A Walk from the Wild Edge by Jake Tyler

Author:Jake Tyler [Tyler, Jake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241401187
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

12

Being part of Mind over Marathon, being involved in the creation of something that reached, touched and supported so many people, was and always will be the most extraordinary experience of my life, so I decided to let the dust settle for a few weeks after running the marathon before setting back off on the walk. I was getting recognized in the street, and as fun and humbling and dreamlike as that was for a while, I really didn’t want it to filter into the second half of my journey. I hadn’t thought about it before setting off, but I’d really enjoyed the anonymity of those first six months. Feeling like a ghost, wandering silently through towns and villages without disturbing the lives of others, observing constantly and interacting rarely, had had a profoundly calming effect on me, and after being thrown back into a busy existence of work and housemates and talking endlessly about my emotions on camera for six months I was keen to reclaim that anonymity and calm.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait long to stop feeling like public property. After a fortnight of new programmes and news items the world moved on. My fifteen minutes of fame evaporated and I returned to life as just another guy in a cap. It’s quite a transition. That little bit of fame is like being hooked up to a drip of pure dopamine: it gives you an intense, sustained feeling of accomplishment. And that makes it easy to get carried away with the whole thing, to feel like you were right all along and that you are in fact the centre of the universe and that you had been put on earth for an important reason. That’s why I felt I had to reground myself, because that wasn’t the right mindset to be heading back out on the road with.

Things had changed massively for me online. I’d gained thousands of new followers across my social media platforms, people who had seen the programme and were now contacting me for advice. It forced me to think about how to communicate with people I’d never met before about highly emotive and personal things. With no real knowledge of how to talk to people in this way and zero education to back any advice up, I struggled a little, not knowing what to do for the best. But the good thing was that it was making a previously difficult conversation that little bit more normal and relaxed. Discussing my feelings with strangers, I realized, was helping to normalize the type of language I needed to feel comfortable using when my mental health, inevitably, took a turn for the worse.

It’s also really interesting to hear how other people choose to articulate their emotions; it helps to understand what it is that so many of us are going through. I decided to invite some people to do something of a ‘mini-walk’ with me, so I could continue learning to talk to people about mental health in new ways.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.