Cycling out of darkness.

In my early forties, after years watching the joy seep out of life, my mental health went clean over the cliff.

Mental health crises often need a trigger and mine was a move out to the suburbs – a pragmatic compromise I’d been deeply wary about.  My unease built and built until a couple of months into our new life, I locked myself in the toilet at work and refused to budge. When I finally summoned the courage to track down my boss, she sent me home and told me to call her in a week.

Three months of paralysing, unfathomable despair followed, at its worst a total indifference to life or death.

My new life – the house and suburbs – was the focus for the gloom, but it wasn’t about that; depression turns your world a nightmarish monochrome, and my new home and neighbourhood bore the brunt – turning my roomy family house into a prison. Having lived central for 15 years, I was banished to London’s fringes, cut off from the connections that sustained me.

Box Park Croydon

In the weeks before my breakdown the biggest struggle was the commute. I had always cycled to work in 20 minutes. The convenience and exercise made “work-life” balance bearable, even if latterly neither work nor life gave me much joy. I had successfully reduced London’s sprawl to a network of familiar patches centred around work, friends and family. I had made my own village.

On moving to Croydon, I figured cycling to work – 15 miles each way along busy roads – wasn’t feasible.  I took the train and hated it from the off.  On my first week, a man my age threw himself under the train at my local station. I imagined someone like me – unable to adapt to life on the fringes.  The commuters seemed hostile and unhappy (early signs of depression’s distorting effect on perception) and the distance huge – the grey sprawl a deep ditch between my new and old lives.   

London commuters

I had also left a central part of my identity behind – the cyclist – with its youth, vitality and independence.  I saw myself part of an unhappy, slow-moving swarm, crawling unhealthily through London’s thickened arteries.

Time, medication and a change of season healed. 

Recovery was slow, but in clear, definite steps. I returned to work, still battling oppressive anxiety and paranoia, and bought myself a folding bike to avoid the Underground: the proximity of strangers was still terrifying.  Almost imperceptibly, I grew to enjoy cycling again. One warm evening in early spring, I cycled all the way home, taking my old route to Brixton and onwards through the dormitory towns to Croydon. I arrived home exhausted (one of the by-products of depression and medication was weight gain and a drastic loss in fitness), but also elated: I could still travel the city under my own steam.

The road opens out.

I ditched the train more and more often, until I was cycling the full 15 miles home through the linked high streets beyond the South Circular, past betting shops, fried chicken takeaways, halal butchers, Bangladeshi and Polish grocery stalls and the odd Wetherspoons.  I sold the folder and got my old steel road bike from the shed and was soon riding the 30 miles to work and back.

At first it was exhausting, and I’d arrive home ravenous, but as my body woke from months of inactivity and overeating, it adapted. The gloom started to lift.

One April evening, glancing down a side street of run-down semis at the setting sun, I felt a surge of fondness for the Southern hinterlands and joy at the ease with which I could cycle them. A simple contraption had re-connected me to friends and colleagues, people from whom I’d felt increasingly isolated. I also got to know parts of the city which had seemed blank.

Old steel

Released from my deep mental well back into sunlight, my slow re-awakening turned into exhilaration – a feeling closely connected to my daily cycles.  We know exercise boosts mental as well as physical health, but there was more to it; the self-reliance of bike travel had banished the sense that London’s scale had made me disappear. 

The city shrank.

I used my bike more and more, getting to Catford or Harlesden by direct routes rather than convoluted and sluggish train or car journeys.  There are satisfying “aha” moments connecting parts of a large city – probably familiar to those training to be black cab drivers: our brains rewarding us for knitting fragments of knowledge into a whole. 

Autumn and winter.

Even as autumn set in, and I needed lights and mudguards, I still relished the commute: it had restored my diminished self-worth.   As I edged towards fifty – an unwelcome landmark, signifying “late middle age” – I still felt youthful and fit. It is difficult to feel old zipping along on a bike (unless you succumb to the temptation to race people half your age) but it’s more than just physical.   

Azeem.

Last summer, during the temporary respite from lockdown, I arranged to meet a friend for dinner in Penge, five miles away by bike.  I was late so stopped to ask a man on a heavy mountain bike if there was a shorter route.  He was heading in that direction so suggested I follow. I wondered if he’d hold me back, but he was young and I struggled to keep up as he spun through back streets.  He took me all the way, and although we couldn’t shake hands, we traded names and good wishes.  He was an Afghan refugee, just a year in the UK. I still recall the kindest face and I’ve often thought of Azeem discovering his new life on two wheels, under his own steam. I wondered if cycling had saved him from isolation and anonymity in a huge city, as it had me.

The physical benefits are manifest – regular bike commuting is a miracle pill, slashing your chances of stroke, heart disease and cancers.  There may be less evidence of mental health benefits, but for me it was transformative; all the precious moments when I felt myself getting better happened when I was riding, the meditative rhythm of the pedals slowly massaging out the psychological knots and tensions that had insidiously formed over years.

Chances are most of us who take to two wheels will feel happier and healthier and eventually, those clogged arteries – ours and the city’s – will flow again.

Guest blog by James Henley.

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