Let’s Talk Responsibility For A Change.

I fell in love with a guy who wrote an essay about the Death of Personal Responsibility back in his Cambridge days when Wham were still a thing. He’d written this over twenty years before we met. It was more smoking in the common room than actual personal heavy lifting but the sentiment was just as relevant in today’s world of smoking bans, global pandemics and an epidemic of preventable illnesses and obesity.

And what happens to these preventable illnesses when the hospitals have regained their composure and the world is finding a new way forward? Will there be a collective sigh of relief that stomachs can be stapled and heart disease can be treated? Or will one of the biggest tragedies of a global lockdown be the lack of personal responsibility with our own health and it’s collective improvement so when the next black swan event comes our way, it’ll be handled with grace and calm, not with panic?

I talk from experience. Not of the covid type, but of the cancer type. I was a pretty blase forty-two-year-old, you know, busy career, big social life, young kids, never made it to the gym but was always a perfect size 10 with tons of energy. Cancer had killed both my parents so I was on every family history watch list going and took that responsibility seriously, but never let it be a death wish hanging over my head. Until the inevitable happened. Seemed it was my turn, and it changed my life forever.

Not only did I fight for my health, but I learnt to fall in love with my body as it turns out it’s the only thing that separates us from life and death. And like any love story, we have our moments but on the whole, we rub along just fine. I understand the need to keep it healthy and in return, I get this bright and breezy emotional stability and snappy brain. It all works.

But what doesn’t work, is this seems to be the biggest well-kept secret for a huge chunk of the population. I’ll never forget the day I had to go to the cancer hospital for my first ever treatment. My hair was still long (and still on my head) I’d been eating really well and walking a lot every day (off work, time on my hands with an overactive brain to distract). My skin was bright and healthy (oh the irony) and, after sitting down on a bench in an overcrowded waiting room, I was like a star shining from within the waiting room walls.

I was approached by a do-gooding volunteer to offer her condolences for my predicament, but even she was puzzled why I was there and asked me if I was accompanying someone or was I actually ill. Feeling like a fraud in a cancer hospital is one of my all-time greats. Looking around at all the grey faces, expanding waistbands and lank hair, I had to ask the consultant if it were the treatment that caused all that or something I needed to prepare for.

Her answer has never left me. It’s the biscuit tin effect, she said. You get bad news and all sense of personal responsibility for one’s health is lost at the bottom of a biscuit tin. When your body needs you the most, the mind finds solace at the bottom of various receptacles be it tins, bottles or packets. At the time I was facing heavy-duty chemo and couldn’t contemplate anything other than healthy anything. A ginger biscuit perhaps when I wanted to hurl or a tiny glass of red wine on day 18 of the 21-day cycle if I was lucky but that was about as far it went. The worrying thing was the biscuit tin effect was allowed by those in the white coats. Perhaps that’s all anyone needs to have permission to work against the only thing keeping us alive.

I made it through my treatment, my skin tired and my hair dropped out but my eyes still sparkled and my waistband never stretched. All that was different between me and the others I encountered on my cancer travels was my belief that I could do this by loving the crap out of my body and giving it exactly what it really needed. And I mean basics like good food and exercise. Nothing more complex than that. And let’s be clear, I was a single mum living on a shoestring budget. I worked my ass off and made a success fo my stuff, but this was by no means a money makes it all okay type of thing.

I’m now eight years into my post-cancer life and aside from the odd celebration indulgence, my core belief that it’s down to me to stay healthy is as strong as ever. Of course, it ebbs and flows with life as anything does, but the fundamental principle that my health is kinda an inside job has stuck with me.

I’m blessed with a desire for a good education, a curiosity to do things better and a solid belief system that puts me and my family front and centre. I understand addiction and I work with people on a daily basis wanting to understand themselves better to stop emotionally eating, spending or drinking all in a bid to self medicate to hide away from the reality of life. I call that taking responsibility because, even if a person gets to me £50K in debt, 5 stone overweight or feeling like a high performing alcoholic, they’ve hit a spot which is screaming GET HELP! And they do.

My fear is the blatant disregard for life, creates a who cares culture that lets the health service pick up the tab. What if every single person thought, hang on a minute, if I cut back on all this, I might not need hospitalisation if I get ill, I might also get some more energy and then who knows where that might lead. Because one thing’s for sure, the health and economic crises that we’re all faced with right now will not improve by hiding behind junk.

When I was ill I read a book by Bronnie Ware The Top 5 Regrets of The Dying, it was the most uplifting book about dead people I’d ever thought possible. It taught me never to have regrets. I felt life was wasted with regrets, as I was facing my own cancer demons, I had to make peace with anything I’d ever considered a regret and not caring for my body happened to be one of them. The trick for me was to make that last a lifetime. I vowed to never have regrets and for no one ever to have regrets about me (I know that’s their deal, but if you read the book, you’ll see no.1 explains what I mean).

So what’ll be the wake-up call for anyone hiding from life? And how do you get to a place of looking forward to this time next year and being mega proud of what you did to take personal responsibility for your own stuff, emotions, finances, body, energy or just clearing out your outdated self sabotaging beliefs? Because not only will your body and newfound snappy brain thank you, so will your nearest and dearest and of course, just think of all the time you’ll gain from never having to recover from an illness because you saw it off at the pass, or spending any time in hospital other than for welcoming new life or to just know that the responsibility for your life is yours alone.