Day -143: The pain and privilege of not being 'normal'
“You are who I’d like to be when I am 30”
It’s late August 2023. I am sitting in a pub garden with my 24-year-old sister and some of her friends. And it is one of these lovely, enthusiastic (slightly tipsy) people who has just paid me such a complement.
It’s not a crazy thing to have said.
I’m married, I own a lovely two-bed flat in a nice town. I have a well paid job which I am good at and allows me to travel. I have lots of friends, I’m fun and I’m fit. Within the next seven weeks I will have completed a half marathon in Stockholm, a half IronMan in Weymouth, Oktoberfest in Munich and a marathon in Porto.
I am smashing it. I am the kind of person I want my little sister and her friends to aspire to be.
So why on earth do I feel so miserable?
In 2023, it was rare for me to string together two consecutive days without crying. I’d often find myself having wildly overblown arguments with colleagues or family members who I didn’t see eye to eye with. I was drinking too much, working too hard and spending too much money - desperately trying to push down the pain I was feeling with piles and piles of positives.
If you bury your pain deep enough, it stops becoming a problem, right?
Wrong.
I have no idea how long I could have carried on the charade for. How long I could have kept marching along the path so well trodden. The one that leads to promotions, babies, a house with a garden, a couple of dogs, school runs, more promotions, an even nicer house. The path that if you hit the milestones at the right time, makes people look at you and think you’re smashing it.
But I am confident that if I hadn’t started talking to a therapist and opening up the boxes which contained the traumas and the sadness, I wouldn’t have taken the mask off for a long time. I wouldn’t have had the confidence to start showing people the pain I was in, or talking more openly about the bad stuff. I’d have probably kept dragging myself down the ‘normal’ path, clocking off the milestones and drowning out the pain with too much alcohol, too many holidays and too much work.
I am also confident that I wouldn’t be sitting on a sunny beach, writing a diary entry for my website which showcases my plan to run around the coast of Britain in a record time.
In the last two years, I have left the well trodden path, battled through a forest of unknown and am now tentatively walking a very fragile, bumpy path into a far less ‘normal’ future. One that has no clear milestones and one which very few people aspire to be taking.
But it is one that feels right.
And so despite the nervousness, the paranoia, and pangs of sadness for the ending of my ‘normal’, I am more settled now than I have been in my entire adult life. Because the path I am on is the right one for me. The steps that I am taking might be small and nervy, but they never feel like missteps.
In just five months of planning Run Britain, I have already found myself in the company of people who think and behave in the same way that I do. Who don’t respond to my plans with the commonly uttered phrase ‘you’re mad’, but with the genuine sentiment ‘I’m jealous’. People who want to be out there immersing themselves in as much world as they can. Who seek to test the limits of human endurance, embark on adventures that no one else has ever attempted and have a passionate desire to leave the world in a better place than when they found it.