I’ve been on something of my own private Dovercoaster over the past few months, ever since making the decision not to swim the Channel relay this year. That decision took a huge amount of pressure off me, but once the relief wore off and the reality set in, I (predictably) went into a bit of a tailspin. The ups and downs were not unlike being tossed around on a boat in heavy seas.

First, it proved tricker than expected to find a replacement for me, which made me feel guilty for leaving everyone in the lurch. The team had an alternate who initially stepped in when I bowed out, but then circumstances changed and the alternate wasn’t able to take my place after all. This meant that our coach, Christine, needed to find both a new team member and a new alternate. The team member issue was finally resolved when Esther (an experienced relay swimmer and all-around wonderful woman) agreed to join. There couldn’t have been a better person to have on the team in terms of both swimming ability and personality. The alternate situation never did get resolved, but with Esther taking my place, it felt like the team was set up for success in any case.

Second, I had a bit of an identity crisis. “Training for a Channel relay” had become my whole personality, so once I was no longer doing that, I didn’t know who I was anymore. I had been working towards this huge goal for the better part of a year, and suddenly it was gone—but instead of the comedown you get after reaching a goal, I had the comedown after reaching nothing at all. I’d been tremendously motivated to swim regularly when I was training for the relay, but when I no longer had to prepare for anything, I totally lost my swimming mojo. Swimming had been everything to me, but I went from swimming multiple times a week to not stepping foot in the water for weeks on end.

The few times I did get in the water, it didn’t go well. Christine invited me to swim one morning with several other women, including someone who was potentially going to be the team alternate. I hadn’t realized that I wouldn’t know any of the other swimmers, and I also hadn’t realized just how accomplished all of them would be: women training for Channel solos and long-distance lake swims, women who had already completed relays and triathlons, women who apparently had no qualms about wading into the sea and swimming alone for hours on end far from the shore. I stuck close to the beach and only managed about half an hour (it was mid-May and the water was still very cold). I met Jeremy for lunch afterwards, and as soon as I saw him, I started to cry. I felt like such an imposter, like I had absolutely no business being in the company of swimmers like that. I had imagined that I could someday be in their league, but now that seemed impossible. That was a real low point.

And third, I had no idea where I fit into the team anymore—if I fit in at all. I had agreed to continue doing the admin (and reader, there was SO much admin), so I was still involved in the logistics of getting the team cleared to swim. I was still going along on some training swims, but I often worried about whether my presence was a distraction. I still wanted to be around to support my friend Silvina especially, but I didn’t want to stand in the way of her bonding with the people she would actually be swimming with on the relay. And I had initially thought that I would be able to go along on the boat as support crew, but it turned out that wasn’t such a sure bet after all.

Many different factors determine the shape of a Channel swim. There are the tides and weather, of course, but also the specific boat and crew. Channel escort boats are very much not luxurious affairs; the ones I know of are small and fairly stripped-down, with room for maybe twelve people at most—and that’s not twelve people spread out on comfy seats, that’s a few people in the cabin piloting the boat and everyone else perching outside wherever they can, squished between all the supplies they’ve brought on board. A six-person relay team will take up half the space on the boat all on their own. When you factor in the boat pilot, the boat crew, and the official observer who is there to certify the swim, you already have a very crowded boat, even before accounting for anyone going along to support the swimmers.

Our coach Christine was obviously going to be the team’s main support person on the boat, and for a while it looked like someone else would also go as dedicated support for one of the team members who had a medical condition. It wasn’t clear how many boat crew would be accompanying the pilot, but even if it was just one person, that would mean a total of eleven people on board already. Basically, no one really knew whether there was going to be room for me, especially since I wasn’t going to have any specific function on the boat. So for months, people constantly asked me when the swim was happening and whether I was going, and I just had to keep saying “I don’t know.”

Even though I understood the reasons for it, this not-knowing was frustrating; the team’s “tide” (the window of time in which they could potentially be called to swim) was from August 17 to 21, so the middle of August was just one big question mark both on my calendar and in my mind. As August 17 drew closer without bringing any clarity, I began to assume that I wouldn’t be going after all. And honestly, I was okay with that. I had thought it would be a fun experience, and I knew I would feel left out when the swim started and I wasn’t there to cheer on the team in person, but I had to acknowledge that I was kind of a random element in this whole thing: associated with the team but not on the team, a supporter but not essential support. In a way, the assumption that I wasn’t going was a relief because it meant I didn’t have to wait for clarity anymore. Once again, all pressure was off.

On the morning of Tuesday, August 12, I was just finishing a cup of coffee before heading out for a swim (my swimming mojo did, obviously, return) when Christine called. I don’t remember her exact words, but it was along the lines of: “The team has a slot to go out on Thursday night, would you like to go?”. I was so surprised I could barely string a sentence together. I wasn’t expecting such an early date for the swim OR the opportunity to actually be on the boat. I babbled something about yes, of course, if there’s room for me, absolutely.

And then the kicker—Christine said: “My passport has been stolen, so I won’t be going along.”

Um.

This was very much not on my bingo card of potential scenarios. Christine was the glue holding together a very disparate group of people. She is a calm, reassuring presence, someone who has swum the Channel solo herself and guided many other swimmers across as well. The team was named “Jitterbugs” because this was the name of a team she had been part of with her brother twenty years ago—and this twentieth-anniversary swim was going to be extra special because Christine’s nephew was one of the team members. There was no way I could imagine the Jitterbugs setting out on their swim without Christine there to guide them.

But when a Channel pilot offers you a confirmed slot, it’s very risky to pass it up because you don’t know when or if the opportunity is going to come around again (and in this case, the weather was due to change that weekend, so it’s very possible the opportunity wouldn’t have come around again). Considering this, it made sense for the team to go. Christine said that I could take her place, as it were, just to keep an eye on everything and make sure everyone had what they needed for a successful swim. I had absolutely no faith in my ability to do this, but I also realized that it was probably me or nothing at that point. So it was me.

I spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday speedily acquiring stuff to bring on the boat: a flashlight and camping lights for the first hours of the journey (because we would be setting off in the dark), bottles of water, food that was easy to prepare and digest (pots of oatmeal, ramen, crackers, cookies, fruit), stuff to make hot drinks (tea bags, instant coffee), seasickness medicine, headache medicine, sunscreen, clothes for the chilly nighttime, clothes for the sunny daytime. I was very aware of not wanting to bring too much stuff, because the boat pilots hate that, but I also knew I’d be stuck on a small vessel for an indefinite amount of time, so if I needed something, I’d need to have it with me from the start. I live in fear of not prepared for every possible scenario, but by Wednesday evening I figured I’d done all that I could, so I was as ready to go as I’d ever be.

On Thursday morning, Christine called again. She was at the passport office, and it turned out there was a very, very slim chance she might be able to get a fast-tracked passport before the boat set off that night. She needed all the supporting evidence she could get to prove that the boat was booked, all the fees had been paid, all the paperwork was submitted, and everything had been cleared for the crossing—but she didn’t have this evidence because I was the team admin, so all correspondence with the boat pilot and CSPF had gone through me. What followed was two absolutely frantic hours as I trawled through documents and attempted to forward them to Christine, all the while trying to stay calm and not to get my hopes up that this was actually going to work.

Somehow, it worked. At lunchtime, Christine forwarded me a picture of her confirmed passport application, and I wrote “OMG does this mean you get to go?” and she wrote “Yes!” and I wrote “AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH” and then I had a little cry of relief and dance of joy. And suddenly everything seemed much more manageable and, frankly, much more fun. This was really happening, and I was going to be part of it after all.

Silvina picked me up Thursday evening after dinner and we made the 2+ hour journey to Dover. Even the drive itself somehow felt iconic to me, because I’ve read so many accounts of Channel swims and the majority start with a nighttime drive to Dover. A Channel swim takes an average of maybe twelve to fifteen hours, and a lot of swims set off in the dark so the swimmer(s) will land in France in daylight (rather than starting in the day and swimming into darkness, which can be dispiriting). We were scheduled to meet at the marina at 11 p.m., be on the boat at 11:30, and have the first swimmer in the water around midnight. With this in mind, I had tried to sleep a bit earlier in the afternoon, knowing I was going to be awake throughout the night and into the next day. I hadn’t been very successful, but I figured adrenaline would keep us all going.

The adrenaline certainly hit once we arrived in Dover and loaded up the boat. The minute I saw the ladder at the back of the boat leading down to the water, I had a flashback to the Ramsgate swim camp which gave me a spike of anxiety followed by a feeling of intense relief that I wouldn’t have to descend that ladder at any point (unless something went very, very wrong). As predicted, it was a tight squeeze on the boat, so we stowed our gear as best we could and then settled into whatever seat we could find for the safety briefing.

The safety briefing unexpectedly gave me another surge of anxiety; I honestly hadn’t given much thought to the possibility of a disaster at sea, but as one of the crew ran through some potential scenarios and explained what we should do if, say, the entire crew was “incapacitated” and we had to trigger the emergency beacon, I felt my heart rate jump. We were on a small vessel heading out into a large, unpredictable, and extremely busy body of water, and as much as I didn’t fancy jumping into that water voluntarily, I really didn’t fancy finding myself in it involuntarily.

There was no time to back out now, though. We were told that the weather would be closing in towards the end of the next day and we needed to get the swim under way as soon as possible—so the pilot fired up the engine at around midnight and we motored out of the marina and down the coast to Samphire Hoe beach. The boat idled off the beach while the first swimmer, Rafe, jumped into the water, swam to the beach, got out and stood clear of the water to wait for the boat’s klaxon to sound, signaling him to get back into the water and start the swim for real. And with that, we were off.

Rafe swam hard for an hour, followed by Dan, Esther, and Phil. All of them had to swim in the pitch black, the only light coming from a small spotlight on the boat and the tiny flashing green lights they each wore clipped to the back of their goggles and swimsuit. It was 4:20 in the morning and still dark when Silvina got in for her first swim. Remembering how scary we’d both found the night swim in Ramsgate, I’d really hoped for her sake that the sky would already be light when she had to swim, but there was just the barest hint of red on the horizon when she plunged into the water and set off.

As she spent that hour in the water, all of us on the boat were treated to the most fabulous sunrise. Silvina said later that it was the changing light in the sky that kept her going, and although she had been terrified, experiencing that dawn light while finally swimming the Channel was truly profound for her. The sky was all pastel glory by the time George, the final swimmer in the rotation, got to do his first hour. And then suddenly it was day, and we could see the white cliffs of Dover in the distance, and tankers and container ships and ferries, and the gorgeous green-blue water all around us. It was glorious.

It was also…not actually going very well.

The shortest distance from England to France is from Dover to Cap Gris-Nez. But because of the very strong tides in the Channel, which change direction about every six hours, it is (almost) impossible to swim straight across. The swimmer who currently holds the record for the fastest crossing (6 hours and 45 minutes!) did just that, as you can see from his track, but that is an almost unheard-of feat. Everyone else gets carried up and down the Channel with the tide (which flows northeast-southwest, like a river changing direction, not “back and forth” between England and France). The boat pilots use the tide times, weather, and individual swimmer speeds to plot the best course across the Channel, ideally avoiding being swept too far northeast or southwest.

I’ve seen the tracking from the other boats that were out with swimmers that day, and everyone got pushed quite far to the northeast—but we got pushed really far. Like, after the first six hours, we were heading for Belgium instead of France. Also, for a while it was uncertain whether one of the swimmers was going to be able to continue; if they didn’t continue, the rest of the team could theoretically still keep going, but the swim wouldn’t be officially certified even if they made it to France. ALSO, the boat’s left engine broke down(!) after we’d been out for about eight hours, so Esther had to swim in a circle around the boat for a good half hour while it was repaired (again, the official relay rules require each swimmer to be in the water for precisely one hour, one after the other, so Esther had to keep the cycle going even though the boat itself wasn’t going).

We were so far off course and so many things were going wrong that the swim was very nearly called off. After much negotiation and discussion with the pilot and amongst the team, the decision was made to carry on for the time being. Everyone gave it their all on their second swim, and by around noon (after being on the water for twelve hours already) we were actually back on track, heading in the right direction, making decent progress. Whereas before it had seemed like stopping was the only sensible option, now it was clear that we would not be turning back. Christine was determined that the team was going to get to France, even if it took another twelve hours—and at that point, it looked like it might.

I’ll say here that I had spent the first eight hours of the journey feeling seasick. Despite having taken seasickness medicine, and despite not typically getting seasick, we were barely an hour out of the marina when I started feeling off. I tried to convince myself it was just tiredness and nerves, but by the time I was barfing over the side of the boat (remembering the advice from Ramsgate not to puke into the wind or onto a swimmer), it was pretty clear what was happening. I wasn’t massively ill, but I was just nauseous enough that all I wanted to do was sit very still with my eyes closed. And that’s pretty much what I did through the hours of darkness, with occasional interludes to make a cup of tea or take some pictures and videos. I felt crummy, but even worse, I felt absolutely useless, just taking up space—not swimming, but also not helping. It wasn’t great.

When the sun rose—and perhaps because the sun rose and I could see the horizon—the seasickness disappeared. I wasn’t 100% sure it wasn’t going to come back, though, and I was also very afraid that I might get a migraine. And by noon, I had been awake for something like 29 hours, and there had been a lot of emotional and psychological ups and downs with the team, and I was pretty wiped out (even though I was the one person on the boat not really doing anything). And the boat, as mentioned, was quite cramped, and precisely because I felt like I wasn’t contributing, I spent a lot of time trying to make myself as small and unobtrusive as possible. So honestly, the thought of spending another twelve hours bobbing slowly towards France—and bearing in mind that we’d still have to make the 3-hour return journey to Dover—was rather daunting.

But I wanted the team to make it all the way across as much as they wanted it. I knew how important it was to each of them, and it was unthinkable to have come so far and not go all the way. We were going to hold on for however long it took, and if that meant landing on a bunch of rocks in the dark (the worst case scenario, but one that certainly does happen—the best case is landing by La Sirène and having them bring out champagne, which also does happen!), then so be it. We were in this for the long haul.

The long haul turned out to be much shorter than expected.

I don’t really know how it happened, but at some point in the mid afternoon, it became apparent that we were making much better progress than anticipated. Suddenly there was talk of finishing in just a few hours instead of the middle of the night. The cliffs of Dover had receded a good while back, while the coast of France drew nearer and nearer. Everyone was on their third swim by this point, and they were all looking strong and confident, despite being thrown around in the growing waves. When Silvina climbed back on board after her final swim, she was sure she hadn’t moved forward at all for the past hour. I said, “Silvina, look”, and I pointed past the front of the boat to the sandy French beach that was suddenly right there, so close that you could see people strolling along the water, and houses perched in the dunes, and cars moving along the road behind them. It was only 5:30 p.m., and it was clear that within the next hour, the Jitterbugs were going to become successful Channel swimmers.

George was the next swimmer in the rotation. The water was too shallow for the boat to move any closer to the shore, so when George jumped in for his swim, he was accompanied by Dan as a support swimmer. And because it wasn’t 100% certain that George would reach the beach within the hour, he was also followed by Rafe, who would have been next up in the rotation and could have overtaken George in the water if necessary to keep to the relay rules. After the many long and, frankly, often tedious hours crossing the open Channel, that last hour was a nail-biter as all of us on the boat squinted anxiously at the three swimmers moving slowly towards the shore, trying to gauge distance versus swimming speed to figure out whether George was actually going to land it or if Rafe would have to sprint for the finish.

George landed it. We could see from afar that he was promptly surrounded by well-wishers on the beach—and because he appeared to be on his own with two support swimmers, we laughed that everyone probably assumed he had just finished a solo (complete in his baggy board shorts). Sometimes, if the conditions are right, all the members of a Channel relay team will be allowed to swim to the shore so they can all stand on French soil together. In this case, three members got to experience the French beach and the other three had to watch from boat. While apparently there were time and safety concerns about letting everyone go, I can’t help but wish that Silvina, Esther, and Phil had been able to join their teammates on the beach.

Not that this dimmed anyone’s excitement! We all shrieked and clapped and hugged in joy and disbelief. As soon as George, Rafe, and Dan were back on board, the pilot turned the boat around and gunned it for Dover while the rest of us cranked up the tunes and popped champagne and recounted the (loooong) day’s events, musing on how often it had seemed like everything was going to fall apart, and how remarkable it was that everything hadn’t. You can put in months of training and planning, you can pay all the fees, you can prepare to within an inch of your life, but there’s never any guarantee that a Channel swim is going to work out. That’s the nature of the Dovercoaster. And that’s what makes success all the sweeter.

It was a bumpy few hours back to England. The sun went down and the champagne ran out and the boat quieted down as the tiredness set in. I don’t think I was the only one to nod off before we reached Dover. When we did finally pull into the marina (at 9:30? 10? I honestly have no idea…) and unloaded the boat, I felt depleted in every possible sense—physically, mentally, emotionally. As the team took joyous photos on the dock and discussed where to go for a celebratory drink, I stood there starving, tired beyond belief, and absolutely desperate to be alone (actually, I was absolutely desperate to be home, but I was staying overnight in Dover, so home would have to wait). I was obviously delighted for the team, but my happiness was of a different quality than theirs. I was happy to have witnessed their success, but it wasn’t my success (yes, I made a small contribution to it, but things would have turned out just fine without me). And after being awake for something like 38 hours, and spending 22 hours of that time on a tiny boat with eleven other people, and 8 hours of that time feeling sick, I needed more than anything in the world to just sit still by myself for a minute, and eat something, and go to sleep.

Silvina and I were sharing a hotel room, and once we’d gotten checked in, she ventured out to find food and some other team members. Meanwhile, I sat on the bed and devoured a pot of instant noodles (unspeakably delicious), took a shower (pure bliss—amazing how briny you can get without ever entering the water), downed a cup of peppermint tea and a few cookies, spent an unreasonably long time trying to figure out how all lights worked in the hotel room, and then collapsed in an exhausted heap.

It was cool and cloudy in Dover the next morning. Silvina and I packed up the car and grabbed breakfast outside the hotel, and then I nipped in to the restroom while Silvina crossed the street to see what was going on the harbor. There was a rowing event happening, and there were (as always) swimmers doing their Channel training. This is where Silvina and some other team members had completed their multi-hour qualifier for the relay, which Silvina said was absolutely brutal—swimming in circles for hours in the frigid and frankly dreary harbor, hoping you passed muster with the people assessing your ability to take on the swim.

When I went to join Silvina, she was standing on her own gazing out over the silvery water of the harbor to the open Channel beyond. That’s when the magnitude of what she and the rest of the team had achieved finally hit me. I knew how hard Silvina had trained because I had been right there beside her for much of it. I knew how many uncertainties she had overcome, and I knew how much this challenge meant to her. I knew what an amazing feat it was for small, fragile human beings to swim across that unforgiving expanse of water because I’d watched them do it for eighteen straight hours, giving everything they had even when they were cold and scared and not sure they were going to succeed. I snapped a picture of Silvina standing there and suddenly every emotion I hadn’t really processed in the past 48 hours (and the past week, and the past three months) bubbled to the surface. When Silvina turned around, I said, “This is weird, but seeing you standing there like that has made me really emotional”—and then we both burst into floods of tears and hugged very tightly for a very long time.

This wasn’t the journey I expected when I said yes to the relay almost a year ago, but it also wasn’t a journey I could have imagined in any form even just a year and a half ago. I didn’t swim the relay, but I did train for it, and that alone was tremendously challenging, pushing me to do things I didn’t realize I had it in me to do. I didn’t swim the relay, but I dedicated a lot of time and effort to ensuring that everyone else could swim. I didn’t swim the relay, but I witnessed an English Channel swim first hand, and not everyone is lucky enough to do that. I didn’t swim the relay, but I got to see the relay through to the very end, and it was a successful end. The Dovercoaster was a rough ride in every sense—but wow, what a ride.

The choice that had landed me in this particular situation was my decision back in October to say “yes” when asked if I wanted to join an English Channel relay team, followed by my decision in January to sign up for a Channel swim training camp in Ramsgate. Our swim coach, Christine, had encouraged us to attend the camp because it’s a great opportunity to swim with a boat, practice relay changeovers, swim in the dark, spend more time in cold water, ask questions about the Channel swimming experience, and get to know other Channel swimmers.

I booked a spot straightaway, as did two of my other teammates. I arranged with my teammate Silvina to share an AirBnb in Ramsgate, and Silvina kindly agreed to drive the two of us there and back. She picked me up on Friday morning and we headed off on the two-hour journey, chatting nervously all the way. It was a gorgeous day and the trip was fine, but we were both massively apprehensive about what we were getting ourselves into. We’re both good swimmers and we’d been training hard, but neither of us had ever done anything like this before, and we really didn’t know how we would cope.

Things didn’t get off to a great start. Based on the rough schedule we had been sent, we thought the camp would begin with some talks, which would give us a chance to catch our breath and have a bite to eat before setting out for our first swim. But open-water swimming is entirely weather-dependent, meaning that schedules can change at any time—and no sooner had we parked the car in Ramsgate than we were told: “Right, we’re heading out on the boat now!” The weather on Sunday was shaping up to be bad, so the decision was made to swim as much as possible on Friday and Saturday and do all the talking on Sunday instead.

Silvina had just driven for two hours, both of us were tired and hungry, and neither of us were mentally prepared for this change of plan, but we tried to roll with it. I scarfed down a cheese sandwich I had (thankfully!) stuck in my bag before leaving home, and we got our swimming gear together as fast as possible.

There were eight swimmers attending the camp: three soloists, two women from another relay team, and the three of us from my team. We were divided up for the first swim, with the three members of my team going out in a smaller rigid inflatable boat (RIB) and everyone else going on the larger Sea Satin. As we motored out of the marina and up the coast on that first trip, all I could think was: “What the HELL am I doing here??” Thank goodness for Silvina, who was in the same state as me. We just kept trying to reassure one another that we were going to be okay. Meanwhile, my heart was in my throat and my stomach was somewhere around my feet.

The boat finally came to a stop and it was time for us to swim. To get into the water from the RIB, you sit on the side of the boat and slide in (as opposed to the bigger boat, where you climb down a ladder to a small platform to enter the water). I went first: I dangled my legs in the water for a second, and then in I went. It was the first time I’d ever plunged into water that cold (13C/55F) rather than wading in slowly to get acclimatized, and it was also the first time I’d gotten off a boat into open water. It took my breath away for a minute, but once we were all in and had done a bit of breaststroke to get used to the situation, we started some relaxed front crawl and…it was really nice? I had thought I might freak out about being in such deep water, but once I got going, I was at ease. The conditions were gorgeous, the small boat was right next to us, and the swimming felt quite comfortable thanks to the current carrying us along. The only thing that stopped us after 40 minutes was the cold; none of us were in neoprene, and by the end of the swim my hands and forearms were so cold I couldn’t even tell when they were entering the water with each stroke (my right hand was also starting to go into a frozen little claw, which is apparently a thing that happens?). Getting back into the RIB was maybe the hardest part of the whole swim: since there’s no ladder, you cling to the side and get hauled aboard like a giant fish. Once on board, we wrapped ourselves in our changing robes and the boat zoomed back to the marina. We were shivering and chattering, but we were also pretty elated that our first swim had gone so well.

I wish I could say the weekend continued in that vein for me, but it really didn’t. All the relay swimmers went out on the bigger boat that afternoon to practice the relay changeover process and get more time in the water. The rules for officially certified Channel swims are very strict (have a look at the Channel Swimming and Piloting Federation or the Channel Swimming Association if you’re curious), and relay teams are immediately disqualified if they mess up the changeovers between swimmers. It adds another layer of stress to an already very stressful situation, and even in the practice situation this weekend, I didn’t deal with it very well (having a klaxon go off just before you get in the water is unsettling to say the least). Also, the Sea Satin is not a huge boat, but a boat of any significant size seems intimidatingly large when you’re bobbing in the water next to it. For my first swim off the Sea Satin, I climbed down the ladder trembling with nerves, plunged off the back, immediately took in a huge mouthful of seawater and then a huge lungful of fuel exhaust, and proceeded to flap around the boat hyperventilating in panic for ten minutes before clambering out and collapsing in a sobbing heap on the deck. It was not my finest moment.

Once I’d calmed down and warmed up, I had to go back in again. The second time around was much better, and I was able to swim steadily around the boat without freaking out for about 15 minutes before getting out. The women from the other relay team who had witnessed my initial meltdown were perplexed—they said I was a beautiful swimmer, and they couldn’t figure out how I’d gone from not even being able to do breastroke around the boat to whizzing around in smooth front crawl like it was no problem. My only explanation is that once I start to panic, like I had during the previous swim, I feel the need to get out of the panic-inducing situation IMMEDIATELY. I haven’t yet figured out how to work through that feeling and calm myself down while remaining in the scary situation. I managed to avoid panicking during the second swim off the big boat, but the first swim was doomed from the start.

That was pretty much the story of the weekend. We were out on the big boat all day Saturday, in really glorious conditions: sunshine, sparkling water, hardly any breeze. The plan was to get in and just swim around the boat for as long as possible. The soloists were going to try longer swims where they could practice their feeding plan (i.e. eating/drinking while in the water), and some of the relay swimmers were going to try to do their assessment swims (to be cleared to swim a relay, you have to swim for 1.5 hours, be out of the water for 1.5 hours, then swim for another hour in sub-16C water wearing just a normal swimsuit, goggles, and swim cap). I already knew I wouldn’t manage my assessment swim this weekend, but I didn’t know that even regular swims would defeat me. The boat wasn’t deliberately moving anywhere on Saturday, it was just drifting with the current like we all were. But sometimes the current would pull me away from the boat or pull the boat away from me, and every time that happened, I lost it. There was a point where I thought the boat was accelerating away from me, and I actually whimpered in the water “Don’t leave me!” and swam like a demon to catch hold of the back of it before I was ostensibly left behind.

I should note here that nobody was ever going to be “left behind.” Every swimmer in the water had somebody’s eyes on them at all times, and if someone started drifting too far from the boat, they were quickly corralled back. Equally, if someone was in real trouble, they would immediately be pulled out (this happened to one swimmer who got very, very cold). But my brain refused to trust the safety protocols, and every time the boat got just slightly beyond reach, the panic set in and I had to swim and grab hold of it again. This is exactly what you can’t do during a Channel relay; once you’re in the water for your relay leg, you can’t so much as touch the boat again until your hour is up and you’re getting out. And as this went on and on, with me constantly and compulsively grabbing for the boat, I thought: “There is no way I’m going to manage the relay.”

I did have one okay swim on Saturday, where I just swam up and down alongside the boat instead of going around it. And even the night swim on Friday was not the disaster it could have been. Everyone was paired up for that, and we were told to swim from the boat to a nearby beach and back again with our swim buddy (because swimming to the beach is how you start any Channel swim). The beach wasn’t that far away, but Silvina and I (swim buddies) agreed beforehand that there was no way we were swimming to that beach. We decided to get in the water and stick by the boat just to get a feel for nighttime swimming. We were doing okay until the motorized dinghy at the back of the boat started descending into the water unexpectedly while we were bobbing nearby because two swimmers had gone to the wrong beach and needed to be herded back to the right one. We were also having goggle issues which, combined with the blinding spotlight on the boat, made the whole experience totally disorienting. We got through it, though.

But even before the night swim, after just two swims off the big boat, I was having serious doubts about whether I was cut out for any of this. It’s not just that it was hard—and it was SO hard, maybe the hardest situation I’ve ever voluntarily put myself in, pushing me so far out of my comfort zone that I might as well have been on another planet—it was that I kind of hated all of it. It wasn’t a case of “I really want to do this but I’m struggling,” it was a case of “I REALLY don’t want to do this.” The good swims were enjoyable enough, but they were vastly overshadowed by the stress of the bad swims. Silvina and I kept telling each other we should be proud of what we were achieving, but I didn’t feel proud at all, I felt desolate—because by Friday night I had already started thinking that maybe I shouldn’t do the relay, and by Saturday night I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to do it even if I tried. And I had no idea how to get out of it.

We went for dinner with our coach and some other swimmers on Saturday, and while my body was sitting in the pub, my mind was spinning off in a million directions, wondering what I should do, when I should tell Christine I was having doubts, what might happen if I went ahead with the swim and what might happen if I didn’t, and how many people I would be letting down if I backed out now—if I even could back out now. I’ve taken this relay challenge very, very seriously. I knew when I signed up that it was a major commitment, and it would be only under the most extreme circumstances that I would break my promise to my team. But this felt like extreme circumstances. Back in November, I wrote: “I know I have to believe I can do it or else I really won’t be able to do it.” And by Saturday night, I absolutely did not believe I could do it.

After dinner, Christine came over to sit by me. She said I should think about attending another swim camp at the end of May to work on getting my breathing under control. And I said outright, “Christine, I don’t think I can do this.” I told her that I honestly didn’t think I would be able to get the panic response under control by August, and that there was a very good chance I would freak out during the relay and disqualify all of us, and that I didn’t want to abandon the team, but I also wasn’t doing anyone any favors by carrying on as if I were okay when I’m really not.

And Christine simply said: “Okay, you’ll keep training for next year instead.”

Now, the relevant factor isn’t whether I actually try again next year or not. The relevant factor is that I immediately felt a monumental sense of relief. Every minute of the weekend had been adding another ounce of pressure to the already crushing weight on my shoulders, and as soon as Christine said “it’s fine, you’re just not ready yet this year,” the weight vanished and I could properly breathe for the first time since leaving Brighton on Friday morning.

The weather was passable enough on Sunday morning, so we went out on the boat one last time for a chance to swim in rougher (and, frankly, more realistic) conditions. I had already decided I wasn’t going to do another swim, so instead I stood on the deck and helped keep an eye on everyone in the water. It got blustery and there was a good swell, and as I watched the swimmers fight through the chilly waves and push themselves to keep going around and around the boat, even as the wind picked up and they were all tossed to and fro, I felt nothing but admiration for their determination and a calm certainty for myself—the certainty that I do not currently have that same mental drive or stamina, and I totally accept that.

So, here it is: I’m not swimming a Channel relay this year after all. Or perhaps I should put it this way: I’m not swimming a Channel relay this year—but I will still be part of a Channel relay. I told Christine I wanted to stay involved however I could, and I also told her that I’d enjoyed helping out other swimmers on the boat over the weekend (the swimmer who got very cold and needed help getting dressed and warmed up again, a swimmer who needed an asthma inhaler passed down to them in the water, etc.). So now I’m going along on the relay as part of the support crew on the boat, or maaaaybe even as an observer. That would be more admin, but it turns out I’m fairly good at both swimming and admin, and at least admin doesn’t (usually) give me a panic attack.

There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that I’ve made the right choice, and there is not the smallest part of me that feels any regret. I wrote in November that “I would regret it forever if I didn’t at least try,” and I feel after this weekend that I’ve given it a really good try. The training camp gave me the tiniest taste of what it’s like to swim the Channel, and I know in my heart that I’m not ready for it yet. But as someone said to me over the weekend, the Channel isn’t going anywhere. When and if I am ever ready, it will be there waiting for me.

To be precise, I’m training to swim the English Channel as part of a six-person relay team. That means I will NOT be swimming the entirety of the English Channel myself. The six of us will each swim for an hour at a time on our own, starting from a beach in Dover at about one in the morning and (ideally) ending up on a beach in France probably about 15 hours later.

Trust me, no is more surprised by this turn of events than I am.

A year ago, I wrote about my lifelong love of the sea and the start of my sea swimming journey. That love has only grown more intense over the past year as swimming has kind of come to dominate my life (in a good way!). I dipped in the sea all last winter while also taking Seabirds classes and doing the Pool to Pier program, so I was at the pool at least twice a week and in the sea at least once a month. And somehow, instead of getting tired of it, I found myself enjoying it more and more.

It was partially the joy of getting better at doing something—and, in my case, the joy of getting better at a physical activity when I have always, always, always considered myself “not sporty” and “not an athlete.” When I started taking pool lessons in January 2023, I remember that a more advanced class was being held at the same time, and I was in awe of the women who were able to swim back and forth non-stop for half an hour. I could barely do 50 meters before I had to catch my breath. But at some point, I realized I was the person swimming back and forth non-stop. The progress was so gradual that I hadn’t even noticed it.

It was a real milestone for me the first time I swam 1k in the pool. When I knocked out 1.5k pretty quickly for the Cancer Research UK Swimathon this past April, the woman keeping track of my laps said “You should have done 2k!”. She was right, but such a distance had been unthinkable when I’d signed up to the challenge months before. When I started the Pool to Pier classes a year ago, I wrote that I couldn’t imagine ever being able to swim around Brighton Pier, or from one pier to the other (which is “only” about 1k). And this summer, I swam from one pier to other, and I felt like I’d conquered the world. (I still haven’t tried to swim around the pier because I’m too freaked out by the idea of it, but that’s another story.)

I would still say I’m very much not sporty and not an athlete, but I can’t deny that I’m actually a pretty good swimmer. And that’s quite convenient, because I adore being in the water. I love the crystal turquoise of a pool, and I even find the smell of chlorine strangely comforting in a Proustian sort of way. But I also love the sea and how the saline water buoys you up, making swimming feel almost effortless when the wind and tide are in your favor. I’ve insisted over the past two years that I don’t actually love cold-water swimming, I just swim in the cold water here because it’s the only water available to me. But I’m not entirely sure that’s still true anymore. Something seems to have shifted in me this year, and I find myself almost craving the chilly water. I’ve started to enjoy the bracing sting of it as I pick my way carefully down the slippery shingle beach and wade in, shivering and cursing the cold as it creeps up my body. It feels awful until it feels great, but even when it feels awful, the cold seems to sear away all thoughts of the rest of the world, leaving just you and the water that surrounds you. It’s…elemental, I suppose. It’s clarifying.

And that brings me back around to the cold English Channel and my plan to swim across it. Here’s the thing: every time I go to the beach to swim here, I’m swimming in the Channel. There are lots of solo and relay Channel swimmers here in Brighton, and one of them happens to be a Seabirds coach, Christine, who regularly puts together relay teams. This summer, some of the other Seabirds coaches started joking(?) with me about when I was going to join a team. I kept laughing it off because, come on, it’s the English Channel and, as we have established, I am not an athlete. Buuuut…the more often I’ve looked out at that expanse of water on my doorstep, the more I’ve wondered what it would be like to take it on. I know I don’t have it in me to run a marathon, for example, but this year I started thinking that maybe I do have it in me to tackle a challenging swim. And once the thought got into my head that crossing the Channel as part of team was maybe not a totally unrealistic goal, I couldn’t let the idea go again.

So last month, during a lesson in the pool, Christine asked me if I also enjoyed swimming in the sea, and I said yes, and then she asked me if I wanted to join a relay team for August 2025, and I said OMG, OMG, I don’t know, I don’t think I can do it, I don’t know, OMG. And then I said yes.

Now, of course, I’m utterly terrified. I really don’t know if I can do it, but I know I have to believe I can do it or else I really won’t be able to do it. What I absolutely do know is that I would regret it forever if I didn’t at least try, because I would be left always wondering whether it would have been possible after all. I also know that an opportunity has been presented to me, and if I don’t seize it now, it might not come around again. Right now I have the motivation, the means, the time, the ability, and the will. Who knows if the stars will ever align like that again? It makes no sense to put off the challenge “just” because I’m scared, because I will always be scared. Fear is definitely a big obstacle here, but I have to trust that it’s not an insurmountable one. Time will tell.

Time is now also ticking down. The scheduled date for my team’s crossing is August 15, 2025, but the potential swim window is wider than that depending on the weather and other factors. In some ways, August seems like a million years away, but when I think of how much training I need to do between now and then, it doesn’t seem that far away at all. So I’m swimming every chance I get.

I’ve also signed up to a few swim challenges to give me an extra boost of motivation. One of them is the Swim 10k Challenge for Cancer Research UK, which involves swimming 10k over the course of November. This is the second time I’ve participated in a Cancer Research UK event but the first time I’ve ever tried to do any proper fundraising, so I was wasn’t sure how it would go. As it turns out, it’s been going very well, and I’m surprised and very touched by how generous people have been. If anyone would like to donate to my fundraising page, it would be much appreciated.

The support is encouraging me to keep going, and it feels good to be swimming for a good cause. I’m already halfway to 10k after a week and a half of swimming, which is another thing I couldn’t have imagined just a few months ago. Right now I can’t really imagine jumping off a boat in the middle of the English Channel and starting to swim, but I hope that when the time comes around, it will seem like a reasonable and achievable thing to do.

Well, achievable anyway. Reasonable is probably a matter of debate!

Several weeks ago I noticed that a woman in one of my swim classes was wearing the same suit. I told her that I had one as well but the zipper had broken, and she said that this was a known issue. The zipper on her previous suit had started splitting open and Sweaty Betty replaced it; another woman in the class said the same thing had happened to her swimsuit. They both advised that even though the warranty period was over, I should take it into a shop anyway and explain the situation—because a suit that expensive shouldn’t just fall apart after a few swims.

Me being me, I thanked them for the advice and did not take it into a shop and try to blag a replacement. Instead, I wondered whether I could replace the whole zipper myself. I soon realized this was beyond my sewing skills, so I searched online for a professional to do the job. I finally decided to bring it to a general tailor in Brighton, and for the past week I’ve been planning to do just that. Meanwhile, the suit has continued to sit in a heap.

But then I wondered if the whole zipper really needed to be fixed or just the slider part—because the “zippy” part itself was in fine condition. Cue hours of searching online for “splitting zipper” and “broken zipper slider.” A very helpful seamstress on YouTube told me that the slider maybe needed to be squeezed tighter so the zipper teeth would connect better. Feeling quite pleased that a simple solution was in reach, I grabbed some needle-nose pliers as suggested—and then what felt like an eternity trying to tighten the slider, then realizing I had tightened it too much so it was impossible to zip up and down, then trying unsuccessfully to un-tighten it, and finally throwing the now truly unzippable swimsuit across the room in disgust.

I’d done such a job on the slider that it now needed to be replaced altogether. Luckily, the internet is also full of videos explaining how to do this, and they make it look sooooo easy. The main problem is that you have to know what kind and size of zipper you have—and friends, there are SO MANY kinds and sizes of zipper. I dedicated an entire morning to zipper research, and after determining what kind of zipper slider I needed (size 5 for a molded plastic zipper), I sprung for the ridiculously named ZlideOn, which apparently just kind of snaps on after you cut off the old slider so you don’t need to remove the zipper stops at the end of the zipper, which are a whole other thing. Zippers are hard!

The ZlideOn arrived today and I got myself all set up with the swimsuit and the replacement slider and a pair of diagonal pliers/snips/nippers/cutters/whatever they’re called to cut off the slider. I thought I was going to have to buy the pliers as well, but I was delighted to find that we already had a pair kicking around the house—Jeremy uses them to snip the ends off of new mandolin/bouzouki strings, which should have given me an indication of the strength of these particular pliers (or lack thereof).

The number 5 zipper slider on the swimsuit is pretty heavy duty, as it turns out. I tried to carefully position the sharp tips of the cutters around the central part of the slider while avoiding the plastic zipper teeth and the bathing suit itself. Once I got them in place, I squeezed the pliers. And I squeezed and squeezed. Oh, how I squeezed! And oh, how absolutely nothing happened. The metal slider was way too thick for the cutters to do anything but chip away at the paint and gouge out sharp little metallic slivers. I kept trying to get the slider in different position so I could get a better grip on it with the pliers, but it was clear that this wasn’t going to work, and I was getting increasingly hot and infuriated by the entire situation.

And then I noticed that as I moved the slider up and down to come at it from a different angle—the zipper was actually zipping up smoothly and properly? And not coming apart? Completely flummoxed, I dropped the pliers, zipped up the suit, and tugged the fabric on either side of the zipper, and it held firm. I unzipped it and zipped it and tugged again, and again it held. After doing this multiple times, I had to conclude that by attempting to destroy the slider, I had actually somehow repaired it. Of course, now the slider was slightly mangled and jagged, with sharp edges that would have cut me and/or the fabric of the suit, but a little smoothing with a metal file took care of that problem. The slider doesn’t look so great, but it seems to work just fine. I keep going back to the suit and checking it again, and it’s still perfectly zippable. But…how…?

I won’t question it. I can’t question it. My knowledge of zipper mechanics is more extensive than it was two days ago but not extensive enough to explain this mystery. What’s important is that the stupid swimsuit has been languishing for months but now it’s back in the game. I’m going to wear it for my sea swimming class tomorrow. I just have to hope that the “repair” holds and the suit stays on my body so we don’t get a little Birth of Venus action going on when I get out of the water!

I didn’t really grow up on a beach. I actually grew up in a series of houses and apartments in the midwestern United States and Central Europe, about as far from a beach as you can get. But my grandparents lived on the beach, and in my memories, we spent every summer of my childhood there.

That’s also not true, however. We spent some part of some summers there, but not all summer, every summer. Childhood summers seem endless, though, so the beach takes up a tremendous amount of space in my psyche. Before I was even old enough to walk, my dad would scoop me up in his arms and wade with me into the surf, and it must have been then that the saltwater got into my veins, because I’ve been a beach girl at heart ever since.

So it is more than a little embarassing to admit that I lived in Brighton—a real, honest-to-god beach town—for over two decades before I dipped my toes in the water here. To be fair, a stony shore lapped by the frigid waters of the English Channel is not exactly my archetypal beach. The beach I grew up with in Florida has powdery sand that singes your feet in the heat of summer. The silty waves crash there endlessly, a natural white noise generator that has lulled me to sleep many a night. The surfers wear wetsuits in the winter, but the water is temperate—warm, even, in the summer. The air is heavy and smells of brine and dry sea oats. There are palm trees, you know? There’s a lot of sun. Sure, there are sharks and rip currents, too, but it’s a beach.

Brighton is one of the sunniest places in the UK, but honestly, that’s a pretty low bar. It’s often cloudy here, and more often than not it’s windy. The shingle beach is steep, and I find it massively painfully to walk on the stones with bare feet. Sometimes there are no waves to speak of, but sometimes there’s a brutal shore dump that can (as I now know) knock you off your feet and drag you back into the water. And that water, as mentioned, is not warm. The coldest water temperatures in northern Florida are about equal to the warmest water temperatures in Brighton—around 18C/64F (for perspective, I was generally never tempted to get into a pool unless it was about 30C/86F).

I guess what I’m saying is that Brighton never really resonated as a beach for me in the way a warm, sandy beach does, so it never crossed my mind to try swimming here. But saltwater is in my veins all the same, so when my friend Alison mentioned last summer that she was thinking of doing an introductory sea swimming lesson and she wondered if I’d be interested, it was like a switch flipped inside me—the beach switch—and I nearly jumped out of my seat with enthusiasm and said yes, yes, a thousand times yes, I want to swim in the sea!

A few weeks later, on a sparkling day in late September, clad in far too much neoprene (in retrospect), we took the plunge on Shoreham beach with Swim + Tonic Kath. The water was glassy clear, which I hadn’t expected, and it felt cold until it didn’t, sooner than I expected, and I floated on it and dived under it and looked across its brilliant expanse and thought: wait, this was right here the whole time?!

That moment of joyous realization changed everything. Alison and I did another sea swimming session with Kath, and we went along to the monthly meetup of the Shoreham Mental Health Swims group, who are an incredibly kind and welcoming and encouraging bunch of people, and we were having so much fun that we really wanted to keep going with the whole thing. So having only just dipped our toes into this watery new world, we went all in and signed up for the Arctic Tern Challenge with our local Seabirds swimming community. The challenge was to get into the sea at least once a month every month from November through April. Yes, I—who really have no tolerance for physical discomfort of any kind, and who would not previously have gotten into water that was cooler than about tepid bathtub temperature—decided it would be a good idea to voluntarily submerge myself in the English Channel all winter long.

And you know what? It was a good idea. It was a brilliant idea. I had never felt the kind of searing cold I felt while wading into the water here in February, when the sea temperature was about 7C/45F and the air was about the same and it was like being consumed by freezing fire. I had never felt the terrifying power of that shore dump, where you try to scramble up the slippery shingle to get out of the water but the waves grab you and pull you back in. I had never dragged myself out of my warm, cozy bed on a dark winter weekend morning and packed a big bag of stuff and bundled myself up and gone to the beach and unbundled myself and thrown on a bunch of cold-water gear and gotten into the churning water for all of two minutes before stumbling out again and stripping off the sopping wet gear and trying to get dressed with the wind whipping my clothes away from me and finally huddling with a granola bar and a thermos of hot tea hoping the afterdrop wouldn’t get me. I never realized I had the willpower to do any of this, or the fortitude. I can’t overstate how much I am not a “hardy” person in any sense. But it turns out that you can just decide: I’m going to get into that cold water. And then you do it, and eventually your perception of things like “cold” changes—as does your perception of yourself.

So I “dipped” all through the winter, and eventually the sun started shining longer each day, and the water slowly began to warm up, and there came a day when I realized I didn’t need the neoprene booties and gloves anymore, that I could just wade into the glittering sea and swim—and I mean properly swim, something I had never really done in the open water until this year. I started taking swimming lessons in a pool back in January with the aim of improving my technique (I’ve been swimming all my life and thought I was pretty decent at it until I tried to swim 100 meters consecutively during my first “front crawl improvers” lesson and had to stop and gasp for breath about 40 meters in—it’s all about the efficiency, folks!), and those lessons eventually moved to the sea so we could learn an entirely new set of skills. I spent many Friday afternoons this summer swimming along in a shoal with my other classmates, swallowing remarkable amounts of seawater as we navigated wind and waves and currents and groynes and other swimmers. I never knew all the different moods of the water here, and how radically the contours of the beach change with every passing storm, and what the tides do and what the wind does, and when you can brave the surf and when you’re better off giving it a miss. And in the process I befriended other women who love the sea as much as I do, and now I can always find someone to swim with when the mood takes me.

It’s been just over a year since Alison and I first took the plunge in Shoreham. The days are getting shorter now, the water’s getting cooler, and the Salty Seabirds have announced their Arctic Tern Challenge for this winter. The summer beach shoes are going to make way for winter booties, and I’ll be walking down to the beach in my oh-so-cozy changing robe instead of flip-flops and shorts. In the meantime, I’ve started taking a new swimming course: the Pool to Pier Program, which builds up to a pier-to-pier swim and an around-the-pier swim in the summer. Right now I can’t imagine being able to do it—but a year ago I couldn’t imagine even stepping foot into this water, and now I can’t imagine life without it. So who knows what’s possible?

The pattern became clear immediately: the headaches almost inevitably arrived a few days before the start of my menstrual cycle, and they were probably getting worse because of hormone fluctuations related to perimenopause. As for what to do about them, that was a trickier question to answer.

Women are more likely to experience migraine than men, so it is supremely unsurprising that, even well into the 20th century, migraine headaches were often dismissed as a psychosomatic problem, and comparatively little effort was put into developing treatments for them. But now, at long last, we know that migraine is a neurological disorder, and headaches are just one possible symptom. There’s no such thing as “a migraine” (though I use this parlance myself). People with migraine will periodically experience attacks (e.g., headaches), but if you have migraine, you have it all the time.

In my quest to get my headaches under control, I’ve become somewhat obsessed with migraine research, and I’ve learned things that have literally made my jaw drop because so much of how I experience the world suddenly makes sense—like why I have to eat regularly (because migraine brains are overly sensitive to blood sugar fluctuations, so I’m like a toddler always needing a snack), why I can’t tolerate bright or flickering lights, why it takes so little for me to feel like everything is suddenly too much:

“The brain of a person with migraine cannot properly process sensory inputs from external stimulation, such as light, sound, smells or touch, even when an attack isn’t happening” (from Managing Your Migraine by Dr. Katy Munro—emphasis mine)

But it’s the attacks that can make the condition unbearable. To avoid delving into the whole history of migraine research (interesting as it is), I’ll just say that the real treatment revolution only started in the 1990s with the approval of drugs known as triptans. My mom was an early user of sumatriptan, the first triptan to be released and the only one available over the counter in the UK. While you don’t need a prescription for it here, you can only get it after consulting with a pharmacist, because it is not entirely without risk.

Triptans are vasoconstrictors, which means they narrow they blood vessels around your brain. (Fun fact: no one knows exactly what this has to do with alleviating migraine pain, because no one knows exactly what’s going on with migraines or why the drugs used to treat them even work in the first place.) The Wikipedia page for sumatriptan succinctly lists some of the potential issues with the drug: “Common side effects include chest pressure, fatigue, vomiting, tingling, and the feeling that the world is spinning. Serious side effects may include serotonin syndrome, heart attacks, strokes, and seizures.”

Ugh.

I bought a box of sumatriptan years ago and never opened it. My migraine headaches were still relatively infrequent and semi-manageable at the time, and while I knew people who sang the praises of sumatriptan, I was too scared of the stuff to try it myself. It had never really worked for my mom, and some people find the side effects worse than the migraine attack itself. My headache pain was bad enough, and I couldn’t bear the thought of trying an unfamiliar drug that might make me feel like I was having a heart attack on top of it. So I’d get a migraine and pointlessly take ibuprofen or paracetamol, and the headache would get worse and I’d think about that box of sumatriptan, and I’d start feeling panicky about the potential side effects and try to convince myself that maybe the headache wasn’t so bad after all, and I’d ride out the pain as always, for hours and hours.

Long after that first box of sumatriptan expired, I went to the pharmacist and bought another one. My headaches had intensified, and I realized that things couldn’t continue the way they were. I couldn’t keep losing entire days to pain and brain fog, and I couldn’t cope with the near-constant anxiety of wondering when I’d get the next headache and how long it would last and how much it would disrupt my life. But I also couldn’t overcome the stupid fear of the triptan, so nothing really changed.

The first entry in my headache diary is from March 13, 2021, when I had an 8-hour migraine with a severity of 7-8 on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being “this is awful but I can still kind of function”, 10 being “just get me to a guillotine”). The next entry is from May 9, when I had exactly the same kind of headache. After that, there’s an entry for July 19-20, when I had a 12-hour migraine with a severity of 8-9. And just under a month later, I had a whole week of feeling “off” which culminated in a 14-hour migraine with a severity of 8. I noted the usual accompanying effects in the diary: light sensitivity, movement sensitivity, spaciness, hammering pain. Not noted: a feeling of utter despair.

I remember this last headache well (I remember all of the really bad ones well). I remember holding the box of sumatriptan and sobbing, feeling so overwhelmed by pain and so unable to just open the damn box and take a pill. I just couldn’t. I had thought I would do anything to make the pain stop, but couldn’t bring myself to leave the known world of the migraine for the unknown world of the drug. It’s hard to explain that anxiety and probably impossible to understand if you haven’t experienced it yourself. I wonder if it’s something like agoraphobia, a sheer terror of crossing a threshold even though remaining on one side of that threshold is making you miserable.

To be fair, in the case of that last bad headache, the sumatriptan probably wouldn’t have helped at that point anyway. You’re supposed to take a triptan as soon as you feel a migraine coming on, and by then I was likely beyond the drug’s reach. So I rode it out, hour upon hour, trying not to cry, trying not to succumb to the paralyzing fear that the headache might never end, trying to just get through it. And I did. The headache eventually passed.

And at some point in the following days, I finally called my doctor and asked for help. I wasn’t expecting much, to be honest. Many “migraineurs” spend years trying to get the help they need, trying to get someone to take them seriously and prescribe treatments that might actually work. My doctor isn’t a headache specialist, he’s a general practitioner, so I wouldn’t expect him to be up to speed on all the latest migraine treatments. I thought, at best, he might tell me to take sumatriptan, which would kind of bring me back to where I started—though I told myself that, if the doctor himself green-lighted it, I would take the plunge and try it.

Instead, he listened carefully, asked smart questions, and gave me a prescription for eletriptan, a newer triptan which is more effective than many of the others (though it apparently can also have more side effects). I picked up the pills from the pharmacy and was determined to absolutely, definitely take one the next time I got a migraine headache.

I didn’t have to wait long: the next attack rolled around like clockwork about a month later. Of course, I still did the typical migraineur thing of trying to tell myself that what was obviously a migraine was not actually a migraine. I denied reality for two hours, (pain severity: 6) before finally, FINALLY opening the box and swallowing a pill. And then I had to do everything possible to distract myself from my rising panic as I wondered what the drug would do to me.

What it did was this: An hour after the first pill, I felt kind of “floaty” and the headache pain had abated to a 4 (bad but tolerable—I could sit and sort of watch TV). I took a second dose two hours after the first. And three hours later, the headache was gone. Just…gone. No side effects, no lingering pain. As if it had never been there in the first place.

Reader, I cried. I cried for myself and all the months and years of unnecessary pain, and I cried with relief because the seemingly impossible had happened: I overcame my fear, took a pill, and my migraine went away.

I’ve had 13 migraine headaches since then, and they’ve all responded well to the eletriptan. I’ve only reached a 7 on the pain scale once since starting the meds, and that was because I waited way too long to take my first pill. Otherwise my attacks have averaged about a 4 and have only lasted a few hours altogether. My headaches are finally manageable, and I no longer live in constant dread of an attack.

That’s not to say I don’t still worry about getting migraine attacks, because aside from the headache, they just make me feel physically and mentally awful for a while. And every single time I take an eletriptan I think “maybe this time it won’t work”—but so far, it continues to work. So it is not an exaggeration to say that eletriptan has changed my life. I realize this makes me very, very lucky. Triptans don’t help everyone, and some people can’t take them at all because of other health issues. Sometimes they do stop working and you have try a different treatment. They’re not a cure-all, and they’re not preventative, and they do have their potential downsides. But this particular triptan has eased a major burden in my life, and it’s given me some sense of control.

I regret that it took me so long to come around to trying it, but I’m also thankful for every hour of pain and misery that it’s spared me. I still have to put up with my migraine brain, but at least I understand it more now. And by extension, I understand myself more now. I am not my migraine, but my migraine is part of me, and I’m finally learning how to live with it.

I don’t remember when the cat first started mooching around, but by the spring of 2019 she was a regular enough presence to warrant a photo (also, she’s just ridiculously photogenic). Jeremy was still working in town every day at the time, so my lunches were solitary affairs, and I appreciated her furry company. I started calling her Fancy Cat because 1) she looks mighty fancy and 2) she likes to demonstratively roll around and stretch languorously like she’s showing off just how fancy she is. She is, however, also very fluffy, and at some point “Fluffy” became the name of choice for our frequent garden companion.

A number of local cats visit our garden on their patrol route through the neighborhood, and we’ve given them all monikers: Black and White Cat (self-explanatory), Harness Cat (because she wears a little harness with a GPS tracker on it), Orange Cat (aka Concerned Cat, which has a very odd, worried-looking face), the Town Crier (a big black cat that wanders around kind of—warbling? Loudly? All the time?). Some are bolder and more curious than others, some will accept a scritch, some are skittish and run away. Some use our garden as a litter box (grrrr), others as a spot to relax in the sun. Some have barged into our house through the open back door or slunk in through the cat flap, but most just pass through the backyard as they go about their cat business.

For the benefit of American readers, I should point out here that these aren’t stray cats or “community cats”, they are outdoor cats with homes and owners. Not all UK cats are outdoor cats, but the majority are, and it’s generally accepted here that many cats are happier not being indoors for their entire lives. This is, as I have learned, a very big cultural difference between the US and UK, with folks on both sides harboring quite strong opinions. One need look no further than this amusing Reddit thread (I know, I know) with the subject “Apparently Americans don’t let their cats outside!?”, which consists of Americans and Brits telling each other that they’re all wrong about cats.

I’m not here to argue one way or the other, particularly as I don’t even own a cat. But I will say that, after spending two decades in the UK, I do not find it strange that pet cats here are allowed to come and go as they please. Speaking for our neighborhood alone, there are no natural predators around that would hurt a cat, and all of our gardens are connected, creating a sheltered corridor away from the road. I know that’s not the case everywhere, and I understand that not all cats even want to go outside. But our local outdoor cats are a familiar presence in the neighborhood, and no one here is fazed to find someone else’s cat in their yard (or house!).

It is perhaps also worth saying at this point that I have always identified strongly as a Dog Person, and I was sort of benevolently neutral towards cats until we moved into a flat with a garden and I discovered that hell is other people’s cats pooping all over your backyard. I went through a phase of hating on cats and their poopin’ ways, and I did every (reasonable and humane) thing I could think of keep them out of our garden (marigolds, spiky plants, lion poo). Nothing worked, so I eventually came to terms with the cats, and then I came to like the cats, and then I met “Fluffy” and slowly, almost imperceptibly, evolved from being a Dog Person into a full-on Cat Lady.

When Covid hit in the spring of 2020 and Jeremy started working from home, we ate lunch in the garden as much as possible because it was our only change of scenery during lockdown. Fluffy kept coming around, and she would sit quietly in the sun or flomp down next us and do her rolling around thing, inviting head scritches and even tummy rubs. This went on all through the summer months of that otherwise horrible year, and it continued when the weather warmed up again in the spring of 2021.

She would occasionally go to the foot of the stairs leading into our flat and peer up them as if contemplating whether to ascend, and we would discourage her and beckon her away from the back door. But then we got curious and wondered whether she would really go into the flat if we didn’t stop her. And one day—tentatively, and perhaaaaps with some goading on our part—she did. She padded hesitantly into the kitchen and then the living room, where she saw the ceiling fan and bolted out of the house again in terror.

The terror did not last. She grew bolder, checking out each room in the house but never really lingering indoors. Until, at some point, she did linger. I had bought two squishy pouffes to use as footrests, and Fluffy claimed one as a nice place for an indoor snooze. Then on a quiet afternoon in July, when I had the house to myself for a bit, I sat on the sofa and Fluffy jumped into my lap for the first time and fell asleep, and I realized that this cat had stolen not just my footrest but my whole heart.

Fluffy started spending more and more time with us. We unlocked the cat flap (installed by the previous owners of our flat) so she could go in and out freely, we put water out for her, and we let her sleep wherever she wanted. But as we grew more attached her, I started to freak out about it. She clearly had an owner somewhere nearby (she’s well-fed and well-groomed—her fur sometimes smells so good it’s like she’s been to a spa), but we didn’t know who the owner was, or where they lived, or whether they might sometimes be concerned about their sweet cat. We also didn’t know Fluffy’s real name (not that it seems to make much of a difference with cats). And, most distressingly to me, I thought if Fluffy ever just stopped showing up, we wouldn’t have any way of knowing what had happened to her. I’m not gonna lie, the prospect of this made me cry more than once.

Thus began Operation Cat Identification. Like most of the outdoor cats around here, Fluffy doesn’t wear a collar, so we had no information to go on (a collar for an outdoor cat may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s actually not). I started our investigation by posting a picture of her to our neighborhood Facebook page and asking if anyone knew anything about her. I was hopeful, not least because one of the women on our street is a cat groomer. Unfortunately, while everyone agreed that Fluffy was very beautiful, no one knew who she was. This made it more likely that she came not from our street but the next one over, where the gardens back onto ours. Jeremy and I took more than one stroll down that street, looking for potential clues as to which flat might be Fluffy’s. There was a place with a little statue of a cat in the front garden, but that obviously wasn’t much help. And whenever Fluffy left our garden we would try to see which direction she went, but she kind of went in all different directions, because she’s a cat.

In the realm of the even more ridiculous, I tried to do a reverse image search on a picture I took of her to see if there were any other photos of her online—because if you owned a cat that adorable, wouldn’t you post it all over the web? That’s what social media is for! I found no pictures of Fluffy but millions of pictures of cats who looked just like Fluffy—who is, as I now know, a long-haired mackerel tabby. I joined some local Facebook groups for cat enthusiasts, which turned up no information about Fluffy but lots of photos of other cute cats. I pondered putting up posters saying “Is this your cat?” or even (gulp) knocking on doors, but that seemed creepy. And thinking that she was probably microchipped, I investigated options for scanning an animal’s chip to read the data on it, and I came embarassingly close to buying a home-scanning device, which probably would have provided no useful information whatsoever, and which would have been even MORE creepy anyway.

If it’s not clear from all of this, I became consumed by the need to identify this cat. I fretted about it constantly. And a solution finally presented itself: Cat rescue groups recommend making a paper collar with your contact details on it to put on a cat if you’re not sure whether it’s a stray. I knew Fluffy wasn’t a stray, but the paper collar seemed to be the perfect way to get in touch with the unknown owner—assuming that we could actually get a collar onto Fluffy, and that the owner wanted to be in touch. With nothing left I lose, I composed the following note:

“Hello! Your beautiful cat often visits us on Xxx Road (just for naps, never food). We hope that’s okay would love to be in touch in case you were ever worried about it! Feel free to contact Jessica at xxx-xxxx”

I tweaked the wording a million times, not wanting to come across as weird and obsessive (though I clearly am), and trying to express that the cat wasn’t bothering us at all, we were just curious about her. I refrained from saying WE LOVE HER TELL US EVERYTHING ABOUT HER even though that’s pretty much what I was thinking. And I felt it was important to add the bit about not feeding her, because we categorically don’t (bar the occasional flake of tuna if she shows up at lunchtime).

I printed out the note on a narrow strip of paper and fashioned it into a loose collar, which we managed to get around Fluffy’s neck with a tiny piece of tape. She was completely unbothered by the whole procedure, but it made me feel sick to my stomach—seeing her collared felt wrong, and it felt doubly wrong to be collaring a cat that wasn’t ours. I was also, honestly, worried about what response we might get. I hoped that the owner would be happy to let their cat keep hanging out with us, but there was always a possibility that they’d tell us to leave the cat alone. I had no idea which way things would go, and the uncertainty was awful.

So we sent Fluffy off with her paper collar, and I held my breath waiting for a reply. She came back a while later still wearing the collar, so we assumed that either she hadn’t been home yet or the owner hadn’t seen it. She was still wearing the collar the next day (to be fair, it was quite hidden by all her fur), and we eventually tore it off because it was getting ratty and clearly wasn’t doing its job. We tried again with a new collar a week or so later. Once again I waited breathlessly for a phone call or text message from the owner, but nothing came, so we got ready for bed—and found the collar on top of the duvet, where it had either fallen off or been pawed off earlier in the evening.

Disappointed but undeterred, we printed out a third collar. This time we were more strategic: Fluffy would often hang out with us until the early evening, and then she would leave and come back later, presumably after having dinner at home. So instead of waiting to put the collar on before shooing her out for the night, we did it pre-dinnertime, figuring that her owner was most likely to see her then.

The third time was a charm. Not ten minutes after the cat left our house, I got a notice on my phone: “I’ve received your little message on my cat…her name is Coco! 😻”

❤️ Coco! ❤️

After three years of wondering, the mystery of “Fluffy” was solved. Coco does indeed live on the next road over, and her owner seemed supremely unperturbed by her wandering ways. I thanked them profusely for getting in touch, and they said it was nice that Coco felt welcome in our flat. As it turns out, Coco is welcome in several flats; while we were still in the process of identifying her, our downstairs neighbor said that Coco had randomly started coming in through his cat flap, too, and that she liked to curl up in a box by the radiator and go to sleep. At first I felt irrationally betrayed—how could she?! She’s not our cat, but she’s our not-our-cat. But our downstairs neighbor has owned cats in the past and is also quite fond of her. And why shouldn’t she have multiple cozy places to snooze? She clearly gets some fulfillment out of spending time with us (or at least in our flat—sometimes we’re in one room and she’s asleep in another), but she is very much her own cat and does as she pleases. We have no hold on her.

But boy does she have a hold on us. Jeremy regularly reminds me that we need boundaries because she is, as we have established, Not Our Cat. But I hear him whispering “We love you, Coco” while stroking her soft fur, and I know that he is just as much wrapped around her adorable paw as I am. We arrange our lives around Coco whenever she’s in the house and avoid doing anything that might disturb her (putting away dishes, vacuuming, taking out the trash). My hairdryer is in the bedroom, but if she’s asleep on the bed, I’ll awkwardly dry my hair in the office so the noise doesn’t upset her. She is WILD about tuna and assumes that every tin has tuna in it, so if I have to open a can of anything while she’s within earshot, I’ll take the can into the bedroom, close the door, and sloooowly, quiiiietly pop the lid to avoid exciting and disappointing her. Sometimes she hears it anyway, and then I have to let her sniff the tin of tomatoes or beans or whatever so she realizes it’s nothing she’d want to eat. I misjudged her once, though, and left some tinned chickpeas draining in the kitchen sink, only to turn around and find her nibbling on them.

She loves the kitchen sink, incidentally, and will sit and stare into the drain like she’s entranced. She will also drink from the faucet, or sometimes lick the tap if the water isn’t running (I obviously clean it afterwards!). It’s not like she doesn’t have sources of water in our flat; she has a big bowl in the kitchen, and we also put a little ramekin on the coffee table next to “her” pouffe so she doesn’t have to get up mid-snooze and go into the kitchen to drink (and also so that she would stop trying to drink from my water glass). I’ve learned that cats are extremely picky about their sources of water, so I’m pleased that she drinks so copiously from the bowls we’ve put out for her. However, that has not stopped me from researching “cat fountains,” because if she likes drinking from the tap, I think she’d love that. And we would do anything for Coco.

My Instagram feed is now mostly just a cat account, and more than one person has asked us “When did you get a cat?” Then we have to explain that we didn’t get a cat, and we don’t have a cat—except when we do (there is probably some joke to be made about Schrödinger here). We don’t have a cat, except when Coco sprawls out between us on the sofa in the evening, taking up a surprising amount of space for a moderately sized cat. We don’t have a cat, except when she comes bounding down the garden path and into the house to settle in one of the many spots reserved for her here (the pouffe, the couch, a chair in the office, a cardboard box in the kitchen). We don’t have a cat, except when she comes in and leaps onto the bed early in the morning to curl up at (or on) our feet for her first long nap of the day. We don’t have a cat, except when she snuggles up next to one or the other of us when we’re not feeling well, as if she knows we need some comfort.

We don’t have a cat, but when we’re away I miss her terribly, and when she’s here my heart is full. I’m a bit overwhelmed by how much I love this furry creature with her stripy legs and snowy paws and serious little face, with her white chin and green eyes and big fluffy tail.

We don’t have a cat, but a cat very much has us.

There are lots of benches with plaques on them around the Water of Leith walkway in Edinburgh. Most of the ones I saw on the morning I spent wandering the walkway had fairly non-specific dedications: in memory of, gone but not forgotten, they loved this spot. Edward’s is detailed in a way that captured my attention. Maybe it’s not unusual to memorialize a date and place of birth on a bench, but that particular place and that particular date spoke volumes to me.

According to the Edinburgh Gazette of March 29, 1968, thirteen other residents of Scotland were naturalized in February 1968, seven of them originally from Poland. One of the other new citizens, a certain Mykola Pufkyj, is listed as being “of uncertain nationality.” A quick search revealed him to have apparently been a Ukrainian who had fought against the Russians in World War II. He was captured by the Allies, and instead of being repatriated back to Soviet-controlled Ukraine after the war, he wound up on a ship of POWs bound for Glasgow. He was held in a POW camp in Lockerbie, and he eventually married a Scottish woman and settled in Lockerbie permanently.

I don’t know the details of Edward Lach’s story. He was far too young to have been a soldier in World War II, but maybe he was the son of one of the many valiant Polish servicemen who fought with the Allies and were given refuge with their families in the UK in the 1940s. Or maybe something else drew him to Edinburgh, where he seems to have made a good life for himself (and where he may still be living now, for all I know). However he got there, he clearly cherished the city enough to publicly express his affection for the place. But in doing so, he also paid tribute to his first home, his place of birth, a country that was about to be torn apart.

What do you do when a country is being torn apart, its cities besieged, its houses and shops and hospitals and theaters indiscriminately pulverized, the living population forced to fight or flee or shelter underground, the dead buried in mass graves or left lying in the streets because attempting to bury them would mean joining them, when people are being concentrated in camps and deported to enemy territory, when civilians are being executed in the streets, when a malignant force has set out to subjugate and ultimately destroy a people guilty of nothing other than claiming the right to self-determination, when a ferocious injustice is being inflicted upon innocents, unforgivable crimes committed against people who would otherwise just be going about their normal day, the same way you’re going about your normal day right now? What do you do when it’s not even “your” country and you have no obvious stake in the matter, other than that you are a human being who does not want to see fellow human beings suffer?

Assuming you have no useful skills that could tangibly help the people on the ground, I guess you just donate money to the people who do have the skills and then you go back to your regular life. That’s what I’ve been doing for Ukraine, anyway, and it feels like failure. It feels like I’m facing the very question I’ve always pondered when I think about World War II and the Holocaust—what would you have done?—and I’ve discovered that the answer is: nothing that feels like nearly enough.

Not long after the current invasion of Ukraine began, I was thinking about the International Brigades and how remarkable it was for people to quite literally fight against fascism in a country that was not their own. Just a day later, Volodymyr Zelensky put out the call for an “International Legion” of volunteers to fight in Ukraine. And though it embarrasses me to admit it, for the very briefest flicker of a moment I wondered, “Could I…? Is there anything I…?” Of course I couldn’t, and of course there isn’t, and it was ridiculous to even entertain the thought, no matter how idly and fleetingly. Ridiculous and self-centered, because it’s not about me and what I can do, it’s about what the people of Ukraine (…and Afghanistan and Yemen and Syria and Ethiopia and Myanmar…) need and what the international community can do to help them.

But as I sit here reading about the atrocities coming to light as the Russians withdraw from parts of Ukraine, I feel like there is only me alone with my conscience and my helplessness, watching people flee another country being torn apart, watching people being torn apart in a country that has seen all of this before. Those who flee might eventually find new homes elsewhere, adopted homes which they may come to cherish, and which may even cherish them back. Others will live and die in ruins that were once a home. No one should have to suffer through such things, but someone always does. For 77 years we’ve said never again, but there is always an again, again and again and again. History does repeat itself, but only ever as tragedy.

Every rapid Covid test I’d taken previously had involved 15 minutes of uncertainty, watching the test solution gently stain the paper strip rosy pink until it finally coalesced into a single solid magenta line: negative. But this time? BANG: two distinct lines in the space of about 20 seconds. When I’d told Jeremy I felt like I was coming down with a cold on Friday, he said “maybe it’s the ’rona,” because these days anything could be the ’rona: a vague headache, a slightly scratchy throat, a general feeling of malaise. So I said, only half-joking, “Yeah, maybe!”

No maybe.

I knew it was just a matter of time. I don’t say that in a blasé way, like I wasn’t concerned about getting it, or I was so fatalistic that I wasn’t being careful anymore. Jeremy and I have still been “careful,” but careful is relative. We both spend the vast majority of our time at home. We don’t often take public transportation or go into shops, but when we do, we wear proper masks (KF94s, for the record, not because they’re cool—though ours are black and indeed kind of cool—but because they’re comfy and work well with glasses). If we meet friends at all, we meet them outdoors. However, and this is BIG however, we also play in Irish music sessions twice a week in pubs that are usually quite empty, but not always. We’ve ventured out for lunch the past few Fridays, and we’ve gone to the pub up the hill for a Sunday roast a few times, too. We’re not hermits anymore. The pandemic has been a balancing act all along, and recently our balance has tipped slightly more towards “doing stuff” than “not doing stuff,” with all the risk that entails.

And now, predictably, I have the ’rona. In a perverse way, it’s almost a relief—like, this thing I knew was eventually coming for me is finally here, so the nervous anticipation is over and I can just deal with it. It’s mostly been like dealing with a really bad cold: congestion, sore throat, tiredness, achiness, and a headache that sort of comes and goes (could be the “Omicron headache,” could also just be my sinuses). I haven’t lost my sense of smell or taste, other than in the way you lose it when your nose is all stuffed up. I was slightly feverish on Sunday and I haven’t been sleeping particularly well, but my oxygen levels are fine, and I’m hoping that my recent booster shot (less than two months ago) and my otherwise decent health will keep me from experiencing anything worse than this. I sure don’t like to think of how this would’ve played out if I hadn’t been double vaxxed and boosted.

As for poor Jeremy, he’s tested negative so far (phew!), but attempting to stay apart from each other in a tiny two-bed flat is not the most straightforward prospect. He’s sleeping on the pull-out couch, I’m sealing myself in our bedroom at night, we keep the windows open even though it’s rather brisk outside, and I wear a mask when I’m around him and have washed my hands raw. It may all be for nought; I was presumably infectious for at least a day or two before the symptoms showed up, so he had a few days to unwittingly breathe in my COVID miasma (yum), and I might just be reaching peak virus shedding right now. Maybe he’ll get lucky and dodge the virus this time. I certainly hope so; I really don’t want to be the one to make him sick.

As for who made me sick—who knows? I did precisely four risky things last week, which is probably the most reasonable window of infection: our Saturday-morning tune-learning workshop, a Sunday lunch, an Irish session on Wednesday, and a driving lesson on Thursday (a story for another time). My money is on either the Wednesday session or, much more likely, the Sunday lunch, both of which took place without masks in pubs, one of which (the lunch) was quite busy. No one I’ve been in close contact with since then has tested positive, which is a relief and also a testament to the power of vaccines. I’ll never know exactly where I picked up Mr. Omicron, but I’m doing everything I can to make sure I’m the last link in whatever chain of infection led to me.

So, physically, this whole thing has been manageable. Mentally and emotionally, though? I don’t know. A few weeks ago I was scrolling through my Instagram feed in search of a particular picture, and as I swept past all the photos from 2020, of Jeremy and I mostly alone at home, I suddenly felt such a piercing sadness that I started to cry. I can’t quite explain why, other than to say that I felt so sorry for the people in those pictures, even though they were doing fine, trying to make the best of a horrible situation and doing a decent job of it. It’s not like I didn’t feel sad and scared and stressed out all through 2020 and beyond—I have a year’s worth of blog posts to remind me of exactly how I felt every single week. But I also buried a lot of emotions very deep, just to get through the days, and in the past month I’ve started to feel like those emotions are being thrust to the surface of my consciousness through some sort of psychological plate tectonics.

Just a day or two before I started feeling sick, I was thinking idly about our washing machine, and how it broke before the first lockdown in 2020. We were supposed to have a new one delivered on March 26, 2020. On March 24th I was still expecting that to happen. But then March 26th suddenly became the first day of lockdown, so the delivery was canceled, and I immediately started to catastrophize about what might happen if one or the other of us (or both of us) caught Covid. We couldn’t do laundry at home, we wouldn’t be able to get to a laundromat, and all the laundry collection services were saying that they wouldn’t take laundry from anyone with suspected Covid. I went into a proper panic about it at the time, imagining every worst-case scenario—not just that we’d catch Covid, which was a terrifying enough prospect at the time, but that we’d be trapped at home, ailing, feverish, in piles of dirty bedding. When I thought back on this the other day, it was with a sense of distanced relief; that worst-case scenario never happened, and the thought of getting Covid now (post-vax, post-boost, in the Age of Omicron) was not nearly as panic-inducing for me personally as it was back then (though I know that’s certainly not the case for everyone). Also, we have a functioning washing machine again.

But when I saw those double lines appear on the lateral flow test on Friday, the past two years briefly collapsed into nothing and I was plunged back into the fear of early 2020. I tried to explain it to Jeremy, disjointedly recounting my memory of the broken washing machine, but I was upset and couldn’t make it make sense. “You were afraid we wouldn’t have clean towels?” he asked, gently perplexed. But of course that wasn’t it. Back in March 2020, when we didn’t have a washing machine and no one had any protection against this unfamiliar virus that was killing so many people in such an awful way, I was afraid that Jeremy would catch Covid and he would be lying there gasping for breath in sweat-soaked sheets and I wouldn’t be able to help him, not even by washing the damn sheets. The seemingly trivial inability to do laundry was symbolic of the more general feeling of helplessness that overwhelmed me at the time. That fear of helplessness is one of the things I thought had evaporated in the intervening months, but in fact it was just another thing that got buried, only to resurface when I realized I had finally caught the virus I’d been dreading for so long.

Of course, we’re not totally helpless now. A friend of mine has been publishing a Calm Covid newsletter (“Low-key compilations of data, advice, and interpretation as omicron takes over”), and just a few weeks ago she posted a piece on what to do if you’ve got Covid. I bookmarked it at the time, figuring we might need it sooner or later, not realizing the emphasis would be on sooner. After I saw my positive result, and Jeremy tested negative, and I had a little freak-out, and Jeremy calmed me down, we tried to come up with a plan. Since it was bedtime, the first part of the plan involved getting Jeremy set up on the sofa bed. I kept my distance from him while he fixed up the pull-out couch, and then we waved goodnight to each other, and he closed the living room door, and I went to my office and had a little cry. I knew that I was probably going to be just fine, if a bit miserable for a few days, and I knew that it wasn’t inevitable that Jeremy would catch Covid from me, but I felt scared and sad and alone nonetheless.

And then I opened up Erin’s newsletter and felt a little less alone. I followed the link to the Vox article she recommended and was heartened by its closing paragraphs: “Even if you’ve told yourself you’ll likely get Covid-19 eventually and it’s probably not a big deal, it’s still totally reasonable to feel overwhelmed and upset by a positive test. […] ‘It’s okay to be concerned, it’s okay to have those types of feelings. […] No one wants to experience illness of any kind, whether we’re talking about Covid-19 or any type of a virus — no one wants to get sick.’” I did feel overwhelmed and upset, even knowing that I probably didn’t need to be, but that was okay. The fears of two long years aren’t easily shed.

I always feel better when I feel like I’m doing something about something, so before going to bed I quickly brushed up on the latest Covid guidance I could find, I dug out the thermometer and pulse oximeter I bought back in April 2020, I checked our medication situation, and I ordered a bunch of fresh Covid tests: a new pack of lateral flows, figuring we’d be testing quite a bit over the following week, and (after slightly hemming and hawing because the guidance on this isn’t so clear anymore) two PCR tests as well, just for extra confirmation. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the availability of free tests delivered straight to your door is a godsend I will never take for granted. I didn’t even know you could get free PCR tests delivered—and picked up by courier if needed!—if you’ve tested positive with an LFD at home. And if we hadn’t had a pack of LFDs sitting here, I might have gone around for several more days thinking I just had a cold and not Covid, possibly making someone else—not least my own husband—very, very sick. Jeremy has also been able to test every day to make sure he’s still negative, even though he’s essentially isolating too (though technically he doesn’t have to, even if he’s not testing regularly, which seems…weird to me?). If nothing else, the tests are acting as little waypoints, giving us some sort of indicator as to where we are on this Covid journey.

I’m hoping this particular journey is coming to an end. I’m on day six now and feeling much better, though I’m still a bit congested and tired. Our PCR tests showed that I do indeed have the virus and Jeremy does not, and the lateral flow test I took this morning was still annoyingly positive (though maaaaybe that second line was a bit fainter than it has been?), so I’m still locking myself down. I was really hoping for a negative test today as some sort of quantifiable marker that I’m getting over this thing, but I guess I’ll have to make do with improved energy levels and the feeling of frustrated boredom that has replaced the frightened uncertainty of Friday and the achy exhaustion of the days that followed. If I’m getting back to my usual grumpy, impatient, vaguely dissatisfied self, I must be doing alright.

• had tea with a friend I hadn’t seen in over a year
• went to a birthday party on the beach for a friend I hadn’t seen in about two years
• cheered on an acquaintance I hadn’t seen in even more years as he crossed the finish line after walking from London to Brighton for charity
• got my hair cut for the first time in 8 months
• sat outside a pizza restaurant and ate pizza
• sat outside a taproom and had craft beer and gyoza
• sat outside a pub and had Guinness and a Sunday roast
• played Irish tunes with the usual suspects
• wore a tutu in a park in the rain and danced with my ballet class for the first time since March 12, 2020.

I basically crammed a year’s worth of socializing and activity into a single week, and it was fantastic.

It certainly helped that summer showed up all at once this week. Last Sunday I talked to my brother in southern California, and while it was still cold and rainy here (we had the heating on and had just been subjected to two days of gale-force winds, a truly miserable end to what was the wettest May on record), he was lounging on garden furniture in his sunny backyard, with blue sky and green trees all around him, and it literally looked like he was in paradise. But a few days later, a tiny bit of paradise finally reached this soggy isle, and we’ve been basking in sunshine ever since. I’m sitting in our garden as I write this, sunscreen on my neck and shoes kicked off, and though it’s not quite southern California, it’s as good as it gets for southern England. I’ll take it.

The sun hadn’t quite reached us when I met up with my ballet class in the park last Saturday. We had a very specific agenda which meant we couldn’t really wait for better weather: we’d been practicing the Lilac Fairy variation from Sleeping Beauty (one of my very favorite variations), and we wanted to gather in Withdean Park, which has the second-largest collection of lilacs in the world(!), and dance the variation among the trees in full bloom—not a performance, mind you, just a moment for all of us to reunite after a year apart and dance for ourselves. Unfortunately, the trees decided to bloom in the middle of the crummy weather, and the aforementioned winds then blew half the flowers away, so when Saturday rolled around with clouds and drizzle, we all shrugged and headed to the park anyway because we knew we wouldn’t get another opportunity.

Considering some of the conditions we’ve been subjected to in the past—like dancing on a wet, splintery stage at Firle Vintage Fair and having to use a dusty horse stable as a changing room—dancing in a slightly damp park and having to use a bit of muddy woodland as a changing room was pretty much par for the course. So we donned tutus and staked out a spot in the middle of the lilac trees, and we danced our dances and laughed as our ballet slippers soaked through in the wet grass, and passers-by stopped to watch (and take pictures), and dogs from the adjoining dog park occasionally bounded through our “stage.”

On my last day in the dance studio in March 2020, I took a video of us doing an adagio to a piece of music called the Bluebird (not to be confused with the Bluebird variation, also from Sleeping Beauty, very much not an adagio). We had been practicing it for a few weeks at the time and it was looking really lovely. In the grim months that followed, that adagio came represent a life that felt lost forever. It was a memory of “normality,” a symbol of all the unremarkable weeks I had bounded off to the studio every Tuesday and Thursday, worrying only about whether I’d finally be able to do a pirouette. We didn’t revisit the adagio in our Zoom classes until about a month ago, and when the music started up the first time we ran through it, I found myself choking back tears. And it was the same in the park, though this time it was tears of joy, and of gratitude for being able to dance in the company of my adult ballerina friends again.

This week was full of gratitude and appreciation: for friends, for sunshine and a garden to enjoy it in (even if our vegetable beds currently look like Fort Knox—or “Fort Fox” as Jeremy dubbed it, fortified as they are with layers of chicken wire to protect them from our adorable but havoc-wreaking neighborhood fox cubs), for Brighton’s parks and pubs and beach (rocky as it is) and for the time and means to enjoy them, for the vaccines that are making it possible to venture out and move through the world each day with less fear and more hope than I’ve felt in 14 long months. It was a week of living in the moment, something I generally struggle and fail to do. Even now, I’m trying to think of some grand and insightful way to wrap up this post, but all I can think of is how happy I am to be sitting outside in short sleeves, and how nice it is to feel the warmth and hear the rustling trees and chattering birds, and how it delights me to see our freshly planted herbs and salads glowing green in the sun and the azalea about to burst into hot pink flowers, and how all of these little things are beautiful and not to be taken for granted. Maybe that’s insightful enough.