In the swim

I exist in a huge tangle of feelings at the moment. All of them vying for attention. Most of them have been squashed by me for so long, too long. Now I am all over the shop, trying to process what comes up and make sense of it, so I can decide what to do about it. My ex-husband who is/was in the guru line, has always been a firm believer in it being entirely unnecessary to know where your feelings or problems are coming from. You just need to deal with them.

I have tried healing myself without knowing the why’s and wherefores of how I got to where I am. Sometimes it was because I didn’t want to look, because once I truly saw, I would have to act and I wasn’t feeling brave enough to do the necessary and decided I could skip a few steps.

Sometimes it was because I had looked and looked and I still couldn’t find that moment. That one event around which everything pivots. I looked so hard at one point I even went for past life regression to try and find it. Total kudos to the past life regression woman who said very firmly: ‘This isn’t a past life thing. I can’t help you.’ Her words did more for the whole 'is there anything in past life regression or are you just clutching at straws?’ question that had been rattling round my head when I arrived, than any taking me back to find that I was a handmaiden of Queen Hatshepsut. I left none the wiser as to my own dilemma but firmly of the opinion that she was the realest deal I was going to find with regard to that stuff.

For me, regardless of what anyone else says or does, it is apparent that I must make sense of what has happened to me if I am ever going to make peace with it, resolve it and move on from it. I am nothing without a narrative and if I don’t have a sufficiently compelling origin story, everything falls apart. I fall apart.

As we contain multitudes, I was not expecting to find one, single, origin story to explain all the chaos of my life and mind, but in recent weeks I have found one big story, which when I discovered it made an almost audible click in my head where a whole bunch of things fell into place. It was worth all the anguish of excavation for me at this point. Once all the ‘if this, then that makes sense of that,’ moments rippled from the past into the now, it felt as if a burden I wasn’t even aware of carrying, had been lifted. The path is now a little clearer going forward.

Once the initial relief wore off, I headed back down in the weeds, pulling up stuff by the roots and getting filthy again. I’m exhausted and have to keep sitting down and telling myself it will be worth it in the end. In the meantime, the headaches come thick and fast and my shoulders and neck are so locked with tension I look like a woodlouse. I had a massage a few days ago, and it was the most painful thing I have experienced for fun in my life. I felt like I was being played like a xylophone.

We are going on holiday in a few weeks. It will be my first proper holiday in two years. I can’t quite believe it’s happening. We were supposed to go away in October last year, but many complicated things happened that meant we had to cancel it. I was meant to go away the October before that, but other complicated things happened then, too. I was a very brave animal about it at the time, because I didn’t really have a lot of choice, but I was extremely sad. Now we really are going away and I am actually doing things to prepare for it. Some of these things are proving to be extremely testing.

A swimsuit was on the list of things I need to get, because the one I currently have fitted my old body and I am not about to give myself a hernia trying to pour this new body into it. A swimsuit is hard to buy right now, given what is happening between me and my body. All clothes shopping is hard at the moment as I negotiate who I want to be moving forward, but swimwear and underwear is particularly challenging.

I buy nearly all my clothes second hand. I find it so much easier than real shops. All of my shopping techniques fall down when I go into proper shops. Everything is stark. The lighting is brutal. And the mirrors. Dear God, the mirrors are horrendous. I do not wish to see every dimple on my arse like a close up photo of the moon landing. I do not need to see myself in the round just so that I can decide that this item of clothing will do. I had forgotten what torture it is.

I chose a handful of swimsuits and trudged off to try them on like the condemned woman I was. I had to try on several because I had absolutely no idea what size I needed and indeed what style I could tolerate. I don’t tend to think about clothes sizing too much because I know it’s utter bullshit, but it still messes with my head at times like these, when I can’t avoid looking.

There I was, spotlit with klieg lights, surrounded by mirrors and wrestling my flesh into a number of quite frankly, awful costumes. Part of my issue with swimwear is that I don’t love it, even on a good day. I think that I am rather Edwardian when it comes to swimwear. I just want some kind of knee length, striped suit that I can wear with a jaunty boater and my menopausal moustache and possibly a bathing machine. I am not interested in cutaways, or high legs. I couldn’t be less interested in tropical motifs or beading or ruching. There is a lot of ruching going on in swimwear which I believe is meant to be more flattering to women’s curves. Why looking like a piece of corrugated jungle is flattering escapes me, but that’s what I ended up with.

I did not end up with this item because I liked it. I ended up with it because it was a very reasonable price and of everything I took into the changing rooms, it was the only one that fit me properly and didn’t entirely make me want to rip my own eyes out. I had very much run out of emotional capacity by the time I came out, so it was that or nothing. I took that and a pack of new pants that looked like they might fit as I swept by the rail on the way to the tills and bought them before I could a) change my mind or b) have a nervous breakdown in TK Maxx at Westfield.

So now I have a swimming costume, which I needed, not just for holidays. I actually love swimming. It’s something I find very soothing, but it’s something I find ways to stop myself from doing for reasons I have yet to get to the bottom of, but which are all part of this complicated adventure I am on.

When we moved onto the boat, I took all the clothes I used to exercise in to the charity shop. I decided that this was liberating, because I hate exercising and I only ever really did exercise as a way to get thin, or to punish myself, or because someone else told me that I should do it. I admit freely that when I exercised, I always did it in a way that was not healthy. I was, at the times in my life where I exercised, quite deranged about it. I found that the only way I could do it was to do it a lot, every day. If I stopped, even for a day, I would lose all interest in it and go back to lying around eating novels and dropping biscuit crumbs in my cleavage. I was an all or nothing exerciser. It made me bonkers, but I was quite thin and quite bendy, so I got lots of praise for it and that covered over the cracks for a while.

Plus, when you’re busy being a person who exercises, nobody ever really bothers to ask you how you’re feeling in yourself. Because everyone knows that exercise is brilliant for you. Why would they bother to ask? Nobody says, ‘I see you’ve done a ten mile run today and that’s grand, but where’s your head at?’ If they had, I might have said: ‘Oh, my head is totally fixated on doing exercise actually. I can barely sit still because my mind is hopping about like a flea on a hot plate. I am currently planning how I might be able to get up a few hours earlier tomorrow so I can do more weird shit to my body. Isn’t that great?’

Eventually I figured out that I couldn’t exercise normally and even though I wasn’t telling other people exercise was making me bonkers, I knew it was making me bonkers and that was enough for me. Thinking about the how and why of that bonkerdom was not on the agenda then, so I gave all my clothes away and decided to pack it all in for good. If I was going to have to choose between all or nothing, it was better to choose nothing. That would only hurt my body, which I didn’t like anyway. My mental health was something I was far more invested in and I knew, despite everyone telling me that exercise is really good for mental health, that it wasn’t good for mine. Not at all.

Once I had the revelation about exercise turning me into a nutcase, I did eventually try to talk to a few people about it. I even talked to a therapist about it (not the one I have now). I got the same response from everyone. ‘Oh no. Exercise is great for you. It’s super, super good for mental health. There are statistics and everything. You’re getting old too, so what with being mad and geriatric, you should definitely keep up the exercising. Basically, you are wrong. Shut up. Go away. It’s definitely better to be mad and fit than it is to be sane and fat. Not that you would be mad if you exercised, because it’s super good for you. You’re probably not doing enough of it. Have you tried pilates?’ So I stopped talking about it and I stopped exercising, because I was too tired to do anything else for an awfully long time.

So here I am, swimsuit in hand, figuring out how to break the habits I have built up over a lifetime. I am attempting to find ways to do what I like and what feels good without turning those things into sticks to beat myself with. I am attempting to find ways to please myself instead of waiting for other people to tell me how pleased they are with me. I am attempting to find ways to move my body in ways that will lift me up and support me and that will let me grow instead of shrinking me down into a taut, mad ball of despair.

I know where I came from now and I know where I’m going, so I will surely figure out the next step given a little time and patience. Maybe, as with so many things I have discovered recently, I can leave it to the water to figure it out. I have written before about discovering that I never needed to be grounded, I just needed to learn how to float. Maybe I need to put the swimsuit on and learn how to swim again.