I first fell ill. Now she asks of the pendulum: ‘Is the message connected to Nick’s experiences as a child?’ It swings clockwise. ‘Yes. So there is a connection here. Is there,’ she asks, ‘any significance to the timing?’ The pendulum swings anti-clockwise. ‘No, it could have happened at any time.’
Another question. ‘Are there beliefs associated with Nick’s fatigue at this point in his life?’
Clockwise.
‘Yes. There are subconscious beliefs that have brought this on.’
She looks up from the pendulum, and at me. ‘Let me know if any of this gets confusing,’ she says. ‘Or if you simply think, What on earth is she talking about? ’ I nod. ‘Is Nick aware of what those beliefs are?’
Anti-clockwise.
‘Okay, so the protocol now is to find out where to go next. I am communicating with your entire system here,’ she points out. ‘I’m not deciding myself what it is because I don’t know; I can’t possibly know what’s best for you. But I am communicating with your system, and it tells me that every part of your system is ready, willing and able to balance, and to begin to completely recover from fatigue.’
I want to ask her: Yes, but how?, when our Skype connection is lost. She calls back moments later, and is now holding a large book in her hand, A4-size. This book, she explains, contains 1,500 belief statements in it.
‘I am communicating with your higher self, and it is going to guide us to the first belief you need to change, and that can help you to start recovering.’
I want to ask her How? again, but remain silent.
‘We have no idea what is coming,’ she says, adding, ‘This is fun. It may not make conscious sense, but this is what is going on at a deep level. You can’t be aware of it consciously, and you would probably only ever be able to do so if you went into therapy, but right now we are talking to your core.’
She starts leafing through the pages quickly for my appropriate belief statement.
‘It’s between pages 20 and 30, between 20 and 25, 26 and 30.’ Still she leafs. ‘Page 27, 28, page 29, page 30. Your belief is on page 30.’ I register here a rush of emotion. We are closin
g in on it, whatever it may be. ‘The category is Fun, Play and Adventure. I wonder,’ she says, ‘if when you were younger, you allowed yourself to be a child.’
I think the question is rhetorical, so I say nothing, but after a moment’s silence, Lucinda looking intently at me on my screen, I answer. Yes, I say, I think I did.
‘Let’s see what comes up, then. Your belief statement is between numbers one and 10, it’s between 11 and 20, between 16 and 20. The priority belief statement is number 16, number 17, number 18, number 19, number 20.’ Her finger, travelling down the page, stops abruptly. ‘It is statement number 20: I Am Fun to Be With.’
She looks up at me. I nod: okay.
‘How does that sound? Does it make any sense? Do you feel you are fun to be around?
I tell her yes.
‘Okay then, let’s test that belief. Let’s see if you believe it unconsciously.’
When you do muscle testing, Lucinda explains, you assume a posture: feet parallel on the floor, eyes looking down but not closed, not straining them. I assume the posture.
‘Now say it out loud: I am fun to be with. Say it like you really mean it.’
I do. The pendulum swings anti-clockwise.
I tell Lucinda that the pendulum is wrong. I am fun to be with. I am!
‘What this means,’ she says, possibly trying to soothe, ‘is that you probably do think you are fun to be with but that your current belief is that you are not.’