One Foot in Front of the Other

By Jess Kershaw

Image by Cole Keister, via Unsplash 

There’s a game that a lot of women end up playing. We don’t particularly like playing it – though we often find a  masochistic solidarity in doing so — and nobody gets to win. It’s called the Comparison Game, and I was a world champion.

I’m sure that many of you have read the think-pieces about how us normal women look at Chrissy Teigen, or Jennifer Lawrence, and think that we need to aspire to their perfectly structured lives, and their perfectly structured thighs. I’m not saying that this compulsion is easy to deal with; it isn’t. But that’s not what I want to talk about, because those women weren’t the unwitting participants in my own personal game of Who Wore It Best.

No, that unfortunate role went to my friends; my family; women I saw every day. I looked at their bodies, and I looked at my own, and I found myself wanting.

I didn’t dislike my body in its component parts. I was (and am!) fond of my long legs, and I think my eyes are pretty. But I despaired of my body’s capabilities. I was never sporty at school — partly because of a total lack of natural talent, but mainly because of the crushing terror I felt at the idea that I might be less than brilliant at something. I couldn’t exceed at sport without trying; therefore I didn’t try at all. I slipped quite naturally into the role of the child who is book smart, but can’t play netball. There’s a sort of child who cannot stand the thought of trying and failing, because their brittle self-confidence rests entirely on success.Trying doesn’t count, because from this point of view it is better not to try at all than to try and fail, which would prove that  you’re dogshit at everything (something you’ve suspected all along).

I don’t mean to ramble about anxiety. It’s just that the two are tied together – the anxiety and the body image. I couldn’t do anything even remotely physical (or so I convinced myself); therefore I shouldn’t try, because I’d fail; and because I didn’t try I couldn’t do it….

You see how it goes: a whirlpool, sucking all potential away.

It became a simple fact about myself. My hair is brown. My eyes are blue. My body is not good enough. And the corollary: other girls have better bodies than me. My friends will climb to the base camp of Everest. They will play cricket and slay, dressed head to foot in glistening white, wielding those lethal balls like weapons. They will greet the dawn with yoga. They will run marathons, plunge into swimming pools like dolphins; they will rock-climb and ice-dance and play hockey with all the savagery of a Canadian bear. I won’t.

Last year, as my thoughts fermented and boiled — I can’t remember exactly what set it off, only that I was caught in the middle of a particularly vicious round of the Comparison Game — I signed up for the Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge. When I was eight years old, I climbed Snowdon with my mother, and I had a vague memory of enjoying it. Besides, it was walking. Twenty-six miles wasn’t too far, was it? And only three almost-mountains. I coaxed my boyfriend and a friend of ours into joining me, and forgot all about it.

Three months before we were due to go, I panicked. Acting in haste and repenting at leisure was sort of my trademark, so my boyfriend wasn’t surprised when I phoned him in a panic, saying I need to delay it like I hadn’t read that the deposit was non-refundable, like we hadn’t booked accommodation. I’m not ready.

What I didn’t say to him was this: you don’t understand, my body isn’t good enough, it will never be good enough, I’m not the sort of girl who works and works until she succeeds, not at things like this. I cannot do this, I said, and I meant: I cannot even attempt to try, because if I try and fail then that is worse than not trying at all.

But I’d spent eighty quid on the thing already, and I’m on an Editorial Assistant’s salary; I’m an anxious wreck, but I couldn’t just let that money go to waste.  

So. I posed a different question, one that the Comparison Game had never let me ask, one that little Jess hovering on the edge of the netball court had never really considered: what if I tried? What if I let myself be shit — because that’s the first step to not being shit?

Oxford is ironed flat. The horizon is a straight line: green fields, blue sky, the sun between. All the blogs I read — and I read all of them — said that the most important thing to do was to climb, climb, climb. Lacking any other option, I jogged up and down my stairs; my housemate must have thought I had gone insane. In London, I climbed up St Paul’s Cathedral. My thighs throbbed with pain, sweat simmered under my armpits, and when I started my brain hummed along with the old rhetoric what’s the point of this you’re going to fail but by the third trip up, my brain had shut up. My thighs throbbed, and I leant into the pain, relishing the ache, because it hurt and I loved it, because the pain said that it was working.

You won’t succeed, said part of me. Having anxiety is like having a little saboteur in your head at all times, which can lead to the feeling that your brain is out to get you. That’s not really true — your brain is a phenomenal instrument, capable of holding all the motivation you need  and listing all the reasons why you will fail. I thought of being eight years old, my mother coaxing me up Snowdon with mini-eggs, and I took to talking to myself the same way. Come on, one more step. Just for me. Please. I was gentle with myself. That doesn’t come naturally, but I worked at it. And just like hiking: the more I practised, the easier it became. Cultivating that soft, motivating voice was just like training the muscles in my legs. It felt bizarre when I started — even unnatural — but I knew it was for the best, so I kept going.

Sometimes I found myself playing the Comparison Game again, pulling up lists of people I knew, displaying their achievements and my lack thereof: hey, your friend just ran 10k, how do you feel?

Well, I could respond, I climbed St Paul’s Cathedral five times this Sunday.

You should have gone to the gym as well, my anxiety would tell me, somewhat sulkily. It was confused. It had less to latch onto than usual. Normally, it succeeded in paralysing me with self-doubt – and then it could castigate me for being paralysed.

Yeah, I didn’t. I’m going to do so well at this.

I didn’t believe that the first time I told myself it. But by the fifty-eighth time, I was a little more convinced. I went on a practice hike with one of my friends (ironically, one of my favourite targets for the Comparison Game, due to her amazing cricket and sailing ability, and her annoyingly slender waist) and walked twenty miles and at the end of it my legs would not straighten, my feet were all tender, and I was delirious with joy, because I could do it, I knew I could.

And then there I was. Whernside is 756m high; a grey-green surge of grass and rock. The third peak in the Yorkshire Three Peaks challenge, it is a slope at one end; a thin plateau; a sharp drop at the other.

I had been walking for twenty-odd miles. The sun speared through grey clouds, turning the wet path to a stream of dazzling silver, and I breathed deliberately: in through my nose, out through my mouth. My calves had tightened noticeably; my hamstrings were two elastic bands, singing and stretched. When we started out, we hiked in a group, bunched together. Now we were strung out, in pairs or on our own.

My body wais a machine of flesh and bone, doing precisely what it is meant to do, working in perfect tandem with my brain (and my brain, for once, was quiet). One foot in front of another, and another, and another. There were some people ahead of me. Some behind. And I didn’t much care either way, because all that mattered was me and Whernside, my feet and the path, my lungs and the air.

There was no room for the Comparison Game, there on top of the world, as birds rose high on the thermals, clouds scuffling ahead of the wind. No room for doubt. The evidence of my ability rested underneath my feet, hummed contentedly in my calves, muscles reporting back that they were tired, yes, aching, yes, but finished? Never. These were legs that had spent months walking up and down Didcot’s one hill, legs that had been cajoled and sweet-talked into training in the rain, the cold, the flustering snow.

Here’s the thing. Completing the Yorkshire Three Peaks challenge did not cure me of my body issues. The Comparison Game still lingers at the back of my head. But I have cultivated a kinder inner voice – a gentler way of talking to myself about my insecurities. I don’t believe that these thoughts will ever quite go away — the niggling voice that mutters your body is not good enough — but I think that responding to them positively, kindly, with a gentle but firm yes it is is the way forward.

Those thoughts are part of me, as much as my brown hair and long legs and blue eyes, my heart and lungs and hands. Snarling obscenities at them is akin to snapping at a frightened dog. It won’t work. I am learning to recognise the Comparison Game for what it is: the shadow of a frightened eight-year-old girl who never wanted to try in case she failed. It is my duty as the grown-up woman I have become to remind that girl of how she stood on top of a mountain, conquering the world, and tell her: yes, my darling, yes you can.

(And for anyone who’s interested, I’m doing the National Three Peaks next year.)