How I Rescued My Brain Read Free Page B

faintly.
    IT’S DARK WHEN we arrive home. The house is quiet and cool. Amelia goes straight to bed. The other two kids are away. With cups of hot Ecco, Anna and I sit down at the dining-room table.
    â€˜What happened yesterday?’ I ask her.
    â€˜I got up in the morning, and you were wandering around the house. You had your business jacket on — that’s the first thing I thought strange. And you asked, in a sort of dreamy monotone, “Anna, what am I supposed to be doing?” I said, “You’re taking Emma and her friend Tina to camp after breakfast.” A few minutes later, you asked me the same question. You were white and your skin was icy. I sat you down at the table with a heat pack around your neck.’
    â€˜I don’t know if it was a dream,’ I say, ‘but were we in the Tarago and I … vomited? Does that make sense?’
    â€˜Yes. I wanted to get you to hospital straightaway. On the road to Lismore, you let down the window and almost threw yourself out while you vomited. We were doing one hundred kilometres an hour. I grabbed your shirt. I think you would’ve ended up on the road if I hadn’t.’
    I’m amazed.
    IT’S LATE. THE only sound in the house is Anna as she goes about doing things. I settle into bed, into the silence, with the darkness closing around me. My body lets go, muscle by muscle, and sinks into the mattress.
    Then, the pieces of the puzzle begin to join and a picture emerges: I’ve finally lost it. I’ve had a mental breakdown.

BEFORE

1
    JUST OVER THREE years earlier, in May 2006, I had turned up to the local outdoor swimming pool on a regular Monday. I came after work each Monday and Wednesday, for the adults’ swim squad.
    The complex, comprising a fifty-metre pool and a toddler pool, plus a spectator stand, picnic tables, and a lawn, sat on the land’s edge, with only a strip of car park between it and a seawall of rocks, which spilled onto the sand. A salmon-coloured sunset had already begun. At this time of year, it would grow in size and intensity during the swimming session, and arch over us so that we could look up at it — as we always did, grateful to live in such a beautiful place.
    We were a group of varying swimming ability, having in common the desire to stay fit: a fifty–fifty mix of men and women, most over thirty years old; teachers, health professionals, businesspeople, retirees. If we didn’t do this together, the invisible string that pulled us to these sessions would be gone, and we’d lapse into our individual, lackadaisical swimming efforts.
    The session began with warm-up laps. After that, we stood in the shallow end, bantering with our coach, our faces turned up to him — trying to delay his next set of instructions, to give our bodies a break and allow our breathing to ease. We still had the hard work ahead of us. The squad lasted an hour, and we regularly did 2.5 kilometres, pushed to make times and distances beyond anything we’d achieve on our own. I liked this. And I liked being told what to do, not to have to think: a contrast to my workday.
    Twelve years earlier, at the age of thirty-six, I had started in private practice as a clinical psychologist in Sydney. It was a stark difference from being employed: no morning and afternoon tea breaks, no collegial chats or regular meetings. I was on my own, and I had to make it work financially. Making it work meant seeing one client after another, writing report after report, all day. I also wanted to prove to myself that I could do what my training and experience had prepared me for, without a superior looking over my shoulder and without the smothering bureaucracy of the health and corrective-services departments I had worked for previously.
    Private practice meant doing the unfamiliar: signing an office lease, paying for secretarial support and marketing, business networking. It also meant versatility: offering a