Have you found your mental health compromised by excessive viewing of ‘One Day’ this year?
Found yourself crying buckets while your loved ones try desperately to reason with you “It’s fictional. It’s not real!”
Then entered into some sort of mental fugue state drifting around for days asking “why, God, why…when Dexter had finally changed!
OK – the above may be my autobiographical account.
But…if this has also happened to you recently…I have a cure!
A walking cure.
Because David Nicholls’ latest book is really clever for a few reasons:
– The premise is two virtual strangers who end up on a walking tour in the North of England through a mutual friend. And there are reasons why the spotlight is not on them getting together. So it highlights how much easier it is to get to know someone organically, whilst walking over a period of time. Rather than in a forced dating situation in some soulless posh restaurant.
– It highlights issues no one talks about much – like being childfree/childless. How isolating that can be in a world that focuses on families and children. And male broodiness – which Natalie Sutherland also brilliantly highlights in her latest Infertility in the City podcast
– And the experience of being out of step in ‘middle age’. When you’re in your late 30s and early 40s and out of the back of a separation/divorce when most of your friends are coupled up and busy with kids.
– And finally how trauma of all types can get stuck in our bodies. And how often just talking isn’t enough (I know that’s a weird thing for a counsellor to say).
But it’s that combination of physical therapy (whether walking, yoga, horse riding or anything else) and talking that can really shift it.
In this Mental Health Awareness Week dedicated to movement, I highly recommend this book 📕!