I started the year having had a tough, lonely 2021 but optimistic that I had come out of it and formed the connections I needed for 2022 to not pan the same.
It certainly started okay. I even dated a couple of people, which satisfied one of my aims for the year; There was the Plymouth swimming community that I was excited to share more adventures with; I had a wonderful running holiday to Greece in May (see 4 photos), running in the mountains in the warmth with like-minded fellow runners, dipping straight in the sea in after with a pre-dinner beer; I had planned a string of 3 ultra marathons, each (ideally) with a full 16-week training plan and a 2 week taper, and 2 weeks recovery after. I did the first in April, and then the second was a 100-miler in July. I got injured so couldn’t complete it, but I did manage my second longest run ever (56 miles) and longest run in just under 3 years.
But it’s always transient. Every time I meet somebody that I think will be a close friend to fill a gap in my life I get excited and expectant about it but it turns out they haven’t got that same need or space in their life. I find it really hard to turn encounters into functioning friendships. I’m not the most natural communicator in the ways that people usually expect, so I ensure to put in my side of the relationship as much as I can – I’ve messaged people, bought presents, organised activities, invited people for dinner, tried to do thoughtful acts, made sure I watch out for where people are struggling. I’m not doing these things because I'm expecting return, but to ensure I am keeping my end good by putting in what I want to get out. But for a friendship it's got to be two way, and I haven’t found that person with whom I can share that equality.
It’s also important for me to have validation that it’s a two-way friendship: my character tends to disappoint people once they get to know me, and I hate to outstay my welcome, so I rely on somebody to use words or actions to indicate that they still like me. If those don’t come I lose faith as invariably what follows is one or the other getting upset, so I walk away to protect us, and await the next friendship prospect.
So connections in my social life dropped away again, as they often do, back to zero. I’ve got plenty of friends, but non close or frequent, it’s the day-to-day type of rapport that has vanished. Please don’t feel like I’m blaming anyone – people all have their own things going on, and/or they’re busy, or they simply don’t see me as a friend, which is fine. But I really desperately needed these social connections this year after a build-up of loneliness to a really detrimental level, and try as I might I couldn’t find them. I reached out, asked people if they were free, told them I was lonely, told them I needed their help, planned things they could come to, but the months passed empty. There wasn’t a complete absence of connections - there was the occational, extremely valued invitation to the local pub, or a lunch invitation at work - just not enough, or none sustained enough to feel valid. It’s interesting coming back to the ‘how I you’ phrase I commented on at the top. I sometimes tell friends that question doesn’t work for me, and they’re okay with that but they assure me that they are asking because they’re genuinely interested. I have experimented with that this year – when people have asked me how I am I’ve often said ‘not good actually’, and people just don’t know how to answer. They often say ‘oh’ with a half smile and sidle away quietly. So I maintain my claim that the start of a conversation isn’t the time to go into that topic.
Loneliness has bothered me for the past several years, but I’d found ways to cope: I’d distracted myself by my activities – running, swimming, mostly alone, ticking off targets and collecting achievements. Suddenly none of these were hitting the spot, I have been distracting myself too long that it was no longer working. The biological urge was also a big factor – I am desperate for a family, 3 years ago I set myself a 2 year target to make it happen, the whole of which was obliterated by the pandemic. This last year I just have no idea how to get there, my communication with people is so broken that I can’t even get to know anyone. But running, swimming, all those things I was doing alone as they’re what I *can* do when I don’t have anyone spend time with, were suddenly seeming hollow and pointless. When the thing you do as an escape loses its validity everything starts to fall apart.
Work was also still a very disconnected, intangible place. I love the company I work for, the projects they do, their ethos, the support they provide. The ‘new normal’ working environment doesn’t work for me though, so many people are choosing to work from home as it fits in better with their family life, that the office is quiet and lacking in soul. The people that are there are hot desking, there’s no familiarity on entering the office - you can’t give a nod to a collection of familiar people as you walk down the aisle. Meetings are predominantly done on Microsoft Teams which has quite a different feel to it than an in-person one – people look different with the barrel distortion of the camera, they may or may not be looking at you on the screen regardless of whether their eyes are facing you, the conversation is more structured and turn-based meaning I have to turn on a sort of ‘forced’ mode which takes the personal element away.
Without real people around me, at work and socially, I can’t get an idea of how to do things that most people find second-nature but I have to copy: for example when to stop for lunch; how to react to a comment from another person; how to know what other people find normal. I am neurodivergent, and to fit in with the world I copy/mimic everything, which is known as masking. Masking can be considered detrimental as it’s so tiring, you’re encourage to let the real you out, but if you’ve been masking without knowing it for so many years you don’t know who the real you is, and if you do let it out often the world isn’t ready for it, so for now masking is the way I cope. So without real-life people to feed off I revert to my own autopilot which is unknown and doesn’t enable me to fit in with the rest of the world, and I forget how to communicate and behave, it’s like the world is spinning and I’m looking down on it trying to work out whether I can run fast enough to get up to speed to jump back on, and while that happening I can’t see what’s going on down there. I become completely dysfunctional. From April I identified that if I can’t copy then I’ll have to find some other strategy to get things done, so I started a monthly todo list (a continuous one was only likely to work for a limited time as it would seem like there was no end point to reach, so a month at a time was a better plan). The problem was that I wasn’t remembering anything (out of sight out of mind) except perhaps at 2am when I was lying in bed about to go to sleep, so if I wrote it down on a list at least I only had to remember look in one place. This sort of worked, but it’s a bit like eating junkfood instead of your 5-a-day, you’ll survive but you won’t be healthy. Every time I target an item on the list I sort of shake in fear of the commitment of it, and take 3 days to build up to it, even if it’s just to email somebody.
My physical state is easier to describe, to cover how I was/am feeling mentally it’s hard enough to be clear about it in my head let alone put it into words. I wake up each day like the world doesn’t exist. I can’t remember what I value in life, I can’t remember the feeling of joy I get when I run, I can’t feel passion for ideas, work or activities. Waking up is the hardest thing I do each day, to get my brain to switch on when its claws are still in sleep and could perhaps stay there indefinitely – I believe this is a sleep disorder as I’ve had it my whole life, but it’s exacerbated by my state of mind. Then if I turn on the radio it seems weird to hear people talking about things where other people are involved, and to hear people laughing and being comfortable, being warm, and joyful and happy. If I see somebody walking towards me in the street I think they’ll be annoyed at me, or be ready to find any excuse to be. Everything feels really alien, I can’t see or imagine the type of life where people go to the cinema and bars, people meet up in groups, exchange banter and laughs, whether it’s me living it or others. It’s not in my head at all, even as a memory. Instead of having a baseline state of positive expectation and happiness I feel wariness and dread, I’m and low and entirely alone.
Some people reading this will be no doubt think it sounds like depression. There is a big overlap, but I want to point out that this kind of depression is a symptom of an existing problem, not the problem itself nor the cause of it. Low mood is just an added complication, most of what I've mentioned above came before it led to that, for example all the feelings of disconnect from the world. And one thing that really frustrates me is if you come to a friend for help and they say ‘have you sought professional help’? If they’re just asking that’s fine, but really they’re saying they won’t or can’t help, when you know they can, after all it's not like you need to point out that professional help is available as it's not something I'm not likely to know. Firstly, I feel you can break mental health help down into 3 steps: ‘understanding the problem, understanding the solution, and implementing the solution’. Professionals will help you with the first two, but they can’t do the last one for you. I’d already resolved the first two – loneliness is a disease and I was suffering from it, and I needed more connections, I just needed help creating them so I reached out to friends. If they then say ‘you need to see a professional’ it’s exasperating because it’s trying to send you into a loop that you can never break free from. There was already a bit of a catch-22 in me reaching out to friends, because it's not that I want them fix my mental health (steps 1 and 2), I just want to spend time with them as a friend doing normal friend things (step 3), but if I ask them to spend time with me they don’t realise how much I need it, and if I tell them I’m struggling they then think they’re not the person to help. Secondly, I've had friends suggest I'm depressed before when what they're actually seeing is just the fact that I'm autistic and function differently to what they're used to, and the best path there would be if they took time to understand that a bit more. Thirdly, getting professional help isn’t easy. At that point I slipped from being a natural problem solver to not wanting to solve anything I knew I was depressed and did seek help, but it’s not a quick process. I’d already been on one waiting list for counselling since January 2021, but as a result of my new enquiry I got added to a separate one, while being informed there was a 3 month wait for an initial assessment (which I have now had, but I have yet to discover whether the process will bear fruit). This wait will be too late for many, so if you’re somebody’s friend and they’re struggling, they need you more than you know, and they may not know how to ask clearly.
Depression is a bit of a trickster and stops you taking advantage of the opportunities that do arise. If you plan something it’s hard to face actually doing it. Even small things in the evening: I get a huge sense of relief when I finish the work day and don’t have to do anything for the rest of the day - but that won’t fix my isolation and it won’t fix my health. But I want to leave the talk of depression aside now, as that’s only a progression of symptoms caused by the real problem which already existed, i.e. the loneliness and lack of day-to-day connection, and feeling closed off to opportunity.
Occasionally there was a snippet of the solution I needed, for example, a conference or sports day at work, or somebody engaging me genuinely in the supermarket or street, or going to volunteer at an event run by my local trail running group and suddenly feeling like I'm among friend. These things surprise me as they’re at odds to my new world, it surprises me that normality still does exist, somewhere behind the veil. And I know it wouldn’t take much to recover, if the opportunities were there.
There was one activity through work that really did work for me for the summer. Previously I had spoken to my boss about a way to resolve the new work environment for me, and he suggesting things like meeting other colleagues for a coffee but these didn’t appeal, although it made me cringe that he would think I was either ungrateful or resistant to finding a solution. Then on Tuesday lunchtime in the spring I saw an invitation to play volleyball so went to watch and got dragged in, and this was exactly what I needed! It was both sociable and active. I instantly realised that the reason the conversational solutions hadn’t appealed is because conversation is the main focus and I don’t enjoy small talk, to me talk has to have a purpose. Volleyball includes banter which gives a wonderful sense of having a shared connection, but it’s not mandatory, you can just play and feel part of something, and you then see those same people round the office too. The volleyball season lasted from June until October and was truly the highlight of my week, it gave me a reason to get out of bed and make it into the office which brings benefits of its own. In addition to the direct benefits of exercise and social connection, it made me realise there was actually nothing wrong with me: For the last year I thought my mental health problems has been because of the way my brain works and the resultant impacts when I can’t feed off other people, and although that’s all true I had an awakening that it was just an overly complicated way of explaining the reality – that I was simply lonely. Also I was relieved to see that the right kind of connections would very quickly help me.
Other times I was unable to take advantage of opportunities that would have helped. Once a month or so there was an orienteering event with my club followed by a social gathering, and there are lot of people in my club who I like who seem to like me, so this would have been a valuable event. Only with my sleep inertia / waking difficulty, and the fact that each day I can’t remember the world that’s out there, I frequently arrived late, so that I would see people briefly in the car park and miss the whole post-run social. The frustration from being thwarted by something that would seem automatic to most – getting up and dressed and out the house - is immense, as you get the double hit of missing the opportunity as well as being mad at yourself, which overpowers being kind to yourself. The need to be productive triggers panic - while one part of my brain is guiding me through it, the louder part is sticking its fingers in its ears and saying 'la la la, not listening'.
I have a philosophy that teaches you how to deal with stuff: The Warrior’s Way, to do with personal power, and awareness. It teaches you how to not squander thought power on negative processes such as wishing and hoping behaviour. It teaches you to properly analyse risk rather than shying away from it. To listen to your full range of emotions and to be able to be in chaos rather than being tricked by the many faces of the ego. However, there is sort of a flaw with this philoshopy. It is a journey that you embark on that you never complete. And it doesn’t tell you how to get help along the way for things that happen that you haven’t yet perfected how to deal with, because you maybe never will. You can only really handle things in an ideal world, and it’s not an ideal world, especially when you’re dealing with unusual stuff like working out your place in the world after learning you are autistic after all. In November I did a well-being course at work which said that good wellbeing comes from connections and hope, which gave me something to latch hold of. Hope is contradictory to the Warrior philosophy so there’s more thinking to do there, but connections – well there's the crux really. Mine had all vanished, and here I was feeling low. But if you’ve already tried to build those in many different ways and failed, what can you do? In September the impact of my difficult summer culminated in my mental health collapsing and me dropped off the radar a bit. I realised that if I was posting about my activities on strava and facebook people would think I was loving life, so I stopped. If I had written this review at that point, a thought which crossed my mind then, this review would have been a line long. A short one. And it wouldn’t have been happy. A couple of people noticed my absence – that saved me. I was only able to articulate how I’d been feeling once I was feeling a tiny smidgen better, and then more people asked how I was, but I am indebted to those four that noticed me vanish. After that I gained an invitation to a regular Friday swim - small lifts like that remind me of how it’s meant to be but it takes time to get back there.
There’s definitely a suggestion that if you’re active that means you’re okay, but it’s not true. If I’m active it just means I’m still alive, I could have a mood of 1/10 and still go out for a hike. 0/10 and I wouldn’t be here any more. People often seem to think the fact that I do lots of stuff is something impressive or admirable. That’s nice of them, and it’s really special to think that I might inspire people, but to me it’s normal to get out there and do stuff, in fact it’s actually a comfort blanket. If I’m really, really struggling I usually ‘follow my nose’ as I call it, but actually I follow my feet, I’ll usually find myself walking somewhere, and I usually didn’t have much conscious say in the decision to do that. So what other people might admire in me, is my baseline. That doesn’t help me find my place in the world, as people assume I’m happy when I may be the polar opposite, and also the fact that I’m constantly active being unusual to them when to me it’s so innate, means they’ll never understand the rest of me. I’ve always said that the reason I do lots of stuff is because I’m inherently lazy and if I stop I won’t start again, and that pretty much what happened this year.
In August I read something in a book that triggered a realisation in me that I have forgotten how to live in the moment, instead I was focussing on achievements and bounding from one milestone to the next. This lightbulb moment made it much easier to stay at home than before and my anxiety in this vanished. I re-gained a love of watching TV and I reactivated my Netflix subscription, and I started learning to play the concertina. But it’s a mixed blessing, it gives depression a safe path, means you don't have to face anything, and my running faltered, and that’s something I need for my physical health if not my mental. Which do I need to be, calm or active? Is it possible to be both? So even things that seem positive bring complications. I spent some time this year trying to bring my bedtime forward, it's something I've struggled with since I left home but with an average bedtime of 2:46 over 3 months it had got more out of hand. However, combining that with a more homely attitude meant lots of evenings getting into bed early to watch TV. Is that helping improve a routine, or exacerbating the isolation and lethargy? Again, it's complicated.
Largely this write-up is talking about problems rather than solutions, but that’s because it’s a write-up of what happened. It’s easy to read it and think that I operating problem-based thinking, but I’m not someone who dwells on problems, I’m a problem solver and constantly think in solutions, any time my mood is above about 2/10. That’s why it was so frustrating that I couldn’t find what I needed, because I was trying and still failing (it’s immensely difficult when the solution is dependent on others and can’t do it yourself) and why I eventually fell apart. But I did at least recover enough to keep trying, especially over the last 3 months: They say if you help others you’ll help yourself, and I’ve raised money for charity, helped friends out financially and with support messages, donated to foodbanks; I spent a while pondering what to do with the work situation, and although it’s definitely not the right solution for me to leave the company, I did realise that an internal move could bring benefits. I was thwarted by certain processes with my first attempt and ended up feeling worse, but after a bit of recovery time I tried a different route and ended up being successful in my application for a new role that was also a career progression so I’m exited about that as it's part of my solution. I started the new role in the New Year; I started to get my enthusiasm back for activities - it’s not the solution as they’re still largely solo, but it helps me to be ‘me’, and being ‘me’ (at least this little I understand of it) is achieving stuff; I also identified that I didn't have any routine any more, I used to do things every night of the week and now I wasn't doing anything. Given how beneficial the volleyball had been I needed something similar, so I capitalised on a chance to spend friday evenings at the climbing wall with some runners I know; Regaining some of my former drive also makes me able to be reception to any opportunities that present themselves; I try to actively focus on seeing the positivies and trying not to add more weighting to equivalently-sized negatives - I recently heard unexpectedly from some friends I haven’t heard from for ages which means more than a new hill summit, so I consciously enjoy each of those moments.
Aside from mental health, which most of this write-up is about, there were some other notable events throughout the year too. In October, after 3 ¼ years on the waiting list and 4 months working through the assessment process, I finally got my Autism diagnosis. That was the end of a chapter of investigation and uncertainty in my life, I can just get on with things now. I’m working on remembering who I am and acting on that without worrying how it comes across, then maybe others will know who I am too - even after knowing some of my friends many years they don’t know when I’m joking, and people aren’t able to communicate with me in the way that I would enjoy; I visited my family more than usual, because my dad had been quite unwell leading up to Christmas last year and was worried about not being around and I wanted to make sure I spent time with him, and he picked up and made another Christmas; the new room I moved into last November has panned out brilliant, as my landlady is wonderful and I can be me without judgement, we don't have many shared activities but our characters are a match.
I had another realisation in the autumn, after something gave me a small lift, that confirms what I learnt in the wellbeing course. People think I’m independent, but I’m fuelled by connections: I love to be independent, but don’t have the power to do that if I’m alone, so it's not independence after all. My (fake) independence and well-being are linked - the independence comes from connections, so do ideas and inspiration, and the type of excitement that makes me implement them does too (if you know me you’ve seen this side of me). That’s me being me, and I can’t do it without you.
Where am I at now? I still feel no purpose, no identity, no place in the world. Day to day still feels alien. There’s something odd about Devon – I feel completely at home here, it’s a haven for all my activites and the opportunities feel endless, but I haven’t felt happy since I got here. Every time I go away it’s like I wake up and can see clearly again. It could be that I used to travel more and now I don’t need to as it’s all on my doorstep, but travel gave me that something extra, that outside perspective… perhaps. Or it did just cross my mind that maybe Devon and me are so alike, that because I’ve lost sight of who I am I’m also lost when I’m in Devon too.
Achievements:
I did still achieve some stuff. I’m reticent to post these as I fear that despite what I have explained above, people will read them and think ‘well things can’t have been that bad if she did all that’. Remember, I just don’t function in the same way as you might think, and these are my survival strategy, that it’s pretty essential that I carry on with them unless I find another way to build up the dynamo. Also for me this is less than a standard year. But I shall post them here for posterity. And I am still proud of them.
* I ran 3 ultras-marathons – the Snowdonia Spring Crossing in April (33 miles, successful completion), the Dragon 100 in June (DNF at checkpoint 6, but still completed 56 miles), and the 8-Trigs in November (34 miles, successful completion, last place!). I have planned 3-4 ultras through the year, so just about managed to claw this one back with a last minute entry into the 8-Trigs having just started to realise the anxiety issue.
* I continued working my way through the (Dartmoor) D365 book, ticking 113 new squares (plus one of the 2 bonuses), bringing my total to 254/365, so I’m 69% of the way through.
* I completed the remaining 132 miles of the coast path, and received my certificate of completion.
* I ticked 146 hill summits (including a couple of repeats). 79 were only TUMPs though (a TUMP is a Thirty and Upward Metre Prominence, a hill so insignificant there are over 17,000 of them in the UK). My lifetime TUMP total now stands at 885.
* I bagged 106 new Dartmoor Tors. My total now stands at 246/896, so I’m 27% of the way through the definitive list.
* I did 48 swims, all outdoors, totalling a shade under 43km, in a mixture of wetsuit and skins.
* My total running mileage for the year was 1,550 miles. This isn’t the 2022 miles I intended (an average of 170 miles a month) - it was achievable and I was on track for the first 6 month, but them lost it as explained above, as it’s had been very physically difficult to actually run. However, on a bit of analysis after the year was over I was surprised to find this was my biggest year yet, beating 2019 at 1,418 miles.
Non achievements:
* I started the year a little overweight at 11 stone 9.5lb. I lost 1 stone 3lb up to mid March, then gained 2 stone 3lb, with a net gain of 1 stone. My weight always goes up and down as I can eat consistently, but it does have big impacts on my exercise. I start to notice the difference to my running when I go above 11 stone, finding I can’t hold a conversation with other runners who are going at a sociable pace. Above 12 stone I feel hugely uncomfortable, in running, and in everything else. At 12 1/2 I feel uncomfortable just sitting as I expand outwards immediately underneath my chest. And if one more person says to me "but surely you burn it off with all the exercise you do"...!!! Seriously, do you know how many calories there are in ice cream and chocolate?!
* One of the several that didn’t happen - I only used my paddleboard twice, despite being very keen to do a lot more this year. Another one of those ideas that just dissolved in the ether when faced with a life where it no longer makes sense to even get out of bed.
