It was a warm school day when I lost myself entirely and my mind and body became possessed by a stranger. It was the transformation of a minute, a shuddering loss of innocence, a single comment and the way I saw the world changed forever. This is probably of little consolation to any parents reading this who have watched their daughter go through a similar mutation, but if you found this shift bewildering, I promise it was far more so for her.
It happened just after my 14th birthday. Summer was starting to click in and the whole school had that looseness and lightness that comes when it gets warm enough to leave your blazer at home, the prospect of the long holiday becoming tangible. Despite the fine weather, we were told we were having PE inside the gym. As PE developments went, this was good news because while throwing a ball around the gym wasn’t my preferred pastime, it was preferable to running up and down the hockey pitch.
Teachers often described me with the twee word “bookish” but really I was just lazy and happiest inside, ideally sitting, with a book or watching a movie. My parents were the same, so I grew up thinking of exercise as something other people did.
I wasn’t one of the super-rich kids, which at my school was synonymous with being one of the popular kids, and I obviously wasn’t one of
