It’s my fifty-sixth session with clinical psychologist Professor Roger Baker, four years later. We do our sessions on the phone now, although we had our first few meetings in Bournemouth, where he has his private practice. Going there was a bit like traveling to a tennis tournament, although I had no racquets and no sports clothes. Rod had to be with me at all times. I needed to lie down a lot. Everything was bright and overwhelming. I couldn’t walk even a hundred yards without feeling like someone might need to call an ambulance.
Roger and I are now doing something that he calls “mopping up.” I found him on one of the darker, more desperate days of my nervous breakdown. I’d been to a GP who’d said she was pretty sure I had a heart problem and wanted to refer me to a cardiologist. My inner voice, the one I had still not tamed, the one that used to ruin my tennis matches, didn’t need much encouragement to start on my “serious health issues.” It was a bit like losing a tennis match all over again: a bad shot leads to a bad thought which leads to a bad shot. Now I’d have a vague palpitation followed by a thought of death followed by another palpitation and so on. These would sometimes last all night. I was exhausted. The more exhausted I got, the more palpitations I had.
It was another form of being unable to stop dancing, like the girl in The Red Shoes, whirling around and around on my own thoughts.
On some level I knew I was having an epic panic attack. Once my “dizzy spells” became unavoidable in the tennis center, I started having them in the gym and the car. I had them after Pilates and at the fish shop. I had a big one while out running on my own with no phone. I had one on the Tube coming back from a lunch with my agent. I had one after the photo shoot for my Seniors’ Wimbledon piece for Guardian Weekend. Eventually I was unable to walk down the street without feeling like I had to hold on to something, like my legs were going to give way at any minute.
The cardiologist said I had ectopic beats. That feeling when your heart basically stops and then does two quick thumps? Completely harmless, but yes, very frightening. Liable to get worse with stress, alcohol, and caffeine. The cardiologist did a treadmill test and found I was fitter than anyone he’d ever treated. A win! This made me feel much better. So I tried to go back to tennis, but the dizzy spells still came. What on earth could be wrong with me? What had the cardiologist missed? On one long night when I couldn’t sleep for all the torment, some desperate inner wisdom made me go on Amazon and order Roger’s book about panic attacks. It became my bible. Which was why I went to see him.
I have now pretty much made peace with the fact that I was a bit of an idiot in 2014, but I still don’t actually know what “happened” to me. Some days I wonder about those insect bites. But I had all the tests. Maybe I had them too late? Officially, though, I didn’t have Lyme disease, or low magnesium, or low vitamin D. No one really believed in adrenal fatigue, although if it exists I certainly had it. No one suggested I might be perimenopausal, but when perimenopause did properly hit a few years later, it felt quite similar. In those six hellish months of my nervous breakdown I became the type of person doctors roll their eyes at because I’m there demanding yet another test to explain my anxiety and depression rather than facing up to those things. Basically always an idiot then, which maybe explains why I’m still “mopping up” after so many hours of therapy. Will I never learn? Or maybe this kind of learning can’t happen overnight.
Does it matter that I can’t put a label on what happened to me? I’ve learned to resist the simple, stay-in-bed-and-be-careful narrative of “I overdid it,” although this is the short version of my story I tell to others: “I played a bit too much tennis and then I had to go and lie down for three months.” Even the three months is a simplification: my whole recovery took more than two years. I’d definitely increased my volume of training too fast, but over those last couple of months I also overthought everything to the extent that I completely psychologically crashed. The narrative in my head never matched the reality. I thought I was an undiscovered tennis champion, but really I was just a slightly above-average player. And so I guess I did burn out, like a moth sizzling in the plastic tray of a fluorescent light, because I could not keep away from the brightness and the flames: the promise of glory and glitter all safely contained within a seventy-eight-by-thirty-six-foot rectangle.
With Roger, I have relived and processed the abortion I had in 1989. One painful session involved me reading the story out loud several times until it didn’t bother me anymore. I have dealt with issues with my family. I have stopped blaming other people for my life. In March 2019, my beloved stepfather Couze died, and while it was one of the most painful things I have ever gone through, I was able to face it like an adult. I was there when it happened, as he slipped peacefully from this world. I helped my brothers carry the coffin at the funeral.
So what needs mopping up? I’m still uncomfortable driving on motorways. I’m scared of cows. I freak out a lot when a low-flying military jet screams overhead. A test I did early on with Roger showed that I am a mass of phobias. I have no other psychological problems—just lots and lots of phobias. So basically I’m fine? No one’s 100 percent normal, right? The most important thing I’ve learned is that the way to overcome anxiety, pain, and fear is to not be afraid. That what is, is. I’ve also learned not to google any symptoms, ever. To be positive, rather than negative. To commit to growing and changing, rather than staying still. To accept and welcome the darkness if it wants to be there. But on bad days I’m still a bit scared of exercise. And every so often I say to Roger that I still don’t understand why I crashed when I did. I was having so much fun playing tennis. It was my joy, my life.
That peaceful, blissed-out feeling I’d get after playing in a tournament, or even a normal long, hot league match, seemed so dependable, but I never considered that I might be abusing a drug made in my own body. I still get the nice feeling sometimes after a run or a bike ride, but it’s much harder to achieve and sometimes leaves me feeling a bit jittery and depressed afterward. Such a shame that I didn’t realize what I had back then, and that it was possible to destroy it, whatever “it” actually was. There’s so much I still don’t understand. I have a friend who is at least four years into a similar extreme fitness journey and nothing bad has happened to her. Why me? Perhaps I’ll just never know.
When I tell people about my tennis adventure, and what happened afterward, they always ask if I still play. I did try. Even in the six months of total breakdown I periodically tried to go back to the ITC, or to Sandwich, where I could quietly play with only the parakeets watching. But I never quite got over the anxiety I felt competing and so gradually I stopped. I took up ballet instead, and when that started to feel competitive and intense I went back to running, which I’m bad enough at to not be a danger to myself. I’ve recently taken up cycling, which I’m good at, which is alarming. Do I miss tennis, though? Hell, yes.