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." 

The Museum of Expensive Things

I went to Harrods yesterday. I hate shopping, but no one goes to Harrods to shop, do they? They go there to point, gasp and and do little high pitched laughs at the price tags. 

Because it's Christmas shopping time now, there was a higher proportion of 'real Harrods customers' amongst the grubby parker-wearing, camera-wielding riffraff yesterday.

I saw lots of little groups of women in panda/unicorn-fur hats and designer ponchos being herded along by Harrods salesmen, followed by a trail of husbands, all with Slavic accents, stylishly swept-back hair and pointy shoes that made click-clacky noises on the floor. 

I have always been fascinated by rich people. That could come across as quite condescending. If it was the other way round and I was a rich person 'fascinated by poor people' then it would be. But wealth is innately flashy, isn't it. It screams to be seen. All the expensive things in Harrods (anything over six figures) are kept behind glass boxes beneath designer lighting. It's not a shop, it's a museum. The things are there to be looked at – gawped at, gasped at.

It's not the things themselves that fascinate me, or the people themselves. Take away their tailored clothes and their money and they're just as flawed and boring as I am. It's the air of exclusivity that enamours me: the glass boxes.  

There is nothing in Harrods that I particularly want. I certainly didn't want the £200 furry heart-shaped Christmas tree decoration I saw for sale yesterday, or the £4,000 suitcase. I'm quite happy with the phone I have. I don't hanker for a 4K TV, or a designer coffee machine. I don't even mind that much that the backspace key just came off my laptop. Perhaps I'm naive or in denial, but I don't think there is an object I could buy in Harrods, or anywhere in fact, that would make me happier than I am now. 

And yet I still want to be rich – and, although I can't justify this in any way, I've always believed that one day I will be. It's a strange thing that's difficult to explain. Delusional, perhaps. But I've never been too bothered about my £20,000 student loan, or my disappointing pay slips, because I've always known that one day it won't matter. One day I'll have more money than I know what to do with. 

But the question isn't why am I so certain I'll be rich, it's: why should I even want to be rich, when I have all I need to be happy, and very little interest in buying things? 

Alain de Botton (I've mentioned him in a previous blog about love. He talks a lot of sense) recently wrote an article that questions the motivations of the rich. Why do billionaires carry on working long hours to make money when they don't even need to? Alain explains:

"The rich are not, therefore, working to make more money with an eye to spending it. They are making money in order to be liked. They are doing so for the sake of status, as a way of keeping score and letting the world know of their value as human beings. The rich work for love and for honour. They stay up late at the office out of vanity – because they want to be able to walk into rooms full of strangers and be swiftly recognised by those that matter and deemed miraculous and clever for having made fortunes, whose size is carefully recorded by the media the world over."

Is wanting to be rich a way of wanting to be recognised, loved, honoured? I am on the lower end of the nation's pay scale; does that make me feel undervalued, ignored?

A Taste of Money

I once spent 48 hours as a rich person. My job sometimes requires me to do things rich people do so I can write about them. It's a good deal. This September I found myself in Lisbon being chauffeured around in a Mercedes minibus with blacked-out windows and a personal tour guide. The plan was to spend the night in the Ritz hotel and return the following day to the Harrods terminal in Luton on a private jet the size of a Boeing 737. I'm not going to pretend I felt spoilt, guilty, or over-indulged on this absurdly luxurious trip. It was brilliant. Every second of it, from being at Heathrow Airport and travelling to a country I'd never been to before, to stepping into a suite the size of my flat with the whole of Lisbon spread out beneath my balcony. I laughed. I laughed hysterically, loudly and at length as I ripped my clothes off, wrapped myself in my Ritz robe, slipped into my Ritz slippers, jumped up and down on the emperor-sized bed and popped open a bottle of port. I simply couldn't believe I was there. The room was mine, the view was mine, the slippers were mine, the port was mine and I had three hours to enjoy it all before meeting back up with the other journalists for dinner.

I swam, I saunad, I rubbed ice into my thighs, I blow-dried my hair and escaped the hotel for a walk in the warm late-afternoon sun. I felt freedom. Even though there was a time limit, I felt this sense of utter bliss. I was somewhere else, somewhere I had never been before, experiencing things I had never experienced before, and there was no guilt. Every day I feel a sense of guilt. Guilt for spending too much money, eating too much, not exercising, not working, not writing. Here, my sole purpose was to enjoy myself. Everything was free, everything was planned for us. All of my needs were taken care of. It wasn't the level of luxury that excited me, but the lack of responsibility, and the feeling of pure freedom that comes with that. 

That night I got chatting to two publishers over the remnants of my hotel room port. They were talking about watch brands. One of them said the watch he was wearing was worth £10,000. I looked at it. To me it didn't look particularly special. It didn't conceal any 007 weapons, it didn't expand into a semi-detached house in the suburbs. I asked the men what they found so interesting about tiny wearable clocks. They said women have their beauty products, their jewellery and their shoes. Men need something to make them feel special too. I said I didn't even notice he was wearing a watch. 

Status. Feeling special. That is a good reason to want to be rich, like Alain de Botton said. But I don't think it's my motivation. My mum once bought me a designer dress from an outlet store in Swindon. It was a really nice dress but I didn't feel more beautiful or important when I wore it. I don't think anyone knew it was designer - and if they did, would they respect or like me more?

Questions for Rich People

When I see people who blatantly have a lot of money, I feel like I'm going to burst with questions. Are all your friends rich? How much money do you spend on food shopping? What do you complain about? Are you happy? What do you do in your spare time? Do you ever go for a walk and think what's the point of it all? Do you feel special? Guilty? Powerful? Absurd?

I would delight in seeing Kim Kardashian's monthly incomings and outgoings.

When I walk through the endless labyrinthine halls of Harrods, I am faced with shelves and shelves of things I cannot have. Gleaming sparkly stuff in glass boxes that will eventually end up in the house of someone who can afford them. I wonder who they are and why they need a £300 sterling silver cup holder, or a diamond encrusted pen for £13,750. Would we get on? Could we be friends? 

When it comes to money, there are endless things to think about. It divides us and ruins us, and if we're not careful, it consumes us. Like Smeagle's ring. But despite all the wealth, extravagance and beauty in Harrods - the ladies powder room still smelt like poo, and in a way that's quite comforting, isn't it? 

Big Sister

Having a big sister is like having someone carve a path out in front of you, hacking back the brambles and flattening the nettles - taking the brunt of life so you don't have to. When we were young, she used to turn the light off, put a scarf over her head, talk in a high pitched voice and tell me she was a little alien waiting for her dad's spaceship to pick her up and take her back to space. I believed her with all my heart. Every time. Once, she climbed into the wardrobe and told me to keep my eyes closed for 60 seconds. When I opened them, she was downstairs in the dining room. For a long time I believed she could teleport.

I believed everything my sister told me. I adored her. Even when she pushed me into the scary study in our grandparent's big old house, turned off the light and locked me in. Even when she stabbed me in the hand with a pencil, leaving me with a piece of graphite permanently embedded in my palm. Even when she passed off a box of broken things she didn't want any more as a 'present', I still took it excitedly, honoured that I was allowed to have her stuff. 

Her stuff always seemed better than my stuff. Even when it was broken.

She had a knack of making things look nice. Her bedroom was always immaculate, with all her little bottles of make up and creams lined up neatly on her dressing table, and all her books in order. Over the years, she learnt the exact position of everything in her room so if I so much as breathed on her Shaggy CD, she'd know about it. 

When I went to my first disco, she did my hair and make up so I felt grown up and glamorous. When my guinea pig Smarty died, she wrote me a poem about her flying up to guinea pig heaven and meeting a boy guinea pig called Marty. When I worried about not being pretty enough, she told me that when I was older, I would appreciate what I had. When I struggled with GCSE revision, she made up a song on her guitar about the water cycle so I would remember it. She's the only one who knows the sea monkey dance. 

She knows words like metatarsophalangeal and multifidus, she taught herself the guitar, she ran a half marathon in 2 hours 9 minutes and then came back to cycle next to me. She bought her own house and made a life for herself in a town far away, she climbs, she sings, she writes stories and she wraps presents really, really well.

So this is a homage to my beautiful big sister Emma. Even though we're proper grown ups now and we don't see each other much, I still look up to you (even though you're a lot shorter than me now).

Whatever happened to that little alien, anyway?

Video of me definitely doing a pull up today

Day 59

It's now been two months since I made a resolution to do a pull up by the end of the year. Seeing as I've just finished a course in multimedia journalism, it's only right that I embrace my newfound skills. So here's a video of me in the gym illustrating just how far I've come on this tumultuous journey...

My belly the blobfish

DAY 54

We're 54 days into 2014, ever so slowly creeping through the shit months of the year where nothing happens except weather. 

Finally it feels like this relentlessly cold, wet, stormy winter could be coming to an end. It's projectiled the worst of it onto our doorsteps and now it's wiping its proverbial mouth and preparing to be a bit more dignified from now on. It's almost time to get excited about the summer again - BBQs, swimming, sunbathing, sunny runs, long walks, weekends away. Except the reality is that I will just sit inside like I am now but with a higher guilt level.

Things have changed! I have work. It's a little unreliable, but it's with a magazine and it's paid so I'm happy. It all happened very quickly. One minute I was enjoying my leisurely job-seeker-allowance-funded unemployed time playing WordHero and other productive things, and the next I was in an office in Brighton sub-editing that week's issue. It's a little challenging, but exciting. Like Devil Wears Prada but without the fashion, glamour, or mean people. It could turn into a permanent position too, so I hope I'm making a good impression. On one day though I did wear the top my mum bought back as a present from New Zealand, and it was only when I got home and looked properly in the full length mirror that it dawned on me that having 'WILD KIWIS' emblazoned across my chest might not have given off the 'she's got her journalistic shit together' look I probably should be going for.  

Aside from the work, I'm still 5:2 dieting and exercising towards that ever-elusive dream of doing a pull up by the end of the year. So far, I have:

• Lost 5lbs in total
• Reduced my body fat percentage by 5%
• Gained 5lbs of muscle (I've got 7stn 9 of pure henchness now) (but can still only do girly press ups)
• Been very hungry every Monday and Thursday
• Felt a little disconcerted by the fact that my belly looks quite a lot like this:

 

It's even got that sad downturned mouth when I sit down.

In case you're interested, a blobfish is essentially a shiny face that lives between 2,000 and 3,900 ft below the surface of the ocean. It spends its days bobbing around just above the seabed, expending as little energy as possible and swallowing anything that happens to float in front of it (mostly little deep sea shrimpy things but I suspect the blobfish is not fussy). I think I may have been a blobfish in a previous life.

Interestingly, Google has provided a visual example of what 5lbs of fat and 5lbs of muscle look like, which is this:

It's satisfying to think I've replaced all that yellow jelly on the left with the muscle on the right. From where, I really don't know. Probably my tits. This also shows that weight isn't necessarily a good indicator of how well your diet/exercise regime is going. Possibly the best thing to do (and I haven't done this) is to measure yourself.

Anyway, I'm boring myself now. Goodbye, thanks for reading.

Love

Romance makes me feel a bit sick. Ever since my first boyfriend in Year 4 demonstrated his affection for me by giving me one of those plastic eggs with gloop and an alien inside, I've been a bit weird about public displays of affection. Don't get me wrong, I liked the gloopy alien very much, I just didn't like the niggling feeling of embarrassment and guilt that plagued me afterwards, as I sat there pondering the meaning of love while squeezing alien gloop between my little 8-year-old fists.

I still feel much the same now. It feels like romance is a performance - a series of actions and symbols that we all act out because we think we should. Giving flowers, candlelight, hearts, the colour red.

During my late teens and early 20s I was single - sometimes out of choice, sometimes not. But during that time, I became very happy with my independence, and very cynical about love. I read a book recently that really resonated with me and that period of my life. It's called 'Essays in Love' by Alain de Botton. In it he dissects the process of 'falling in love'. It's a brutally honest account of love and I like it because it covers the things we don't like to admit to ourselves or each other. The doubts, fears and illusions. The pain of losing something, the confusion of feeling something for someone that you once felt for someone else, the boredom of domesticity. 

The rose-tinted gloss of Valentine's Day hides all of these things, but this is the truth of love. And it's so much more complex than anything we're drip-fed by Hollywood - so much more enjoyable. It's not cynical to acknowledge the dark side of love. In a way it makes it easier to be with someone and forge a relationship that runs deeper than a few gestures or happy memories.

I can't really do the book justice by writing about it, so here are a few passages to give you a taste:

“We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?”  

“It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.”

“.. if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance.”    

  “The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.”