9:00 P.M.
I AM SITTING ON THE PATIO, IN MY GARDEN, TREMBLING, AND SMOKING a cigarette. I have an all-day hangover. I have my bathrobe on, hood up—like Obi-Wan Kenobi, when he’s trying to walk amongst enemies unnoticed. I feel I might be among enemies. This is an unkind hangover. It is making the birds, gargling in the trees, sound malign. It is unnerving me. I feel . . . The Fear.
I have never felt The Fear before. All my life, drinking has been fun, and the subsequent recovery, unexpectedly pleasant. A hangover is, after all, a bit like having a mild cold—thus, allowing one to legitimately abandon the to-do list for a day and instead coddle oneself in comfortable clothing, eat reassuring carbs, and watch soothing television programs. If you’re a busy woman, a hangover is a secret mini-holiday—your “illness” excusing your comparative sloth.
In the same vein, I’ve spent years wondering if we might, actually, secretly enjoy being on our periods, too—for the modern woman needs a reason to spend a few days being a little bit “fragile,” and being allowed to cry off otherwise onerous things because “I’m cramping up to here, and off my tits on codeine. I’m gonna have to swerve the team-bonding zorbing session, Mark—you don’t want to return one of the orbs all covered in my Rhesus Positive.”
The ultimate manifestation of needing a reason to have a break comes with a fantasy I have heard many, many of my most industrious friends admit to, after a few drinks: “Sometimes,” they say, “I think how nice it would be if I was hospitalized for a few days. Not with anything serious, mind—just a classic broken leg, say. I could lie there and just watch telly, without anyone hassling me, and having food brought on a tray. I wouldn’t even care that the food was shit—at least I wouldn’t have had to cook it.”
I would say roughly 80 percent of my middle-aged female friends have admitted to this dream at some point or another. The stats are quite high.
So this is the vibe I’ve always had with my hangovers—I drink to have a joyous night of release, and then a subsequent day of quiet, pleasantly trembling self-care. This is what women do, to relieve the pressure—we use booze medicinally, as our foremothers did. Medieval nursemaids were given porter rations, all housewives had a “tincture” in their cupboards, and the Second World War was won on everyone singing “Roll Out the Barrel” in an East End pub. Boozing is our heritage. Having a drink is a key part of being a hardworking, independent modern woman—we say, “gin” when we mean “I will not be working for the next few hours.” We say, “wine o’clock” when we mean “I am still a fun person!!!!!” We say, “get drunk” when we mean “I still exist outside my duties! I still want adventures! I am not dead yet!”
But: It’s not working anymore. It doesn’t make me feel better. I do not feel recharged.
Instead, I can feel anxiety as a definite substance inside me. It never goes away. It cramps my guts—I have the shits, constantly. It makes my joints brittle and dry. I grind my teeth in my sleep. Every fleshy part of me is hard with tension. I think alcohol will soothe these pains—disinfect, lubricate, or heat them—but it doesn’t, not anymore. I am immune to my old medicine. It has turned against me. It makes me worse. And the hangovers are existential. They are the kind of hangovers that are two hundred miles high—towering, terrifying—and that seem impossible to climb back down from.
At forty, my hangovers have turned into something else—in the same way Mogwais turn into Gremlins.
“You just ain’t got the enzymes anymore,” my sister Caz says, when I ring her from the patio, and tell her in a sad, noble voice that my stomach is full of demons. “It’s part of the bitch of being a middle-aged woman. As women age, our guts stop producing the digestive enzymes that process alcohol—so it just sits there, like the poison it is. So, no—it’s not demons, which you would know if you’d ever read a single medical paper, you ignoramus. It’s undigested alcohol.”
“Is there some pill, or woozy-making cordial, I can take that will make it better?” I ask. “Something I can do that will make me be able to get drunk again?”
She laughs.
“Mate, if you find it, tell me—we’ll become billionaires overnight.”
I admit—this information has me discombobulated.
“So, is there some kind of . . . alcohol substitute, that I could move on to, instead?” I ask, hopefully. “Something invented by hipsters, perhaps? In East London?”
I can feel my hand moving toward my purse. I am ready to make an online purchase. Whatever it is, I’ll buy it.
“Something you can have a couple of times a month that chills you out, and makes everything seem great?” I continue.
“You weren’t so good smoking weed, were you?” Caz says, tactfully.
We both know what my stoner phase was like: a dedicated and all-encompassing two-year skunkweed binge, which ended when I had a psychotic episode watching Stand by Me and became convinced that because I fancied Kiefer Sutherland, I was a pedophile.
“He was twenty when he made that film,” she says, again, wearily. “This is ground we’ve gone over many, many times. He was already married to his first wife.”
“But he was playing a sixteen-year-old,” I say. “This issue is a whole episode of the Moral Maze. I still worry. Does it mean I have tendencies?”
“I’m not rehashing this again,” Caz says, tetchily. “You’re not a lady pedophile, and you are also absolutely unsuited to psychotropic drugs. Weed is not the answer for you.”
“So, what else is there? What takes the pain of existence away?”
“All right, Lou Reed,” Caz sighs. “There’s Valium, or heroin, but my understanding is that a smack hangover will make you wish you were simply back to dealing with gin demons.”
“So—what can I put inside me that will make me happy?” I ask. I feel as lost as a child. “What will make things better?”
“Dude, you know where you’re heading?” Caz says, thoughtfully. “The Big G. God. I really think you’re very vulnerable right now to finding Jesus.”
Jesus? Jesus! This is so unfair. Why doesn’t booze work for me anymore? It was so cost effective and sociable! When will they invent booze that doesn’t hurt? Also, sidebar: when will they also invent fags that don’t kill you? WHY CAN’T THEY INVENT FUN THAT IS GOOD FOR YOU?????? HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BE HAPPY? I CAN’T FIND A WAY TO BE HAPPY ANYMORE.
Why does fun make me want to die?
I HAVE TO find a new way to be happy. I have to find a new fun that doesn’t make me want to die. There can’t be two unhappy people in this house: Unhappiness is not an option when you are a mother. Your role is to provide food, shelter, love, happiness. You must be the emergency cache of joy people dip into, when their stocks are low.
I just want something—one thing!—to keep me going. Something that is, simply, good. Something that makes things better. Something for me. I can’t run away to a forest in Wales, or spend a week buying secondhand books in Hay-on-Wye, or learn how to Eat, Pray, Love in India: I need something that is cheap, nearby, and can fit in around work and home. Something that drains the anxiety out of me and stops my body hurting—even if just for a short while. And if it could, possibly, make me a bit high, that would be marvelous. Because I can’t—I really can’t—feel this bad for much longer. I’m a phone on 4 percent; 3 percent; blank screen.
So, look. Everyone knows that yoga makes you feel better. Everyone. It’s not hung around for two thousand years for no reason.
But the problem with yoga is, when people who do yoga talk to people who don’t do yoga about yoga, it makes the not-yoga people very tense. It’s a terrible paradox.
“You’re tense? Man, you should do some yoga.”
This is a sentence that invariably inspires no other reaction than, “Fuck OFF with your yoga. FUCK OFF! I actually was going to start doing it—tomorrow, in fact—but now you’ve piously told me to do it, I’m going to delay it, for at least three years, JUST because you’ve made me INSTANTLY AND IRRATIONALLY ANGRY.”
I think the word yoga itself must actually work as some manner of evil spell. The muscles the face uses to say “yoga” seem to make it, unfortunately, go into what I would term a smug shape. I would say yoga is a problematic a word—it says, “Hey—I’m feeling some bad energy over here, bud,” whilst trying to massage your neck in an intrusive way.
The problem is that yoga has a point. We do have some bad energy. We are quite tense—of course we are. Have you seen the world? Everyone is tense. Everyone. “Tension” isn’t just a character trait that only “uptight” people have—it is a basic description of the reality of 99 percent of all bodies on earth.
Indeed, I would say the more pleasant a person you are, the more tense you are likely to be. “Politeness,” “reasonableness,” and “kindness”—indeed, the whole concept of a civil society—is based on you regularly clenching your bum cheeks tight like a carpentry clamp, and then shallow breathing to prevent yourself from screaming out loud at the awfulness of this colleague/child/work/news report.
And so, over the years, your body gets stiffer and sorer. You go into your thirties able to talk for two hours about which bras give the most tit support, and when you get into your forties, you can talk for two hours about which chairs give the most back support. Some days, your lower vertebrae are so locked that, if you dropped, say, a quid on the floor, you’d just . . . walk away from it. That’s just an Old Tax you’ve paid to not have to bend over. You’re happy to wave that money goodbye if you don’t have to fold your creaky, old, wooden back in half.
THINGS CAME TO a head for me two days after I’d talked to Caz, and she’d suggested my only salvation might lie in Our Lord Jesus Christ. When I woke up, got out of bed, and walked downstairs, the whole operation took more than five minutes, and I made an OOOOF! sound every time I moved a body part. The soles of my feet, my jaw, my hands—everything felt like tight, rusty wire. I clutched and pressed down on the bannister so hard it actually came off the wall. There was something so deeply wrong in my lower spine—something so dense and crushed—that all I could think of, obsessively, was being picked up by a giant, who would hold me in his hands and just pull the vertebrae apart: pop! pop! pop! I would give everything I own to have the Hulk come over and push his big, green thumbs into either side of my pelvis. Or roll me into a hot ball, in his hands, and gently crush all the torque out of me. Crush me so hard, physically, that my brain emptied of all this hot electric soup.
Being an aggressive problem-solving person, I concluded that what all this tension and anxiety needed was for me to work tirelessly and remorselessly at becoming relaxed again—so I booked a Pilates lesson. Pilates is good for the body, right? And I’m middle-class now—so I needed, clearly, Pilates. I just needed to be fit. Fit means your body stops hurting, right? Your body only hurts if you’re unfit and weak.
“Put me onto your machines, and let’s ruthlessly grind me into tranquility!” I cried, hobbling into the instructor’s studio in my new leggings and disgustingly old T-shirt. “I am ready to PUMP this body!”
And she looked at me—a rigid, knotted item—and said, “Mate, you don’t need to strengthen your muscles—you need to stretch them. I can see it from here: You are severely hypertonic. Your whole body is in constant spasm. Come on—I’m going to take you through some stretches, instead.”
And because she didn’t say “yoga”—just “stretches”—I meekly complied.
I was, finally, in the end, after years of resistance, tricked into yoga.
She stretched me to the left, and to the right—she made me curl up in a ball, holding my knees, and rock on my back, like a bug. She made me stand up tall, and then touch my toes—“Hang like a rag doll,” she said, as sheets of muscles in my back and arse slid, shifted, and finally settled into the right place. There were crunching sounds. There were pings! as vertebrae unglued from each other, and spinal fluid rushed into the newly created spaces. One ear popped—I realized I’d been semi-deaf for months, if not years.
And, after ten minutes, I felt a physical ease, for the first time in possibly decades, that hadn’t involved drugs, sex, or booze. Here, in the middle of the day, sober and dressed, moving around was a thing that was simple again, and didn’t necessitate going OOOOF! and AGH! and GNAH!
After twenty minutes, it felt like all the cranky poison in my muscles was being blasted out with a hose. I could feel it leaving, in vapors, through my feet—the fascia turning from brown and black to pink and white.
And, half an hour in, I just got very, very high—superlatively calm and floaty, and full of thrill about having arms and legs. When I stood up, I felt an inch taller, and as if the whole world had shifted into a panorama view. My eyes felt like they were the size of my whole head, and I felt like I could do anything and everything and—more importantly—I wanted to. My body felt gleeful—like it wanted to just . . . arse about, being silly. Being joyous. Scientifically, I would say my status was that of a “giddy goat.” I tried to remember when I last felt this way. I concluded it was probably when I was five.
And this was when I realized what people mean when they say, “You need to do some yoga.” What they really mean is “You need to move around like a child again.”
For becoming an adult means “moving like an adult.” It means you stop impulsively running into a room and hurling yourself upside down on a sofa. It means you stop doing cartwheels and headstands, or sitting with your legs wide open on the floor like a mad toddler ballerina. It means not swinging your arms around, or reaching up to the sky, or standing with your legs stretched wide like Peter Hook playing bass in New Order.
It means “not fidgeting,” which means “not moving at all”—not sighing, or shouting, or grunting when you feel unhappy, but simply holding your breath, and counting to ten, and burying those emotions deep in your belly, your arse, your thighs. It means sitting hunched over for hours—over a laptop, over a sleeping baby—and not moving a muscle.
This is what you are told to do, over and over, by teachers, parents, carers, lecturers—stop messing around, sit up straight, stop grunting, stop sighing, don’t loll. Even when I was giving birth, a midwife said, “Could you be quieter?,” as I mooed, mid-contraction. There is no point in adulthood, it seems, where it is acceptable to be loud. For the rest of my labor, I sat quietly in my birthing pool, using all my energy to not “make a fuss.” To be adult is, mainly, to be silent and still.
And so, gradually, over the decades, you build—and get locked into—this aching, tense, adult body; you have built the cage of your own destruction. This is what we are trained to do. This is what is “proper” to do. And we do it.
And then, at some point—when we are finally rigid with anxiety and repressed energy and emotion—we have to put on some leggings, find an empty bit of carpet, and start the slow process of undoing all those knots and bolts, and letting out all those sighs that have sat in your chest since 1997.
So the first time you do yoga, you aren’t “doing yoga”—but just “relearning what your body knew when you were a child,” instead. After my first lesson—looking at the world through my new, huge eyes—I watched children playing and saw how often they naturally went into yoga poses: hands and feet on the floor; in Triangle; staring at the world in Downward Dog; pushing their bellies up to the sky, in Bridge and Plough. I saw how they had not yet learned all the awful, mannerly tricks of adult physicality.
And when I finally got down on the carpet, in my own front room, and basically copied their moves, I saw how this makes time go backward—how yoga screws with the clocks.
Because, previously, I feared getting older: I knew my body would get stiffer, and more painful, each year, until I was quite lost and locked inside it, and all that would be left was my face, and my voice, and the walking sticks—and the same limping and painkillers of my parents.
But now—now I do yoga—the clock is thrown absolutely into reverse. The older I am, the more yoga I will have done—and so the younger my body will feel. I am losing hours, weeks, years, every time I get on the mat and let my sockets open, my bones melt, and my breath make a pleasing Huuuuuuurgh sound, as I go upside down. That is a crazy, time-warping magic—the only crazy, time-warping magic of physically aging. So as long as you do yoga every day, you will get better and better at it—the day you will be best at it will be the day before you die.
This simple new fact, brought about by a simple new hobby, disrupts your view of the future. You have stepped outside your mortal, declining monkey fate, and now you slowly turn into an earthbound god, with nothing but welcome for your fifties, your sixties, your seventies. I might, finally, be able to stand on my head by the time I’m ninety! That is what my old age will be: a supple, giggling hag, standing on her head, watching everyone else walk by, upside down—finally seeing the world the right way.
EVERY TIME I get on my rubber mat, I feel like I’m doing housework on myself. My body is a loft, or basement, that I’ve been piling rubbish into for years, and that now, every day, I am gradually emptying.
For the first year, every time I stretched out my legs—in a lunge or some wobbly, half-completed split—and unlocked my hips, I could feel exactly when each square centimeter of them had first become jammed. It was like archaeology. Here was the hard, tight pebble of tension, right in the hip socket, from that bad first birth—three days in the labor bed, the baby’s head grinding against the bone—and then turned diamond hard with the compression of a subsequent year in a chair breastfeeding.
There was a brittle, brown sheet—the thoracicolumbar fascia—right across my lower back that had gradually gone into a long, endless spasm between 2010–2015, as I wrote every day, on a garden chair, chain-smoking, and shivering in a coat and fingerless gloves. The first time I stretched into that, it felt like a Velcro hook and eye tearing open, in a good way—dust and mud crumbling off, and the sunshine pouring in for the first time in a decade.
Before yoga, I carried this around with me like an ever-increasing bag of pain on my back. Sometimes, it used to panic me—I could feel myself filling up with cortisol, drowning from the inside.
Now, though, I know that however awful a day or night is, I can get down on the floor in something comfortable, breathe slow, fold my body into various shapes—a pigeon, a plough, an archer—and the stress will pour out of every opened joint. We talk so much about achieving—getting things, sorting things, improving things, doing things—but the very opposite of this, undoing, is an astonishing trick to learn, as you get older. The philosophy of looking at the things that cause you pain—either physically or mentally—and rewinding, to the start, and beginning again.
This, I think, is the business of your older years—your middle age. Finding the weak spots in your programming, undoing them, and starting again.
I know, now, that over the years, I had learned to sit, stand, and walk incorrectly; that my breathing had collapsed into short, shallow licks. And I know why all those things had happened—at the time, they were a solution to a problem. I had weak muscles, so it hurt less to slouch. I was stressed, so my breath became tight. My pelvis was destroyed by childbirth—so I threw all my weight out of my hips and into my quads instead.
And now—these things don’t work anymore. Now, it’s time for this older woman to find a quiet place in the house, for twenty minutes a day, and undo the knots. Release the hounds. Allow the bones to, finally, slide into their proper lines. And as the body undoes, the mind does too—for anxiety finds it harder to spawn when you have no dark corners, or tangled muscles, anymore: when you are limp and full of light, lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, and feeling very, very high.
I had always thought the only way to be happy, or high, was to put something in me. To drink, or smoke, or have sex. But the best way to get high is to take something out of you. To drain away a lifetime of hunching, cringing, tongue biting, and fist clenching. You’re too old to carry those things around with you anymore. And that’s what yoga is.
Every evening now, I roll out the mat and make things, just in my own bones, better.