Help Me!

by Marianne Power

  ‘That’s a good one!’ I said.

  She laughed.

  ‘No, really it is, it’s a classic, it was written in the Great Depression. I’ve read it at least three times.’

  ‘You’ve read it three times?’ said Sarah.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘And you think it’s helped you.’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘You don’t worry anymore . . .?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  By now she was doubled over, tears coming out of her eyes.

  I wanted to get annoyed but I couldn’t. I worried more than anybody I knew.

  I was a poor advert for that book and indeed for any of the books on my shelf – or rather the ones hidden under my bed. I was proof of the argument that if self-help really worked you’d just need to read one and you’d be sorted. As it was I was buying at least one a month – and yet here I was, hungover, depressed, neurotic, alone . . .

  So why did I read self-help if it didn’t, well, help?

  Like eating chocolate cake or watching old episodes of Friends, I read self-help for comfort. These books acknowledged the insecurities and anxieties I felt but was always to ashamed to talk about. They made my personal angst seem like a normal part of being human. Reading them made me feel less alone.

  Then there was the fantasy element. Every night I’d devour their rags-to-riches promises and imagine what life would be like if I was more confident and more efficient, if I didn’t worry about anything and jumped out of bed to meditate at 5am . . . There was just one problem. Every morning I’d wake up (not at 5am) and go back to life as normal. Nothing changed because I didn’t do anything the books told me to do. I didn’t do the ‘journaling’, I didn’t say any affirmations . . .

  Feel the Fear changed my life the first time I read it because I took action: I felt the fear and quit my job. But since then I hadn’t stepped out of my comfort zone – I’d hardly stepped out of bed.

  And then with Sunday’s hangover finally fading, while I re-read Feel the Fear for the fifth time, I had an idea. An idea that would stop me being a depressed, hungover mess and turn me into a happy, highly functioning person:

  I wasn’t just going to read self-help, I was going to DO self-help.

  I would follow every single bit of advice given to me by the so-called gurus to find out what happened if I really did follow the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Really felt The Power of Now. Could my life be transformed? Could I get rich? Skinny? Find love?

  The idea came to me fully formed: One book a month, followed to the letter, to see if self-help really could change my life. I would do it for a year – so twelve books in all. And I would systematically tackle my flaws one book at a time: money, worrying, my weight . . . Then, at the end of the year, I’d be . . . perfect!

  ‘OK, but you’ve got to actually do stuff,’ said Sheila when I told her my idea on the phone a few days later. ‘You can’t just read books that make you analyse your feelings for the whole year.’ Her tone implied I’d just use this as a massive opportunity to navel-gaze and become even more self-obsessed than usual.

  ‘I will do stuff!’ I snapped. ‘That’s the whole point.’

  ‘Which books are you going to follow? Have you got a plan?’

  Again, a dig. Sheila knows I never have a plan.

  ‘I’m going to start with Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway because that had a big effect the first time I read it and then I think I’ll do a money book and then, I don’t know. In selfhelp land they talk about the right book finding you at the right time,’ I said.

  I knew I sounded flaky.

  ‘Are you going to do books you’ve read before or new ones?’ she asked.

  ‘A mixture,’ I said.

  ‘Are you going to do a dating book?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘And when?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sheila! Later in the year. I want to work on myself first, then I’ll think about a man.’

  I hated that I used the phrase ‘work on myself’.

  ‘So what exactly do you want to get out of all this?’ Sheila asked. This is why she gets paid the big bucks. To see the flaw in any plan.

  ‘I dunno. I’d just like to be happier and more confident and get out of debt. I’d like to get healthier and drink less—’

  ‘You don’t need a book to drink less,’ Sheila interrupted.

  ‘I know you don’t!’ I said, taking a quiet gulp of wine.

  ‘OK, but you have to actually DO things. Not just talk about them.’

  ‘Yes, Sheila, I get it. I will.’

  But even Sheila’s realism couldn’t get me down. I got off the phone, closed my eyes and imagined how perfect I would be at the end of the year.

  Perfect Me would not worry or procrastinate, she’d get her work done easily. She would write for all the best newspapers and magazines and earn obscene amounts of money doing it – enough to get braces to fix her dodgy teeth. Perfect Me would be living in a gorgeous apartment with big windows. She’d have bookshelves full of highbrow literary books that she actually read. At night she’d go to swanky gatherings where she’d look gorgeous in low-key but expensive clothes. And she’d go to the gym all the time. Oh, and she’d have a handsome man in a cashmere jumper by her side. Goes without saying.

  You know the kind of perfection you see in magazines: those interviews with perfect people in their perfect homes with their perfect outfits talking about their perfect lives? I was going to become one of them!

  It was November now, so I’d start in January. New Year, New Me.

  I felt a jolt of excitement. This was it. This was the thing that was really going to change my life.

  I had no idea then that my neat twelve-month plan would turn into a sixteen-month roller coaster in which every bit of me was turned inside out.

  Yes, self-help changed my life – but was it for the better?

  1

  Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, by Susan Jeffers

  ‘Take a risk a day – one small or bold stroke that will make you feel great once you’ve done it.’

  Wednesday 1st January and I’m standing on a wooden deck, looking down at the mud-brown pond. Icy air is whipping my legs and it’s starting to rain.

  A blackboard propped on a chair announces the temperature of the water: five degrees Celsius. Nearly freezing. Goosebumps stand to attention on every inch of my skin.

  ‘Have you swum in the Ladies’ Ponds before?’ asks the matriarch standing guard by the water. Her voice is as bracing as the weather and her accent suggests she may own half of Hampshire.

  ‘No,’ I reply.

  ‘The water can be quite dangerous at this time of year. It’s extremely cold.’

  ‘OK,’ I say.

  ‘When you get in you should take a long breath out.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘That will stop you hyperventilating.’

  Oh, God.

  I look around at the huddle of middle-aged women with damp hair holding cups of steaming tea. If they can do it, so can I. Right?

  I put my first foot onto the icy-cold metal step and then my second. Then down another step. My right foot hits water. A shot of pain.

  ‘Fuck!’ I say.

  My left foot goes in. I shriek again.

  I don’t want to go any further. This was a really bad idea. I am not the kind of person who swims in the middle of winter. I get cold standing by an open fridge.

  I turn around and see a queue forming behind me. I can’t back out now, everyone is looking at me.

  I keep going until I am in up to my waist. I gasp for breath. Then it comes: the sensation of being stabbed by a million tiny icicles.

  The icicles were Sarah’s idea. She might not be a fan of selfhelp but she would cheer me on no matter what I did. I could have told her I was becoming a Scientologist and she’d say ‘Cool, you’ll meet Tom Cruise!’

  ‘I was th
inking about scary things you could do in January,’ she said, when we met before Christmas, in a pub off Charlotte Street.

  ‘I was watching Kitchen Nightmares last night and was thinking you could work in one of Gordon Ramsay’s kitchens and have him swear at you,’ she continued, shouting over Slade wishing everyone a Merry Christmas on the speakers.

  ‘That would be scary,’ I agreed, to humour her. There was no way on earth I was going to do that.

  ‘And Steve says you could streak at a football match . . .’

  ‘Right . . .’

  ‘Or shave your hair off . . .’

  ‘I don’t want to shave my hair off!’ I said, unable to indulge this line of thinking any longer.

  Sarah looked at her phone and read out more suggestions from a list: ‘Dump a friend and tell them exactly why you hate them. Not me, obviously . . . Oh, and this is the best one! You could write an erotic story and send it to your mother!’

  ‘Oh my God. Why the hell would I want to do that?’

  ‘It’s scary, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. It’s just gross.’

  ‘It’s scary gross.’

  ‘Where are you getting this stuff from?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, I was lying in bed last night and they just kept coming to me!’ said Sarah.

  ‘The point is to face fears I have in my everyday life – not do a load of random stuff which is going to get me arrested. And anyway, how exactly am I going to get into a Gordon Ramsay kitchen?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll figure it out – you’re a journalist, aren’t you?’ said Sarah.

  ‘I write about mascaras.’

  ‘So what are you going to do, then?’

  ‘I don’t know – things like open my bank statements and answer the phone, do my tax return . . . the real things I’m scared of.’

  ‘You’re going to spend January picking up the phone?’ said Sarah in a tone that made it clear that I was not going to be allowed to do that.

  ‘I think you should start by jumping into Hampstead Ponds on New Year’s Day. Face your fear of the cold.’

  And actually that was a good idea. I really was scared of the cold. Sarah and I once went to my best friend Gemma’s house in Ireland in February. I was so freezing I went to bed wearing every item of clothing I’d packed – including my coat. I spent most of the week too scared to leave the radiator.

  And so it was that on 1st January I took an outdoor swim on one of the coldest days of the year.

  Sarah did not come with me. She had been out till 4am and was now lying in a darkened room sending me text messages with splashy emojis. Gemma was cheering me in spirit from Dublin, where she was looking after her newborn baby, James.

  Instead my friend – and new flatmate – Rachel had agreed to come. Just before Christmas, she’d taken pity on me, offering me her spare room so that I could get out of the bankrupting basement.

  She’d promised to swim with me as if it was no big deal. I didn’t think she meant it. I figured that she’d wake up on New Year’s Day, look at the stormy skies and suggest we do lunch instead. I’d be able to get out of it and blame her. It didn’t happen that way. Rachel knocked on my door at 10am, with a towel over her shoulder.

  ‘Ready?’ she asked.

  ‘Are we really doing this?’

  ‘Yes, of course. It’ll be fun.’

  ‘But look, it’s raining outside, it looks horrible.’

  ‘We’re going to get wet anyway.’

  ‘We could just go and get some lunch somewhere . . .’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be a wimp. This was your idea.’

  And that was the problem. I was good at ideas. I was also quite good at talking about ideas. Doing them, though, well, that was different.

  As we walked through the dense wooded path to the ponds, the chatter of voices got louder. We arrived to find at least thirty women, dressed in woolly hats and padded anoraks, gathered around a makeshift table full of sausage rolls, mince pies and a giant vat of mulled wine.

  It looked fun. If only we could skip the bit where you get into the water.

  ‘Is it very cold?’ I asked an elderly woman getting dressed in the changing hut.

  ‘It’s over very quickly,’ she said, smiling with blue lips.

  And it was.

  At first the water felt so cold I thought I was going to die.

  I panted and splashed my way through it like a frantic puppy.

  Within seconds I could feel a cramp in the back of my neck and another in my right foot.

  It hurt. The water hurt. Every bit of my body hurt.

  I kept moving though and, slowly, I started to feel warmer. Well, maybe not so much warm as numb, but that was fine with me.

  I started to calm down.

  Everything went silent bar the sound of my heart pounding in my ears.

  I looked at the weeping willows watching over me, as my limbs cut through the silky water.

  This is what it’s like to be alive, I thought.

  I kept moving.

  It was beautiful.

  And then it was done. I grabbed the silver rails and pulled myself up the steps.

  A woman in an orange swimming hat was rubbing herself down with a towel. She must have been seventy and was wearing a pair of pink Marigolds. She beamed at me.

  ‘Can you think of a better start to the year?’

  My body flushed with warmth. I was tingling and grinning from ear to ear. Every inch of me felt alive.

  ‘No, I really can’t,’ I said.

  And I meant it. In that freezing five-minute dip, I had crossed a major line – the line that takes you from being someone who talks about things to being someone who actually does them. The world felt full of possibility. My year had started.

  Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers was published in 1987, the era of shoulder-pads, Margaret Thatcher and Cosmopolitan magazine.

  While other self-help books at the time were written by men, telling women how to find love and keep love, Feel the Fear was written by a woman telling other women to just go out and do something – do anything. Not for someone else but for themselves. Its tone is upbeat but no-nonsense – and as I re-read it during the no man’s land between Christmas and New Year, I felt a familiar rush of motivation. The trick now was to act on it, just as I had in my twenties.

  Susan’s basic premise is that if we sit around waiting for the day that we feel brave enough to do the things we want to do, we’ll never do anything.

  The secret of happy and successful people is not that they are any less scared, she says, but that, you guessed it, they ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’.

  In fact, according to Susan, we should be scared every day because that’s a sign that we’re pushing ourselves and moving forwards. If you are not feeling any fear you are not growing.

  ‘Basically, I have to do something scary every day,’ I said to Rachel, when we were back at the flat making bolognese after our swim.

  ‘So what is the scariest thing you can think of doing?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘Stand-up comedy. The thought of it makes me want to be sick.’

  ‘Hang on,’ she said – running off to the living room and coming back with a notepad. ‘Write that down.’

  ‘Why? I’m not going to do stand-up.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  ‘No, come on. I’ll do scary stuff, I promise, but I don’t need to go that far.’

  But it was no good. She’d written ‘STAND-UP’ in capital letters.

  ‘What else?’ she said, pen in hand.

  I felt panic rising.

  ‘Um. Asking a guy out or chatting up a guy, or anything guy related.’

  ‘You should ask a man out on the Tube in rush hour.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just to make it interesting.’

  ‘No way. I’m not doing that.’

  She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘OK,’ I answered.

  By the end of the e
vening, we’d come up with a list of scary things for me to do in January:

  1. Stand-up comedy

  2. Chat up a guy on the Tube

  3. Ask out a stranger

  4. Sing in front of a crowd

  5. Public speaking

  6. Pose naked for a photographer or an artist

  7. Watch a scary film (which I hadn’t done since Misery traumatized me, aged thirteen)

  8. Go to a spin class

  9. Confront someone about something they’ve done to upset me

  10. Ask for a discount in a shop or haggle (mortifying)

  11. Get the four fillings I need

  12. Get the mole on my back checked out

  13. Eat offal (puke, I was a coward about any meat with chewy bits, mushy bits . . . or just bits in general)

  14. Skydive or do something daredevil-y

  15. Cycle in London

  16. Find out what people think of me (the bad stuff)

  17. Parallel parking

  18. Drive on motorway

  19. Lose my temper (I never did. Ever. I was too repressed and scared it would make people hate me)

  20. Use the phone every day (I really hated the phone).

  That night I couldn’t sleep. My brilliant idea now felt very real and I didn’t like it. I did not want to jump out of a plane and never in a million years did I think I’d do stand-up comedy. That was for other people. Wacky, thrill-seeking, masochistic people. People who were, possibly, a bit nuts.

  Was I a bit nuts?

  I started small on 2nd January – with a spot of parallel parking. Not exactly dramatic, but I hadn’t tried it since my driving test when I was seventeen. On the rare occasions I did drive, I preferred to park three miles away than to suffer the stress and embarrassment of trying to get into a spot while cars piled up behind me. It seemed so stupid to let such a tiny thing, a thing that people do every day, become something I avoided my whole life.

  Susan says there are three ‘levels’ to every fear. The first level is the ‘surface story’ – in this case the fact that I hate parking. Underneath this fear is the ‘Level 2 fear’ – which is the deeper ‘ego’ fear of looking like an idiot. Susan writes: ‘Level 2 fears have to do with the inner state of mind, rather than exterior situations. They reflect your sense of self and your ability to handle this world.’ But underneath this fear is the deepest fear of all, the fear which Susan says is underneath all fears – a fear that you won’t be able to handle the feeling of being an idiot who can’t park. Susan has one answer to this: ‘YOU’LL HANDLE IT.’