It was far from the normal memories stirred by the rhythmic strokes up and down the regimented lanes.
In my final year of university, I swam every week on a Thursday morning at a pool filled with old women who would talk to me about politics in the changing room as they dried their sagging breasts and vaginas.
I told people how much I loved swimming. Raved about the morning sessions and how lucky I was to go each week.
And I was lucky. But not because I loved swimming.
Last year, exercise became part of a terrifyingly delicate coping system that allowed me to almost function.
As I swim now at the bougie gym on the business park, I find myself thinking about the Thursday mornings spent doing rigid lengths as I ran through every thing that I had done wrong that week, every social situation I had been too much or too little in, every situation back home and in Canterbury that I had aggravated or evaded. And with each stroke, I'd feel my chest slowing even as my breathing quickened, beating out each thought curled around the dark part of my brain with each windmill arm.
As I squat with kettlebells at the gym above the pool, I am swept back to evenings spent at a sweaty kettlebell class up three flights of stairs where I fought and punished my body for an hour until the pain of the weights and the steady counting of reps was all I could hear and feel. Lingering after the class too long, putting every chair back in place, slowly, slowly so I didn't have to get the bus back to myself and that cold flat that didn't ever belong to me.
In daily life, in recovery, I find it hard to picture the girl who felt the cage of her body so acutely and, frustrated with its durability and longevity, thought over and over of how she could break it. I can't imagine thoughts so thick with phrases of suicide that even the lightest image held for a moment too long became woven into the unending narrative of I need to leave, I need to leave, I need to leave.
The thought of living and continuing to live became frightening, became something looming, something to be endured.
I'd wake up in the morning, look at my clock and sob, terrified of the amount of hours I had to fill, terrified of the time I had to spend thinking and doing and being.
I have never been so scared in my life.
When I stood at the top of the stairs of the library and imagined which of my bones would break if I threw myself down, I knew that I had to get help.
I didn't want to try medication, had resisted for years, not wanting to remove the last option, not wanting to admit that, this time, I hadn't been enough for myself.
Starting Citalopram was horrific. I refuse to sugar coat it. As my body tried to work out what I had forced into it, I stopped sleeping, waking up every hour just to reassure myself that I hadn't died, that these tablets weren't killing me. Sleep deprived and my levels fluctuating constantly, I stopped being able to function at all.
It was tough. It took ten days to start to steady. But oh, it was worth it.
I had no expectation of what the medication would do, prescribed over the phone with very little explanation about what would happen. I thought it might make me calmer. I worried it might make me feel numb. But with the constant agitation, I knew dullness would be preferable.
I came home at the weekend after around two weeks of taking it. When the thought of killing myself slipped its way to the surface of my conscious mind, I was shocked. Not because of the thought itself, but because for the first time in months, it was the first time I had noticed it because it was the only one I had had all day. My thoughts were just my thoughts. They weren't being choked any more.
I had thought that the agitation was, on some level, normal. That the anxiety and stress of being on my own was a perfectly expected response to being lonely, to feeling socially excluded.
But when I came to write my next set of essays, spending hours in the library on my own, I found myself able to breathe. The library sessions that had previously become so much I had considered throwing myself down the stairs, that had elevated the agitation that crept into my bones and had become so unbearable that I would climb on the top of a cupboard behind the toilet, curl up, and cry; I suddenly found these library sessions annoying. I know that sounds odd. But it was incredible. Suddenly I found myself bored of writing essays, rolling my eyes at another article trying to claim an original thought about Victorian literature, angry with printers that wouldn't co-operate, laughing with other final year students with tired eyes pretending that they didn't care about their grades. I could feel what it was like to write an essay. I could get stressed as a university student gets stressed.
Citalopram didn't stop me from feeling anything, didn't dull my senses, didn't stop me being me, it brought me back.
Last year was not easy, even on medication there was a lot that broke me. But I wanted to be alive, wanted to be living every stressful, messy, rollercoaster bit of it.
I still have anxiety, I still have triggers and behaviours I have to watch and be wary of. But I am in recovery.
So as I move through this new season of work and saving and learning, sometimes feeling like I have become old and boring, its important to have little reminders at the gym or the pool of how far I've come. To show me, when I feel guilty for stability, for having my life together when so many people don't, that this is what I need right now. That this period of calm and stillness, this period of resting and recovering is important. Last year damn near killed me. This year isn't going to come close.
I get home, watch Eastenders (don't even ask...), talk with my mother and brother, take my medication and go to bed. It's not glamorous. But I'm learning that this is what recovery looks like. This is what being content feels like.
One day I'll break into the rollercoaster world again, but sometimes you just need to breathe. To let yourself laugh like a child as you pin your legs together as you swim and pretend your mermaid. Sometimes you need to let yourself revel in the fact that you've been given a body and a life and you are going to do and be so many things.
Because I fucking am.
And that's the power of recovery.
