Mental Health Swims - My First Hosted Open Water Swim

About a fortnight ago, the Mental Health Swims (MHS) account followed me on Instagram, and within moments I was shooting the Founder, Rachel, a DM.

I couldn’t believe that I was seeing a model that was a mirror refection of Run Talk Run (RTR) but for open water swimming. The premise and goal is the same - facilitate a safe space where people can turn up entirely as themselves, whether they are happy, sad, anxious or meh. Normalising mental health conversation at the forefront, with an activity as a secondary bonus feature. RTR for running, MHS for swimming.

Unlike RTRs weekly regularity, MHS meet to swim just once a month which lowered the barrier to participation and hosting, since I wasn’t entirely sure that I could commit to a weekly swim. Fast forward about a week or so, and Rachel and I are chatting endlessly over the phone about our dreams and plans for both RTR and MHS.

I answered some of her questions about what it takes to scale such a beastly support community. We talked about the boring Health & Safety stuff, the logistical sign-up process stuff, and then we bonded over the emotional labour that we pour into these communities and the need for boundaries. If I wanted Rachel to come away with anything, it was to know that the boundaries she puts in place now will be the very lines with which she’ll save herself when MHS undoubtedly scales into something even more magnificent than what it is today.

So how was that first swim?

SCARY.

I have to admit that over the last 3 years I’ve developed a pretty solid routine around my RTRs that make them easier to navigate as a leader. What I mean by this, is that my confidence has grown.

Hosting this MHS for the first time, however, had me swimming in discomfort in the days prior… what would I say? What if a really competent swimmer turned up and I couldn’t facilitate their needs? What if my social anxiety flared up and I lost all communication skills in an instant? What if they could smell the sadness on me, and it was all too much?

It was like I’d been thrown back 3 years and I felt a wave of empathy for all the new RTR Leaders who show up to their runs in the first few weeks so deeply unsure of their right to be a “running leader”.

In the end, it was just my mum and boyfriend who came along for the dip and so any social pressure was alleviated immediately. I also massively messed up with tide times and so I felt incredible gratitude for the fact no strangers had seen this cock up!

So between Jake, my mum and I, we splashed in the shallow rock pools and slipped around on the seaweed and laughed at each other as we fell into deeper parts of the sea unexpectedly. We didn’t talk mental health…. but I could bring my most “Jess self” there and that was special.

Instead of hosting these monthly I think I’m going to hold them weekly. I want to build my confidence with open water swimming, and I want to build my confidence in facilitating a support group outside the realms of RTR too.

The world deserves mental health support that is accessible, and less intimidating than sitting in a circle raising our hands to share what little parts of sadness we can bare to expose. It’s up to us, your Average Joe’s, to make sure we are creating spaces where talking about your mental health is just so normal.

I think this is what I care about more than anything in the world… the running and the swimming… they’re just a lovely little bonus.

Join me next Sunday @ Holywell Toilets. Time to be confirmed - I’ll post it to my Instagram @jessicamaryrobson

When Bulimia made me a Runner

Before I begin. I need to express that this blog post could be somewhat triggering for anyone living with an eating disorder. I want to make it very clear that this is merely just my personal experience with bulimia and running, and that running may not be the answer for you in recovering from your eating disorder. Please do seek advice from your GP before using exercise as a means of recovering.

Running was not something I had set out to do in search of “better health”.

Running was not something I had set out to do in search of “clearing my mind”.

Running was not something I should have even been contemplating, given how very ill I was when starting.

You see, when I moved to Oxford, I was still very bulimic. I was starving and bingeing on some fucking whirlwind of a negative “coping strategy” which did not look like coping at all. Not from the inside, and probably not from the outside, either.

When I moved to Oxford to study I was shy. So painfully shy. Socially fucking anxious if I’m being honest with you. I did all that I bloody well could to integrate myself within the realms of drinking and ‘Monday Night Bridge’ and painting a picture of a well put together 19 year old who knew exactly what she was doing. I don’t think I was fooling anyone on the course, and I definitely wasn’t fooling myself. 

I developed two very close friendships within my houseshare which helped me find a sense of “home” within Oxford, but those two girls had family that lived so closeby to the city that they would leave every weekend… which inevitably left me to my own devices. Instead of indulging in the culture of such a beautiful place, I found myself indulging in rumination… and with that, indulging in vast, large quantities of food with it. A numbing, if you will, of the intensity of emotion that I felt. I speak more about my experience of bulimia in another blog post.

By this point, I had been bulimic for about 5 years.

I was used to this cycle. I would binge, purge, promise myself I’d do better on Monday (or when the housemates would return), and starve my way through to the weekend again. I couldn’t sustain it, and it was on one of these weekends that my bulimic brain came up with another cunning way to rid myself of the calories being consumed on these binges.

Running.

I didn’t head out with a plan. I honestly didn’t even know what running would feel like. It wasn’t something I had ever really engaged in at school… the sheer thought of going out and doing that one thing terrified me.

I remember considering all the ways my body was going to jiggle and shake and feeling so repulsed by that thought that it drove me to want to run even more.

But then I did it.

And it hurt, and it felt like shit.

Every step of the way, it felt like shit.

I walked, and it felt like shit.

I stopped for water, and it felt like shit.

I tried to break into a run again, and alas, it still felt like shit.

The whole experience totally sucked. Until I got in, and had a shower… and for the first time in a very very very long time I felt something that was not shit.

I felt something entirely new – pride.

This was not a feeling I was familiar with. I genuinely remember standing in that god-awful-in-need-of-a-deep-clean-shower, and feeling pride wash over me. I called my mum and told her I’d been for a run. It sounded like she was proud too.

Pride.

That pride, I carried everywhere with me. That positive feeling that was SO unfamiliar to me, I used as fuel to give the running thing a go again.

I did the same route. A short little way down Cowley Road, down the side street onto a much busier road (that takes you out of Oxford) and into South Park where it was boggy as fuck at the bottom and then had a pretty sizeable climb up to the playground. Usually getting a little overwhelmed by bumping into other humans as I approached said playground so cutting across to the other side of the park and then sometimes crossing the road into the cutest little wooded area.

As time moved on, I’d push beyond the realms of this short circuit that I created for myself. And that pride thing? It just grew stronger and stronger.

And with that pride came a whole bunch of other things that I had never thought would be the very things that would pull me away from the bulimic bitch that resided in my head

Alongside the pride I also found myself…

·      An appetite! Like, genuine hunger. I’d been fucking with my ‘satiation’ signals for so long that I forgot what it was like to have a signal from my stomach to my brain that wasn’t being driven by pure upset or a need for numbing

·      A sense of identity – I could now see myself beyond my eating disorder. I was more than just bulimic/shy Jess now. I was also “Runner Jess”

·      Something to bloody well talk about in social situations – this helped my social anxiety SO much. Whenever things got hairy meeting new people, I found that I could at least talk about running (and how amazing it is) for ages without boring myself

·      This one is going to sound corny as fuck, but I found myself a means of self-exploration that I’d never known before. A means of traveling within myself – introspective work to a whole other level. A time to process the utter whirlwind of my teenage years and spend some time getting to really know myself

I can’t say that all of the above stopped me throwing up my food right away. It was, of course, a long long long process.

My best friend Bulimia introduced me to Running, but it was Running that helped me see that Bulimia had never been my friend at all.

End note. I want to remind anyone reading this (again!) that this is merely just my personal experience with bulimia and running, and that running may not be the answer for you in recovering from your eating disorder. Please do seek advice from your GP before using exercise as a means of recovering. If you do want a space to talk about using running as a tool to aid recovery from bulimia I am always happy to chat over email. Jessica@runtalkrun.com - please do reach out for help or seek further support from placed like BEAT if you’re struggling.

10 Ways You Can Support Someone with Bulimia

Supporting someone with bulimia is hard.

Supporting someone with bulimia is confusing.

Supporting someone with bulimia is exhausting at times.

It can be really hard to know what you should say or how you should act around someone with bulimia. Should you eat normally? Talk about food at all?

As someone who suffered with bulimia, here are some things I wish I had the strength to tell those supporting me…

1. ASK THEM HOW THEY ARE DOING

2. Actually listen to the answer

3. Ask again if you get “I’m fine”

4. Keep inviting them to social events, even if it involves food. Try and organise some non-food socials too though

5. Don’t try and educate them on food/healthy eating. They know what is right and wrong

6. Don’t talk about your diet

7. Don’t talk about your own body image concerns

8. Avoid chat about burning calories - especially post Christmas

9. Don’t make any assumptions about their illness. Even if they don’t appear to be purging, it could still be bulimia.

10. LET THEM KNOW YOU ARE THERE FOR THEM. Even if they don’t wanna talk about things right now, let them know you’re there for them WHENEVER they are ready

Supporting someone with bulimia is challenging, and requires some superhuman lovin’. Don’t be afraid if you need to take a step back to look after yourself in the process.

If you’d like to get educated on what it is like to live with bulimia, I’ve written about my own experience with bulimia (and how if affects me today) in a blog post.

My Meeting with Talk Wandsworth

On Friday 20th September I had the pleasure of heading down to Tooting to meet the staff of Talk Wandsworth. It was such an uplifting "meeting" - not sure I can call it that but we'll go with it - that I decided to share it with you all.

Who are they?

If you're in their catchment area, Talk Wandsworth are your first port of call if you're struggling with your MH, essentially. They are a NHS service that will provide the initial assessment and then refer you to the most appropriate support following that. They also provide workshops and outreach to communities in the borough - providing skills like stress management, and hosting support groups for new dads, that kinda thing.

What was I doing there?

I was invited in to talk to the wellbeing practitioners team during their monthly "reflective practise" session. The aim of their reflective practise sessions is to provide an opportunity for the team to discuss cases that may have been particularly challenging, or uplifting, or different, or difficult... you get the vibe. It offers the practitioners an opportunity to share their experiences with the team and explore

- how it has affected them, directly

- how the emotive response it invokes in them, might affect their work

It's a chance for the practitioners to support each other, and raise concerns or questions or simply just air it all.

Another reason they host these monthly meets is to encourage the practitioners to think a little outside the box with their work... which is where Run Talk Run fits in nicely.

I was asked to 'present' RTR. Not just based on the service we provide but also because of the reasons that it exists in the first place (which is essentially a result of my resistance to formal therapy). It was BRILLIANT. The questions that were asked about our peer-to-peer service gave me so much reassurance that our message was truly heard by these legends working in the community.

It was so cool to indulge myself in talking about RTR with a team of people who truly "get it".

The Outcomes

• Many of the practitioners made a point of saying how this is going to be fantastic for the communities that they are serving, and how needed the space is - it will be another alternative support service that they can now offer to the people they are liaising with, which is brilliant

• They also picked up on the fact that we are a preventative measure against relapse

• They liked that we are tackling a problem of isolation/loneliness in the borough

• One lady said she was conflicted about whether she wanted to even tell her clients about it, because she so desperately wanted to go to it herself!

• They provided me with further details of the workshops that they host that I can share with the run-talk-runners in that local area

• Talk Wandsworth are putting together ideas on how they can support the RTR Run Leaders for the Wandsworth borough - what workshops/support they can provide (e.g. training in suicide prevention, etc).

• A personal outcome, aside from RTR... I was told how powerful my story is, and this gave me a real confidence boost that I needed to hear (hey we all need some praise sometimes) which has prompted me into wanting to really refine my "RTR journey" talk. I may seek some public speaking coaching.

On 16th October I will be attending a very similar service, in the borough of Westminster. On the back of yesterdays conversations I am super duper excited.