learning to walk

It was my twenty fifth birthday. I was sat in a cafe in Dalston, and I had the day ahead of me. I wouldn’t see my friends until the evening, and I was content. It was a feeling I hadn’t had in months - being able to see a day in front of me with no real aim other than to slowly meander for the sake of it, and not being terrified of that prospect.

Anchoring my day was a vague plan to find my Nana’s childhood homes. She lived at many different addresses in North London as a child, and I’d spent the last day listing them, itemising into plots that I could digest. The addresses - houses, flats and rooms that she either half-recalls or remembers brilliantly well - were all steeped in a feeling of motion. A road that led down to the old Arsenal stadium, that she could see from her house. A friend from when she lived on St Anns Road whom she used to walk to St Ignatius Church with to light candles. Two addresses in Clapton that are streets away from one another. The sense of having to move quickly and often, of having deep roots in the feeling of North London but not being anchored into one space.

I spent hours on my birthday walking between Stamford Hill and Clapton, down towards Angel and back again, trying to match names and numbers to the list my Nana gave me. A street that is viciously clean, whose numbers no longer match those I have scrawled in a book. A bedsit that her stepfather’s brother occupied on Great Percy Street; everything matched, but I got the feeling that if I lingered taking pictures someone would call the police. The buildings are the same as when he lived there, proudly displaying their heritage and restoration badges, but I don’t think anyone lives in a bedsit there anymore. I kept on walking.

Since my birthday at the start of April, my life changed dramatically. I finally got a job, I moved out of Buxton, and I now live in North London. Since leaving Buxton I have not stopped moving. Its been constant, on the Tube, on the bus, on a whim going to different parts of the city and seeing people or just looking around. Walking. Talking to people. Making friends at work. Going on dates. And everything has been fine.

In the eight months I spent living at home, I became frightened. The act of walking itself, alone, somewhere that was not within my immediate vicinity, became something that filled me with dread.

The main draw of moving home last autumn was being outside. To walk is to be at peace with the fact that for the next few hours, you have to concentrate on keeping your body moving. Relinquishing control and being exposed to people or weather, and simply allowing yourself to be in the world. The Peak District’s bleakly beautiful landscape was the perfect landscape to lose oneself in; barren, alien and deeply familiar. It shrouds and exposes you at the same time.

But because it was winter, dark and cold, I couldn’t to be outside. I would cut everything short; instead of going to the forests, I created circuits in the local parks, fields and pathways that felt more manageable. Tomorrow came, and I did the same, and repeat.

My old life fell apart with each step. Relationships, my identity and perceptions of my childhood, even old hobbies fell away as I forgot what it was that I actually enjoyed doing. I forgot the best routes to walk in Grin Low woods, or where the path was to HSL Buxton where sheep roamed around and explosions sometimes ring out. It doesn’t have the same romanticism when everything falls apart in the local allotments instead of on the moors of Stanage Edge.

The paranoia of small towns is something that creeps in slowly. Since a child I had always wanted to escape that all-encompassing anxiety, and instead found myself back inside the panopticon as an adult. It slowly crept on me that being outside was risky. Walking alone, in transit between places, was something to avoid. What if I saw someone from school? What if I had a panic attack? What if every other person I’ve ever met knew the whole time? Everything that was escalating around me compounded into a fear of being outside, a fear of wasting time enjoying myself without boundaries when I should putting all my energy into fixing my life. Everything turned inwards as the physical release of motion was unavailable and I felt it heavy on my spine, locked in a tight, painful twist of safety.

The routes that were safe in my mind became smaller, tighter, and less beautiful, often less than ten minutes, and I could only breathe a sigh of relief once I closed the front door once more. I made a beeline without pausing or deviating, my dog looking at me with pity as we circled the same routes, cutting through the same parks and pathways, over and over, because I was so terrified of being anywhere that wasn’t ‘safe’. When I re-broke up with an ex-partner (messy) in December, I sat on a bench at the edge of Grin Low Woods looking into the bare, blackened twigs covered in snow. It was beautiful, and I sobbed - I wanted so desperately to lie on the forest floor and listen to the snow creak in the branches in an attempt to feel something more than what I was able to, but I could not will my legs to take me there for fear that I would die.

So the walking I did on my birthday in April - the tens of thousands of steps - was monumental. I initially only walked along the route I had painstakingly made, not looking up except to make sure I turned down the right street. When my phone ended up dying, I found myself in the depths of Hackney without a clue where I was or what house I was meant to be finding. And even though my heart felt like it would, the world didn’t actually end.

Since I have moved, I have also not stopped writing. Most of it ends up in the bin, deleted or overwritten - and I am just realising now that this is a normal way to write, that not every idea has to work and not every sentence has to be perfectly written the first time around. And I keep kicking myself that I didn’t do this earlier; the months of unemployment whilst surrounded by open country should have been a perfect chance to write something substantial. But the fear of outside went hand in hand with a deep fear of being seen - as being fallible, failing and flailing, or just simply not being interesting enough. Standing still was safer than exposure.

My mother drove me to my new house a few weeks ago. She used to live in Finsbury Park in the late 90s when she worked at Madamme Tussauds. London is somewhere she remembers as a place she never stopped running in; blurred by a lack of sleep, of rushing and meandering at the same time, of not quite knowing what was happening, of being late and missing trains, loud pubs in Soho with friends she hasn’t seen in years, never in exactly the right place, being at peace with a constant sense of unease. As we walked down the streets I now live in, she pointed at things she remembered. Street names. A cafe. A stretch of grass. Anchors for a memory built upon constant motion.