A Midlife Cyclist by Rachel Ann Cullen

Author:Rachel Ann Cullen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blink Publishing
Published: 2020-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

23

THE REVIEW

I’ve reached the halfway point of my therapy course, and Dr G has emailed me to arrange our review. He’s not stupid, he knows I’ve been struggling.

It looks like it’s been a little while since you logged in. Please try to do that when you get a chance so you can read my messages. Let me know how things have been going for you.

Shit, SHIT! I’ve been rumbled. Dr G knows that I haven’t been completing my online BDD diary; he knows when I last logged on to go through my latest torturous module worksheets, and when I last completed one of my many ‘assessment questionnaires’.

I prided myself on being a good student, with my recently appointed Good Cop SWAT team dutifully on hand to identify and eliminate any interpretation traps, and now I feel like I’m letting him down. I’ve started to regress, falling back into my old ways, and not even making the effort to pick up and use the new tools I’ve been given. I begin to catastrophise that Dr G will be disappointed in me, and will wish that he’d never accepted me onto the BDD therapy programme. Shit, shit, shit! Plenty of other people could have benefited from this treatment, why has he wasted his time on me? Will he remove me from the course? Have I just blown my chance of ridding myself of this thing? Did I fail under pressure, simply because things got a bit much? How am I not even able to work my way through a twelve-week online therapy programme? Why have I stumbled now – at only the halfway point? And why am I here, wanting to quit when the going gets tough?

My head is still spinning with the prospect of going down to London to NOT take part in the London Marathon, and as it stands, that’s still the plan. But I can feel myself breaking down. Mentally, I feel vulnerable and, well, truly exposed.

I message him back my availability, which is later than he hoped due to my impending trip to London. I hope that Dr G will understand, and that he won’t feel let down. I’m not sure he’ll buy the whole ‘snowed under with work’ or ‘sheer busyness’ thing, but I’m kind of relieved that I won’t have to face him (literally) and his endless assessment questionnaires this week. I feel like I’ve bought myself a little more time to get back on the wagon, and to claw myself back out of this dark hole which I’ve fallen into right when I was just beginning to see daylight breaking through.

You can get there again, Rach. You can climb out of here again.

And so, I begin. For the first time in what feels like weeks (it’s actually days), I’m logged on:

‘Please tick the box that best describes how often you have thought about your appearance or a specific feature over the past week, including today:

(a) not at all;

(b) a little;

(c) often;

(d) a lot;

(e) all the time.

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