It’s been a few days since the last post. I’ve been on holiday, and the experience made me think back to a time when going on holiday seemed like the last thing in the world I would be able to do. ‘Me? Go on holiday? Absolutely not. Those kinds of things are for other people. I will be lucky to ever feel brave enough to go on holiday again!’
The thought of going somewhere I hadn’t already been was
unbearable. The idea of meeting someone I didn’t already know; excruciating.
It sounds awfully pathetic, I know that. But when you’re in
the thick of it there’s nothing pathetic about it. You do have some kind of
sense that you’re being a bit wet, but the fear of everything is too big and
you can’t concentrate on anything outside of yourself.
We had been to America the summer before all this happened.
Three weeks of driving from New York, to Washington DC, and on down to the tip
of Florida. They were three of the best weeks I had ever had, sharing this
mammoth road trip with my fiancée. But now, paralysed by fear, I couldn’t even
go to the Waitrose around the corner from our house, let alone go to another
town. Another country was entirely unthinkable.
I couldn’t see how I would ever be able to enjoy new places
again. The thought of going somewhere I didn’t know the surroundings, or the
people, or the quickest way out was terrifying. I honestly thought I would have
to spend the rest of my life going only to places I had already been, and even
some of those places were questionable.
I started walking. I had left work by now, and I just
started walking. I set up the health app on my phone and started counting
steps. We had recently moved to a new area, and I didn’t know my way around at
all, but I would set off when my wife left for work at around eight thirty, and
just wander by the river and across the park and see how much distance I could
cover. Or rather, how little distance I could cover.
I made it five hundred steps on that first day. That was
barely past the Waitrose car park and in to the park behind. A woman was coming
towards me with a dog, and she scared me. She was tiny. Her dog was tiny.
Neither of them was threatening in any way, but that wasn’t how my brain saw
it. My brain saw a hundred possible awkward scenarios, and a thousand things
which would be devastating. The woman might say hello, and I would be forced to
say something back. The dog might rub itself against my leg. The woman might
not say hello and I would smile at her like an idiot and she would think I was
crazy. I could say hello, but I might be left hanging in some awful unrequited
greeting. All manner of terrible things could – and certainly would – happen if
I passed this woman. So I turned around before she – or her tiny dog – could get
anywhere near me and I went home.
Each day I set the app to count my steps, each day I took
ten or twenty more than the previous expedition. All the time, my eyes were
slightly funny, and it felt like my brain was on fire; an invisible fire to
everyone in the outside world, with flames that flickered and licked the inside
of my skull and occasionally convinced me I would die because I was too far
from home.
But I forced myself out of the house each morning, and I
continued to put one foot in front of the other. Five hundred steps became a
thousand. A thousand steps became five thousand. Soon I was walking ten
thousand steps before nine thirty each morning. I walked over 250 miles in two
months, all along the same, well-trodden parks and river paths around my house.
And the whole time I was totally scared to death.
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