Maybe as with you, the reader, this pandemic era has had a considerable impact on me, though not one immediately apparent. Now of course, that impact can be good or bad. You might be surprised by that, but I have had one or two friends tell me the pandemic, the time it has afforded us as the world has slowed down, allowed them to fix one or two things going on in their lives. They believe they’re actually coming out of this nightmare 18 months later better shape than they went into the pandemic.
It took possibly six months for me to realise how this strange new era had impacted me and there was a whole heap of stuff going on with the flat, which predates the pandemic but peaked as we went into the Christmas lockdown that definitely cranked the pressure up in a very bad way.
By then, I’d already realised that the glimpse of the new freelancing life I was building for myself didn’t actually give me the freedom I though it would. I was operating in multiple time zones and at the beck and call of clients at all times of day and night and that was proving a physical strain. I could feel my body reacting to that in a way it never had before.
Some of the work paid brilliantly, but then I had to deal with (often wealthy) clients that were trying to knock down my rates, and then there was the work that paid less than brilliantly in the first place. At least by last summer I’d had the foresight to get rid of the tight clients. If I was going to freelance doing the audio editing work which I’ve long disliked, it had to be for good money. By Christmas, all that work had been knocked on the head as I had begun to feel that physically something was amiss with me.
All these years, my battle has been with mental health. Anyone of course is susceptible to that. Money is no protector against depression, but what I’ve always maintained, in fact, my old friend ‘The Kid’ was the one who drummed this into me, ‘Money gives you options’. All too rarely have I had those options. Those with money, and also a network of family and friends, have a better chance of coming through their mental health travails. That’s not a dig at those with a better life. It’s just a fact. They have those options. If a relationship goes wrong, they can move out right away, for instance.
I’d put a fair bit of work into the well being side of things over the last decade, erratic admittedly, some times when it was too late, probably, but I was aware of it. But I had completely disregarded my physical health and never paid too much attention to the effect your mental health might have on your physical health. And I’d finally gotten fit again. Surgery on my fractured foot after nine years of not being able to do much except walk and swim, had left me curious as to how successful the operation had been. Within the year, I’d started running, encouraged by my old pal Micky Boyd who had turned into one of those annoying runner types after nearly two decades of obesity. In turn, Mick has turned me into one of those annoying runner types. I post my times on Instagram. I’ve gone full pivot. In my case, I think it’s simply validation. 400 days of isolating alone, it’s as if I take any opportunity to remind the world that I exist. Tragic, I know.
I should add too though, that unlike Mick, I’m different in that he genuinely loves running, and he was good at it as a kid. I don’t even like running. In fact, the only time I like running is when I’m out walking. It’s as if walking is no longer fast enough to satisfy me and I become tempted to simply run where I’m going, knowing I’m now capable of it.
It's a battle for me to stay on top of my fitness. I don’t think I’m one of those naturally fit people. I have to stick to my 3 nights a week running regime or my fitness slips, and it took four months after going down with Covid earlier this year to feel back to my normal self out running. But it’s been brilliant for me mentally, and that’s where the benefit of running kicks in in for me. Without it the last couple of years, I don’t know really. Part of me thinks I’m fortunate in that I live in a flat with the highest ceilings I’ve ever had, without a single ceiling fixture, and I’ve been crap with knots my entire life. There’s no danger of me doing anything stupid. But at least the running at least brings some much needed blue sky thinking into this place.
Now I play football again too, after twelve years of not kicking a ball. That’s more enjoyable. Everything about it, the journey into central London, seeing old friends, even spraying myself with insect repellent that’s more expensive than the Patreon for my podcast page. There’s the game itself, the centrepiece and realising for once that I don’t have to worry about my fitness. There’s no other guy of my age group on a Wednesday running as much as me in our games. That’s a real turnaround and my old friends have been surprised.
And then of course, there’s the journey back, feeling tired, but it’s a nice tired. Getting in late, having some cereal and yoghurt (an addiction), jumping in the shower and then not being able to fall asleep easily after the night’s exertions.
Again, I’ve gone off on a tangent and I’ve got a Star Wars Football League fixture to fulfil tonight (Tattooine v Bespin), so I’m not going to scroll back to work out how to segue this next bit into the sentence that was meant to lead to this. I was aware from Christmas as I came under enormous strain on several fronts that despite clocking 12k + runs, something was wrong with me. I could feel it. It was a strange feeling, a nagging physical discomfort establishing itself in my life, unlike anything I’d ever felt before. My GP had given me some hope that it might be linked to a change of medication, but I began to get worried when I saw the symptoms listed last – typical of my luck – on the list of potential side effects and from then, I had the sense that I had a problem. Changing back to my old meds soon confirmed this. The nagging pain was still there.
Shit.
I’d had plenty of warnings over the years from friends, and doctors and clinicians even. The latter, one particular guy, a lovely Mancunian, had told me back in 2015 that I ought to consider meditation on a regular basis because if I didn’t find a way to switch off, I wasn’t going to pull through the mental health difficulties I was experiencing. Again, I completely failed to grasp that fully, despite him expressing this opinion several times, and I just continued.
Lately, my great friend The Space Daddy, all 20 stones of him, told me that he understood why I’d worked the long days I did when I was growing up at Mayflower – regular readers and listeners of my work will know that part of my life so there’s no need for me to revisit it in this post – but he said Mayflower ‘was now over’. There was no need for me to work such punishing hours. My mum was no longer here. I didn’t have to work as hard as I still was to get us both out of Mayflower before it was too late. The fact is, it was too late, he said. Mayflower was over. My mum had been gone for over 20 years. I could no longer justify my hours at the machine. I needed to step back, accept my physical limitations as a middle-aged man, and take my foot off the pedal. I might’ve accepted this more easily had he not been taking a bus for a single stop to get another kebab as we spoke on the phone.
The pandemic, the lockdowns, meant that I had to wait months and months before I was seen by a hospital. All manner of tests were carried out by my GP, eventually, but I spent the last (nearly) five weeks with my phone, unusually for me, on vibrate, waiting for a call from the hospital that I was meant to get within 48 hours after some more scans one Sunday in June. When out walking, I’d carry the phone in my hand. All for this call.
I finally got that call on Friday afternoon. By God, I’d had to harass the NHS to get that call. Even my GP had had to chase them. I wasn’t impressed and this has been in keeping with my own personal experiences over the last 20 years of the NHS’s awful administration. Now do I think nurses should be paid more? Absolutely.
My issue is the NHS admin. It’s dreadful. And you also get inter-departmental rivalries, as you do in many big organisations, teams not communicating with one another and sometimes, in this case, the patient can suffer.
I wasn’t one of those people out there last year, banging pots and pans one night a week for a minute, partly because I’m low-key, partly because I’m low on pots and pans, and partly because of my own history with the NHS. Also, given we knew the virus was airborne, and taking into account the old windows in this flat, since replaced, weren’t easy to open, I would’ve had to go all the way to the ground floor and stand outside on the front lawn with the pots and pans, not knowing if that invisible virus might latch onto the chosen pot or pan, and cutlery.
The call from the hospital finally came Friday lunchtime. I was in the café when I took it.
Where else, eh?
I was sat inside owing to the sporadic rain and the strong breeze which in recent weeks has seen my paperwork blow onto the muck-heavy Lambeth pavements when I’ve been having the coffee au fresco. Thankfully it was fairly busy in there and I was able to take the call. The news from the surgeon wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad. It was somewhere in between. It’s clear I will only be around for longer if I finally find a way to strike a far better work-life balance than I have to date. That won’t be easy. The internet has made life that much harder for creators. Sure, you can get your work out to more people, that’s true, but often, like this, you’re giving it away for nothing. When do charge for work, low rates too, people stay away because they don’t know the name. I tell myself my poorly selling work says more about the listener/readership than the quality of my work. My belief in my work, if not my life outside of the work, has always been unshakeable. But no one can live without making money, though there have been many times when I have tried to disprove that, and while that self-belief is prized, it won’t pay the bills.
I was reading the other day about a dispute between the 86-year-old Dalai Lama and the Chinese over his reincarnation. The Chinese want to have a say in that – how the hell does that work – but the Dalai Lama thinks talk of his reincarnation is premature. His visions, he says, have told him he’ll live until he’s 113. When I was 8, I remember one particular day where I became convinced I would live until 2053. Unless I learn from this first major health scare of my life, I don’t think that’s going to happen. The positive is, I suppose, I’m aware I need to change and be less intense.
Working evenings and weekends needs to end and I’ve been better on that front. There can be no more playing three games of Star Wars Football on a single day at the weekend, or researching guests and reading for my football podcast well into the night. Without changing, my Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available podcast, while I’m confident it’ll be around to mark 400 shows, 500 is a big ask if I don’t get in front of this and appreciate my new limitations.
Most of what happened last year was outside of my control. That’s a fact. It was unusual to find myself caught up in various things where for once, with careful thought, whatever I did would have no bearing on the outcome. I documented these on the podcast every week as they were going on. That said, I’m a little angry with myself. Sure, I was given little choice in the issues I was dealing with, but perhaps with a different approach, I might not have put my body through the wringer. Now I’ve got to get to grips with a new mindset. I’m not sure if I can do that from where I am. But I have to try.
It's already affected me psychologically. Just this morning, I had a cat nap that involved chasing a doctor (for some reason we were on a train) to get me whatever treatment I needed.
It's a big moment for me.
Really.
Twitter: @1607WestEgg
Podcast: Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available