Knowing Your Limits: When is it too much?

A few weeks into starting my new job, and having just moved to London, I found myself in Foyles bookshop (despite swearing off all fiction since completing my English degree.) I decided to read Helena Morrissey’s Good Time to be a Girl, written in opposition to Sheryl Sandberg’s notion of ‘leaning in.’ I’d admired Helena for a while; she is incredibly successful, confident, glamorous, and in possession of exactly the kind of career I’d optimistically imagined for my future self. One of my favourite aspects of being so heavily involved in my university’s Women in Business society was that I was able to meet and converse with some of the most brilliant, self-aware, eloquent women in finance, law, fashion and media; Helena was no different to any of these women. She was in many ways even more so at everything than they were: a mother to nine (nine!) children, former CEO of Newton Investment Management, incredibly senior at Legal and General. A Governor of several charities. A holder of honorary degrees. A former Cambridge undergraduate. And she still had time for Pilates.

As someone who has always refused compromise to an absurd degree, and consistently tried to outperform expectations to the detriment of my physical health, mental sanity and personal life, I was drawn in by her lifestyle – or the way she described it. My brain chose to ignore, as it often does, the elements where Helena warned about the incredible difficulties of ‘having it all’: stopping mid-commute to vomit due to intense morning sickness, struggling to afford to bring up children and pay off a mortgage in the early days of her career, and of course her husband choosing to become a stay at home parent in order to make their lives more feasible. The truth of the matter is, as Helena of course acknowledges, is that her life would be impossible had people not been willing to make sacrifices: had she not worked weekends and cut maternity leave short, had she not missed out on certain elements of her children’s lives, had her husband not been able to freelance relatively easily, had they not been able to afford childcare relatively easily. Yet I was determined in some way, no matter how ridiculous and impossible it seemed, to match her: I approached my job with a new intensity, completing tasks at a greater speed, arriving earlier and leaving later. I did extra work on top of what I was asked to complete. I joined spin classes and signed up for a sponsored swim; I was determined to spend every weekend out exploring London or seeing my friends. Anything else felt like missing out or – worse still – failure.

A few weeks into this routine, the first warning sign hit me. As I was on my way to work, I started to feel faint and fell down some stairs. I was shaken but carried on with my day, despite feeling exhausted and nauseous. Two weeks later, it happened again; this time I was unable to go to work and spent the entire day in bed, waking intermittently. People around me were begging me to stop approaching everything with the same burst of intensity – but I still wasn’t ready to acknowledge that I was doing anything wrong. After all, I had my first vocational exam coming up for my qualification, and I didn’t just want to pass – I wanted, once again, to beat expectations. Studying while working is exhausting at the best of times, with classes for almost three hours after work finishes, but my intense pace of studying meant that I sacrificed lunch breaks, evenings, chunks of weekends and even my morning commute for extra studying. I was often exhausted.

One day after my manager had taken us for a team lunch, I suffered a violent episode where I experienced contraction-like cramps and was unable to walk properly for a couple of hours. This was the first time I had been truly terrified about my health in a long time; I called the doctor out of panic, who kindly and swiftly made me an appointment. The result of this was an examination, two scans and various blood tests.

As a sidenote, I had been living with various health problems such as cramps and exhaustion for a long time, and had put it down to hormonal birth control or something which was ‘normal.’ If even one person reads this and recognises the symptoms, please never ever assume any discomfort, pain or chronic difficulty you experience is normal. I was deeply fortunate to find a GP, at long last, who took my symptoms seriously enough to order me some scans and a thorough investigation. Prior GPs had simply told me I had low iron and left it at that. I have recently been diagnosed with adenomyosis, a condition in which the uterine lining becomes fused with the muscle which surrounds it, and which can cause a variety of health complications and fertility issues. It can be managed with hormonal or non-hormonal types of medication, and it is thought that one in ten women suffer with it, although there is a woeful lack of information on the condition. It is chronic and it can be debilitating, and as much of a relief as it has been to realise that there is something wrong that can be treated (for which I am so grateful), it has also made me learn a valuable lesson: learn your limits. There is nothing wrong with not being able to go out and stay out partying like you used to, nothing wrong with not having plans every day of the week, and more importantly, nothing wrong with having off-days at your job, or sometimes simply performing, not overperforming.

I have wanted to verbalise this for so long but have been unsure how to do it; this condition has enabled me to not put so many restrictions or pressure on myself and be kinder to myself and my body. I encourage everyone to do the same: we all speak about self-care but are then drawn in by social media and always feel that we should be somewhere else, doing something, with someone, or achieving something. Real self-care is recognising that you will not always be the best, and you will have low days or off days even when you try to push through them. It is also knowing that you deserve more than constant exhaustion or pain, and prioritising mental and physical health.

I am definitely still learning how to do this, and while I hope that my diagnosis will help me to push myself less, I know that I will need an occasional reminder that I am not superwoman (and neither, as wonderful as she is, is Helena Morrissey.) And that’s more than alright.