Help Me!

by Marianne Power

  Full of references to Aristotle, Thoreau and Benjamin Franklin, the message of the book – which I’d gathered from interviews with the author, rather than reading the actual pages – was that we cannot seek happiness as a goal in itself; instead happiness only comes from being a good person. Covey took a dim view of the modern self-help industry, believing that the reason people are unhappy is because they were looking for short cuts, all surface over substance.

  ‘Happiness is a by-product of service and a life of integrity, and when people don’t live true to principles and they are not involved in service, you are going to find depression and despair,’ he was quoted as saying, in an article written shortly before his death, in 2012, aged seventy-nine.

  Covey, who was a Mormon with nine children and forty-two grandchildren, did not advocate walking around muttering affirmations about abundance. No Vision Boards. Just a slow, day-by-day, commitment to doing the right thing.

  After my three weeks of self-pitying sickness and ten months of self-indulgent self-examination, this was what I needed. There would be no more selfish happiness-seeking! Instead I would be a person of strong morals and principles! A person of her word! A person of discipline! A selfless person!

  A Highly Effective Person!

  There was just one problem. I seemed to have lost the ability to read.

  Monday 3rd November and I sat by my desk with a clean notepad and my old copy of the book and quickly remembered why I’d never got further than a few pages.

  The talk of ‘paradigm shifts’ and ‘synergizing’ was too complicated for my fried mind. The diagrams weren’t any better: Triangles, circles, arrows, flow-charts – all with teeny tiny words squeezed in them. I squinted. Turned them upside down. Nothing doing. I did not understand a word of it. It took twenty minutes to get through one paragraph.

  I tried to whip myself into action, like an old horse, with an uplifting pep talk that went thus: Come on, you lazy cow, get on with it. People out there are doing hard things with their lives, this isn’t one of them. Why can’t you read? What’s wrong with you? This is the kind of book that really successful people read – world leaders! Good people! If you want to stop being such a self-centred bitch you need to read this book!

  But the whole tough-love thing wasn’t working.

  I could practically smell the burnt rubber as my brain tried to take in the words. So by Friday afternoon, I gave up on the book and found a cheat sheet online. Even that was tough going. Over the weekend I read and re-read the sheet, trying to understand what it was saying. In the end, I came to my own interpretation of Covey’s Seven Habits:

  • Habit 1: ‘Be proactive’

  We may not be able to control what happens to us but we can control our reaction to it. Stop blaming others, stop being a victim, take responsibility for yourself, your actions, your words and your thoughts.

  • Habit 2: ‘Begin with the end in mind’

  How do you want people to talk about you at the end of your life? Keep that in mind every single day.

  • Habit 3: ‘Put first things first’

  We all get distracted by emails and work dramas, but remember to focus on what is important to us rather than what seems urgent.

  • Habit 4: ‘Think win-win’

  Real success should not occur at the expense of others.

  • Habit 5: ‘Seek to understand/then be understood’

  Go into conversations prepared to listen – really listen – to the other person.

  • Habit 6: ‘Synergize’

  Once you’ve really listened and worked to create win-win situations with others, amazing things happen.

  • Habit 7: ‘Sharpen the saw’

  We are the saw in this scenario. In order to keep being the best you can be you need to be a ‘sharp saw’ not a tired, blunt one. We stay ‘sharp’ by keeping physically and mentally fit, taking time out to rest and looking after our spiritual and emotional well-being.

  But even the cheat sheet made my head hurt. ‘Proactivity’. ‘Sharpening the saw’. My saw was not sharp; it was blunt and no longer fit for purpose. But I was not allowed to complain anymore.

  In the book Covey tells the story of Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl, who lost his family but kept his sanity in camp, saying, ‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances . . .’

  And so, while every bit of my head was begging me to stop the self-help, I attempted to be a Good ‘Proactive’ Person. I stopped drinking, I stopped moaning, I exercised and I set myself the task of performing one act of kindness a day; I made Rachel dinner, I helped a woman on the Tube with her big suitcase . . . but the world was laughing at my efforts.

  On Monday 10th November I accidentally downloaded some malware onto my computer which deleted about fifty per cent of my files. On Tuesday I got an email from my accountant reminding me that my tax return was due at the end of the month. I spent two days going through old bank statements and hating myself. Again.

  Then on the bus home from the supermarket, my phone got nicked. And, no, I did not have insurance. Actually that wasn’t true. I did have phone insurance with my bank account only it was invalid because I’d never bothered to register my phone in order to activate the policy.

  I wanted to scream and shout, but none of this stuff was supposed to touch me. I should be Highly Effective and see the bigger picture! If Victor Frankl could handle a concentration camp I should sure as hell have been able to cope with a stolen phone!

  The dangerous expectation that can be created by selfhelp books is that if you’re not walking around like a cross between Mary Poppins, Buddha and Jesus every day you’re doing it wrong. You must try harder.

  Sometimes it felt like these books wanted to hammer out the very nature of the human condition – a condition that has many emotions, including bad ones. Nobody is perfect. But I’d been trying to be.

  The higher I was setting my standards the more I was feeling like a failure.

  As the month went on I started to come apart. At night I was having nightmares which involved me killing members of my family and being chased around my childhood home, which somehow morphed into a multi-storey car park.

  My mind had always been a bit messy but now it was beginning to spin out of control. I was having lots of conversations but all of them were in my head. I became sure that all my friends and my family hated me. I imagined people talking about me. I was trying to push ahead with work but I seemed to have lost my ability to write too. I spent five days struggling with an article that should have taken a day and got an email back from my editor, who described it as ‘unreadable’.

  In thirteen years of writing I’d never had such a comment. On the upside I had the name of my autobiography but on the downside, it was proof that the self-help stuff wasn’t sending me in the right direction career-wise.

  I was like that whirling wheel that spins on your screen when your computer is about to crash. I was trying to keep going but shutdown was imminent.

  And then I planned my funeral.

  Covey says that most of us spend our lives climbing up ladders that are leaning against the wrong wall. We need to get clear about what we really want in life, what’s important to us, what our purpose is, and then every day we should live according to that vision. And the best way to get clear about what that vision is, according to Covey, is to imagine your own funeral and imagine what you’d like others to say about you.

  And so, while Rachel cooked Sunday lunch, I sat down at my desk and opened my notepad.

  My Funeral, I wrote. And underlined it.

  Right. My funeral.

  What did I want people to say at my funeral? What did I want to have achieved by the time I’d died? I had no clue. I didn’t know what I wanted for dinner most days – how on earth could I know what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life?

  Who would be there talking about me? Would I ha
ve children? A husband? Or would I have friends who I’d met while travelling the world? Would I be single when I died? Was that OK? Am I happy that way? And would I be rich? Or would I have led a simple life and given everything I had to charity?

  I mean – what made a good life? I didn’t know and I felt like a failure for not knowing. The feelings of anger and frustration that had been simmering since August were barely contained now. Why didn’t I know what I wanted to do with my life? What was wrong with me? Why was I so fucking useless? Concentrate, Marianne. You stupid cow. I closed my eyes and forced myself to picture it. My funeral. And then the vision came to me with shocking clarity. I killed myself at forty-two. I had fallen down that black hole I’d always been so scared of . . .

  The doorbell rang. I went downstairs feeling shaken. Rachel’s friends were standing in the kitchen opening bottles of wine. I said hello to everyone but my mind was still playing out me being dead. Everybody hating me.

  ‘You OK?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘Yeah, why?’ I snapped.

  ‘You seem stressed.’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  How could I tell her that I was stressed out from attending my funeral after committing suicide five years from now? And so I poured a glass of red, drank it quickly and poured a second. By the time I was on my third I was beginning to feel the familiar warm fug that made being in my head slightly more bearable.

  In between chatter about kids and jobs, Rachel’s friends asked about the self-help and I told them about the funeral exercise – without telling them the details.

  ‘Didn’t Joan Rivers say she wanted to be found dead under George Clooney?’ asked Rachel. They all laughed and I pretended to laugh along too.

  Ha, bloody, ha.

  I topped up my wine and zoned out as chat moved to holiday plans and stories from some debauched party they’d been to. Usually this kind of afternoon would have been my idea of heaven but now I felt so removed from it all. Why wasn’t anyone taking life seriously? Why couldn’t we talk about big things? Like what made a good life? Or what was the purpose of it all?

  Why were we all wasting time talking rubbish? It was all so pointless.

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Rachel asked, while we were clearing up.

  ‘Yeah, I’m just tired,’ I said.

  I went upstairs and saw two missed calls from Mum.

  I rang her back.

  ‘I just wanted to remind you it’s your aunt’s birthday tomorrow.’

  ‘OK, thanks.’

  ‘So send her a message.’

  ‘Yeah, I will . . . Mum . . .?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What would you like people to say about you at your funeral?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean when you die, what kind of eulogy would you like?’

  ‘I don’t want a eulogy. When you’re dead, you’re dead. All this standing up and saying how wonderful so and so was, it’s just a lie. Nobody can stand up and say she was a right old bitch, can they?’

  ‘But, OK, what would you have liked to have achieved in your life?’

  ‘That you girls are happy.’

  ‘No, but what about you personally?’

  ‘Marianne, I don’t know. You know I don’t think about things as much as you do . . .’

  ‘Come on, there must be something you’d want to be remembered for?’

  ‘I suppose I’d like it if people said, She did no harm.’

  I could not decide if that was the humblest or most ambitious of goals.

  By the end of November, the pressure to decide what my perfect life would be coincided perfectly with a piece I’d been asked to write for a magazine about always being single. Scientists believed that they’d found a ‘Single Gene’ which meant that some of us were born with a disposition to live alone. I wrote about how I was always single and maybe had this gene. The magazine wanted more details. I was getting enquiries from my editor: ‘Have you ever been in love? Do you want children? What do you see in your future?’ All massive, personal questions to be answered on deadline for the whole world to read about.

  On a Tuesday afternoon in Bread and Bean while ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ was playing on the speakers I felt I had to decide every aspect of my life.

  I wasn’t taking a swim in Lake Me, I was drowning in it. Self-examination had turned to self-loathing. When I started imagining my fictional suicide, I knew it was time to stop.

  The fact that I’d given up at Habit 2 of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People said it all.

  13

  Depressed

  ‘You’re touching the void – and you’ve got to step back because you won’t be any good to anyone if you go under.’ – Bald London Cabbie

  ‘You need to go to the doctor. You can’t carry on the way you’re going.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Up and down like this – it’s not right. One minute everything is great and the universe loves you – and the next minute everything’s terrible . . .’

  ‘It’s not that bad.’

  ‘You’ve spent the last hour crying in the pub on a Saturday night.’

  We were in the Queen’s Head in Islington. There was a buzz in the air. All around us normal people talked about normal things. I had met Helen in an attempt to pretend I was one of them. Normal that is. It hadn’t worked.

  First I asked her about her funeral – a conversation she did not want to have.

  Then she’d made a comment about putting off going to the dentist.

  ‘But why are you putting it off?’ I asked, leaning in to her.

  ‘Can we not turn this into a therapy session?’ she snapped.

  Tears sprang into my eyes.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she demanded.

  ‘Nothing.’

  I sat in silence.

  ‘Marianne, what is wrong with you?’

  ‘You don’t like me anymore,’ I blurted out. That’s when I really started crying. Like a four-year-old.

  ‘Marianne, don’t be stupid,’ she replied, shaking her head.

  ‘You don’t want to see me anymore,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘You think I’m an idiot.’

  ‘I’m not spending my days thinking about you,’ she said.

  ‘You think I’m stupid for doing this self-help stuff.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re stupid, but do you think it’s helping?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I think you need to get different kind of help,’ she continued.

  I was confused: ‘What kind of help?’

  ‘Medical help.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Antidepressants.’

  I thought Helen was the one overreacting. I didn’t want to push my emotions down with pills and booze. Well, maybe a bit of booze was OK . . . but . . .

  ‘I don’t need medication. I just –’ I didn’t know what to say. I just what? Felt like every minute of the day I was on a knife-edge, clinging on to sanity? Or that some days it felt like I was being dragged further out to sea, losing all feeling of solid ground under my feet, moving away from all the things that used to define me – my friends, my work, my routine, going to the pub, shopping . . .

  ‘Just what?’ said Helen.

  I didn’t tell her about the knife-edge or the sea. Just as I didn’t tell her about the nightmares where I’m killing people or the fact that before my fictional funeral I’d killed myself.

  ‘I’m just tired,’ I said. Tired. How many times had I said that word when I didn’t know what else to say? When I didn’t know how to say I’m lost, I’m scared, I’m lonely, I feel like I’m losing it . . .?

  ‘Why don’t you take a few days off. Hang out with Sarah. Be normal for a while.’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to her in months.’

  ‘What? Didn’t you sort that out?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Marianne.�
� Helen, like the rest of the world, loved Sarah.

  ‘Stop it, I know.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you go away for a while? Go to Ireland and see Gemma? She always makes you feel better.’

  And she did.

  Gemma and I had met while working in newspapers in Dublin in our twenties. We bonded over midnight deadlines and vats of red wine. We were opposites in every way – she is petite and olive skinned and tans in two seconds. I’m tall and pale and hide from the sun. She is fearless and says everything that’s on her mind, I am perpetually anxious and keep everything bottled up. But from the second we met it just worked.

  Normally we’d travel back and forth to see each other every couple of months but since I’d started self-help she’d had her first child and I’d been too busy and broke to go over. For months she’d been telling me that I didn’t sound right and that I was pushing myself too far. I’d denied it and told her everything was fine. I couldn’t make her listen to my self-induced madness when she had a newborn to look after.

  ‘I can’t to to Ireland, I have to get on to a new book. I’m already behind,’ I said to Helen.

  ‘You can’t do another book now. I don’t think you should do any more books, full stop. You are messing with your head too much. You need to stop now before you do some proper damage.’

  Maybe she was right.

  Just a few months earlier I was doing Rejection Therapy in this same pub: pouring my own pint, playing with the band and having sex chat with the new mums. I’d felt the fear, faced my finances and relished (almost) rejection. My self-help mission was a triumph! It was opening doors to me – making me do things I’d never done in my entire life. I’d felt alive! Excited! Full of possibility. What had happened?

  I looked around the pub – at all these people drinking, laughing at stupid stories and talking about nothing at all. I didn’t know if they were lost or I was.