Thanks to the cat.

I have that underlying feeling of anxiety today. A sort of hum beneath my surface. I go to do almost anything and I get a little jab in my chest, my brain jumping to something sad or unpleasant. My shoulders rising to my ears with the tension I keep holding. 

It is okay. It won't last. Perhaps by the afternoon it will have faded away. I know why I feel this way. Time of the month. Global pandemic. Climate change. Incompetent, self-serving government. The lingering remnants of a heartbreak, almost vanished but still there. 

Whenever I feel this way it is often my cat that restores a sense of calm. God knows what I did in the days before him. 

Today he stepped in from the garden and, as cats often do, immediately decided to turn around and go back out. But when I went to open the door he sniffed my feet lovingly before looking up at me with that imperious manner as if to say "it is time for a cuddle." 

I sat down on the floor and crossed my legs. He circled me slowly. I picked him up. He settled on my thigh. We sat looking out into the fresh morning, the sun warming his fur and my face. 

For a moment I felt so still and so calm, that anxious hum fading away. It was just me, the cat, and the sun.  

What a deep pleasure it is to be chosen by your cat for a moment of shared stillness. 

Simple pleasures.

I have a routine now. Thank god. For three days a week I commute into London to train at a drama school.  It is completely delightful. 

The sense of purpose in itself feels like a huge relief. The movement from one place to another, the ability to leave my house for the day and see something new and different each time is a privilege I'd never have thought to be so thankful for. 

Perhaps the commute is unusually enjoyable because there are so few people on the trains. There isn't that bizarre bustle for the last few remaining seats, nor is there any need to sniff in a stranger's armpits as we are packed like sardines into the tube. Although I long to be near other people again, and I can't touch or hug my new friends. 

I love a routine that makes me feel like I am going somewhere, literally and figuratively. I secretly love the hustle of getting past bad drivers in their Chelsea tractors on their way to dropping small children at school. I love the feeling that everyone has somewhere they need to be getting to. How strange it was for us all to be standing still. 

I am not writing one of those Dettol adverts that attempted to romanticise the soul destroying office work that we will all be glad to see the back of. I just like the busyness, the energy lifting up again, the ability to see other humans in all their shapes and sizes. 

I love that one morning I stood at the platform and across the tracks I saw a young mum and her son share a moment of pure bliss, their love radiating all the way to where I was standing. He pecked her with a kiss, and another, and another and I was witness to their lovely, happy moment. Now every time I see them across the platform I smile to myself, my mood lifting with the memory. 

Some mornings I hear James, the station master, speak into the tannoy. "Hello, Mollie" he says. I wander over to the office and we speak through the glass. He asks how I am, how my mum is. He tells me about the leaf fall timetable changes, and the holiday he is going on. He'll see me in November, he says. 

I love the feeling of going somewhere. Of seeing other people going somewhere. To be slightly over the top it puts a spring in my step. 

It is a simple pleasure, and I am extraordinarily grateful to have it. 

My little sister.

I dropped my sister off at university yesterday. I didn't think much of it before but now it's one day with her gone and already I am finding myself thinking "oh, Hannah's not here." 

Being the older one I haven't felt this before. I was the one moving away to new horizons, not thinking too much about how my sister might feel without me in the house. She might not want to admit it but I know that she missed me when I was at university. 

My sister is one of those people who always comes across as very capable. She can be very pragmatic when she needs to be. So I didn't think much about leaving her on her own for the first time. I hadn't realised that she has never been away from Mum, Dad or me for longer than a couple of weeks. I haven't felt scared about leaving home for a while now, I forgot what that might be like. But when I was watching her set up in her new student home I suddenly felt both protective and proud. I could feel and remember the fear of thinking that by the end of the day our parents and I would be gone and that big house and that big town would be hers and hers alone. 

Some days she might feel like she rattles around in it. Sometimes she might feel a little lost. Sometimes, most of the time actually, she will feel like she is on top of the world. She will feel free and excited and brilliant. 

There will be streets in her new town where she can point out the places she cried, the places she met new friends, the places she laughed so hard she couldn't stand up. She will own those streets forever, even when she is one day very far away. She will become herself in those streets. 

She may feel very frightened at the beginning, or half way through, or even right at the very end. But she will never be alone. I am only a drive or a train ride away. Her big sister, watching her flourish, ready to catch her if she falls. 

This strange way of life.

I have found the weeks going by like I am living through a cycle. There is very little to break up each day, let alone each weekend. I know that this is a temporary lifestyle for me. I know that very soon there will be new places to go, new people to meet. I have realised that these are the fundamentals for feeling renewed and alive. 

When this pandemic is over, in whichever way it will end, I don't think I am going to sit still for very long ever again. I enjoy puttering about the house, being quiet and still for a few hours, taking in a slower pace of life. But when it is enforced, when it is for the sake of everyone's health to reduce your entire life to a small bubble of places and people, it is like living in some version of Groundhog Day, The Truman Show and somebody playing The Sims all mixed into one. 

I am surprised every time the night comes along because it felt like no time at all. I get confused as to what happened (not a lot) on which days and how much time has passed since the week began. My heart sinks when I'm reminded how many weeks and days and hours have been and gone since lockdown began in March. 

Even so, I have very little to complain about. I have a job, I have a beautiful home, I have a close family who I only want to kill about once a week. I have my garden, I have the local common to meet friends at and drink pints from the pub, I have my neighbours who have plied me with wine every time I knock on their door on a Thursday or Friday evening, and their children who have spent Saturday mornings with me doing crafts. All of these things in themselves have become part of the routine. The light relief, the escapism itself, has been swallowed into the repetitiveness of our current daily lives. This is not to say that I don't love all of these things, that I am not deeply grateful, but when I imagined being twenty-two, so young and carefree, this way of life was not in the picture. 

I suppose this is a way of airing my grievances, of which there are very few legitimate complaints, but I am also still surprised when I think about what we are living through. Every single person around the world has had their lives changed in some way, big or small, at pretty much the same time because of a shared human problem. It feels enormous and strange and scary and almost inconceivable all at once. I have adapted to a different way of life, and I have become used to it, but I don't know when it will stop feeling weird. 

My body and my mind.

I have always known that my mind was closely interlinked with my body. We often separate the two in their own rights, forgetting that every though and feeling coming out of your brain is as much a biological process as the heart pumping blood up and down arteries and veins. We think of thought and goings on of the mind as ethereal, unknown entities separate from any physical matter. But every thought and every feeling we ever have comes out of a lump of biological material sitting inside our skulls.

When I was younger I engaged in a type of therapy called Mickel Therapy. I was taught to recognise every physical symptom such as nausea or stomach ache or fatigue and link it back to an event in the day which may have caused my body stress. Everything my body did was connected to something going on in my brain. I was not suffering from a purely psychosomatic illness, but my body and my brain were sending messages to each other in response to certain things throughout each day which resulted in physical illness and exhaustion. This therapy changed my life and made me better.

I am pretty sure I have experienced PMS every month since my first ever period at the age of 11. It got so bad when I was 17 that I felt severely depressed every time my period was about to happen. I went on the combined pill to help regulate my hormones and for a long time this helped me feel better during my cycle. It helped so much that often I didn't really notice symptoms of PMS at all, apart from feeling a bit more stressed or down or confused a few days a month. What has fascinated me over the last few months where I have been experiencing a lot of emotional stress and grief is how much it has heightened my awareness of my hormonal cycles.

I hadn't paid much attention to the emotional part of the monthly cycle apart from feeling rubbish during PMS. I listened to a podcast with comedian Aisling Bea (it was an episode of Jameela Jamil's I Weigh, for anyone who's interested) where she talked about period shame. She spoke about the fact that researching the effect that the menstrual cycle has on her body throughout the entire month, not just the week and a bit at the end of each one, has changed her life for the better. Before this I had never heard of the 'rise' phase or the 'shift' phase. I knew vaguely that ovulation happened somewhere in between but never considered the effect of hormones in that particular process.

I have learnt that during the 'rise' phase I feel absolutely amazing. I feel positive about everything going on in my life, I feel that I can manage anything that comes my way, the future looks bright, the sun seems to be always shining. I now know that this switches in the course of 24 hours when I enter the 'shift' phase and I become gradually more upset, exhausted and unable to deal with anything emotionally right through to when I get my period.

Weirdly, I have been able to monitor this closely due to the emotional impact of a breakup. If I feel generally okay about the situation and able to focus on moving on, I know that I am in the height of my 'rise' phase. When, and it can be literally the next day, I suddenly feel deeply upset about the whole thing and like the sadness will never end I know that I have started my PMS.

This has helped me to understand my body and my emotions even better than I did before. It has helped to know that even when I do feel catastrophically upset everything will improve dramatically in the next week. It has helped me to forgive myself when I suddenly feel like any emotional progress I have made is erased during the height of my PMS, because I can now understand it as a completely natural, intrinsically physical experience and not something that I have made up in my head.

Living in any body is a privileged, unique experience, particularly when you have a very healthy one. Understanding that everything my mind and body does is an interlinked, biological experience both makes me appreciate my corporeal vessel even more and allows for greater mental health. This doesn't mean feeling on top of the world every second of every day, but it does help in not beating yourself up for those inherently human, completely natural and forgivable moments or days of feeling  less than okay.

It is also important to add that, for anyone who has a menstrual cycle, every single experience is different and getting to know your own quirks and tendencies is a healthy process. As a bonus, it is also a step towards smashing that socially accepted shame surrounding the daily physical and emotional experience of over half of the world's population.

Hopeful embroidery.

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/NellyMakesEmbroidery?ref=shop_sugg

Over the weekend I finished an embroidery project. It was my first ever piece of embroidery, and I am quite proud of it. It was another form of therapy that I sought out during lockdown for feelings that seemed to have no end. I have noticed this about myself before, that with extreme emotion comes a sudden outlet of creativity, but I thought it only extended to writing and performing. In fact, I thought myself completely inept at any artistry that involved painting, needles or drawing. It was another thing in my life that I had prematurely signed myself off from but, unlike running, it was an activity I constantly desired to settle down and do. Lockdown, being temporarily unemployed, and living through a period of extreme discontent opened up the time I needed to discover a different creative side to myself.

Actually, this side was awakened within me on a random trip to Hobby Craft just before last Christmas from which I spontaneously bought watercolours and paintbrushes. Much to my dismay, just by buying these products I did not immediately acquire the ability to paint well. I expressed this dismay to a close friend on our trip to Paris in December after we saw some students sketching in the Père Lachaise cemetery, complaining that I just did not have the inbuilt talent needed for that kind of art. She disagreed that this could ever be the case and argued that most artistic talent is about building up a skillset that anyone can learn. I wasn't convinced, but at the same time I didn't stop thinking about her take on the matter. Just before I went travelling I sat down with my watercolours, looked up a YouTube tutorial and miraculously produced a watercolour bee. It is not a groundbreaking piece of art, but it looks like a bee and I had frankly astonished myself that had managed to produce it.

Then came lockdown and I found myself with more time to practice painting. I got better at it because I took the time to learn, and copy, and have patience with producing the final piece. I now have a small collection of paintings that I feel proud of.

Then came heartbreak, as I must have mentioned about 100 times now, and for a week or two I couldn't bring myself to do anything at all. The only thing I could manage to do was read, and I found myself drawn to a collection of essays called The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater by Alanna Okun. Okun wrote so lovingly about her passion for crafting and the way it has seen her through periods of anxiety, grief, heartbreak and longing that I felt quite inspired to give it a go.

I was desperate for some form of distraction, for a way to move through my pain. I found myself wanting to gain something out of my pain, too. I wanted a physical manifestation of my progress. I wanted to work hard at something that I would one day look back on and say "Look how far I've come." In the past, this desire to do something with emotional pain has resulted in a play at the Edinburgh Fringe. This time it has resulted in a few things, one of which being a beloved piece of embroidery.

I searched Etsy for an embroidery kit to teach me the way and allow me to create something pretty and special. I found the perfect one, and waited impatiently for it to arrive in the post.

The design took me a couple of months to complete. I would work on it listening to podcasts and in the evening watching the television with my family. I would even go to it when I felt sad, just to be able to do something with my hands and make my thoughts slow down. Embroidery came to be something that could make me feel so wonderfully serene, that could work away painful feelings without ignoring them or pushing them away.

I taught myself the techniques and spent hours on tiny little things that ended up looking like flowers. I used to think that I couldn't bear the fiddliness of the needle and thread, that it would drive me mad. In fact, it did the opposite, it made me calmer and provided another form of meditation.

My Granny is the queen of craft. She has created the most exquisite pieces throughout her life, some of which have ended up in exhibitions. She has spent many hours attempting to teach me how to knit, casting on for me on several occasions, only for me to give up after about 20 rows each time. I always thought that in that regard I had been a disappointment, unable to take on her endless talent. My Granny may not have very much time left in our world, but the other day I was able to show her my first piece of embroidery. She thought that it was beautiful and we got to share a sweet and special moment of love formed out of what I had created. When I started the piece I did not expect this to be an outcome, but I am so happy that she knows her legacy did not go to waste on me.

I can't say that I will ever produce anything as beautiful as my Granny did, but I have a feeling that embroidery might stay with me for a long time. It is too peaceful, too lovely to give up on now. The design that I embroidered has the word "hope" in the middle and colourful, wonderful flowers sprout out around the word jubilantly. That is why it was so perfect, and it did not fail to please.

Running is cool.

Plot twist: I really, really enjoy running. For anyone who knows me even remotely this is something I don't think anyone saw coming. For my entire life before now I have declared myself an anti-runner. I could not think of anything I would like to do less. I despised cross country PE lessons and walked in rebellion at the back every time. I thought that the 100m on sport's day was okay but only because it was over very quickly. I thought that people who ran for fun were crazy and scoffed when they suggested that I tried it out. I thought that it was painful and boring and exhausting and I could get my exercise elsewhere. Except for the fact that after I gave up rock climbing and dancing the only exercise I got was the enforced 2.5 mile cycle from my college into town, and after that there was nothing. For my entire adult life I have done little to no exercise. I thought that I was fine with that, I thought it was just my personality type. Now I am beginning to realise that I was missing out on something.

I am not going to write about how everyone should run (although, coming from someone who hated it and now loves it maybe everyone genuinely should give it a go) I just wanted to express the newfound pleasure that it brings me.

I started with the Couch to 5k app, and I am now on week 9 and I can run for 30 minutes without feeling like I might drop dead. Jo Wiley has been the encouraging voice in my ear, interrupting whichever podcast I am listening to tell me I've run for "5 minutes", "15 minutes", "you've got only 60 seconds left!" I started running at the beginning of lockdown because I felt unfit and at a slightly uncomfortable weight and I felt that I should do something about it. Then I stopped the app because I had to deal with feeling incredibly sad. Then I started the app and started running again because I felt incredibly sad and I wanted to give myself something to focus on. Turns out that was one of the best decisions I made in a bad situation.

I built up my runs week by week. At the beginning I was impressed when I could run for 3 minutes without stopping. I couldn't really imagine what running for 30 minutes would be like so I just took each run as it came, never looking into the future to worry about it. Each time the minutes spent running increased I surprised myself. Running became easier, then harder, then easier again. I don't think I have ever experienced physical training in the same way before, the way each improvement makes you feel proud and positive.

Now that I might in some small way be able to call myself a runner I can truly say that the most satisfying, most enjoyable part of running is the mental bit. I know that everyone told me endorphins would make me feel really good, even on really sad days, but I didn't realise they would feel that good. It is addictive. The rush after completing a run lasts for the rest of the day and I know that in retrospect that pleasurable, relaxing feeling was building up during the run too. I know this because when I imagine myself running now, or when I think back through my run, it makes me excited about going out to do it again. I forget when it was hard, or when I wanted to stop, I just remember that I kept going and how good that felt.

The meditative and mindful quality of running is something I was surprised by. I can notice my body in ways that I usually don't. I can notice and enjoy the rhythm of my steps and become so entranced by it that I forget I am running. The simple 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2 fading in and out of my awareness. I am always so amazed by how at first my breathing is ragged and almost panicky, but I push my way through it until the breath is calm and rhythmic and it carries me through. I always think, right at the beginning, that I can't do it, that I'm going to give up and then only a few minutes later I am rounding the corner of that country lane and the yellow house comes into view and oh... I have been running for five minutes and I forgot how hard it was to start.

Running, in so many ways, has been an extremely effective form of therapy over the last few weeks. I have taught myself the value of focussing solely on the task at hand and not worrying about what happens next. I have watched myself improve and grow and learn to love something new. I have put in a lot of physical and mental effort and been able to reap the benefits. And when I feel like complete and utter crap I have a way of getting out, giving myself an endorphin rush and a reason to feel proud and coming back feeling calmer and more positive.

I am not a good runner and I have a lot of improvements to make but that makes me love it even more. I have more to look forward to, more to work on, more things to discover about myself and my body. I don't care that right now I must be pretty slow, because it is such an enjoyable thing to do, such a wonderful and loving thing to do for myself, that I am not self-conscious or competitive about it in the slightest. It is a personal journey that allows me to see the joy in solitude.

I am most likely preaching to the choir here. So many friends and advice columns and health nuts have told me how great running is in the past and I have just dutifully ignored them. I thought I hated running so much that it would never make me feel anything other than miserable. I guess that is another lesson I have learned: the older I get, I realise the less I know about myself and that countless, unpredictable joys and adventures lie ahead. Even when I am moping about thinking that nothing good or exciting will ever happen again, I can counteract that with the absolute fact that they most definitely will and they will be bigger and better and more surprising than I could have ever imagined.