Help Me!

by Marianne Power

  I was amazed to see that almost all of them put their hands up.

  ‘And how many of you think self-help is for losers?’

  One old man in the corner and the young Bob Marley guy.

  ‘Well, I am that loser,’ I explained. ‘I am that sad soul whose only company in bed is a copy of Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus, the one who has the Little Book of Calm on her messy desk . . .’

  I got a few giggles at the mention of the names and then I relaxed a bit. I shared statistics I’d found about how selfhelp sales were booming: up twenty-five per cent in Britain since the 2008 crash. ‘We all need guidance in times of uncertainty,’ I explained, feeling very wise as I said it. I then made the argument that self-help was modern-day philosophy, dropping names such as Aristotle and Socrates, despite having read neither.

  ‘And far from being American, did you know that the first self-help book was written by a Scottish man called Samuel Smiles in 1859?’ I asked.

  After what felt like one minute, a green light came on at the back of the room to signal I’d been speaking for five. Then a red light was telling me my time was up. There was applause and I rushed back to my seat, cheeks on fire, knees shaking, heart pounding.

  I’d done it!

  Afterwards over tea and ginger nut biscuits, everyone was very kind.

  I was a natural! Engaging and funny! Was it really my first time? My head started to swell. ‘You made eye contact throughout the speech, which most beginners don’t do,’ said Captain Birdseye. ‘It’s called the Lighthouse technique and is usually done by advanced speakers.’

  ‘The first time I spoke I was so nervous I didn’t even make it to the end of my speech,’ he said. ‘That man over there –’ he pointed to Jammy Dodger man – ‘wasn’t able to get a word out, his lisp was so bad.’

  ‘I couldn’t hear any lisp,’ I said.

  ‘He’s worked on it. He came four years ago when he had to do a father-of-the-bride speech and then he stayed. We have fun. It’s a good bunch.’

  And it was. There was a glow in the room, a glow of support and encouragement, a glow of people helping each other to face their fears. This crowd was the opposite of my usual night-life in some too-cool-for-school London pub where the only time people look at each other is to size up the competition.

  At the end of the evening I was given an award for being the best newcomer. Jane, the president, called me to the front of the room.

  ‘Usually we give chocolates but after Christmas I know that we’re all watching our weight so I’ve got you this instead.’

  She handed me a box of Go Ahead yoghurt bars.

  ‘Only seventy-three calories!’ she said.

  ‘Brilliant!’ I beamed.

  Then I was given a certificate and my photograph was taken. It was pretty much the Oscars.

  On the bus home I tried to get my head around the fact that it had gone so well. I wondered how many other things I might actually be quite good at that I’d always been too scared to try?

  Maybe if I faced my fears instead of running away from them, I could be a whole different person. Maybe if I could get over my fear of looking like an idiot in front of other people, I could actually live life instead of always watching from the sidelines. And maybe if I didn’t always have my guard up, waiting for people to judge me, I might realize that they are there to support and help . . . because deep down we’re all as scared as each other.

  As well as daily fear-facing, Susan says we should build up a library of inspirational books and tapes to listen to instead of the news. News is bad, apparently; it only brings us down. This was a bit of a technical hitch, seeing as I was a journalist who had started every day of her working life by reading the papers. Oh well.

  As well as reading positive books, Susan recommends that you repeat affirmations throughout the day, such as ‘I am alive and full of confidence!’ or ‘I can do anything I want!’ The idea is that by repeating these statements over and over again, we drown out the more negative thoughts we usually have.

  These affirmations should be in the present tense and be positive rather than negative; so rather than ‘I will no longer put myself down’, I was to say: ‘I am becoming more confident each and every day.’

  You can listen to recordings of these affirmations, repeat them to yourself, or use the most valuable of self-help tools: the Post-it note.

  Susan says the best thing to do is to write affirmations on Post-it notes and leave them everywhere – your bathroom mirror, by your bed, by your desk . . . on your dashboard.

  ‘Go overboard,’ says Susan. ‘Be outrageous until your friends ask you what’s going on.’

  So instead of doing work, I channelled my newfound confidence and positivity into scribbling uplifting messages such as: ‘I love and approve of myself’, ‘I love my life’ and ‘Money flows to me’ on Post-it notes which I stuck on the wall behind my desk.

  I put the ‘It’s all happening perfectly’ Post-it – which is one of Susan’s favourite catchphrases – on my bedroom mirror. Susan reckons that no matter what is happening – even if it seems awful at the time – events are unfolding just as they are meant to.

  ‘The idea is that we replace our usual negative thoughts with positive ones,’ I explained to Mum, who called in the middle of my scribbling.

  ‘You mean you delude yourself?’ she asked.

  ‘No, you just try to focus on the good rather than bad,’ I replied.

  ‘You’re not going to go all American, are you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know . . . happy,’ she spat out the word. ‘People don’t like that, Marianne. It’s not real.’

  Sunday 12th January. My day of nudity had arrived. On God’s day, no less.

  I sat under a bus stop outside the hall trying to psyche myself up for yet another uncomfortable experience. The adrenalin that had carried me through so far had run out. I was tired. I didn’t want to fight fears anymore. It was raining. Again. And it was dark. I called Sarah.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Watching Sherlock, eating a curry. What about you?’

  ‘Getting my kit off for strangers.’

  ‘Oh God, yes! How are you feeling?’

  ‘Terrified and hungover.’

  ‘Did you get a wax?’

  ‘No, damn . . . I didn’t think of that. I wasn’t thinking of it like a date . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, they probably like to keep things real.’

  ‘I would pay a million pounds to be on the sofa watching telly with you, right now.’

  ‘You were the one who wanted to get out of your comfort zone.’

  ‘I know. Now I just want to stay in bed,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘You always want to stay in bed.’

  And I did.

  Sleep was one of my favourite things on the planet. I once wrote an article about a movement that was encouraging women to ‘Sleep their way to the top’ except instead of sex, it really was just campaigning for sleep. It was one of the best ideas I’d ever heard.

  ‘Come on, it’s exciting. Think of all the cool stories you’ll have in the pub,’ said Sarah.

  ‘That’s true.’ Pubs were another of my favourite things.

  And so, I took a deep breath and got naked. Came home and ate four slices of cheese on toast. As all the best models do.

  Tuesday 14th and I now had the most random to-do list in the world:

  • Stand-up!!! Where????

  • Watch The Exorcist

  • Book sky dive and spin class.

  I could do with adding: ‘Wash hair’ to it.

  And ‘Do some actual paid work.’ Fear-fighting seemed to be taking up every waking hour. To kickstart the day I went out for a power walk, muttering: ‘I do it all easily and effortlessly . . .’ I didn’t know if this was a smart way to reprogramme my subconscious mind or just a new form of procrastination.

  Thursday 16th and my head was
reeling. Life had become too weird.

  I went to a spin class with Rachel, thinking it would be an easy one to tick off the list. It wasn’t. After twenty minutes my legs gave way. I sat motionless for the rest of the class, while people with rock-hard calves went hell for leather in expensive Lycra. It was humiliating, worse than the naked modelling.

  Rachel promised me it got easier and I promised her that I had ‘felt the fear’ and gone spinning but I would never be doing it again.

  Afterwards I flopped out on the sofa and watched The Exorcist. Despite the fact that I get scared by Murder, She Wrote, I was not freaked out by the green puke and the flying furniture and neither did I get any satisfaction from ticking this fear off the list. Maybe because at the same time as watching the scariest film known to man I was googling open-mike comedy nights. A bit of demonic possession seemed like child’s play compared to being heckled in a sticky-floored London pub. My life was starting to feel like a Japanese game show and I didn’t like it.

  I did no fear-fighting for the next four days. Instead I watched old episodes of The Kardashians (Kim having more Botox) and wrote an article on thermal tights.

  The Positive Post-its on my bedroom wall kept falling down.

  Monday 20th and I was forced to get back to fear-fighting with a hospital and a dentist appointment on the same day. Who says the universe doesn’t have a sense of humour?

  When I was eighteen, I found a dodgy mole on the inside of my left calf, which turned out to be a malignant melanoma – one of the most serious types of skin cancer. I was meant to be starting university but instead I was in hospital having a tennis-ball sized chunk of flesh removed from my leg while the words ‘cancer’ and ‘chemotherapy’ hung in the air. The kind I had is fatal in thirty per cent of cases.

  The doctors believed the surgery was successful, but for five years I had regular check-ups to see if the cancer had come back. It was a scary time.

  Every time I had to strip off and lie on a paper-covered bed, while a consultant felt for lumps and bumps, my chest would tighten and I would think: ‘What if this is the time they find something? What then? I don’t want to die!’

  Fortunately I was given the all-clear when I was twenty-three and had – more or less – got on with life since. Then I’d noticed a dark spot on my back just before Christmas and so, in the middle of my fear-fighting month, I found myself walking through the same hospital reception as I had all those years before. As I lay on the same paper-covered bed and looked up at the same tiles in the ceiling, I remembered what it was like to be eighteen and not wanting to die.

  Here I was, thirty-six and still not wanting to die.

  I wasn’t ready to go yet. I’d wasted too much of my life worrying! I hadn’t done it right yet!

  Why did I worry about small stuff that just didn’t matter? Really, why? And why hadn’t I learned that lesson the first time – when I was eighteen? Surely that brush with death should have left me with a ‘life’s short, seize the day!’ mentality? But it hadn’t. Instead it taught me that things can – and do – go wrong.

  I was seeing a different consultant this time. This one looked ten years old.

  ‘I can’t say for certain until we do the tests but I’m not worried,’ he said.

  I was so grateful I wanted to hug him. Imagine having that job. Every day telling people whether they are going to live or die. Especially when you’re ten.

  I left the hospital feeling the same way I had after every appointment all those years ago – relieved but unsettled. I sat on a bench outside and had a little cry. I walked through the park and vowed to appreciate everything and not worry about stupid stuff anymore. I promised to be nicer to my mum and to be a better friend. I bought a cinnamon pastry.

  After all that life-and-death stuff, the fillings were easy. I had three done with no injections. The dentist’s assistant told me I was very brave. I had another cry.

  I’d like to say that after the hospital appointment the thought of stand-up comedy felt like child’s play – but it didn’t. The upside of cancer is that you don’t have to be funny about it. And, on the whole, people don’t boo you.

  But I didn’t have cancer, thank God or whoever is up there. What I did have was a slot on a weekend comedy course, in a pub in Paddington. I had also arranged to do karaoke and eat offal during the same weekend in a last-ditch attempt to tick off as many fears as I could before the end of the month.

  So at 10am on the last Saturday of January five of us congregated in the basement of the Mitre pub, hoping that comedy genius would strike amidst the smell of stale beer and Pledge.

  Ian, our teacher, asked us to introduce ourselves and talk about why we came. First there was a Finnish guy whose wife had given him the course as a Christmas present (‘She’s telling me I’m not funny anymore,’ he said), then there was a Greek Woody Allen who had booked the course while drunk, followed by a ‘six-foot-five poof from Liverpool’ (his words) and Jenny, an advertising manager from Manchester who had made a New Year’s resolution to do more fun stuff. And then me.

  Ian asked us to share who our favourite comedians were.

  I struggled to come up with something. The truth was that I hated stand-up. Even the good comics made me uncomfortable. It’s their neediness. Find me funny! Like me! Love me! I find the whole thing excruciating.

  I didn’t say any of this, of course. Instead I said, ‘Joan Rivers.’

  I gave them the whole fear-fighting spiel and they laughed. I told them about chatting up the guy on the Tube and about the naked modelling, they laughed again. I began to alter my views on comedy. Clearly I was a natural.

  We were then asked to do an exercise called ‘Rant and Rave’ which involved finding five things that drove you crazy and ranting about them for three minutes. I prattled on about hen dos and being single at a wedding, like some sort of tragic Bridget Jones and then half-heartedly moaned about the phrase ‘Let’s put a date in the diary’.

  ‘I work from home,’ I said. ‘I’m doing well if I leave the house most days . . . but everyone else is acting like they’ve got a schedule like Obama.’

  It wasn’t funny. My classmates were confused and I was embarrassed. I left at 5pm feeling like a woman with a death sentence to eat cow’s brains with Rachel at St John – a restaurant described as every vegetarian’s hell. I washed down the animal innards with buckets of wine so that by the time we got to the Bird Cage pub in East London, where I would be doing karaoke, I was in the perfect state of inebriation – still upright and able to read the lyrics but too drunk to care.

  I got home around 2am, with ‘Baby Don’t Hurt Me’ going around and around in my head. I woke up three hours later, half drunk, half hungover in a panic.

  I had to write a comedy routine. I had to stand up in front of people and say it that night. The thought made me want to be sick. And so I was.

  Back in the pub basement, the group agreed that I had some good lines but I had to work on my delivery. Ian asked me to speak with ‘attitude’ but I could do only one style of delivery: terrified.

  He gave up: ‘It’s OK. Even if you deliver it as flatly as you have just now, you’ll still get some laughs. Your desperation comes through. You’ve got that woman on the edge of a breakdown kind of vibe.’

  Great. I was going for self-deprecating.

  I practised my routine with Rachel before the show started. She didn’t laugh once.

  ‘I just feel bad for you,’ she said. ‘It really is hard being single at a wedding . . .’

  I ordered a large glass of Chardonnay and paced back and forth in small circles by the bar.

  I felt a strange numbness in my limbs and a high-pitched buzzing sound in my head.

  I ordered a second glass of wine. The acid liquid landed in my acid stomach, making me feel even more nauseous.

  I told myself that in an hour or two I would be home, on the sofa. Then I could watch television and eat some toast. Nobody was dying, nothing depended on this an
d, however badly it went, I could handle it.

  The room filled up with paying punters.

  My eyes were twitching with nerves and tiredness. My armpits were wet.

  Greek Woody Allen was up first. He talked about his therapist asking the same questions every week. He figured it was a therapeutic technique but actually the guy had Alzheimer’s. Jenny did a routine about a first date bringing out spreadsheets. And the tall guy from Liverpool pulled a blinder – turned out his dad was a Catholic priest who had left the priesthood when he met his mother! ‘And look how God repaid him – with a giant poof!’ he said. Comedy gold!

  Then it was my turn.

  The buzzing in my head returned.

  I stepped under the white spotlight. I picked up the mike from the stand.

  Bloody hell. You are actually doing this. It’s happening. You’re on a stage about to do stand-up comedy.

  I took a breath and looked out at the silhouettes of heads in the audience.

  I waited for a wave of panic to come but, well, it didn’t. I was so tired I had gone past caring.

  I started talking. I told them about my fear-fighting month.

  I acted out the ballet poses I had done in the life modelling class. I could hear laughs. I told them about Mr Jumper making my arse look bigger than Australia and about Mum worrying that self-help would make me ‘all American’. More laughs. Not uncontrollable give this girl a Perrier Award laughter, but real, honest laughter.

  I talked about being put at the kids’ table at a wedding.

  ‘There’s nothing like sitting with a bunch of teenagers playing Angry Birds to make you wonder where you’ve gone wrong in life,’ I said. That got another laugh. It might have been a pity laugh but I didn’t care.

  And then, in a flash, it was over. My comedic debut, done. I floated back to my seat. Rachel looked amazed. ‘It was funny!’ she said. ‘Really!’

  I sat in dazed silence as people started to gather their things, ready to go home.

  I went into the loo and looked at myself in the mirror. My skin was greasy with sweat but my eyes were beaming. I’d done it. The most terrifying thing I could think of, something that most people would never in a million years do . . . I’d done.