Cleared For Takeoff (but not for landing): And By The Way 'Let go of my carats!'

I think it was Einstein who said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

It was a 3-3 Mexico-India draw which meant that things were no longer continental, they had gone global and I had a world-size, economy-class problem with flying.  Long haul flying specifically.  And I couldn't even blame an airline having spread-betted my way through the sky on BA, Jet, Virgin and even KLM. (Not even any decent air miles for being such a transatlantic tart either)

Every time I landed back in the UK after having been away with work I would be fine for the first 48 hours - sleeping, eating and the routine jetlag stuff would return to normal- and then, on day three, it would happen. The first and the last times were the worst; times two to five were scary but didn't stop me.  The first time was coming back from Mexico City in 2013.  I'd survived the half-pint measures of tequila over working lunches (largely due to an accommodatingly thirsty pot plant behind me), I'd survived having my suitcase opened and my underwear sniffed in every corner of the airport by the drugs squad and their dogs, I'd survived the inordinate amounts of melted cheese pouring their way over every food order, I hadn't been shaken out of the elevator by an earthquake despite the foreboding sign in the hotel lobby, and I hadn't been shot on the Paseo de la Reforma (the Champs Elysee meets Bronx of MC).

But waking up back in the UK, I couldn't breathe.  Well, I could but only in a really shallow, gaspy kind of a way that got worse when the bathroom steamed up.  I went to work and felt weird- distant and far away.  The open plan office didn't feel right and I parked myself in an office on my own for the day.  Big Anthony, my brilliant personal trainer, got the shock of his life when he suggested I do thirty wide-arm press-ups in the gym and instead I crumpled and threw my arms round him in tears. By the time I got home I was losing feeling in my hands and arms- pins and needles were seeping up my body.  I called a cab and ten minutes later was at A&E. It was getting exhausting looking after myself!!

I blamed the sudden altitude of Mexico City - flying straight in to 2000m.  But the oxygen levels in my blood were fine and a chest x-ray showed no clots.  Phew.  But in that case what was wrong with me?  I left with two inhalers- a brown one and a blue one. Variations on the same symptoms continued to occur for the next five long haul flights, dispelling the altitude theory, and with the breathing difficulties becoming less pronounced and instead a black hole starting to open up in my mind a little bigger each time.  When I flew back from India in February 2015, the black hole opened its cavernous jaws and swallowed me whole.

It was as though I was watching myself sliding and couldn't do anything about it.  I was just getting further and further away from myself. I couldn't get out of bed for a weekend. I was clumsy, laboured and in slow, slow motion.  And then of course Breakdown hit and the rest you know!

The disruption to my biorhythms seems to have been the trigger, building and building over the last two years and threw my normal coping mechanisms out of sync enough to destabilise me emotionally, physically and psychologically all at once.  Curious that it was always the return flight that got me as if coming back to the status quo was on some level terrifying.

What I was experiencing were anxiety attacks.  I was so busy worrying about what might be wrong with me that I'd overlooked worrying about the worry.  I didn't know what I was anxious about though as my body was starting to manifest physical symptoms of what my subconscious was feeling.  Confusing to say the least and frightening for someone who likes to know what's going on at all times!

It wasn't until several sessions in to my therapy that something happened when I was just out and about in town that made me realise that these panic attacks after flying must have something to do with a significant part of me feeling  out of control.  Not out of control 'crazy' but more 'hurtling down life on the wrong path' out of control. Fundamentally not very happy, not very true to myself out of control.

I'd popped into a jeweller in town to get something valued and as soon as I pulled the box out of my inside pocket I started to feel hot, too hot under my gilet and behind the locked door that was now between me and the fresh air of the street.  The jeweller suggested that I leave the box there in the safe overnight as the Valuer wouldn't be there until the morning.  I couldn't breathe, I felt hot, I felt sick and I felt stifled.  Chlaustrophobic.  I wanted to run. Why?  I didn't feel in control.  Someone I didn't know, was holding something of great value to me and about to take it out of my possession which wasn't what I wanted.  Out of control.  Unlike the flights, I recognised it this time  though, recognised my body tripping 'fight or flight' mode telling me that the immediate world was suddenly a threat.  As I quickly and quietly suggested to the shop assistant that I would take time to think about it and come back another day, all I could actually hear as I stumbled to the door was my head screaming over and over again 'Let go, Let go, Let go of my carats!'. Panic punning- now?  Right this moment? Seriously?
At least my anxiety has a sense of humour.

Breaknecking - Knowing When to 'Buzz The Tower' (and when not to)

I'd done a lot of taking myself to bed over the last few weeks and was pretty sure I was almost lost forever (how is it 29 years since Top Gun?) but the second I started to feel better, I saw the green light and just went for it. Like a MIG in a tailspin. Flying so fast with absolutely no idea that I was going to need to eject from my own life and float back under a re-educated, more sustainable parachute.

I logged back on to my dormant runkeeper account, picked a new route to explore every day, entered a local 10km nine-weeks away and started clocking up the miles.  I started at 8km and built to 14km within the space of ten days.  None of this come-out-of-recovery-walk-jog-walk stuff. 

I swam length after hypnotic length in the outdoor pool at the gym and had to remind myself to get out after 50.

I threw my clunking brain into gear and chewed through Coriolanus and the 2500 word essay I needed to do for my English Masters, compressing two months' work into a week.  I wrote through the night, missed the deadline by 17 minutes and submitted it into the ether. Done.

I drove to Essex. I drove to the Lake District.  I drove to Cornwall and back in a day- a round-trip of 13 hours. What do you mean I should have broken the journey?

I tried to catch up with as many friends as possible.  I coffee'd, I lunched, I hen-partied, I musicalled, I even old-peoples'-home-visited. I just did it. Didn't cross my mind not to.

And I crashed. 

The problem with having been in the military is that you have no off-switch.  Living life at 100mph is perfectly normal, taking it up to 150mph on the Nurburgring might raise an eyebrow; driving home from Germany postings in a tax-free sports car at 120mph on the Autobahn is routine; flying through the Crossed Swords in Baghdad in a Puma helicopter merely an experimental detour; getting dumped out in the green zone in a cloud of diplomatic dust with only a mobile phone and a pistol because some guy called Tony Blair needs a lift, mildly inconvenient; pulling the duvet over your head when people trying to kill you are mortaring the f*** out of the compound you're in, mildly irritating.  That was life.  Fast. Fearless. Fun.

Except now I wasn't well and I needed to slow right down and listen to my mind and body.  I needed to just stop. Stop work, stop over-thinking, stop over-training, stop over-stretching myself in every area of my life.  I worked with the psychologist to understand 'pacing' and  set a reasonable scale of expectation and activity for myself.  I needed to find out what I could cope with, what were my tolerance levels - now and in the future?  I needed to understand what most people would understand by 'gentle exercise'.  That could be a 10km walk over a few hours in my mind- no, 12 minutes walking was apparently 'gentle'.  Wow- I needed to completely recalibrate.  I started to pull things out of my diary- not just because there was too much in there, but because I just couldn't manage.  I postponed, I cancelled, I prioritised, I streamlined, I left my trainers on the doormat. I found my parachute.

It sounds silly but I learnt the power of setting boundaries, reminding myself that I have choices and that I am in control.  I don't have to buzz the control tower every day to prove that I am....what?  It's ok, just to be me. No need for speed.

Scale Break - Monster on Mirtazapine

Pulling just-washed jeans up over my thighs is one of the worst things in the world; trying to do them up then squatting ten times to stretch them out is admittedly a bizarre ritual but one that at least usually gets both arse cheeks in where they should be. So when my favourite usually-loose-round-the-hips Ted Baker jeans only just met in the middle and there was a definite muffin-shape bulge spilling over the top one day, I stopped breathing.  Not that inverting my diaphragm was going to make an inch of difference to the situation, I was just hoping that by freezing in the moment I would somehow be able to quickly rewind and slowly restart back at a thinner, more jeans-friendly, me. 

I rushed to the full-length mirror hoping that its unhung balancing act on the bookcase would work in my favour.  Instead it was reflecting widescreen.  I rushed to the bathroom scales hoping that the layer of dust they'd been gathering would be enough to plead poor calibration.  I tried 'best of three'. Wideload - every time. I had never seen such big numbers under my big feet.

I had been on Mirtazapine for two weeks now and the soporific sedation was bliss compared to the headaches and insomnia beforehand.  But whatever it was altering in my brain to calm it down was simultaneously slowing everything else in my body and causing it to swell up like Violet Beauregard on speed.  I experimented with running, I experimented with barely eating for two days and still the weight crept up.  I was uncontrollably inflating. I was a monster on mirtazapine.  Not good for a need-to-control-everything freak like me.

The doctor seemed unsurprised when I explained the involuntary inflation of 6.6kg in 2 weeks and the mirtazapine monster.  I needed the meds that also made me thinner - so that I could fit into my TB jeans and maybe not be single for the rest of my life -did he have any of those (meds, not the jeans)? He set me up with Sertraline -I had dated and ditched both Citalopram and Mirtazapine ('psycho' and 'feeder') within the space of the last six weeks. It's not me, it's you- you're wasting my time.

I ditched the mirtazapine, experimented with low carb, high protein, full fat eating, and started to notch up the running miles.  Back in the jeans.  With a belt.

Emergency Break- A&E (Headcase Checking In...)

The 'thump, thump, thump', started in the Hilton coffee shop in Milton Keynes.  It had nothing to do with the number of roundabouts, giant cycle paths and distribution centres navigated on the way there.  It had something to do with the old bloke unfortunately resembling Stalker 69, sitting opposite me in the foyer; it had somewhat more to do with meeting work before I was ready.

Having now been on sick leave for a month, I was being 'formalised' under the  sickness at work policy.  I'd never taken a day off sick in my life (not even a pretend one) and here I was with a virtually fablonned biff chit (aka laminated sick note) meeting with the Unit Head to discuss stress risk assessments and occupational health formalities.  Unfamiliar territory. Thump. Discussion moving on to return to work date. Thump Thump. Discussion moving on to likely organisational changes. Thump, thump, thump. How did I feel about all of this? Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, get me the thump out of here.

I drove home badly.  Wrong lanes on roundabouts, I wasn't seeing the colours on the traffic lights, I was completely disorientated.  I pulled into Tesco's after missing the turning twice because I couldn't find my usual reference points.  There was a pharmacy there that the doctor thought might sell Melatonin supplements to help with the circadian rhythm balancing.  I came out with Montmorency Cherry which was apparently close and may help my body with producing melatonin. Might do the trick- every little helps, right?  I got back into my car. There was another Stalker 69 in the van parked opposite me eating his lunch.  My heart rate went through the roof and I remember gasping out loud completely involuntarily. Stalker 69. He was everywhere.  Why?  Was this paranoia?

Thump, thump, thump.  The pressure in my head increased steadily over the next two days. My right eye was watering and I just wanted to lie absolutely still.  Except I couldn't sleep.  I'd flipped from over-sleeping thirteen hours at night and three hours in the afternoon to feeling wired.  Absolutely wired as though I could run and run and run or lift the heaviest weights possible in the gym.  Lying down made the thumping worse so I sat up, made cups of tea, raided the fridge, tried to read, iplayered everything, googled stress symptoms a million times  on a hundred different sites and was glad when it finally started to get light.

I thought someone was going to kidnap me.  I locked the door and locked down.  Paranoia?
I thought if I went to sleep I wasn't going to wake up.  Thump, thump, thump.  Paranoia.

And then I started to cry.  And cry.  And cry.  And cry.  I cried for fifteen hours straight without stopping.  The pressure in my head was so intense I thought my brain was going to explode out of my skull.  There was constant, jabbering white noise playing on a fast forward loop inside my head and the only way of getting it to lighten up at all was to 'tune in' to it.  I couldn't eat without wanting to be sick.  Thump, jabber jabber jabber, thump thump, jabber jabber jabber, thump, thump, thump.
Someone bought me a ticket to A&E.  I checked in with all my baggage.

No brain tumour, no bleed.  Acute stress that wasn't going to get better unless I took strong medication and rested. Ok.  I'd gone cold turkey on the Citalopram and tried to do this myself; I'd got it wrong.  I left A&E, still crying like the boiler that bursts in the flat above, and started on the Mirtazapine.  I left my baggage on the carousel and checked out- perhaps the bomb disposal unit would kindly blow it up for me later. Thump, thump, BOOM.

Breaking Into Wonderland- Shrink Me, Please!

Now I'd fallen down the rabbit hole and the chink of light above was looking very, very small and far away, I thought I might as well just take a deep breath, surrender to the fact that it wasn't just my bum that looked big in a space this small, caked in earth and leaf mould, and explore.  Yes, I was going to explore the dark so thoroughly that maybe Bear Grylls would be there with his shirt off having just climbed a mountain with his teeth to meet me at the end...

Deciding to start counselling was one of the scariest decisions of my life.  I had a real trepidation about opening Pandora's Box and not being able to get the lid back on- ever.  I mean, I know I've got a few skeletons, mostly tucked away under a fug of alcohol and cloaked in the odd rubber dress and bruised by the odd broken stiletto, but they were generally more likely to have sent some poor, unsuspecting bloke running for therapy rather than me.

Joining an NHS waiting list for a counsellor seemed a little pointless given that I needed help right there and then.  I also knew myself well enough to know that if I didn't run with the impulse then the moment would pass and I would find a reason to move on to something else instead and I would be back at this crossroads again in a few months-, maybe even years-, time.

After a few days of nervous phone tag, I finally met with a private 'counselling psychotherapist' here in Bedford.  I went in feeling the same fraud I did when in the doctor's surgery and came out an hour later drained, cold, trembling and relieved. I knew deep down that I was doing the right thing although wasn't prepared to hear that this would be a three-stage process likely to take most of the next six months: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and stabilisation; Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) and trauma processing; then finally building towards managing the future. But I was going to do this.  I was going to take the sick leave, take the time to invest in myself, stop the world and just get off for a while.  Or maybe I was stopping the world to get back on...once I'd got out of this crazy rabbit hole and snogged Bear Grylls that is.

Twelve sessions in, I can honestly say that this is a liberating, exciting process but one that shouldn't be underestimated.  I can go in some weeks feeling fine and cry my way through the hour; I can go in feeling low and come out feeling energised and back in control; I can go in with my own hazy agenda and come out with clarity and acceptance.

The emotional rollercoaster has been frightening and I'm not sure I could have learnt to hang on for the ride without the counselling support.  I have struggled to regulate my emotions whether happy or difficult and would become 'stuck' in emotional overdrive, flooded with nauseating emotion wrenching at my gut and that I just couldn't turn off.  Initially it terrified me.  I would panic and get close to putting my fist through a window just to try and pull the handbrake in a head-on emergency stop. I had been numb for so long that just feeling emotion again, of any sort, was overwhelming.

I have learnt now how to be 'safe' in the present moment, how to recognise 'triggers' through bodily sensations and how to bring myself down from 'fight or flight' responses.  I am far more self-aware than I have ever been and feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to do this.  Much of the inspiration has come from a book recommended by my therapist and I would recommend it to anyone to dip in and out of and see how life-changing something as simple as self-acceptance can be.

Mindfulness- a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world (Mark Williams and Danny Penman)

Yours well and truly shrunk.

Breaking The Mould - Would You Like to Walk My Dog?

I walked into the doctor's in Bedford for a routine appointment to extend my fit note and walked out ten minutes later with a dog. A small, silky, amber-coloured cocker spaniel somewhat magnificently named Nike to be precise.  Another thing I didn't see coming but I forgive myself for that one.

Nine minutes and forty seconds into the ten minute appointment, sick note signed but still in front of him, the doctor turned to look at me and decided to close the appointment with 'Did I have any pets?'.


Did I have any pets?  Where on earth did that come from? But  there I was now reaching for a balled-up Kleenex in my pocket, looking up and away at the top left-hand corner of the room, frantically blinking back rapidly-erupting tsunami-size tears when a simple 'er No? would have got me out of there.

Would you like to walk my dog?  She's just in the car outside the surgery- she's quite old now and very good.  Just take her round the park opposite and pop her back when you're done.  She's called Nike.

So there I was walking the doctor's dog around a strange park with tears streaming down my face and snot on the back of my hand with a sick note in one hand and an opportunity leading me by the other.  This random act of kindness (kind act of randomness?) did two things for me.  It restored my faith in the 'chaos factor' that always helped me land on my feet with a twist; but also showed me that having a dog could be just the protective, nourishing reality I needed. (Not to mention the fact that NHS prescriptions just got real!)
When I'd been lying on the sofa in the dark blocking out the world only the week before, I hadn't wanted to see or speak to anyone.  But I had craved a dog.  A dog lying on the floor next to me, just to rest my hand on its warm, quiet, loyal head as I emptied mine.


That was 3 March 2015.  Almost three months later, I now have a puppy lying sprawled in the sunlight on the floor in front of me. (He has just scratched up his first stretch of carpet and worked out that pot plants spit real earth onto the floor when harassed but he's still perfect in his wilful, stubborn, snoozy, adorable way.)
But that, ladies, gentlemen, and all my friends- is a whole 'nother magic story!

Breaking Off - What Colour Are My Balls?

Right, so time to get off the sofa and get better.  But first, who the hell was I?  In the Army I knew exactly who I was.  I had been fully deconstructed and reassembled on the drill square and during log runs at Sandhurst and had been put back together as a fully automated, commissioned officer.  I had a uniform (badly ironed and the late night v-shaped scars on my right arm to prove it), I had a rank, I had a fixed, unswervable daily routine, including a silver service feeding plan, I lived and worked with people who just got things done and put the world to rights in the bar afterwards.  I had responsibility, things expected of me, frequent urgent despatches to go cross country skiing for weeks at a time, the opportunity for fully-inclusive package holidays to hot, hot places with tea and medals on return. On the firing ranges I knew that I would miss most things at 100m and hit everything from 300m with a respirator on; at my office I knew there would always be someone awaiting a bollocking stood outside and a fresh brew on the desk inside; in the bar I knew that I could get five bottles of Verve for €50 and pour 4 of them over those stood around me who would either be naked or at least in fancy dress.  The madness was the sanity. The crazy world made sense.  And then, a little tired after a year-long one of those hot, hot package deals, I left.

And I drifted.  Drifted while moving in a highly-organised fashion between project management jobs as that seemed to be what the world thought it needed although didn't quite know what to do with.  The thing was, I had absolutely no idea what I was aiming for- didn't have a clue whether it was the pink, the red, the brown, the black and where the hell was the cue ball when I needed it?  Sod the f*****g parachute, what colour were my balls?  Did I even have any anymore?! Where were those impulsive, stubborn cahunas that had steered me into the Army careers office on my way home from a bad day in the City (recruitment consultant - every day was a bad day) and enrolled me at Sandhurst three weeks later; the ones that bought an Audi TT convertible over a dodgy internet connection in Basra (justification for upgrading from trusty Renault Clio: surviving); the ones that got my underwear caught alight in the Paris Hilton (hotel, not the Chihuahua-clutching blonde) one snowy New Year; the ones that got me a spontaneous nose job in Harley Street following a particularly traumatic break-up; the ones that drove me to France on the wrong side of the road the day after passing my driving test. Yes, where the f*** were they now.

The simple epiphany came while I was stood in the shower wondering which flavour shower gel to use that morning.  Squashed into the tiny rack in front of me were no less than five different shower gels, three shampoo and conditioners and two face washes.  That was it.  My life was overloaded- exploding with too much choice.  No wonder I no longer knew who I was- I didn't even know which of anything was my favourite, my signature, anymore.  And this was the same in every corner of my flat as I looked around.  Scented candles: orange grove, vanilla and honey, red berry, seagrass (wtf?) FMBs: brown, dark brown, tan, black, black with spurs, grey. Tea: English breakfast, earl grey, organic green, green with manuka, camomile and honey, lemon and ginger (I hate ginger). Cook books: Jamie, Nigella, Ella, Hugh F-W, Gordon (decorative). Books: three at a time bought every time from Waterstones and never read, just stacked. Jewellery: mountains of it lying oxidising in various tins and boxes.  I'd lost myself.  Not in a romantic chapter of desperation and depression but under a pile of...'stuff'.

So I decided to streamline then and there.  Indulge in my favourite things all of the time because they were 'me'.  Use the things I liked, no matter what their value- what occasion exactly was I saving them for? Live- get on with it.  And I promised myself the following...just because that's where I'm at:

• Shower gel:  Molton Brown Templetree  (and Dove if feeling poor)
• Tea: English Breakfast and Earl Grey (together, in a pot)
• FMBs: Sort yourself out, its summer- barefeet and flip flops
• Books: William Boyd (Cecilia Ahern in moments of absolute weakness)
• Box Sets: Breaking Bad (do not attempt to watch GOT simultaneously)
• Soaps: Eastenders every day and Made in Chelsea on Mondays (of course)
• Sports Kit: Sod everything and leave trainers on doormat
• Perfume: Bulgari by night and JLo in the sunshine
• Men: streamlined to devastating perfection. May need to compromise (will require therapy)

Balls.