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Reflections from a difficult couple of weeks:

It’s been three times in my life now that my mental health and ability to function have fallen dramatically apart: when I was 19, when I was 31, and with Matthew’s death when I was 39. Each time I have clawed my way back to a standing position and started the climb to regain my life. Each time it has taken years of immense pain. The deepest scar to my psyche is that in summer 2019, just as I was celebrating near-full recovery from the second breakdown, Matthew died and I tumbled down again.

There’s been the primary pain of trauma, depression and grief, which has in itself all been quite enough. But on top of that I’ve also crippled myself with shame and a sense of failure, made worse by constant comparison – either to what my erstwhile peers are doing in their lives or, even more insidiously, to what I myself have been able to do in the past, and therefore hold as evidence for what I should be capable of now.

I’ve done some fairly serious mountaineering and skiing, and I hold myself to that standard. Ditto the casual 30-mile weekend runs, overly-packed social life, high heels, 100-hour work weeks, and glossy fast-moving career. I am a person who has done those things, my brain tells me, and I should be able to do them now, and I can’t, and so I’m failing, day after day after day.

That thought spiral has been tearing me apart.

But I’ve been taking enforced rest over the past few days, and I’ve been thinking, and out of that I’ve formed a new approach.

I’m discounting the sense of self that came with what I was doing with my life in 2011 pre-breakdown. I’m discounting the similar figurative and literal high-points of the first five months of 2019.

(Then I was in a deeply loving marriage to a wonderful man; I was Himalayan-climbing-fit and about to travel to India; and my ability to work full-time was finally solid again after years in the wilderness. None of those things is true now.)

Instead, I’m going to re-set the clock – to a place that acknowledges what I’ve gone through in the last few years. In terms of markers to measure myself against, nothing before summer 2019 and Matthew’s death counts anymore. It’s all irrelevant to the shape of my current life.

(There are skills I carry with me from the before-times, but the strength all went and I need to build it again bottom-up.)

I’m acknowledging that my life was reduced to a boulder field, and that I had to start again.

Here’s how I’m doing.

In February 2023 I may be struggling, but I’m much stronger than twelve months ago when I couldn’t work. 2022 was closer to functional than 2021 when I was fairly newly arrived in residential trauma treatment. And February 2020 is better not spoken of at all – I was completely broken, deceiving myself that I wasn’t, and about to have to face the pandemic, newly-widowed and on my own.

We all tread our paths. I’ve reached some very high points, and fallen to others which have been spirit-breakingly low. For the past three years I’ve been moving slowly upwards. That’s the only story I can tell. And I’m not just telling it because it looks pretty on the internet. I’m aiming to change the mental habits of a lifetime, ditch the unfair comparisons, and live it as well.

All of that said, though, here’s a race finish photo I don’t think I shared at the time. It’s from the 100km ultra I walked-because-I-wasn’t-running-fit in 2021 while in treatment. To their credit, the therapists, though surprised, understood it was important and supported me. To my credit, I went gently enough not to destroy myself in the process of proving a point.

Here’s a true story for you:

In November 2010 I turned back on a mountain called Ama Dablam in Nepal. Afterwards, back in Kathmandu, I was in a secondhand bookshop and I bought Matthew a mountain expedition book as consolation for him not having been able to come to the Himalaya with me. It has only just occurred to me to look out of interest at what that book was. And … it was the story of the first ascent of Nanda Devi.

Now. This is not a particularly common book. I had also never heard of Nanda Devi then – I just thought the book looked nice and I had that amount of currency left to spend in this dingy secondhand bookshop before I got on the flight home.

Fast-forward to 2018, and I had had and recovered from a very severe breakdown. I was climbing hard again. I wanted to go back to the Himalaya, and I started considering an expedition to an insanely beautiful mountain called Nanda Devi East.

To my knowledge I had never heard of Nanda Devi; I had to google it to find out what and where it was. I had found the trip by chance through a mountain guide I knew, and not because I was looking for that particular lump of snow and rock – it’s not a mountain that just appears in catalogues of expeditions. (In fact Nanda Devi has been entirely off limits since 1983, and Nanda Devi East (the subsidiary summit) is so rarely climbed that it has still never been guided at all, and only one woman has ever summited.)

My expedition to NDE – as most of you know – went horrendously, tragically wrong. I experienced a lot, and I learned a lot, and when I came home I started writing about it.

My own book starts on Ama Dablam and ends on Nanda Devi East – and I not only planned that structure for the book three years ago, I’ve already drafted the whole thing. (Draft two is currently underway. No-one has seen the book yet.)

So somehow back in 2010 at the end of my Ama Dablam story I managed to physically buy the story of the mountain that I had no clue my own next eight years were leading towards. Without knowing or remembering that I was doing it.

That’s my discovery for today.

The book, with its date of receipt clear in Matthew’s handwriting – I saved it six weeks, and handed it over for his birthday in January.

Update: I mentioned in passing at the bottom of my previous post that I’ve declared victory over the first draft of the memoir I’m writing about grief, collapse, recovery and big mountains.

Not only did I mention it here in passing, I also realised it in passing, and, as is my wont, I then moved straight on to the next task. It’s a big task, the next one, substantial revision. But actually I’m not going to move straight onto it. Instead I’m going to pause for a moment, and celebrate. Finishing this first draft is a really big deal. Here’s why.

(I’m going to be honest.)

This draft – this 155k word monster of a draft – is a careful book, a painstakingly constructed book, a book that mines and reconstructs and reflects on and, hopefully, understands and creates wider meaning from, a series of enormous events over a ten-year time frame. It’s not dressed up therapeutic or diary writing. It’s more ambitious than that.

I wrote the first 65k words in the year-and-a-bit after Matthew’s death, through deep deep grief, massive ill health, work, and the first waves of a pandemic. I don’t know whether my supervisor and fellow students ever knew this, but I did most of the first term of my MFA while actually in hospital – leaving the ward for a few hours every Tuesday evening to get the Tube to Birkbeck and participate in the workshops and seminars, and then returning to the ward and the nurses’ care.

In the second year of writing, in which I produced the next 70k words, I was in hospital again and then in a trauma clinic. In the former, I attended a supervision online actually from the ward. In the latter, after the first couple of months in which I was unable to think straight and therefore to write at all, I got special permission to use my laptop for an hour a day (laptops and phones were otherwise banned), and I sat in a shed in a meadow from eight o’clock most mornings to tap out words. Steady progress, steady progress.

I got home from the trauma clinic nearly four months ago and since then have been building resilience and finding my bearings. In that time my writing pace has picked up – from a weekly average of 1,570 words in the clinic to one of 3,806 since I’ve been out. (The weekly rate through 2020 – grief, work, pandemic, hospital etc – was 1,726, in case anyone’s interested.)

All those days of one word, and then the next, and then the next. All those days of keeping faith in this book regardless of how the rest of my life seemed to be going.

I have a first draft. It’s hugely imperfect. For a start, it’s about 40% longer than I need it to be. Much of the first half is lumpen and will need complete rewriting. Much of the second half is really good.

There is, I think, about six months of work to do before it will be ready to be read by the people to whom I will send it to be read. That’s six months of work as painstaking, emotionally difficult, and dedicated as the work I’ve done on it over the last two-and-a-half years. I’m ready for that. (I’m excited about it.)

And, yes, it’s two-and-a-half years I’ve been working on this book, at an average of about an hour a day, for those who are interested in time. It’s also two-and-a-half years since Matthew died. (I started both the book and the MFA a month after he died, as a way to give myself purpose when I could not see any way forward or any reason to live.) Matthew would be so proud of how I’ve got through those times, and I’m going to make this book something he would have been so proud of as well.

That’s it. I’m sorry I don’t provide internet kittens, but you do know me better than to expect that.

I’m musing – stay with me – about big grief and its progression over time, given that last weekend marked two-and-a-half years since Matthew’s death. Three things that are top of mind:

I’m just about starting to realise that I am no longer part of a marriage and partnership with another person. Rationally, of course, I have known that from the start, but deeper parts of my psyche are only just starting not to be constantly surprised by it – it’s taken that long for the new neural networks to begin to form.

The waves of grief, of the full body sobbing not just the crying kind, still come. When they do they still put me physically on the ground. (The softer crying kind also still come every couple of days, sometimes very briefly, and sometimes for an hour or more at a time.)

My strength for normal life is nothing like what it was. I need to sleep for nine hours a night, and often lie down for multiple hours during the day. Almost anything I do requires rest afterwards. It’s as though I have suddenly and dramatically aged. (My first white hairs have appeared as well.)

It’s the way it is, but all of that still surprises me. Some days I try to deny it. Other, wiser, days I try to accept and work within it, whilst hoping it will improve over time.

I have plentiful and excellent therapeutic support, and I’m making progress – I’m not asking anyone to worry about me.

Instead I’m sharing this because until all of this happened to me I had absolutely no idea what big grief does. I’m guessing most of you don’t know either.

I would guess that I used to think it was mostly about sadness and that that sadness would decline slowly over time. If you’d asked me, I’d probably have hypothesised it would be manageable after a couple of years. I had no idea that it’s so physical, so difficult for the brain to absorb, or that it lasts at this intensity for so long.

I wish, for various reasons, that I had known more what it’s actually like, and I thought some of you might be interested to know as well

Anyway, as a trailer for those who have read this far, there will be a book on exactly this subject in due course, I hope – not the current book-in-progress but the one after that. And on the current book I am – right here, right now – declaring victory over the process of completing a first draft. Now the revisions start.

Final point: I skied last weekend. We had a good time.

The eleven-month mark passed on Saturday. I was in the Peak District, with dear friends, with a map and compass, a bivvy bag, and a sleeping bag that was too thin for Friday night’s high wind or Saturday night’s clear skies. Forty-odd miles of walking took me in a wide loop across the high moors, on paved paths, on periodic trods, and through trackless bracken, heather and bog. Grouse popped up under our feet. Features which were marked on the map never appeared. Others, which looked innocuous on paper, turned out to be natural Henry Moores. On the top of Bleaklow we made smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiches. Near the source of the Derwent we ate dried sausage and pasta which tasted as good as only food cooked on a camping stove in the middle of nowhere can taste. For hours on Saturday we were entirely alone in the landscape. For too much of Sunday, back within a couple of miles of roads, we were around too many other people.

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I was on Matthew’s territory, in part following the route of the High Peak Mountain Marathon – the forty-two mile race he did with friends most years in March. I thought I would feel him there, but I didn’t. My brain instead felt disconnected; it was automatically pushing the emotion away. I still have no emotion today. I had taken off my rings for the weekend, as I always have done when going somewhere wild where my hands would get cold and they might slip off. It felt important just now to put them back on again; I don’t really know why, and I wonder how long it will feel that way.

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There are days when I seem to make progress, when I can smile at a small memory before it makes me cry. There are days when grief roars through and I am prostrate before it as I was in the early weeks. And there are the strange days when still my brain will not believe it, when I seem to float above reality, unable to touch down. That’s what this weekend was like; on Matthew’s territory, doing without him the things he taught me to do, with his name coming up in conversation every few minutes, and yet with no real sense of him, or even of myself.

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Today I have mountain kit airing all over the flat. My legs are pleasantly tired. I’m luxuriating in having spent the night in a bed with a duvet and mattress, untormented by swarms of midges. What am I trying to say? That grief is unpredictable, and that it is deeply uncomfortable, and that – searching for a metaphor as I always am – I am reassured that despite taking the wrong route off Bleaklow and ending up on an unintended rocky outcrop and then on a hillside it was uncomfortable to cross, when we reached the river we were able to ford it, and when we rounded the bend there was a place to camp.

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Morning thoughts:

It never did go silent where I live. The trains kept running and there were ambulances. Both though stuck out in the otherwise quiet early days. For a period the trains were hooting more than usual. A deep slow minor third every time, and every time it set off in my head the organ notes that opened Matthew’s memorial service.

Then men in orange jackets arrived to build a cycle network. Through those weeks, still with no traffic to speak of, my soundtrack was a pneumatic drill. Every time I went out to visit the mini supermarket, the barriers (also orange) had progressed along the road. There were holes, and then kerbs dividing new lanes, and then a strip of glistening black asphalt stark against the patched grey of the main carriageway.

Now normal noise levels have returned. In the background trains shriek on their rails. If they are still hooting then I cannot hear it. There are traffic lights below my window and I hear the rumble of engines, the kick of motorcycle exhausts. The drill still comes in bursts. It’s a different sort of drill now, I think, one with the rhythm of a strimmer and not the pounding relentlessness of one breaking up the ground.

Part of me loved the quiet while it lasted. Quiet empty city. Quiet empty flat. Quiet empty brain. The city broken by sirens and the spectre of death. The flat just the flat. My brain, also sitting with the spectre of death, calm only when it was not overwhelmed with waves of grief.

This new normal, noise-wise, is much like the old. The sky today as well is a typical summer’s grey and not the clear blue glare that showed up every speck of dust and seemed to signal the end of the world.

There’s been a winnowing that has gone on outside. In parallel, one going on in my brain. The one in my brain will stay, I hope, however much I’m again surrounded by noise.

Morning thoughts:

It never did go silent where I live. The trains kept running and there were ambulances. Both though stuck out in the otherwise quiet early days. For a period the trains were hooting more than usual. A deep slow minor third every time, and every time it set off in my head the organ notes that opened Matthew’s memorial service.

Then men in orange jackets arrived to build a cycle network. Through those weeks, still with no traffic to speak of, my soundtrack was a pneumatic drill. Every time I went out to visit the mini supermarket, the barriers (also orange) had progressed along the road. There were holes, and then kerbs dividing new lanes, and then a strip of glistening black asphalt stark against the patched grey of the main carriageway.

Now normal noise levels have returned. In the background trains shriek on their rails. If they are still hooting then I cannot hear it. There are traffic lights below my window and I hear the rumble of engines, the kick of motorcycle exhausts. The drill still comes in bursts. It’s a different sort of drill now, I think, one with the rhythm of a strimmer and not the pounding relentlessness of one breaking up the ground.

Part of me loved the quiet while it lasted. Quiet empty city. Quiet empty flat. Quiet empty brain. The city broken by sirens and the spectre of death. The flat just the flat. My brain, also sitting with the spectre of death, calm only when it was not overwhelmed with waves of grief.

This new normal, noise-wise, is much like the old. The sky today as well is a typical summer’s grey and not the clear blue glare that showed up every speck of dust and seemed to signal the end of the world.

There’s been a winnowing that has gone on outside. In parallel, one going on in my brain. The one in my brain will stay, I hope, however much I’m again surrounded by noise.

Morning thoughts:

It never did go quiet where I live. The trains kept running and there were ambulances. Both though stuck out in the otherwise quiet early days. For a period the trains were hooting more than usual. A deep slow minor third every time, and every time it set off in my head the organ notes that opened Matthew’s memorial service.

Then men in orange jackets arrived to build a cycle network. Through those weeks, still with no traffic to speak of, my soundtrack was a pneumatic drill. Every time I went out to visit the mini supermarket, the barriers (also orange) had progressed along the road. There were holes, and then kerbs dividing new lanes, and then a strip of glistening black asphalt stark against the patched grey of the main carriageway.

Now normal noise levels have returned. In the background trains shriek on their rails. If they are still hooting then I cannot hear it. There are traffic lights below my window and I hear the rumble of engines, the kick of motorcycle exhausts. The drill still comes in bursts. It’s a different sort of drill now, I think, one with the rhythm of a strimmer and not the pounding relentlessness of one breaking up the ground.

Part of me loved the silence while it lasted. Quiet empty city. Quiet empty flat. Quiet empty brain. The city broken by sirens and the spectre of death. The flat just the flat. My brain, also sitting with the spectre of death, calm only when it was not overwhelmed with waves of grief.

This new normal, noise-wise, is much like the old. The sky today as well is a typical summer’s grey and not the clear blue glare that showed up every speck of dust and seemed to signal the end of the world.

There’s been a winnowing that has gone on outside. In parallel, one going on in my brain. The one in my brain will stay, I hope, however much I’m again surrounded by noise.