A pain in the arse...and back, hips, legs, and feet

I discovered something surprising about two years ago. I like running.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a real runner. I don't wear my phone in a little pouch strapped to my bicep, and I don't own any brightly coloured lycra tops with special breathable bits under the armpits.

I don't look like this when I run. Does anyone? Except for Kate Hudson when she's trying to sell expensive and unnecessarily fashionable exercise things?

Before I discovered I liked running, I was an avid gym-goer. And by avid I mean I had a crush on the personal trainer at my gym. Then I slipped a disc trying to impress him leg-pressing 120kg and had to be wheel-chaired out.

I was forced to cancel a job interview I had the next day. I thought that was a bit of an inconvenience. I couldn't lift my arms up or turn my head or bend down or walk.

I lived with my parents - I'd just finished university, but they were on holiday in France. I spent the next few days crawling around the house, taking ages over things that shouldn't take very long at all, like pulling the blinds down or opening the oven door.

I thought, something just needs to click in there. I'll be ok in a few days.

A few weeks later the pain had eased off slightly. I was ok, as long as I didn't stand up for more than 10 minutes, do any kind of twisty movement, or laugh too hard (which, as you can imagine, I wasn't doing much of).

I winced my way through a job interview in Surrey, got the job, and prepared for the move. My dad had a stroke that very same day. Just three months out of the dream-like bubble of university, real life turned out to be a bit of a bitch.

I packed my stuff and paid £600 a month to live in somebody's spare bedroom. I realised I could cycle to work fine.

I joined up at the local gym and developed a routine of work, cycling and gym. I used the cross trainer and bike - they were the only things that didn't put pressure on my sciatic nerve.

I didn't feel 21. I felt old. On one occasion I got a taxi to a doctor's appointment but the driver took me to the wrong surgery and left me stranded without any money. I tried to walk back the way we'd come but the pain was too bad. A woman pulled up beside me and asked if I was ok. She kindly gave me a lift to the right place but it hit home just how frustratingly helpless I was. Miles from my family, unable to walk, and no one to even complain about it all to.

Over the months the pain came in waves, never leaving completely. I was struck by how difficult pain is to talk about. You don't want to go on about it, it sounds self-pitying and there is nothing anybody can do to help, you just make them feel uncomfortable. I came up with an idea for a pain-tracking app that would convert the severity of your pain into colours that would form a pattern over time (red for really bad, blue for no pain) so you could show people a visualisation of your pain, and try to understand it better. I wrote a business plan and was shocked to learn that hundreds of thousands of people live their lives in chronic pain.

I never made the app but someone should.

A year went by, during which time I was bundled by the NHS from GPs to consultants, to physios and eventually to an epidural appointment that I never had to go to, because one day the pain went away quite suddenly.

I was carrying my shopping home after the gym, and I realised that there was no pain at all. I did a little jog. All fine. I sobbed with relief all the way home.

I started with a two mile run to a little lake in a wood near my house that I stumbled upon accidentally. Then I started running to the gym instead of cycling. Then I started running at the gym, and not long after, my sister phoned to see if I wanted to run the Eastbourne Half Marathon with her.

12 weeks later, we ran it.

There I am, running towards the finish line

I look minging but I just ran 13.1 miles 

I could barely walk afterwards and couldn't run again for another month, but it changed the way I felt mentally. When you break down physical barriers and do something you never thought you could do, you gain confidence. I like running because it makes me feel free. I don't really do it to lose weight, although I bang on about that. It hasn't helped me lose much - a couple of pounds maybe. But it's being able to move freely, to get into that rhythm of breathing and putting one foot in front of the other and feeling like you're going somewhere. Even if it is slow and sweaty and attracting concerned stares.

Everybody experiences pain in a different way and it's such a difficult thing to deal with, physically and mentally.

This has turned into a bit of a dark post, but I know that when I had sciatica it helped to read other people's experience of it - especially young people. A lot of the time it was 'I've had sciatica for 10 years and I want to kill myself'. I don't know if it was the exercise that cured mine, but I know it kept those kind of thoughts at bay.

Anyway, today my pain is long forgotten. Honestly, I can't recall exactly what it felt like. I can only remember that it was horrible on a lot of levels. Today I feel lucky every time I run.

I don't like sharing

I am an introvert. Social situations exhaust me like you wouldn't believe. 

For me to perform well socially, the conditions have to be just right. I have to be well-rested, I have to be in a good mood, feeling confident, perhaps excited about something. I have to be prepared. Otherwise my mind develops this membrane, like cling-film, that comes between me and the outside world. When this happens, I can't think of the right things to say, I pause in the wrong places and I panic intensely about whether I'm using the right tone, looking in the right eye, or doing the right thing with my face. 

'Banter' with strangers is torture. An intense fear of saying the wrong thing means I can't be quippy and witty with my retorts, so I tend not to retort at all.

Of course I'm not the only one. There are billions of introverts in the world. I heard it's a scale, like autism. 

It's not that I don't like other people. Actually quite the opposite - I like knowing about people, watching them, trying to understand them. Not in a Patrick Bateman sort of way. Just normal human curiosity. But I prefer to be an observer.

Obviously you can't get through life just watching things happen without someone noticing you and trying to get you involved, so savvy introverts develop a persona – an image of themselves they portray to other people. It keeps things ticking along. But personas are difficult things to keep up and after a long day of being around other people, it starts to get thin and raggedy. Just as ectothermic animals like snakes and lizards need heat to re-energise, introverts need time alone. 

So how do introverts handle relationships? 

I'm getting married in the summer. I hate sharing, and now I'm promising to share everything forever. My future, my living space, my bed, my thoughts, my ambitions, my time, my food, my lacy underwear. 

For introverts, the very idea of being constantly with someone FOREVER is enough to make you want to fake your own death and disappear to another country. 

I have never withheld the fact that I could happily live man-less in a cottage with a dog for the rest of my life. When he asked me to marry him, I was still drunk from the night before and everything felt surreal even before he got down on one knee and presented me with a box with a ring in it. But I said yes and that monosyllabic response has, as trite as it may sound, changed my life. 

But it's ok. When introverts stumble upon a kindred soul they feel at ease with, they unleash the person within, imparting – whether the recipient likes it or not, a cacophony of pent up thoughts and feelings. It's a relief. As icy and independent and aloof as we like to think we are, even introverts need to feel a connection with another human being sometimes. Even if just to confirm that we still exist. 

The trick to being an introvert in a relationship, is respecting each other's space. Buy a king size bed. Buy headphones. Go for runs alone. Go on holiday alone. Make it clear if you bought that cheesecake JUST for you. Understand that life can be that little more exhausting when you're constantly wondering whether your expression, pitch and body language is appropriate for the current social situation. 

Kahlil Gibran put it a bit more romantically. He said: 

"Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. 
 For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. 
 And stand together, yet not too near together: 
 For the pillars of the temple stand apart, 
 And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow."