Ever since I’d gone to LA to report on a Zumba convention a year before, I’d dreamed of living there. With that in mind, I went online to do some imaginary house shopping. I couldn’t decide between something in the Hollywood Hills or something by the beach. Spanish bungalow or uber modern and glassy?
Then I spent twenty minutes looking at bathroom tiles for a house I didn’t have, in a country I didn’t live in. Aqua or green? Purple or blue? I did the same with cushions for my non-existent beige sofa. I kid you not, this got me stressed. What if I made the wrong choice? How much money was I spending on all this? Was I already bankrupt in my dream life?
As I looked at hundreds of pictures of perfect people in their perfect houses I got that familiar feeling of not being good enough. I wasn’t pretty enough to live in LA! Who would I be friends with? I’d be lonely in a big house on my own.
I found a picture of the old Mercedes I’d sat in but that didn’t inspire me either. A car wasn’t going to change my life.
I made myself some tea and cheese on toast and realized that perfect bendy skinny LA girls don’t eat carbs. I was failing my dream life already! I didn’t want to pick a future that meant cutting out cheese on toast.
By the time Rachel came home she found me half a bottle of red down, surrounded by mountains of paper at the kitchen table.
She sat down and picked up a picture of a house in the Hollywood Hills.
‘What’s this?’
‘My future home.’
‘Really? It doesn’t seem very you.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know, it just doesn’t. Why do you want to live in America? You don’t know anyone over there. Why can’t you be happy here?’
It was a good question. Why did I always think that happiness had to be somewhere else, with me being someone else?
I’d always thought that happiness had to come in the form of stacks of money and nice clothes and a fancy house, but maybe it didn’t. Maybe there were other ways to be happy? I didn’t want my life to be a giant shopping list.
Bloody hell, I really was changing.
I decided to change tack. Time for a new vision! The new me wouldn’t be money-obsessed and skinny – she would be happy and free and fun! I pinned up pictures of Indian temples and Moroccan tiles (not for my designer bathroom, but to symbolize a trip to Morocco). I added a picture of an old desk by a high window where future me would write wonderful, fabulous words. I put on a picture of a woman meditating, another doing yoga, a glass of green juice (the future me drinks green juice) and a courgette salad. There was a woman doing a handstand. I have not done a handstand since I was eight – but I liked her. She looked joyous in her upsidedownness.
Next to me Rachel was pinning pictures of picnics in the sun, country cottages and people around a table laughing. Her Vision Board looked like her life right now, full of simple pleasures, good food and good company. Not a designer handbag in sight.
‘Now we have to find a man,’ she said.
I went through a pile of Sunday supplements to go man shopping. It should have been a fun job but I kept looking at lovely smiley men and imagining them thinking, ‘Dream on, love, as if I’d go out with you.’
I started cutting out a picture of the man who designed the new London bus. There was an interview with him and he seemed clever and modest and funny. And he had nice curly hair. I googled him and learned he had a wife. I can’t have another woman’s husband on my Vision Board.
‘You’re over-thinking this,’ said Rachel.
‘I know, but it doesn’t feel right,’ I said.
‘So what do you want in a man?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. Someone nice.’
‘OK. What else?’
‘Someone kind, clever, funny . . . and twinkly.’
‘What’s twinkly?’
‘You know – just got a twinkle about him. And he has to be down to earth and successful but not too successful. He can’t be a dickhead.’
‘Why do you look so scared?’
And it was ridiculous but I was scared. It felt scary even thinking about what kind of man I would like because he wouldn’t like me back – why would he? He could do better than me and then I’d be rejected and hurt and what was the point in all of that? Better not to want it at all.
I was rejecting myself even in my fantasy life.
But this was exactly the problem – if you don’t think you deserve good things, you will not allow them to happen.
Gemma always talked about the time I got chatted up in a pub. The man probably ticked every box on my dream list – at least in the looks/job department – he was tall, dark hair, blue eyes, smiley and an architect. So what did I do when my future husband started chatting to us and asked me if I’d like a drink? I said, ‘No, thanks.’
I’d just come from a twelve-hour shift at work and looked rubbish – greasy hair, no make-up, dodgy office outfit – and couldn’t believe that a guy like that could seriously be interested in someone like me.
‘He’s drunk and trying it on with everyone,’ I said to Gemma.
‘No he’s not, you’re an idiot,’ she replied. I was. I am.
Rhonda says: ‘When you feel bad about yourself you are blocking all the love and all the good that the Universe has to offer you.’
I had been blocking a lot of things for a long time. It felt safer that way. Better not to dream at all than to dream and be disappointed. I had to get over that.
I started to google ‘Smiley handsome beardy men’ and passed a good twenty minutes looking at generic bearded men online. Then I remembered the email Sarah had sent a few months ago with THIS IS THE MAN YOU ARE GOING TO MARRY in the subject line. It was a link to an interview with the lead singer from a band called Snow Patrol. He was talking about being rubbish with the opposite sex and drinking too much. And he lived in LA. We were pretty much spiritual twins. I printed off a picture of him and stuck him on. And it made no sense but it felt so exposing to do this – to stick up a picture of a man and say that I might like one in my life.
After dinner I propped the Vision Board on the floor by my desk. As I lay in bed I looked at it. My dream life. And it looked nice. And the more I looked at it over the next few days the more I started to believe that these things were possible.
Maybe that’s what this book’s secret really is; it gives us permission to daydream about our futures in a way most of us don’t do after the age of five, when we would announce with no self-consciousness that we wanted to be astronauts or ballerinas or ambulance drivers. It stops us from making excuses and hiding behind so-called ‘reality’, something we start to do as soon as we hit our first teenage disappointments.
It was actually scary to dream big because it meant opening yourself up to disappointment when/if your dreams didn’t become reality. But it felt good to become much clearer on what I really did want. I had thought it was the car and big house stuff, but really what I wanted was peace of mind and friends and travel. Although, let’s be honest, I wanted the pots of cash too. My cheque for £100,000 was also pinned on my board. And the more I looked at it, the less ludicrous this dream life (even the cheque) seemed.
The Secret says that it’s not our job to worry how things are going to happen, but the whole glossing-over of the idea of ‘work’ still made me uncomfortable. I didn’t believe a genie in a bottle was going to work magic; I believed I would, with enough positive thinking and hard work.
Athletes believe in their success and visualize the moment they cross the finish line, but then they train every day to make that vision a reality. I remember watching a documentary about Usain Bolt. He might make his record-breaking sprints look like fun runs but the film showed him training so hard he vomited.
Was that ‘inspired action’ and the law of attraction? Or was it old-fashioned hard work?
Then something strange happened: four days after doing the Vision Board, I got an email from my editor asking me if I’d like to write an
article about kale being cool. I had to eat and drink nothing but kale for a week and report back – presumably from the toilet.
Days after putting up a picture of green juice on my Vision Board I was getting paid to drink green juices! I wrote about health stuff all the time, so the kale story wasn’t completely out of the realms of normality . . . but . . . two days after that the same editor asked me to write about a yoga class which involved hanging upside down . . . Universe, is this a sign? Maybe the magic does work. Now, if someone would just send me a cheque for £100,000 . . . then, I’d be convinced.
4
Rejection Therapy, with Jason Comely
‘You must be rejected by another person at least once, every single day.’
I was eight years old, traipsing around the playground. I can’t recall where my best friend or, indeed, my other friends were – but that day I was all on my own.
The lunch hour stretched ahead like a Sunday afternoon.
It had been raining that morning and the grey concrete was damp. Clouds sat heavy in the sky, another downpour was imminent. The world felt ominous.
Groups of girls were scattered around the yard. Some were hanging upside down, on the climbing frame, their navy pleated skirts tucked into their knickers. Others were playing hopscotch on squares painted in banana yellow. There was a group skipping too. Eggs, bacon, chips and cheese, which would you rather please . . .
I scanned the playground for anyone I could play with, someone else on their own, maybe. A safe target. But there was nobody. Instead I saw two girls from my class sitting on a bench, talking. Their legs were crossed in the way that they’d seen their mothers do. One was eating crisps and the other a little box of raisins. I envied their snacks. I was only ever allowed fruit and today’s banana was mushy. I knew them a bit but we’d never played together before. I walked over to them and hovered.
‘Yes?’ asked the girl with the crisps, whose name was Lucy T. There were four Lucys in our class. Lucy S, Lucy W, Lucy J and Lucy T. Lucy T was clever and had an older sister at school, which gave her a certain status. Her wild mousy curls were so thick she couldn’t even wind her hairband around more than once. She was with Lucy J, who had silky brown hair and spoke very softly. She also had big sisters and she had foreign stationery from Italy and France. This gave her double status. Continental notepads, with their tiny checked pages, were the height of glamour in our classroom.
‘Can I play with you?’ I blurted out. I worried as soon as I said it that it sounded desperate and babyish. I was eight. Too old to ‘play’. Why didn’t I say, ‘Can I sit with you?’ or ‘Can I talk to you?’ My mistake hung in the air. The girls looked at each other.
‘We’ll need to think about it,’ said Raisin Lucy.
‘Could you please walk a few steps away while we talk about it,’ said Crisp Lucy.
I walked a few steps away and pretended to look at a giant oak tree. Last term we had taken leaves from its branches and traced around them in class before putting them in a book to dry. We’d drawn acorns and felt its bark. I wished I could just play with the tree.
‘You can come back now,’ said Raisin Lucy.
I walked back.
‘You can’t play with us today,’ said Crisp Lucy. Clearly. Decisively.
‘But maybe tomorrow,’ said Raisin Lucy, with a weak smile that suggested she felt bad about this state of affairs.
‘OK, thank you,’ I said. I’m not sure why I thanked them. I guess for taking the time to consider it.
As I walked away from them, looking down at my grey Clark’s shoes, I could feel my cheeks getting hotter and my eyes beginning to sting. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. But I did cry. I went into the toilets, closed the door and cried until the bell rang.
That is my first conscious memory of rejection and even though I haven’t thought about that day much since then, I have probably spent most of my life avoiding that moment when you ask someone to play with you and they say ‘no’. That two-letter word which can make me feel eight years old again.
‘Are you nuts? That sounds like self-harming,’ said Sarah, when I called her at work to tell her about my next self-help challenge.
‘People who have done it say it changes their life – and anyway I need to keep my feet on the ground after all The Secret stuff.’
‘This isn’t just keeping your feet on the ground, it’s nailing them there,’ said Sarah.
My mission for April was an extreme form of self-help called Rejection Therapy. I was bending the rules slightly in that this was a game, not a book.
The aim is simple: I had to get rejected once a day by another human being. Not try to get rejected – but actually get rejected. When I first heard about this masochistic form of self-development a couple of years earlier I had thought it seemed insane. I mean, who would do that to themselves? Life’s hard enough! But it had stayed in my mind, niggling away, and after a month of fake cheques and fantasy, I felt it was just what I needed. A cold shower of reality. And if the last few months had taught me anything, it was that the less I wanted to do something the more I probably needed to do it.
‘But I don’t understand how getting rejected every day is going to help you,’ said Sarah.
‘The idea is we’re all living our lives in fear of rejection. We don’t do half the things we want to do because we’re scared people will say “no”. But with this you learn that it might feel horrible to get rejected but it won’t kill you. And people who have played the game say that it’s much harder to get rejected than you think it is – lots of times you get a “yes” when you think you’ll get a “no”.’
This was the experience of the Canadian IT guy named Jason Comely who came up with the game after his wife left him. He had been spending his days and nights alone in his one-bedroom apartment, becoming more and more isolated. He realized that what was holding him back now – and what had always held him back – was a fear of rejection and so he made it a challenge to get rejected every day.
Jason had flipped the rules of life. He made rejection something he wanted rather than feared.
Without realizing it, Jason had used a tool of psychotherapy called exposure therapy or flooding. This is when you force yourself to face your fears so that eventually you become desensitized. It’s used to treat phobias of snakes and heights.
Jason kept seeking out rejection. He started asking to cut in line at the supermarket, friend-requested strangers on Facebook, asked for discounts in shops. He even went on Canadian Dragons’ Den.
More often than not, people would say ‘yes’, leading to encounters and opportunities he would never have had otherwise.
‘So are you going to do Dragons’ Den?’ asked Sarah.
‘No! God, no!’ I snapped.
‘I was joking. Don’t get stressed.’
‘But I am stressed. It’s stressful doing all this stuff. I’m tired.’
‘So why don’t you take a break? Come over to mine this weekend and we’ll go out and drink too much and spend Sunday hating ourselves on the sofa,’ said Sarah.
‘I can’t. I need to get organized and make a list of ways to be rejected.’
‘Can’t you take a weekend off? I feel like I hardly see you anymore and you’ve already done so much.’
‘I haven’t really.’
‘You have and it’s amazing, but this can’t be good for you, all this chopping and changing. A few days ago you were road-testing cars and now this . . . It’s like you’re swapping diets all the time. Doing Atkins one month, then going vegan the next – Damn. Sorry. Gotta go –’
And with that she rang off. Her boss must have come back into the room. I pictured Sarah in the normal world of work and emails and colleagues . . .
I sat at my desk and felt very alone as I looked out of the window at clouds. Next-door was having work done and the drill was getting on my last nerve. I wanted a drink. I looked at my phone – it was only just past noon.
I didn’t want to do
Rejection Therapy. Not at all.
I didn’t know where to start. I mean, practically speaking. Should I walk down the street now and ask people to give me a tenner? Or go to the pub and ask for a free drink? I’d wanted to ask Sarah for ideas but what I was doing felt ridiculous next to her real-life stresses so I put a request on Facebook for suggestions.
Here’s what I got:
Go to Claridge’s and ask to have a quick nap in one of their rooms – for free!
Phone Buckingham Palace and ask to go to the garden party
Audition for X Factor or a West End show
Go into Chanel and ask them if their bags are fake
Go to a model agency and tell them you want to sign up
Ask to interview Kate Moss
I decided it wasn’t too early to drink.
Three days later, having spent the weekend either drunk or in bed, I gave myself a good talking to and wrote a list of sixteen rejection scenarios to get through by the end of the month:
1) Ask for a discount in a shop
2) Ask for a free coffee
3) Ask for a free meal
4) Smile at every person I see for a day
5) Say hello to five strangers on the street
6) Ask a stranger on a date
7) Ask for a stranger’s number
8) Ask to cut to the front of a queue
9) Ask to join a stranger at a bar/restaurant/cafe
10) Ask for credit card interest/bank charges to be reduced
11) Contact three new magazines to work for
12) Ask a bank to give me £100 for no reason
13) Ask someone I admire to meet me for a coffee
14) Ask a stranger to be friends with me on Facebook
15) Ask for a free room at Claridge’s
16) Ask for a free bag in Chanel
Jason suggests starting small with your rejections, by asking for a free coffee. My regular cafe in Tufnell Park was one of those tolerant places that lets freelancers like me spend hours on laptops while sipping only one or two coffees. So on 3 April, I did my work (an article about how you can blame your postcode for your frizzy hair – from tap water to exhaust fumes, where you live affects your looks . . .) before going up to the till to pay.
Help Me! Page 9