My walk of life: “Walking eased my addiction”
After an unhappy stint at university, Richard Shrubb became hooked on drink and drugs before finally being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. But a love of walking and the outdoors helped get his life back on track…
I remember visiting the Alps with my parents when I was about four. We were sitting outside a restaurant amidst the most spectacular alpine scenery. My dad wanted to take a photo: he told me to climb on top of a fence, so he could get a shot with the mountains behind me. As I was climbing the whole place fell silent. What the other diners knew and we didn’t was that there was nothing on the other side of that fence except a drop of about a thousand feet. They all thought I must be suicidal. I wasn’t, not then. That came later. I spent a lot of my childhood in the outdoors. My parents were in the military and we lived in lots of different places, but the countryside was never far away. Some of my fondest memories are from when we lived in the States, where my dad and I used to disappear for days at a time on walking trips in the Blue Ridge Mountains. After I finished school, I went to Southampton University. I’d been excited about moving to a city, but I found it hard to adjust. It seemed so lonely and unfriendly. I started drinking heavily and got into drugs – cannabis and acid mostly – and that’s when my life started to go off the rails. In 1997 I moved to Bristol under a cloud, in trouble with the law for something I’d done while drunk. By now I was an addict. I thought city life would bring me enjoyment and success; instead it brought misery and despair. There was so much going on and I was just an anonymous face in the crowd. I could go into a different pub every night for a year, get banned from all of them and still have places I could go and drink. I was all over the place: sometimes I’d be frenziedly high, other times suicidally low. I became paranoid and started to mix up what was real and what was in my head.
In 1999 I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. That was the start of my recovery. I knew that to get better I had to stop drinking, so I took medication that makes you violently ill if you have any alcohol. I didn’t know what to do with myself without drugs or booze, so I went back to something that had helped me feel at peace while I was growing up – walking. I’d strap on my boots and sweat it out on a Cornish coastal path, covering about 10 miles a day. As I walked it was almost as if I could feel the addiction leaving me. I always came back feeling better. The exercise did great things for my body as well as my mind; I went from a size 38 waist to a 36. Five years later I felt I’d finally got my life back. I completed an MA in Journalism and was thrilled to be offered a job in broadcasting. That was, until I happened to mention I had schizophrenia. The offer was revoked. That came as a hard blow, but in the end it made me all the more motivated to be successful and prove how wrong their prejudices were. Not long afterwards I met my wife. She’s a lover of the outdoors too and we bonded over long walks in the countryside. Together we realised that the city didn’t suit us. Two weeks after we got married we moved to the Forest of Dean. We now live in a lovely big house where we work together running our own media company. We work hard, but with flexible hours. If I want to shut my computer down and go for walk, I can. We often take a trail that crosses the river Wye and leads us past a field of wild mint – the smell is amazing. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to say I’ve beaten schizophrenia, but I can certainly tell you I have it under control and I’m now getting on with enjoying life. Like a lot of people, I still sometimes need a reminder that there’s more to life than my desk, and now I have it right outside my door. At this time of year the colours are simply knock-out. Interview by Julia Buckley
YOUR WALK OF LIFE
Do you have a story to tell about a life-changing walk or how walking has transformed your world? Contact us at walkmag@ramblers.org.uk
