I remember exactly the night that it started. I was doing my physio exercises one evening, when I started noticing that my feet were clicking… a lot. I wiggled other bits of my body, I rolled my arms in their shoulder sockets and noticed the pain in my chest that resulted from it, I opened my jaw as widely as it could, and pressed my fingers against the part where your jaw hinges, and I noticed that one side sticks out more than the other and what if that means that there’s a tumour growing there? Or what if this is early onset arthritis that’s making everything hurt? What if, in two years’ time, I’m stuck in a wheelchair while all those around me continue on with their lives, climbing mountains and finding love and having careers, while I’m stuck in a god damn wheelchair under their pitiful gaze?
I know. I know how that all sounds. I know I sound like I’m crazy and I’m extrapolating something which is incredibly normal into something life-changingly awful. It went on like that for two and a half months. It started on the 10th of January. And I’m pleased to say that today, 31st March, I know deep down that I am not dying. Okay, I know we are all dying to some degree, but I don’t spend most waking moments over-analysing every sensation in my body and googling every symptom under the sun.
In the past two months, I’ve convinced myself that I have, to name a few:
- Lymes disease
- Arthritis
- Blood cancer
- Bone cancer
- Fybromialgia
- A slipped disc
- A pinched nerve
I made a joke out of it. My boyfriend at the time and I would joke that I needed a child sensor thing on Google on my phone to stop me from searching my symptoms. I couldn’t help myself. On reflection, I know that I was indulging in these intrusive thoughts and letting them rule my life. You have a choice about how much headspace and attention you give those thoughts. I still sometimes look down at my fingernails and notice a weird blip in one of them and try really hard NOT to Google all the awful diseases that this could be a sign of. I take a breath, and I take some perspective, and I decide not to Google it. I move on with my day. That’s a pretty big step for me.
I quit my job over this. I literally thought I was going to die. I thought I only had a couple of months left to live. I used to (and still do sometimes) feel so frustrated and embarrassed at myself for feeling like that, it felt so overly dramatic. A really good friend said something so simple to me during this time, something which I have come back to a lot and has changed my perspective on mental health. She said, “That sounds really scary for you.” It stopped me in my tracks. That kind of hit the nail on the head of how I was feeling – I was afraid. All. The. Time. That fear was a real, physical feeling. It wasn’t something I was just making up in my head that I could brush under the carpet, it was something that manifesting itself physically in my racing heartbeat, the knot in my stomach, the exhaustion and just wanting to turn my brain off, even for five minutes. And it felt crap. How about I stopped blaming myself and telling myself to just get on with it, and instead sat with that fear and recognised it for what it was, accepting that I do feel like crap instead of living in this state of denial all the time, which clearly wasn’t doing me any good.
I distinctly remember the day that I realised that at least part of how I was feeling was stress-related. I was in a meeting with my manager, sitting beside each other on a Teams call. It was a license review meeting, which basically means that I sit there beside my manager and try to think of some intelligent input but mostly feeling like an absolute idiot with no place being in my job. Yeah – that’s how I used to talk to myself most days at that job.
Anyway, in the previous week going up to this meeting, I’d been getting really bad pains in my back and nerve going down one arm, and I was waiting on the results of a Lymes disease blood test, which meant that I’d pretty much convinced myself that I had it. One of the symptoms of Lymes is that you get this tingling and drooping in your face. Now, you know in a Teams call how your own lovely mug is always reflected back to you? Well during this meeting, while most of my brain was taken up with what an idiot I am, the other part was focussing so hard on the excruciating pain in my back, and then my face started to tingle, and I swear in the Teams video, it looked like one side of my face was dropping. I put my fingers to my face to subtly check – have my lips always just been a bit lower on the left? How am I going to get out of this meeting? I need to get help, now. It’s going to be SO dramatic if I just up and leave and say ‘I think I have Lymes disease and I need to go to a hospital right now’. So I sat there, minute by painful minute, until finally the call ended. And I told my manager some version of how I was feeling, and he said I should go home. So I did.
I cycled through Edinburgh, from Leith to Liberton. By the time I was halfway, my face didn’t tingle anymore, and my back felt at least 50% better. Not perfect, but definitely better. As I reached home, the realisation dawned on me. I had very negative thoughts during that work meeting, and the pains got so bad that I literally thought I needed an ambulance. That is not normal. Work should not make you feel like that. There’s got to be a link in how bad I felt in that work call and how that physically manifested in my body.
I spent the next 2 weeks on stress leave, I started antidepressants, I went on a ski touring holiday (hey, someone’s got to do it) and when I came back I was resolute – I was quitting that job and doing something that was around people, outside, something that was chilled and would allow me to be happy, or some version of it. A side note – I know what you’re thinking, how bad can you be if you still went on a skiing holiday? Well, I had several crises about whether to go on it, including phoning up my insurance company to see if they could cover the costs. Long story short, it was cheaper for me to go on it than to not go. My back and jaw hurt so much at times on that holiday that I thought I was going to have to fly home, not that I told anyone or let on how I was feeling. I felt like a burden – we were on holiday to have a good time, they didn’t need me having a meltdown about a sore jaw.
Back to the work situation. I stopped working at the start of March, although I still work freelance running a project that tries to make hiking more accessible for under-represented groups. I feel better. Today, I ran in the hills for the first time in 7 months, and my feet didn’t hurt. I ran so hard uphill, and I felt okay. I ran so hard downhill, and I felt okay.
I cried. I cried a lot on the drive home, and they were mostly tears of happiness. I cried because I genuinely believed that I would never be able to run in the hills again. I cried because I remembered all of the times that I felt lonely and isolated because I couldn’t go running with my friends. I distinctly remember opening up Instagram one morning to a professional photo of one of my friends at a running race – eyes closed in euphoria, hair windswept, cheeks pink. The expression on her face is one of pure joy, and it was so painfully relatable yet so far out of my reach. The bitterness tore at my guts.
I cried because I am proud of who I am today. When I was a kid, I hated myself. I always felt like the huge, awkward girl who never managed to do things right, never said the right thing, never quite fit in. I dealt with that in high school by developing an eating disorder and exercising all the time. It didn’t make me anymore likeable, in fact it probably did the opposite because I was never around - I was always running or in the gym or trying not to pass out from hunger somewhere. I bullied myself so much during that time, I told myself I was useless and that I’d never make friends or fit in or achieve the image of who I wanted for myself.
There were some really key people and experiences who changed that for me. I joined the kayaking club at university, and every single one of those people helped build me up to be who I am now. They helped me to see that I am likeable, that I am worthy of friendship and love, and that there is so much more to life than the number on the scales or how far your hipbones protrude when you lie down. I am, and always will be, so grateful to those people for helping me feel and learn that. We went to the French Alps on a 2 week kayaking trip in 2018, and on the last night we sat under the stars and my friends Sam and Noah were playing music. They played songs that they had written which had so much meaning to us all, and they ended with a song called ‘To the alps, to l’Argentiere’, I cried so hard at the end because as we all sang together in that French campsite, it was the first time in my life that I felt accepted and surrounded by loving friends who didn’t mind what I look like or what stupid thing I said, they just liked me for me.
I cried today in the hills because, at age 25, I realised that I am really proud of who I am. That’s not something 16-year-old Emily would ever have expected. I wish I could sit down with her, give her a hug and tell her that it’s okay. It’s okay to just be your weird self, to be vulnerable, to just decide to be and do whatever you want to. If you need to make someone proud, why not make that person yourself? I can’t think of a better use of time.
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