Get Well Soon

by Nick Duerden

  For now, though, the Hawaiian Tao master is still telling me about the negative stories I have been taught about how life is supposed to progress. I wrap things up, wishing him goodnight, and I go back downstairs to the story of mine.

  In the drawn-out moments that it takes me this morning to roll over and squint at the alarm clock, I realise that it is a weekday. Tuesday. The school run looms. But first, my routine.

  I groan, get up, scratch, yawn and feel my age. This is all no less brutal now than it was a year ago, and it still requires discipline to climb up out of bed and away from it, but I do it, and my complaints dissolve by the time I reach the shower. I have long since dispatched with my Hour of Power. There are only so many movies you can run in your head until you have seen them all. So instead, post-shower, I do 10 minutes of yoga, which I perform assiduously but not, I fear, in any way yogically. I remain at a constant level with yoga, and this despite the fact that earlier this year I took a 10-week course in it. The course was for beginners, the hope being we would graduate into something other. Advanced, perhaps. But I do not seem to have a body made for advanced yoga. Beginner is my limit.

  Then it’s down to breakfast. No toast any more, no coffee, but porridge, recommended for its slow-release-energy properties, into which I sprinkle mulchy flaxseeds and a squirt of agave. The kitchen is full now of tell-tale signs of our joint sustained health kick, because Elena works in maintenance too. One cupboard is full of oatcakes, to my mind the only foodstuff that makes flaxseeds exciting. Another has brown rice, pulses. The dark chocolate, contraband these days but tasting better than ever, is hidden (and frequently replenished), but the fruit bowl is proudly displayed, and always heaving, the fridge full of vegetables. We juice now, too. Everybody does, it seems.

  With the children gone, safely delivered to their classrooms, I return home to work. My approach here has changed, too, in some small but intrinsic way. I still love the job, and I am still at my desk before nine each morning, eager to start, to fill the screen with words. But somewhere over last few years I have ceased pushing myself quite so hard, with such fervent mania. This hasn’t been easy. But giving up that incessant drive to bag commission after commission as if life depended on it (which it still sort of does) has been, undeniably, a blessed relief. I can breathe now.

  And if there is less work for me today, then there is for everyone. My trade is changing, a new generation emerging, new ways of doing old things, Instagram far more important than words, tweets preferred to a long read. And that’s fine, I’m fine with it. Really. Except that – no, no, I’m not, of course I’m not. I’m furious, livid at the prospect of my imminent extinction. But then perhaps I must simply try now to reposition myself elsewhere. After all, our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. Confucius said that.

  My own personal enlightenment stretches only so far. I am still, for now – who knows, possibly forever – stuck in my story, impervious to my true essence. But I am working on it, a solid plod in what I trust is the right direction. I do not want all of this to have been in vain. I want to learn from it, to come out of it a better person, to myself if to nobody else.

  I have tried a mere handful of the hundreds of alternative therapies out there, all of which boast their own convincing salesmen and women, many of whom have come through considerable tribulations of their own, in some cases defying science. These are the extraordinary people. I conclude that I might be one of the ordinary ones, because while I am certainly getting better, slowly but defiantly, there has been no great epiphany for me, no Damascene conversion into new light, no overnight miracle. Instead, I have ingested as much as I could. I have understood some of it, got confused by a lot, and have likely already forgotten much along the way. I am still unpicking all the unhelpful behavioural traits that landed me in this mess in the first place, and I am forever on the lookout for signs of progress.

  It is demanding work. Much of it requires a complete overhaul. But then I am in midlife, and habits die hard. I like a lot of my habits, even the bad ones. They make me me. Leaving them behind will be a wrench.

  Two jobs today. I meet a singer mourning the loss of his father from dementia, and an actor who has spent many decades attempting to get to grips with depression. Yet more lives being put together again.

  Then it’s to the modern equivalent of a greasy spoon for a bread-free, nutrient-rich lunch, something very likely on a bed of what I’m told is quinoa, and then back on the bike, over the bridge, to the train station. The first half of Waterloo Bridge is a slight incline, a slog, so I pedal hard. But it is worth it, because on either side I am surrounded by my very favourite city view: the Gherkin, the Eye, St Paul’s, the Cheese Grater, the other one. It was this I missed most, this view, when I was stuck at home all the time, wondering if I would ever get to see it again. It is sunny, and warm for September, the wind in my hair. London is looking radiantly proud of itself.

  I reach the best bit now, the halfway point, and the beginning of the descent. My bike picks up pace. I overtake a bus and several other cyclists. As I approach the IMAX cinema, I look to my right and see what I had hoped to see: nothing, no cars, no traffic. I don’t have to brake. My wheels are going too fast now to pedal any faster, and so I careen at effortless speed around the roundabout, leaning into the bend. On my left, a car appears out of nowhere, fast, rudely encroaching into my lane. It cuts in front, I swerve, and a second later I am alongside it. I look in to see a pretty young woman driving, oblivious to me. Next to her, in the passenger seat, is a man peering at his BlackBerry, thumbs flying across its keys. He looks up, and I look back into the face of Alan Yentob. This fact is of more interest to me than it is to him, because he already knows he’s Alan Yentob. He casually disregards me in favour of returning to his email. Ahead, the looming traffic lights have changed from green to amber. Both me and Alan, and his driver, cruise on through as it changes to red. I need to leave him now, and take a sharp left towards the station.

  It is uphill from here, all the way to my platform, but I’m still going at such a clip that I need exert no energy at all. I take my feet off the pedals, weaving in and out of pedestrians with what passes, for me, as wild abandon, the wind still in my hair, and for a sustained moment it feels as if I could go along like this for ever, uphill but effortless, prepared for whatever comes next.

  But only for a moment, because then the hill becomes too steep and the bike slows. I start pedalling again.

  Epilogue

  I have always liked stories, a good narrative with its beginnings, its middles and ends. You can read them like a book, and I suppose I am all the more invested in this one because this one’s end – here, these last few pages – might just represent my having got fully better. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet, not entirely, and I am beginning to accept that it might never.

  What is better, anyway? My old self? My old self, the healthy one, is seven years younger than the me of today, seven years fitter, and still in the ignorant bliss of comparative rude health. He hasn’t had a psychological fallout from which he is still trying to put the pieces back together, and so my old self has likely gone for good, replaced by the new me. But I’m better than I ever dared hope. Two years on from my adventures in alternative health, I still tire easily, I still subconsciously impose limitations on my physical activity, and I still crash intermittently. But I have my life back, a variation of it at least, and I’m relieved, and grateful. Perhaps, then, this is as good as it gets? And perhaps, as Susie Orbach told me, the scorch marks I bring along with me might just turn out to be good ones.

  ‘For me, it was very transformative,’ says one person I speak to who went through a similar experience. ‘There were so many benefits, in so many ways, to my having been ill, because positive things have come out of it. We learn from it, and we can grow; life can become fuller as a result. I know that may be difficult to hear about if you are still in the midst of it, but I’ve had many conversati
ons with many people about this. Initially, they focus on what they’ve lost because they can no longer be the person they had been before, but there is also a dawning of recognition, the fact that perhaps they weren’t as happy as they could have been. So, yes, sure, you do lose certain things, and I have, but you gain other things, among them a real appreciation of life. You start to value the simple things, and you form a much greater connection to what is really important.’

  This message, for all its hackneyed intent, remains an alluring one: from illness comes wisdom. It is an angle I am well aware of, having reported on such stories for the past 20 years via interviews with many people, often very successful women and men, the surprising majority of whom have, in their own pursuit of a career and success and happiness, sometimes catastrophically burned out along the way, and have been forced into living in newly sustainable ways: the pop and rock stars with their pill addictions, their therapies and NA meetings; the singers with Crohn’s disease and depression; the fearless but fragile American artist with bipolar disorder who eventually found a cure, after 30 years of searching, via yet another developing alternative practice, this one called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), which sounds bizarre but is said to be effective in the treatment of trauma.

  ‘There is nothing wrong with me now at all any more,’ she told me, offering a low-wattage smile when I had been expecting floodlights. Then she added: ‘Which is sort of a problem in itself.’

  I met someone recently, a former pop star, who had lost several decades to drink and drugs, his wife left him, and he ended up in his 50s in rehab, depressed and alienated and utterly lost. So he became newly spiritually ravenous. ‘Who am I?’ he wanted to know. His search, ongoing, is all-encompassing. He has joined the Masons. He practises Transcendental Meditation, and reads books by Jesuit priests, the verse of Sufi poets. He has undergone shamanic interventions and ayahuasca ceremonies, craving higher states of consciousness and a better understanding – of everything. Death looms somewhere on the horizon, and he wants to reach that particular conclusion clearer, repentant, humble, at peace with his shortcomings, and better prepared to navigate, soberly, what remains.

  ‘Know thyself, you know?’ he said, only slightly tongue in cheek, hailing as he does from Camden, not California. ‘Life is a journey. Learn. Absorb the useful, disregard the rest. And when you seek something and you find it, know it, own it.’ I asked him if he was happy now, if happiness was what happened to people who read Sufi poetry. ‘I’m content,’ he replied. ‘I’ve learned that there is strength in vulnerability, that vulnerability is a powerful thing. Don’t be afraid to show yours. You know, there is a lot going on right now, in us, in the world. We are in a crisis time, we’ve lost sight of one another, our true hearts. We need to be part of the paradigm shift from the age of capitalism to the age of consciousness. We have to wake up, to be aware, and we have to share that awareness.’

  ‘We change in fundamental ways every seven to nine years,’ the Hawaiian Tao master had told me. This was news to me. I must have coasted ignorantly through my previous changes, but I am all too aware of this most recent one. And he’s right: it has changed me in fundamental ways. I have lost confidence but developed a certain survivor-like steel. I have learned to pace myself and even, for moments at a time, to fully switch off. I am slower, calmer, more present. I am less fraught, less frenzied. More resilient. I walk, don’t run, in every sense. Life may feel more effortful now, but only because I am so assiduously aware of its constituent parts. Often, this brings reward.

  From time to time, I try to pinpoint any positives to glean from all this. When I compare life before with life after, the former wins in almost all categories. I miss living off an endless energy resource, and a part of me is still affronted by the fact that it proved not to be endless after all. But then again it’s good to stop running in all directions all of the time. I still meditate, though not always as rigorously as I should, and my yoga routine is less about the breath than it is about simple stretches. In other words, I could do better, but the intent remains. I’m unfit but active, ish; there’s room for improvement. If I look hard enough, I see that life is indeed now full of endless daily miracles, mostly of the humdrum kind, but which I cling to because I know how much they have cost me. I have saved a small fortune in shoes. My marriage, I think, is stronger, and I am lucky to have an amazing wife who took the ‘in sickness and in health’ bit seriously. I must work to repay this. I am watching my children grow up, because I’m a very present father – too present, the girls might argue, because I am always here, never anywhere else. But I want to be here with them. Nowhere else is quite as much fun.

  Being ill has paid off in other ways, too. I have met some truly fascinating people, people I can learn from, and write about. Fascinating people to write about is all any writer craves. They have taught me more in the past three years than I have learned in the previous 30. I hope to retain at least some of their teachings.

  And I have come, grudgingly, to accept that I am Jack Lemmon in The Odd Couple when all I ever wanted to be was Walter Matthau. This, perhaps, is my fate.

  There are worse.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many people gave me a lot of their time during the writing and researching of this book. I would like to thank each of them, but particularly: Will Williams, Anna Duschinsky, Phil Parker, Alex Howard, Susie Orbach, Professor Peter White and Elaine Hilides. Thanks also to Julie Clark, for unstinting friendship. To Natania Jansz, for key creative counsel. To A.L. Kennedy, Cathy Rentzenbrink and Meg Rosoff, for such generous and encouraging words. I am enormously grateful to the whole team at Bloomsbury, particularly my editor, Sarah Skipper, and my wonderful publisher, Charlotte Croft, who made it all happen, and steered the book – and me – so capably. I’d like to thank my beautiful daughters, Amaya and Evie, vital life forces who kept me sane, and kept me focused. Mostly, I would like to thank my wife, Elena, who did nothing less than help make me well again when I was convinced that getting well again might never happen. She was my doctor, my nurse, my support system, and she was so incredibly kind. She is my best friend, my foil, and my very favourite feminist.

  PRAISE FOR get well soon

  “Get Well Soon is a wise and tender, necessary book, filled with a truth born of searing experience. The memoir charts one man’s ­journey through intractable long-term illness, but it would be infinitely recognisable to anyone whose certainties have been ­shattered and who has had to rebuild… The book is just so lovely.”

  A.L. Kennedy

  “A fascinating and moving story of one man’s attempts to regain his health and vitality. I enjoyed the love and resilience that ­underpin the struggles and searching.”

  Cathy Rentzenbrink

  “An intelligent, incisive exploration of the cures trotted out to treat the 21st century’s most insidious malaise. And no, it’s not all in your head.”

  Meg Rosoff

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  First published 2018

  © Nick Duerden, 2018

  Nick Duerden has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.

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  This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical advice of physicians. The reader should consult a physician in matters relating to his/her health and particularly with r
espect to any symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied for.

  ISBN: Print: HB: 978-1-4729-5048-2

  ePDF: 978-1-4729-5047-5

  ePub: 978-1-4729-5049-9

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