Help Me!

by Marianne Power

  I paced up and down my room. What a fucking idiot.

  I didn’t know what to do. My next Barclaycard bill was due in ten days. £120 and I didn’t have it.

  I felt I was coming out of my skin. I had to get out of my body – out of my head. I could no longer be me.

  I went down to the kitchen and poured myself a big whiskey before going to the living room and lying on the sofa. I flicked on the television. The Kardashians were arguing over the new clothes that Kanye had bought Kim. I drank more whiskey and fell asleep. When I woke up Lindsay Lohan was on the screen. She was crying. She was about to be thrown out of the hotel she was living in.

  When Rachel came downstairs the next morning, I was still on the sofa, where I had fallen asleep fully dressed. I was crying again. This time it wasn’t at the beauty of squirrels or an advert for a building society – it was at my own stupidity.

  ‘Do you want me to lend you some money?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘No. Thank you, but no. This is my problem, I have to fix it.’

  ‘Do you want me to sit down and go through things with you – we could do a budget, make a plan.’

  Do a budget, make a plan. Two phrases that made me break into a cold sweat. She’d offered before but I’d always made excuses. I was now all out of excuses.

  That night we went through my bank statements.

  ‘What was £56 in Waterstones?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Books?’

  ‘What kind of books?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know – self-help, I guess.’

  I found the receipt. It was for a book on de-cluttering, another one on sugar-free eating and one on juicing. I remembered looking through the sugar-free one in the cafe at the top of the bookshop, reading recipes for spiralized courgettes while drinking hot chocolate and eating a slice of carrot cake. I had yet to cook anything from the book and had not even opened the juicing book or the Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. Instead I’d added it to the clutter in my room.

  ‘And what was £55 in Whole Foods?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘Vitamins,’ I replied.

  ‘You’re spending £55 on vitamins?’

  ‘Yes, but I thought that they’d give me more energy and I’d get more stuff done and then I’d get myself sorted,’ I said. I realized how deluded it sounded.

  ‘Marianne . . .’ she said. I started crying again.

  ‘I know, I know. Please don’t say anything.’

  But she kept going – through my flights to Italy, my bar bill from F**k It . . .

  ‘What was £500?’

  ‘The Tony Robbins course.’

  ‘It cost £500?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And there were how many people there?’

  ‘Seven thousand.’

  ‘That’s millions he was earning for a few days. If Tony Robbins is a billionaire who wants to make the world a better place – why does he charge so much?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘If you don’t pay for these things you don’t appreciate them, you don’t take them seriously. And he gives loads of money to charity.’

  I didn’t tell her that I’d bought the cheap seats and that people paid up to £1,200 to sit closer to him and that a good portion of the event had been spent trying to sell us longer, more expensive courses such as his Business Mastery course and his Date with Destiny week – both of which cost several thousand.

  At regular intervals Tony invited people up on stage to give forty-five-minute talks about how their lives had turned around as a result of these products. Again and again, we were told that these people had made investments in themselves that had turned their personal incomes from $10,000 into $1,000,000.

  At Tony Robbins the message was clear: not having money was an excuse, spending on this stuff was an investment – an investment that would reap rewards. But when? When were the rewards going to come? I was now seven months into my self-help experiment and I wasn’t seeing much in the way of rewards. Every high had been followed by a crashing low. My work life was erratic, my friendships were suffering, my finances . . . well, my inability to deal with money seemed to represent all my flaws: my laziness, my childishness, my self-indulgence . . . and this self-indulgence had grown with my self-help consumption.

  I started to see how self-help can be dangerous for someone like me. I loved losing touch with reality – it was my forte. Self-help allowed me to do that with bells on. I was too busy reading books, spouting affirmations and dreaming big to get on with silly stuff like earning enough money to pay the bills.

  And remember Kate Northrup? My money guru? Do you know how she got into debt? By doing too many personal development courses. Seriously. She wrote a self-help book about how to get out of the debt created by self-help. I had chosen to gloss over that part of the story when I was reading it. But self-help is a business – a big one. And it’s selling the same thing that clothes companies, food companies and booze companies are: happiness.

  Can happiness really be bought in the form of a four-day event in the ExCeL centre any more than it can with a nice holiday or a new car?

  ‘This is like that moment in a Nick Hornby book where the guy realizes what an idiot he’s been,’ said Rachel.

  I couldn’t remember if Nick Hornby had happy endings.

  The phone rang. It was Daisy.

  ‘I’m booking tickets for India in January – do you want to come?’ she said.

  ‘I can’t, I’m broke.’

  ‘Don’t say you’re broke.’

  ‘OK, fine, I can’t afford it!’

  ‘There’s no such thing as can’t afford!’

  ‘I’ve just put tampons on credit card,’ I snapped.

  ‘Did you read The Law of Attraction yet?’ she said, either not hearing the tone or choosing to ignore it.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have to – it will really help. And then Pam Grout’s E2 or there’s that book by Marianne Williamson which is awesome . . . The Law of Divine Compensation. Come on, you just have to change your outlook on money and it will come. The world is abundant, remember.’

  It didn’t feel very abundant right now. I wondered how Daisy was affording all the courses and holidays she was going on. She’d flown to America to do Tony Robbins last year and was off on some juice cleanse in Spain in September. How was she paying for all this global soul searching? She must have saved when she was working. Saved in the way that everyone secretly was – without me realizing.

  ‘Are you still there?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘Yes. Sorry, I’m here.’

  ‘Have you ever thought about going to a DA meeting?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Debtors Anonymous – it’s like AA but for people who have problems with money.’

  ‘No! Come on, I’m not that bad.’

  ‘My friend goes and she finds it really helpful. She isn’t in debt anymore but she got into a situation with store cards a few years ago and she says it’s kept her on track. She goes to a meeting in Knightsbridge. I could put you in touch with her if you like.’

  ‘I don’t know, it sounds a bit full-on.’

  ‘But if you have a problem with money this might help.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said before saying goodbye and watching television all weekend.

  To add insult to injury, three days later, The Greek Skyped.

  ‘I am going to be best man at a friend’s wedding at the end of the month. It’s on one of the islands . . .’ he said.

  ‘Sounds gorgeous,’ I said, dreaming of blue skies and even bluer sea.

  ‘So, I was wondering –’ he cleared his throat a bit – ‘would you like to come over and be my guest? It will be a nice wedding, nice people. I would love you to be there.’

  ‘I want to come back to London,’ he continued, ‘but it’s impossible for me to leave my parents. I thought maybe this could be our second date? Just get enough for the airfare, then everythin
g else will be covered,’ he continued.

  And so I did the only thing that a girl who is being asked out on a date to a Greek island could do. I said ‘no’. Not only could I not afford the flight, I did not feel I deserved it. I was punishing myself.

  I was also, irritatingly, still thinking about Geoff. Not that he was thinking about me. Every time I went on Facebook he was posting pictures of himself with random girls.

  I could hear The Greek’s disappointment. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I hope you change your mind . . .’ Gemma called and I told her about the invitation.

  ‘If you don’t get on that plane and get a bit of action, I’m going to get over there and put you on one,’ she said. ‘I’ll lend you the money.’

  ‘I can’t let you do that.’

  ‘Yes you can, life’s short, you have to enjoy it.’

  ‘I don’t deserve to enjoy it – I’ve made such a mess out of everything, I’ve been an irresponsible idiot with money and I can’t go jetting off again. I can’t believe how lazy I’ve been. I’m disgusted with myself.’

  ‘You’re not lazy – you are one of the hardest-working people I know. So you’re taking a detour this year but that’s OK, you know you can always get work. What does Sarah say about it? I bet she’s telling you to go.’

  I hadn’t told Gemma that I wasn’t speaking to Sarah because Gemma loved Sarah but I knew what Sarah would say. She would have told me to screw the credit cards, go out there and get laid, have fun. She would have stopped me from sinking into self-pity. She would have told me to grab life with both hands . . .

  But Sarah was no longer around and I was too proud to call her. I was also too ashamed to take up Gemma’s generous offer to pay for a Shirley Valentine fling.

  ‘You’re doing what?’

  ‘I’m going to a Debtors Anonymous meeting with a friend of Daisy’s.’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit over the top?’ Rachel said.

  ‘No, I have a problem with money and this might help.’

  ‘Just do more work – wouldn’t that sort out your problems?’

  But I did not want to hear reason. I was deep in the self-pity/self-help spiral where all answers had to be found in some form of therapy or self-analysis. And so I got the Tube to Knightsbridge, one of the richest areas of London, to talk to people as broke as me. Or maybe even broker – at least that’s what I was hoping, that their lives would be such a mess that I would feel better in comparison.

  Annoyingly it didn’t work like that. There seemed to be a shortage of specifics in the stories people told. I was desperate for someone to say they’d run up £100,000 on credit cards just so that I could say, ‘Look, I’m not that bad!’

  They didn’t play ball. Instead I listened to other people talk about life in general and then I stood up and said the famous words: ‘Hello, my name is Marianne and I’m nearly £20,000 in debt.’

  I felt more exposed than I had sitting naked on that office chair in the town hall.

  But as I listened to people talking I knew I was in the wrong place. According to DA my debt was a disease, something I was powerless over. But that felt like a lie to me: I wasn’t powerless and I didn’t want to pretend that I was.

  The next day I called StepChange, a debt charity. I cried on the phone as I explained my situation. A patient woman talked me through my various options, including defaulting on my overdrafts and credit cards and then letting them step in and arrange a payment programme with the banks. It would completely screw up my credit rating but if I was sick and unable to work and could not afford a roof over my head, or to feed any dependants, it was an option, she explained. I felt even more disgusted with myself than I had the night before. I was not sick. I was able to work. I had a brilliant career, for God’s sake, with no dependants to look after and no mortgage to pay. My financial mess was completely of my doing – and I could get myself out of it. I thanked her and hung up. I did not deserve her sympathy. I deserved a giant kick up the arse.

  And so for the rest of August I decided to put a hold on self-help and put all my energies into real help – i.e. earning money and working. I practised Rejection Therapy and emailed every editor I knew and didn’t know. For four weeks I worked non-stop, seven days a week, from 7am to 7pm. The Secret didn’t help me; I helped myself. I tested the different drying speeds of twenty hairdryers, I wrote an article about a horse shampoo that had become an unlikely hit with humans. I spent two days with a make-up artist who painted my face to look like Jack Nicholson from The Shining. Wooden door and all. I wrote about summer Spanx (which still made me sweat in places I didn’t want to sweat). I covered a BBC documentary about cutting-edge surgery for animals – including an operation to remove cataracts for Rosemary the orang-utan, brain surgery for Tiara the tiger, and a prosthetic tail for Fuji the dolphin. I wrote about sunscreens. Again. I went to an auction house in south London to buy luggage that had been put into Lost Luggage at Heathrow and never reclaimed . . .

  Never had I been more grateful for my work. What on earth had I been complaining about? I was so lucky to be able to earn money doing fun, interesting things – why did I want more? I just needed to grow up and stop being such a spoilt brat. Get practical instead of emotional. Take action instead of getting lost up my own navel-gazing behind.

  By the end of the month I was not back in the black but the debts were, at least, under control. I didn’t know whether I should go back to self-help. Maybe it was just time to get real. Face facts.

  ‘I think that’s what you were meant to learn from all this,’ said Sheila on the phone. ‘That your life was pretty good the way it was.’

  But was it? August bank holiday and I’d been invited to a barbecue by a friend and former colleague. I didn’t want to go but after falling out with Sarah I was scared to alienate any more people in my life. I took the bus all the way from Archway to Clapham. It took two and a half hours but buses are cheaper than Tubes and I was being a martyr.

  ‘Long time no see,’ said another colleague, Tom, who opened the door and led me to the garden. ‘What are you up to? Are you still writing? I haven’t seen your byline lately,’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, I’m doing bits but not as much as I used to.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he said. ‘Even my mother doesn’t believe I’m a journalist anymore. Nobody’s commissioning anything these days. Journalism’s going to the dogs . . .’

  Another colleague Leslie joined us with a coal-black burger on a paper plate. ‘Journalism is dead,’ she declared in between mouthfuls. ‘Print media is over. It’s all kids writing blogs now . . . I got asked to write something for a new website the other day. I asked what they paid and they said “Nothing! But it’s good profile for you.” Good profile? I’m a journalist. I write to pay bills . . .’ And on they went about the death of our industry.

  It was depressing, so I tried to offer a more optimistic note: ‘Yeah, but the world’s changing, there’s no point in moaning about it, we just need to make the best of the world we’re in now.’

  ‘And how do we do that?’ said Leslie.

  ‘We can do so much now that we couldn’t do before: look at all those people making a fortune on YouTube – you can do anything from your bedroom,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t spend twenty years on Fleet Street in order to start making videos in my bedroom,’ said Leslie.

  ‘And it’s people writing for free that is killing our industry,’ said Tom.

  I excused myself to go to the toilet but instead I hovered in the kitchen hoovering up bright orange tortilla chips before joining another group of people engaged in a chorus of doom and gloom ‘Have you seen the price of a studio flat in Clapham these days?’ chat.

  These people were more solvent and succesful than me. They had children, mortgages, pensions and holiday plans while just weeks ago I’d had to pay for tampons on credit card – but, God, they were miserable. And I didn’t want to be that way.

  ‘I’m going to head off,’ I sai
d after a couple of hours. Nobody looked disappointed. I walked into the garden to say more goodbyes and was met by a woman in her early sixties with dyed black hair in a messy pile on top of her head.

  ‘I’m Victoria,’ she said, shoving her hand out at me. Her nails were long and purple.

  She was a feminist writer I knew by name. One of those ferociously bright women who had gone to protests about women’s rights, equal pay, Greenham Common . . .

  ‘So are you having a good time?’ she asked, eyebrow raised.

  ‘No, not really. I’m just leaving.’

  ‘Dull, isn’t it?’ she laughed, topping up our wine.

  ‘Are you a journalist too?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, sort of,’ I replied.

  ‘What kind of things do you write?’ she asked.

  ‘I write a lot about mascara,’ I said, joking but feeling embarrassed. She wrote about proper things. Politics. Feminism.

  ‘But I’ve also been busy with another project this year . . .’ I told her about the self-help books. I suppose I thought she might have been impressed and that we could have joined together in being bigger, deeper thinkers than the people around us.

  I was wrong.

  ‘Why on earth do you need someone to tell you how to live your life?’ she barked, slugging back warm white wine. ‘Can’t you figure out how to do it yourself?’ I opened my mouth to say something along the lines of there always being a need for philosophy or religion to help us understand how to live a good life – but I didn’t get a chance . . .

  ‘Your generation –’ she continued, shaking her head and curling her lips – ‘it’s all me, me, me.’

  She took a drag on her cigarette. ‘Self-obsessed and narcissistic. In my day we had bigger things to fight for. Issues. Injustices.’

  And then, just to finish me off, she spat: ‘Self-help books only serve to make neurotic people more neurotic.’

  After that I didn’t bother with goodbyes. I picked up my bag from the living room, let myself out and started walking.

  Stupid cow! What does she know? I might be self-indulgent but she was angry and bitter and drunk! She was just jealous of me! Yes, that’s it. She was jealous! I am younger and have the world ahead of me and she doesn’t!