Running to 90s handbag house and hip hop

Or my fail proof technique for fighting morning anxiety

I’ve always had anxiety in the mornings. Until recently I didn’t realise that it was linked to the fact that I often woke up alone in my dad’s house. He’d try and rouse me to get me off to school (which was more than an hours drive away) and I just couldn’t get out of bed. So I bunked off school. Ended up not doing my A levels at all. The night before I would write myself little notes:

Get up

Get dressed

Wash face

Try and be happy :)

That kind of thing. It didn’t matter. I would open one eye and hear his motorcycle - a loud roar steadily becoming a low level hum as he turned out of our road, and headed towards Woolwich Common. He’d gone. Immediately my heart sped up and I’d run downstairs in a state of panic. The mean cat would be sitting in the kitchen staring. It was an unpredictable creature that seemed to have absorbed all the bad energy, and would lunge at your leg as you passed, sink in its claws. The house was full of this bad feeling, this heaviness (the same house my stepmother and sister had inhabited), and I didn’t know what to do about it. I thought it was linked to my environment so I ran away to another country.

It didn’t work.

It followed me to Amsterdam. I was living with a much older boyfriend and in the mornings the same pattern repeated. I’d wake up and he’d have left a note in the kitchen (I say ‘kitchen’ but it was one room that we shared- a shabby, grey and decrepit apartment in the oldest part of Amsterdam- most of the building has long been knocked down now). He didn’t have a motorbike, but I’d hear him running down the tiny wooden stairs and the door would slam behind him. I’d peek out the curtains and watch him mount his bicycle and he’d be off (he was a musician and worked in a well known recording studio on the Herengracht- one of the more iconic streets). I’d turn the TV on to get rid of the feeling, and try and find any activity that would eat up the energy in my body.

I’d start with cleaning our clothes in the shower (we didn’t have a washing machine) and then hanging them up to drip dry. Then cycling to the supermarket to get food for the evening. I was continually in motion. Back again and coffee and more tidying. The place was always a state, but I tried to make it look semi-cosy by arranging cushions on the mattress where we slept and lighting incense. Then I’d watch Oprah. If he didn’t come back by the time it was getting dark I’d cycle to the studio and play ‘Sonic the Hedgehog,’ for hours. It wasn’t unusual for me to play for 8 hours at a time- smoking cigarettes and taking small toilet breaks. I was about 18 by then. Still a child in many respects. Eventually the boss of the studio offered me a job - writing lyrics for dance music that was being released across Europe. I’d sit with an old typewriter and a rhyming dictionary, and look up words that rhymed and type up my lyrics. The songs were released all over Europe. A couple of them were hits. I have put a link at the bottom of this piece (one of the songs did pretty well and was played regularly on MTV).

I’m digressing but the thing is this anxiety was pre-programmed, and right up until about 3 years ago I accepted it as a thing, and thought there was very little I could do to get it out of my system. When the kids were babies I would get them wrapped up in a blanket, hurl them in the buggy and take off. I would walk to the park, go to a playgroup, go to the supermarket, even go and sit in a church (I once made it through an entire church service and drank wine and ate the bread despite not being christened- just to get out of the house). I just knew I had to move and do something with the pent up energy. I was worried that if I didn’t move then this anxiety would unleash something far more serious.

‘You were worried that you were going mad,’ my therapist said a few months ago when I talked her through the pattern.

‘You thought you might kill yourself too?’

I had never thought it through logically but it was true that my stepmum had killed herself in the morning, that she had got up out of bed, taken my baby sister and jumped off a nearby tower block. It was therefore fairly logical that I would make that connection. However it’s not rare that anxiety takes hold in the mornings- it is often the same for many people. It goes back to our primitive roots- waking up in caves and looking for bears in the shadows. In reality I haven’t seriously contemplated ended it all anyway (apart from a few dark days in my teens) but nonetheless there was always this feeling - the need to move, to get up, not to stay in bed, to be active, in motion, to shake the bad away. It was exhausting not understanding the thing or why it was happening. Also this feeling that I was a slave to it. That it had the upper hand.

Then I realised that I could also run it out. That this dark thing would be slightly less dark if I slowly ran around the block a few times. That I didn’t have to drag the whole family out (though this is still something I do fairly regularly anyway). Instead I could set off in the dark and run laps. Now this is what I do and have been doing for a few weeks now. If it’s lighter then I head down to the canal and I run to the park. I am very slow. Someone pointed this out to my partner- the fact that they'd seen me and I was running SO SLOW. This made me feel self-conscious for about 30 seconds, and then I realised I didn’t care. I am not running to impress others or to get a better time. It is about survival. It’s about getting the bad out. On these runs the darkness is absorbed into the air around me. The ghosts flee.

I am not trying to forget you dear family. I am just trying to live with the knowledge of all that has happened. I am just putting one foot in front of the other you see.

I sometimes see other women running, and I nod as they go past. I feel a certain kind of solidarity knowing that we run together - probably for similar kinds of reasons. They need to get their bad out too. So they can get on with their shit.

As we get older we become (hopefully) better at realising the healthy things we can do to feel a little better. In my youth I had no clue. You can well imagine what it was like being a 17 year old living in Amsterdam. I went further than anyone else. On the nights I went out (which were basically four times each week), people laughed when they saw my face. I was so out of it. Completely and utterly. It was frightening. I fell down stairs. I fainted in queues. I ended up in accident and emergency. I was trying to erase the energy. It was a different kind of running. It was a miracle that I survived that period and lived to write this now.

I sometimes listen to house music when I run. This is usually from back in the day. 90s stuff. The thought of clubs makes me shudder. It would be weird for me to still want to thrash about like I did back them.

Whilst I’m running, I think about that blonde girl with the big bug eyes who was so desperate to find peace. Who looked for it in men, in drugs, in work, in money, in clothes, in having children- the list goes on. I wish I could tell her to try running instead. She wouldn’t have listened. It took her thirty years to discover there were better ways to escape. Thirty years to realise she could survive anything the world decided to fling in her direction. That she was strong and resilient and ultimately more than okay. That the ending was not set in stone.

And if you want to see her she is in the video I’ve linked to here.

(Video is by ‘First Contact’ and is called ‘I Call Upon’- all lyrics and speaking aloud by Anniki Sommerville. I have no actual idea what the song was supposed to be about.)