Suddenly I’m down after days of being at ease

Suddenly this evening I’m so unhappy. I’ve not been at my current weight since 2017 nor have I been this unfit since then. I’ve spent the last five years improving and at worst maintaining my fitness, so much anxiety and daily struggle has gone into making myself do things that don’t come naturally to me, and here I am as if the last few years never happened.  The rolls of extra cushioning around my neck are back. I know, we shouldn’t see these things, or even think this way as women – it’s not there, the thought is simply deteriorating our confidence. 

But I know it’s there; whatever new or old feminism says, it’s there. So is the roll of extra hola hoop attached to my abdomen. Again, I know it’s there because I also know when it’s not there. So, a few kgs heavier, what’s the big deal? Unfortunately, it’s both visible and feelable. Three kgs are nothing, people say, yes it’s a number, but it’s also two MacBook Pro laptops, it’s three jugs of milk, and three big cola bottles – you do the maths. When was the last time you bought a kilo’s worth of something? It’s a lot. 

Try running with three bottles of lemonade. Those are the facts, yeah I shouldn’t think of points to make myself upset but I repeat, I can feel it and see it and I’m not delusional since the scales don’t lie. 

The most upsetting thing is all the food I still want to eat despite having eaten so much I put on many extra kgs. I’m upset because I don’t do much running, swimming, and no cycling and I don’t particularly want to. I’m upset because despite not doing these things and being OK with it, I’m still beating myself up all day, trying to convince myself to do it. Partly because I would feel good afterwards but worse when I don’t. 

I’m upset because my face is a different shape from a month ago, my eyelids are fuller and heavier and drooping over my eyes. The fold is almost gone. I know my face and I can see exactly where it looks different, even if no one else does. 

Everything is bulgier and I don’t like it. There are extra parts to me and it feels foreign. What’s more, I’m not running fast, or getting that total body exertion where you feel the blood pumping from head to toe, I don’t feel that sensation that bad things are being pumped out of the body through the pore, the waste products of aerobic exercise when sweat is poring out. The sensation of washing it off and feeling fresh and like you’ve used your body and its utmost capabilities.  Right now I feel like I’m wrapped in thick, heavy bubble wrap where I’m trapped and I can feel the new parts moving when I move.  

I’ve spent much of my last week watching this TV show about local gangs and corruption. It’s all the rage and is genuinely so good, it’s distracting; for the last two weeks, I’ve been distracted. Just yesterday I was thinking how free and how much I loved being in this city, Beijing, where I lived for years, where there is sun every day even when it’s freezing outside it’s bright. I never feel upset during the day whereas in the UK I often feel that way during the day. I’m able to have the snacks I like every day, and there are fun shops just on my doorstep. I can’t run every day, even though the biggest park in town is on my doorstep too, due to the pollution. But I’m not upset about it except for the benefits it has for me physically. There’s also a 50m pool right there, but there’s no one to train with. In fact, I don’t mind not doing any exercise ever, but I mind letting my fitness and ability to do things with my body go to waste. It can do great things, but I need to train it to do these things and not doing that makes me sad. 

Of course, I’m set due to more than this. Yesterday was a really hard day. It was hard on a practical level. Things happened that you wish were a bad dream. Nothing life-threatening but things I could easily never have experienced in life. Things I am finding hard to get the ick off myself for. I saw things that ruined my eyes and makes me feel sick. During this time I had the urge to escape but I couldn’t, I had to stay and face it and I couldn’t blink to make it go away. It has scarred me. I’m definitely not at the stage where it’s funny. It’s os hard to write about it too. I feel sick. 

Chinese New Year: crying on the sunniest Sunday in late January

Relationship, can’t say I’ve had one. 

I’ve never been in a fulfilling relationship. Every “relationship” – if you could call it that – has involved someone trying to control me, manipulate me, belittle me, make me feel awful about myself, and whether they realised or not, torture me to the point I have to cut them off. OK I lie, there was one relationship where there was none of that, and I was so bored out of my mind (the only reason I stayed was because he was good-looking).

Food glorious food

My only companion in life right now is food, I realised. But when food has no taste, yet it serves as a distraction, all you’re after is the texture of it in your mouth. Well, that’s when you know you’re getting fat.

Because even whilst with a tub of ricotta cheese and a white wrap you popped in the toaster 8 hours before, half stale and half crispy (too lazy to re-toast at 4:45 am), standing up on your kitchen counter dipping the former into the latter and going through the motions, you don’t even need scales to know you’re gonna get fat.

Suddenly you fancy a banana and there’s only the end left, you’re holding your pitta bread so you use it like a skewer and stab it.

 

The last time I really really broke down like today…

I was called a racist.

Well, that really set me off. Today was one of those days, anything set me off. The last time, if I could be bothered to look it up in WeChat, was a party a German journalist had in Beijing on her rooftop, circa 2014, where the literati, sorry ex-pat journalists of Beijing, all showed up and ate something. I don’t remember what, I just remember the washing machine sitting right outside th toilet.

I was called a racist by a female, American journalist of South Asian heritage, after suddenly realising that she looked like my friend Summy, a very attractive lady – by popular consensus – also of south Asian heritage. She was mortified – beyond offended, and clearly, I did that thing of coming out with the observation mid-conversation, which made it worse, because well, I was probably bored out of my mind listening to their chat.

“Oh my God, you’re racist”, she said.

OK like, really? Who says that. I might have only one-contact lens in, think they both have extraordinary bone structure (in fact I do not) but is “racist” the most obvious thing to say when someone of also ethnic background tells you that you resemble their friend? Maybe.

Anyways, reasons aside, that was enough to push me over the edge of a very sore diaphragm that I was finely holding from letting rip, having heaved and gutted out my nasal pipeline for a morning, pushing out tears from every leaky orifice on my face. The pressure on your tear ducts must be immense if you need to fill your belly with so much air that water pressure builds from a tiny follicle in your eye.

So that’s the last time I had a breakdown. So that’s pretty bad. I remember calling everyone I trusted on Whatsapp and either getting no response (OK genuine question, what IS everyone doing on a sunny Saturday afternoon in June? What, everyone has social plans no one is sat at home) or having the phone cut dead on me. Even my parents were probably busy – shagging or something obscene.

Crying my eyes out leaning on a dustpan and brush

I did think of videoing my sorry state just to remember how awful I felt and looked. How it feels when you are sat in the dark little flat in central Beijing with possibly the best view in the city (not just my words, there are pictures too, upon request), and you’ve got your doors bolted, the windows so tiny it feels a bit like a prison and you can’t sense anything alive nearby, or physically remove yourself even if you wanted. When stepping out is the hardest step you could take all day.

I remember sweeping my floor and being suddenly overcome I’m crying while supporting myself on the mop stick. OK, that’s a bit dramatic given I’m not 80 years old, but standing up and holding a stick is not a good position to get overcome with grief in, as your hands aren’t free and you’re kind of in a distorted bent over position. Ideally, you want to seamlessly transition to lying on the bed face down and burying your face in some giant cushion and have all your tears soak straight into the fabric and not have to wipe all your snot off with your hands. Dry skin. Especially in the winter. It was fortunate on Sunday I had gloves on in the park. Hygenic, not so much,.

So with my ripped-out diaphragm and crying into the air I thought about how I had no friends to talk to, let alone hang out with on a weekend in summer, and potential ones I meet think I’m the R-word.

So Sunday then. Everyone seems to know. About the Rabbit. 

It’s ironic that the year everyone in the UK seems to know it’s Chinese New Year, it’s literally the shittiest ever Chinese New Year of my life. It’s so weird when other people seem to be more excited for you about your festival than you are yourself. Everywhere I see people are quoting the year of the rabbit – a runner was described as one on Strava (the sporty person’s social media). Someone else drew a rabbit with their run route.

It all seems to be part of the fun, the fashion. Do people understand why Chinese New Year exists, or why the lunar new year breaks the coldest time of the year, after which the ice melts and the crops start growing? Do they understand that I’m unable to spend Chinese New Year with my family because there are barely any flights returning to China after three years of COVID? The fanfare offends me, and it shouldn’t. It should be a celebration but it bloody offends me when people I don’t like talk about ‘running like a rabbit’ on their Sunday Long Run. Let’s be honest, you could never outrun a rabbit.

On this chosen Chinese New Year Sunday, it was so sunny that my dark, ground-floor living room (there’s a theme here, is it time to move to the penthouse yet?) had sunlight hitting the back wall, which almost never happens.

I’m supposed to be swimming, cycling or doing whatever the radiant sporty women from my running club do. They all look so wholesome bathed in the post-cross-country running glory. I never looked like that standing in the same spot, I thought, as I doom scroll at breakfast binging a tub of ricotta and some other cheese derivative.

At the lido, where I didn’t swim because I could barely get out the door to get there, I just used the locker to put away all my swimming equipment. I couldn’t stop crying standing there bathed in the steam of the heated pool, it was almost picture perfect except for the tears and the fact no one pays you any attention because they’re all under your feet.

I ran in a state of zero excitement, and it wasn’t perking up in any way and I just wanted the slow inertia to be over. I had Katy Perry’s “Girl on Fire” on replay, and even that wasn’t working. By the end of the first loop of Victoria park a figure in the distance came into view and my vigorous squinting, which has grown worse due to the lack of running and looking into the distance, told me it was someone from my running club. We stopped, and he asked me how things were. Immediately, my nose started hurting and the tears came. Poor guy, freezing in the cold, with 7km more to go and some girl he hasn’t seen in months stops him and turns on the pipeworks. “Is it work or…”? he asks. It’s everything, I reply. And I wasn’t fibbing, really, everything including my shit running was running me down. The complexity is too much, there’s too much to detangle in my own head let alone spew out for anyone else to understand.

“You’re the first person I’ve seen today…”, I said.

“That you know?”, he replied.

There was some talk about coffee and then we were off. But even that faint, brief interaction gave me a lift, as I felt my mood go up and my step too. I did an extra small loop of the park. By the end of the run, I’d done 13k, and I could’ve kept going.

Exercise is good for you. It’s there when there’s no one to speak to when you scroll through all the people on Whatsapp who won’t pick up except maybe your parents. And today, they were in China Town looking at dancing lions. Then you ask, is it a sad state of affairs when exercise is the only thing left? If it makes me forget and feel better transiently rather than find the support I really need to deal with problems? When there’s no one in the world who knows your whereabouts you wonder when would be the first time anyone would bother to call to find out. Probably no one except maybe my mother and my flatmate.  They’re obliged but even the latter wouldn’t be back till late at night.

And this is a really boring set of paragraphs that offer nothing but documentation of my worst day in years. Oh and that date the night before didn’t help. It didn’t help he was actually a nice, respectful guy and I had to run off without warning. It didn’t help I had to cycle in the freezing cold for an hour without Google Maps, and those who know me can imagine how lost I got. Worst of all, it didn’t help seeing how frail my granddad had become on the Day of the Rabbit. And how many times he asked when I was going back.

Doing well is not as good as marrying well?

“Doing well is not as good as marrying well”, my mother likes to repeat to her 25 year old daughter whenever she senses my appreciation of the importance of finding a good husband slipping away. The phrase tugs at me ever so slightly each time, with its underlying depreciative view of the female sex. My tactic at retaliation is to stubbornly tell her I have no interest in getting married as I have many other priorities to be getting on with. Her response to this has become quite ritualistic; she tells me to stop being so childish, and suggests that I learn a new skill, such as cooking, since women who cook sumptuous meals always attract men, a phenomenon which sounds suspiciously fantastical.

It may be a testament to how far women have come in the western world that I disagree on this topic almost note for note with my mother. While I lived the first eight years, and she her first 37 years of her life in China, we have both spent the latter 17 years of our lives in the UK. Her view of the matter however remains unchanged. It is simply this: while a good education and a career is a basic necessity, a woman’s primary role in life is to gain fulfillment through a stable family and security. To do so, she must find a good husband to look after her, one of calibre and achievement. It is also her opinion that a woman, upon reaching a certain age, should re-prioritise and place greater emphasis on her pursuit of a husband. After this has been secured, she can ease through life in a steady state of contentment, wanting nothing more, nothing less.