Rachel Worrall

Posts Tagged ‘Management Consultant’

I like baths now. I used to be emotionally scarred by them. I had an English Teacher when I was 14 who was very into the environment in a not necessarily healthy way – he once wrote a school play for all of us 11-15 year olds, all about the death of the world from pollution. My angelic blonde-haired, green eyed younger sister was cast as Death – and he told us all that baths were for bad people who wasted water and that showers were but a necessary evil. Speaking to a group of boarding school students who had scheduled bath nights and waited, shivering in line at 6am, for one of the few shared showers, this all seemed a little beyond the pale.

My only other run-in with baths was during my working years as a management consultant when my parents suggested taking a bath before bed as a remedy for my almost permanent work-induced insomnia. ‘When you were a baby we gave you a bath before bed and that sent you off nicely’ they told me. But I also remembered them telling me that I was impossible to get to sleep and nothing would save me except a long walk. It didn’t work anyway, the insomnia and the bath thing. I got very bored sitting there, the water growing slowly cold and clammy around me – too jittery for sleep, too jittery for a bath. The only effect the suggestion had was to give me further jitters because I was now jittery that I couldn’t not have the jitters in the non-jittery bath. Intense.

Since I’ve had CFS though and my problem is lack of insomnia, I have rediscovered baths. I started with them again when I found I was too exhausted to stand up in the shower. First I sat in the bath and let the water fall on me. Then it occurred to me, sitting there, like Newton under his apple tree, that I should take a bath. And thus a whole new world was opened unto me. Bath lilies, salts, oils, powders, things that fizzed away between my legs and were coloured a powerful blue, I even bought a rubber duck, though I learned, after much searching, that it migrated with my 18month old nephew to the UK.

Perhaps it’s my star sign, Pisces, but I have come to love sitting in the hot water, scooping it with my palms and letting it fall in drops from my fingertips in a way that catches the morning light through the window. There is a real feeling of freedom, a feeling of it being impossible for anyone to get at me. There’s a feeling of great oneness, of the possibility again for health, for hope. There’s a time to contemplate, to think about yesterday, to look ahead to today. I’ve discovered that one of the key times that my husband and I talk is when I’m in the bath, him sitting on the toilet seat, talking away. I get out of the bath feeling stronger. For me, a CFSer, it’s a rare chance to regain that most precious thing: strength.