I already knew Mum has no empathy and that although she gets very angry when anything bad happens to her, she doesn’t seem to be capable of feeling sorry for anyone else. I suppose that’s why she genuinely didn’t understand why I was so shocked when she said things like, ‘I used to love going to visit my nan and granddad when I was a child. They had a pond in their garden and I’d sit beside it catching frogs and squashing them.’ Which explained why she’d got so angry with me a few weeks earlier for rescuing three little frogs I’d found at the side of the road outside her house, and had shouted at me, ‘What did you do that for? There’s something wrong with you.’
Another of the stories she told me was about one Sunday when Dad came home from the pub drunk – as he always was – and persistent in his sexual demands. I was living at Denver House at the time and had been home for a visit the previous day. So she decided to pay him back by getting him to phone and tell the member of staff who answered that he knew my period was about to start and just wanted to check that they would provide me with everything I needed.
She grinned as she told me how he was too drunk to realise the implications of what he was saying. But I could feel my cheeks burning with humiliation at the memory of what must have been that same day, when someone at the unit asked me if anything had happened during my visit home that could have made my father aware that I was expecting my period. I’d hated him for embarrassing me, when actually it had been my mother’s idea to set him up and manipulate him in the hope of getting him into trouble – a score settled at my expense.
I think that was when I began to realise just how much she’d controlled and manipulated all of us, like some character in a novel or a film who sneaks around causing trouble and setting everyone against each other by dripping poison into people’s ears.
From a selfish point of view, I found visiting Mum and hearing about how her father used to abuse her emotionally draining, and eventually it reached a point when I began to think, ‘That’s enough now. I can’t take any more.’ Knowing she’d lied about so many things made me angry and determined to fight back, and for the first time in my life I stopped blaming myself for everything that had happened. She had come very close to getting her wish and destroying me, but maybe there was still time for me to do something to help myself.
Chapter 17
After I’d joined the library when I was living at Denver House, I’d read a book called You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise Hay, which is a self-help book based on the idea that, ‘What we think about ourselves becomes the truth for us … Everyone is responsible for everything in our lives, the best and the worst. Every thought we think is creating our future.’ Even during the worst times, I’ve always had an idea at the back of my mind of, ‘This can’t be it. It can’t just finish like this.’ So I’d found the book helpful, because it gave me something to think about, even though I wasn’t in the right place mentally at the time to be able to act on any of it.
After listening to my mum’s stories, however, and realising that she had quite deliberately done what she could to destroy my childhood and my relationship with my dad and make sure I didn’t have the good life she felt she herself had been deprived of, I began to think it was time to take responsibility and try to fix my own life.
The first thing I did was join a library again. Then I started doing what the author Louise Hay calls daily affirmations, setting myself small targets such as, ‘Today, I’m going to clean the cooker,’ or ‘This morning I’m going to get up, get washed and dressed and go to the shop to buy some bread and milk.’ Before long, I had cleaned and redecorated the flat, bought some new furniture, and was beginning to wonder whether I might be able to do other things too, if I took everything step by step. So when I saw a sign advertising jobs at a local warehouse that was owned by a supermarket chain, I found out how to apply, then went to a charity shop and bought myself some clothes that I thought would be suitable to wear if, by some chance, I was asked to go for an interview.
I hadn’t ever worked before, and although I was trying to think more positively, I still believed I wasn’t really good enough. So I was surprised and quite nervous when I got an interview, and very excited when I was offered a job as a warehouse operative. It was a full-time job, which meant I was able to sign off benefits and, for the first time in my life, pay my own rent and council tax with money I’d earned myself, like any other normal adult would do.
Within days of starting work, there was food in my cupboards, money in the gas meter and the flat was warm. Then I threw away all the tatty clothes that had never suited me and all the shoes with holes in them that made my feet wet every time it rained, and bought myself some nice things that fitted me properly and that I wasn’t ashamed to be seen in.
Even though I’d done well at school before the abuse and the alcohol made it so difficult to focus, I’d always been convinced I was too stupid to be able to do a proper job, so it was an amazing feeling to find that I could and to know that I was no longer dependent on benefits and didn’t have to beg my mum for food. It’s scary though, when I look back on it now, to think how close I’d actually come to hitting rock bottom.
It was hard work in the warehouse, with an early start on the days when I was doing the morning shift, and it didn’t take me long to realise that I wasn’t going to be able to keep it up unless I cut down on the drinking. I had been reliant on alcohol for so long by that time that the prospect of having to get through a day without it was daunting. But it actually proved to be less difficult than I’d expected now that I finally had something in my life worth being sober for.
I knew better than to expect Mum to be happy for me, of course. What I hadn’t anticipated, however, was that the more independent and confident I became, the more she shut me out. Sometimes, she wouldn’t answer the door when I went round to see her, and sometimes she flung it open when I rang the bell and shouted at me, ‘Who do you think you are? You’re not coming in. Go away.’ All because she couldn’t bear the fact that, despite her best efforts over the last 19 years, I was doing okay.
I went home less often after that, and started thinking about what I wanted to do. I don’t think I’d ever previously thought that I might actually have a choice about what I did with my life, and when I started to think about it, I realised that what I really wanted to do was box. I know boxing is a controversial sport, but it does involve a lot of skill and I’d had a passion for it ever since I used to watch it on television as a little girl. What I also liked about it as I got older was the way it seemed to mirror the constant struggle to do better in life. But I knew that before I could even think about taking a boxing class, I was going to have to get fit. So, instead of sitting in the flat after I’d finished work for the day at the warehouse, I started swimming. Then I gave up smoking and took up running too.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the first time I ran a mile without stopping. The fact that I could barely walk for two days afterwards seemed a price worth paying for the sense of achievement I had knowing I’d done something I’d never done before.
Alcohol was the last thing to go. I’d already cut down on it a bit, but I knew that if I didn’t stop altogether, I would never get fit enough to do what I wanted to do. And anyway, now that my life had some purpose, I didn’t feel lonely when I was on my own the way I used to do. It probably sounds daft, but it was as if I’d become connected to the rest of the world in a way I hadn’t ever been before. So even when I was alone in my flat, I didn’t have the horrible sense of being totally isolated that I’d always had.
Perhaps it was because, for the first time in my life, I was just like everyone else: hurrying off to work, going for a swim, jogging through the park, and doing all the other normal things that normal people do. What I also began to realise was that using alcohol to dull your senses really does dull them, and I would sometimes stop to look at a flower and wonder why I’d never noticed before how bright the colours were. After having wished so many times
that I was dead, it was an extraordinary experience to find myself appreciating being alive.
What also surprised me was the discovery that if I set my mind to doing something, I really could do it. I gave up drinking completely for three months, and although I did have an occasional drink after that – because I was having nightmares and flashbacks about the abuse I’d suffered when I was living in Denver House – I always limited it, because I had to be able to work and because I wanted to continue to do all the exercise I was doing.
Then, one day, as I was leaving the sports centre after swimming 30 lengths of the pool in the early-bird swim, I noticed a poster on the door advertising boxing classes at a gym that was just around the corner, and I remember thinking, ‘It’s on my way home. I might as well drop in.’
You often hear ‘wellness gurus’ and other people saying things like, ‘Open your mind to new experiences and good things will happen,’ which can sound a bit trite, because if it was as easy as that, why would bad things ever happen to anyone? But good things did happen for me after I started opening my mind to doing things I’d never have thought myself capable of doing. One of them was going to the gym that day and finding that a free class was just about to start – funded by a grant from the council – for people between the ages of 16 and 21. As I was 21, I joined it, then went back a couple of hours later to do another. And suddenly it felt as though I’d found the missing piece of a puzzle I hadn’t even realised I’d been searching for.
After I’d done the second class, the teacher, who was a professional boxer, called me over and told me, ‘Sometimes people just blow me away. They walk through that door and I think, “Where on earth did you come from?” Come back on Monday and I’ll get the coach to have a look at you to see if I’m right and you’ve got what it takes.’
With the money I was earning at the warehouse, I’d been able to buy myself a second-hand bike, which I rode everywhere, and as I was riding it home through the park in the rain that day, a rainbow suddenly appeared in front of me, and when I reached out my hand, it looked as though one end of it was resting on my palm.
I sometimes use angel cards, which are a bit like tarot cards and can be a useful way of focusing your thoughts on a particular problem or question. I did them when I got home that day, and after shuffling the pack, the first card I picked out had a picture of a cloud on it and an angel holding a rainbow, with the word ‘Study’. Again, I know some people will think it sounds stupid, but it made me feel as though I really was on the right track.
After I’d finished work the following Monday, I cycled to the boxing gym feeling very nervous, as though I was about to take part in the most important interview of my life. When I got there, the coach asked me to do some sparring to check that I didn’t shy away from being hit. It’s a stumbling block for some people, because as well as having a good technique when you’re hitting an inanimate object, you need to be able to stand your ground and dodge the blows when a real person is trying to hit you in the face.
At the end of the session, the coach said, ‘Okay, we’ll train you. I think you might just have what it takes to become a professional.’ And suddenly it was if someone had flung open every shutter and every door in a darkened room, filling it with almost blinding sunlight.
I had to pay for the classes, and fit them in around my shifts at the warehouse, but that was fine. I was earning enough money to cover the cost, and one of the many good things about the job I was doing was that my responsibility ended as soon as I walked out of the building, so I didn’t have to worry about it at all.
I was running between 30 and 50 miles a week by that time – I could do a mile in six minutes – and I felt amazing. I got up at 4 o’clock every morning, thought about all the positives in my life while I ate my breakfast – that I was safe, had food to eat, a roof over my head and a job. Then, if I was on the early shift – from 6 a.m. till 2 p.m. – I trained for an hour or so before biking to work, went straight to the gym when I clocked off, and was on the treadmill by 2.30.
When I wasn’t at work, running, swimming or at a boxing class, I was doing yoga or some other session at the sports centre. In fact, I was never at home, because setting fitness goals and achieving them had become an obsession. One day, for example, when I did a 13-mile run just fractionally over the time limit I’d set myself, I turned around and did it again. It took longer the second time, of course, because I was tired before I set out and because I’d almost run as far as I did in a week by the end of it. But I was so happy about the fact that I’d achieved something I’d never done before, I bought myself an ice-cream from the van that just happened to be in the park at the very spot where I ended my own personal marathon!
Looking back on it now, I realise I sometimes became stuck in a trap of everything having to be all or nothing. But it was the happiest time of my life in many ways. I rarely spoke to my mum. She wasn’t interested in me at all now that my life was no longer a disaster, and without her entirely negative influence, my self-esteem was able to recover enough for me to start thinking about who I am, what I like and what I might be able to achieve if I put my mind to it. What I didn’t realise, however, was that I wasn’t just running to get fit: I was running away from all the bad stuff that had happened, stuff that I was going to have to deal with when it eventually caught up with me.
Chapter 18
I met Jess on an online dating site, then in person about a week later. I was 22, had never dated before and was very naive, still convinced that one day I’d find the ‘special someone’ I’d been waiting for since I used to sit under the stars on the roof at Denver House listening to Céline Dion singing about believing in your dreams.
I didn’t trust people though, and when Jess rang about three weeks after we’d met up for the second time and said her husband had kicked her out and she wanted to move in with me, I cried when I put down the phone. It was a bit of a shock to discover she was married – she hadn’t mentioned it in any of her emails or when we’d met. What really upset me, however, was the fact that I’d agreed to her coming to live with me because I thought it was my fault her marriage had broken down, but it wasn’t what I wanted at all.
With work and boxing training going well, I’d decided I wanted to study counselling and fitness instructing, so that I could share the things that had turned my life around with other people who’d had similarly bad experiences. So, by the time Jess moved in – which she did with a carload of stuff the day after she’d phoned me – I’d cut back the hours I was working at the warehouse and had started going to college. Jess was working too, and for a while she commuted every day to a town about 40 minutes’ drive away, close to where she’d been living with her husband.
Despite my initial misgivings, it wasn’t long before I’d persuaded myself that Jess moving in to the flat had been a good thing. And then it all started going wrong.
It was my fault that I started drinking again. I didn’t have to do it just because it was what Jess wanted to do. But although I know it sounds stupid, I think I was so anxious to have ‘someone special’ that I persuaded myself it was probably what everyone did with their partners when they fell in love, and went along with it. The problem was, just one drink when you’re really fit can mess up your training, and with my history it had an effect almost immediately. The odd drink hadn’t appeared to be a problem before I started boxing, but it wasn’t ever just ‘one drink’ after Jess moved in, and it wasn’t long before I was struggling, both mentally and physically.
Before I met Jess, I’d stopped relying on alcohol for the first time since I was 13 years old. And I’d done it myself, because the job and the boxing training had given me a reason to want to stay sober. But as any alcoholic will tell you, even with all the right kind of help and support, it’s really tough to give up drinking. So I suppose, in the circumstances, the outcome was almost inevitable.
I won’t go into all the details of what turned out to be a rather messy relationship that la
sted, on and off, for a couple of years. Basically, we started bickering quite soon after Jess came to live with me. She needed more attention than I was always able to give her and got quite violent when she felt she wasn’t getting it, and eventually it became impossible for me to do the work I had to do for college or to concentrate on anything. What made it worse was the fact that I was torn between thinking it was all my fault – after years of conditioning – and feeling guilty because I wished Jess hadn’t come to live in my flat.
To be fit enough to do what I wanted to do, I had to train at the gym twice a day, and you have to be at the top of your game to do that. So if I’d been drinking with Jess or had had a late night, it had a very significant effect on my performance, and after a while I started to put on weight and go to the gym less often than I should have done.
Anyone who’d seen me when I was at rock bottom wouldn’t have recognised the slim, fit, motivated, employed person I’d become by the time I met Jess. I had been proud of what I’d achieved and of the fact that I had done it all by myself. Now I was losing everything, and I didn’t know how to claw it all back and re-focus on the positive things I’d fought so hard to build into my life.
While it was all falling apart, I kept telling myself, ‘I can make this better,’ which is what I used to believe about my relationship with my mum. So I should have known from experience that it wasn’t going to work out. In fact, what I should have been telling myself was that Jess wasn’t my ‘special someone’, however much I wanted her to be. I wasn’t responsible for her and I should have just ended the relationship, picked up my own life and carried on. For some reason though, I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t let go. Perhaps it was because I’d never trusted anyone before and had always believed that, ultimately, everyone would let me down, so I couldn’t bear to face the fact that, having finally allowed myself to become intimately connected with someone, I’d made a mistake.
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