Jog On: How Running Saved My Life

by Bella Mackie

I’d avoid certain numbers, letters, colours, songs and places. All as a way to ‘compromise’ with my brain, in the hopes that the bad thoughts would go away if I just stuck rigidly to my little mechanisms.

I got shin splints, which hurt like hell.

Throughout my life, if I couldn’t do something well on the first attempt, I was prone to quit almost immediately.

Your twenties are a time for experimenting, having fun and enjoying everything that life may offer you, or so we’re told. Instead, for many people, I think they are a time of massive insecurity, debt, and a sense of displacement – a decade of worry and fear. So I did what I could. I dropped out of Uni, went to a psychiatrist and took the antidepressants that I was swiftly prescribed.

My NHS GP was kind, but could only offer to put me on the waiting list for therapy, which stood at six months back then.

I guess what I’m saying is that anxiety is complex, messy and dark. It’s not just panic attacks or a fear of crowded places – horrible things which are easy to understand by a general audience – but relentless obsessions, terrible thoughts, exhausting compulsions, physical malaise and deep sadness as a result.

Aged nine, I worried that my mum might die while she was out if I didn’t turn off the light switch correctly. And I didn’t really know what correctly looked like, only that I’d ‘feel’ it when it was.