Help Me!

by Marianne Power

  A man wearing a Santa hat knocked on the window. The noise frightened me. I realized that we’d stopped driving. We were outside Rachel’s. I had no idea how long we’d been there.

  ‘Better get back to it.’ He smiled.

  ‘Of course, sorry to keep you.’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  He got out of the cab and opened my door. He went to the boot and pulled out my bag. We stood on the pavement for a second, looking at each other.

  ‘I’ll see you again,’ he said.

  I nodded and he got back into the taxi and picked up the gang of twenty-somethings who were screaming ‘IT’S CHHHRRRRISTMASS!’

  I hadn’t even got his name. He didn’t know mine. This man who had seen into my soul.

  I walked up the steps to my front door. It was so cold I could see my breath come out in clouds. Christmas tree lights sparkled through the neighbour’s window.

  Had that really just happened? That conversation?

  Before I could turn the key, the door opened and Rachel was standing in the hall, grinning.

  ‘Were you snogging the taxi driver? You’ve been parked outside for more than an hour!’

  14

  The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle

  ‘Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness as well as disease.’

  Christmas passed uneventfully. I ate, drank, slept and watched a lot of television. Rachel got me a book featuring pictures of the Nativity as acted out by dressed-up guinea pigs. It made me laugh. The fact that I was laughing again was a good sign. Our family managed to get through it without killing each other and two weeks of National Lampoon’s Vacation and purple Quality Streets were a soothing balm on my brain. Normal life.

  On New Year’s Eve, I left Mum’s and headed to Rachel’s. She’d gone to Scotland to see friends so I stayed in on my own, which was fine with me.

  I’d always hated New Year: the pressure to have the best night ever just because it’s 31st December. Instead of going out, I ate spaghetti bolognese and watched fireworks out of the window. Daisy was in Kerala on a yoga retreat. Sheila was in Mexico and Helen was at a house party. Gemma was with her family. I wondered what Sarah was doing.

  I fell asleep on the sofa and woke up when Jools Holland and his gang were singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

  Thursday 1st January. The start of a new year.

  By now I was supposed to have gone through twelve selfhelp books. There should have been highs and lows, tears and revelations, romance and rejection, all coming together to form some sort of profoundly moving (but neat and tidy) epiphany.

  The new and improved me would have felt shinier and more enlightened. Oh, and skinnier and richer, obviously. Ideally with a cashmere-jumper-wearing hottie in the wings. I mean, let’s face it – isn’t that what self-improvement usually comes down to? Money, sex and looks. But I had not become the Perfect Me I’d set out to be. Instead, I had ended the year more of a basket case than ever.

  At 12.30am my phone beeped. It was The Greek. ‘Happy New Year! ☺’

  I messaged him straight back. ‘You too!’

  He replied: ‘I’m sorry I have been quiet. My father has been in hospital. I think of you often. ☺’

  I thought of him in Athens, caring for sick, elderly parents while the Greek economy was also going down the pan. He had real problems.

  Dots appeared on the screen. He was still typing.

  ‘Have you finished your challenge?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ I replied.

  ‘Want to talk?’ he messaged.

  He Skyped and in the small hours of 1st January I told him everything that had happened since I’d met him that day in the coffee shop.

  ‘I don’t know whether to keep going with the whole thing or just leave it. I don’t think it’s been very good for me – it’s been extreme,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe it needs to be extreme for it to change you. When you read the books before, your life did not change, did it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Now it has changed.’

  ‘Yeah, but it doesn’t feel like good change.’

  ‘Maybe you had to be broken down in order to be built into something new,’ he said.

  ‘But when does the something new come? Right now I’m just broken.’

  ‘You sound OK to me.’

  ‘Sorry, I am. I am being dramatic. I feel much better. I rested a lot the last month. How are you?’

  He talked about his father’s illness and the stress his mother was under. He was sleeping just a few hours a night, in between caring for them both. I didn’t know how he was doing it.

  ‘I am their son. They did everything for me and now it’s my turn,’ he said with no hint of resentment or self-pity.

  ‘What I’m doing must seem so self-indulgent compared to your life,’ I said.

  ‘I think what you’re doing is great. But remember that you already have a good life and you should enjoy it.’

  The next morning, I woke up at 7am on the sofa. Helen had texted at 4am, ‘HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!’ And Sheila had sent a photo of a cocktail and a sunset.

  I got up and looked out of the window at grey skies. The street was deserted. Everyone sleeping it off. I put the kettle on and made a coffee. So. Another year. What next? Quit the self-help or keep going? The consensus seemed to be that I needed to stop. Any rational person would say that I needed to stop.

  But I didn’t want to. I didn’t know why but I didn’t. I wanted to see this through – I felt sure something good would come of it if I did. But I needed help.

  I followed the taxi driver’s advice and went to see a therapist. It started off pretty promisingly.

  ‘I’m not surprised you’ve come unstuck,’ she said. ‘You’ve been conducting experiments on yourself. You have been your own guinea pig and you’ve had no supervision.’

  ‘I’d never thought of it like that,’ I replied.

  ‘Do you know what your unconscious is?’ she asked, leaning forward on her beige leather La-Z-Boy.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts and memories that live below our conscious awareness. What you’ve been doing for the last year is poking at your unconscious, bringing up things you didn’t even know were there. And now they’re coming to the surface, which is why you’re crying and getting angry and having nightmares.’

  Then it was exactly as the taxi driver had predicted.

  ‘So in the dreams,’ she said, ‘it’s your job to save your family?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re not doing it?’

  ‘Yes, I mean no – I’m not able to save them.’

  ‘And do you often think it’s your job to save everyone?’

  ‘No. I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Is that a role you take in your family?’

  ‘Are you going to make this all about my family?’ I asked.

  She smiled. ‘Let’s see.’

  ‘Do you think I’m having a breakdown?’ I asked, trying to change the subject.

  ‘You are having a time when you question everything. It can happen when there’s a big change in life and the old rules you used to live by no longer make any sense.’

  ‘That’s how I feel now.’

  ‘And what were you hoping to get out of all this when you started?’

  ‘I wanted to be happy.’

  ‘And what does happy mean?’

  ‘I don’t know – just happy.’

  ‘None of us can be happy all the time – but what we can be is content. To have some level of peace.’

  ‘OK, I’d like that then.’

  ‘So why hasn’t that happened, do you think? You’ve read all these books, absorbed all this wisdom. Why do you think they haven’t helped you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you think self-help works?’
>
  ‘I think the problem with self-help books is that you are reading them with the same mind that has made you unhappy. You need an outside perspective to challenge you and show you a different view,’ she said.

  That made sense actually.

  ‘So do you think I should stop doing the books?’ I asked.

  ‘Do you think you should stop following them?’

  Bloody hell – did therapists really do this? The whole turning the question back on you stuff? I thought that was just a joke.

  ‘No. I want to finish what I set out to do but I worry that this whole thing is just self-indulgent. Why can’t I just get on with life like everyone else?’

  ‘I don’t think that what you’re doing is self-indulgent. You’re on a journey of self-discovery and that is worthwhile, in my opinion. It’s an investment. An investment in yourself – but you shouldn’t do it on your own.’

  Well, you would say that, I thought, and then our time was up. She asked me if I wanted to see her again. I said I’d get back to her. On my way out she asked: ‘Have you read a book called The Power of Now?’

  ‘No, I have it at home but I couldn’t get past the first couple of pages.’

  ‘You might like it now.’

  And so it was, in January, I found The Book; the book that told me that the best of times will come from the worst.

  When I first tried to read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, a couple of years before, I’d thought it was impenetrable New Age gibberish. I couldn’t understand how it had become a number-one bestseller, loved by everyone from Oprah (of course) to Paris Hilton, who took it to jail with her when she was arrested for drink-driving. In fact, I couldn’t understand it, full stop.

  Despite being determined to prove that I had a greater – or at least an equal – reading ability to Miss Hilton, I gave up at around page twenty.

  Sentences such as ‘It is a misperception of your essential reality that is beyond birth and death, and is due to the limitations of your mind, which, having lost touch with Being, creates the body as evidence of its illusory belief in separation and to justify its state of fear’ were too much for me.

  Then there was talk of things called ‘pain bodies’, which are ‘semi-autonomous psychic entities’. Excuse me, what?

  This time, however, it was different. This time every weirdly worded sentence read like the truth. Actually, I might capitalize that, just for effect: ‘The Truth’.

  For the next three days I read it constantly.

  Not since A-level English class when Mrs Batch introduced us to a colour-coded note system to deconstruct Wuthering Heights, had I made so many scribbles in a book. Every other page had an ecstatic ‘YES!!!’ in the margin, whole chunks of text were underlined with stars and exclamation marks by the best bits. I could see why Oprah described Eckhart Tolle as a prophet for our times and I began to suspect that there was more to Paris Hilton than met the eye.

  German-born author Eckhart Tolle was a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student living in a bedsit in North London when he had his ‘spiritual awakening’ in 1979. On the night it happened, he was planning to kill himself. After years of constant depression and anxiety, he’d had enough. ‘I cannot live with myself any longer,’ he thought.

  But in that moment Tolle had an epiphany: ‘If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the “I” and the “self” that “I” cannot live with.’ He then concluded that only one of these selves was real and, as soon as he realized this, all his negative thoughts stopped.

  The next day he woke up and everything was different – he was in a state of ‘uninterrupted deep peace and bliss’. That morning, he writes, ‘I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on earth, as if I had just been born.’

  Tolle had transcended thoughts – the voice in his head.

  Tolle explains that most of us spend our lives with a constant ‘voice in our heads’, the inner critic who judges and interprets reality, and determines our mood. He explains that when we see people talking to themselves on the street, we assume they are mad – but that’s what’s going on in all of our heads all the time, we just don’t say it out loud.

  We all have a voice that ‘comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes and so on,’ says Tolle.

  Quite often the voice isn’t even focusing on what’s happening now, it’s rehashing some old situation or worrying about an imagined one in the future.

  ‘It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness as well as disease,’ writes Tolle. When I read that, I sat bolt upright in my bed.

  This small German man was reporting from the inside of my head.

  Tolle explains that this voice stops us from ever enjoying the only thing that’s real: the Now. Only by living in the Now can we find peace and joy.

  Reading every page felt like a religious experience.

  This was it! The book.

  If I could figure out how to shut up the vicious voice in my head, then everything would be better. But how?

  The first step is to be aware of what the voice in our head says. Tolle tells us not to judge the thoughts or get annoyed with yourself for having them, nor should you get carried away with them – just step back and observe them.

  He says that the more we observe our thoughts – rather than get caught up in them – the more they will lose their power. They’ll still pop up occasionally but they won’t take hold like they used to. You’ll be able to dismiss them the way you would a dottering old uncle.

  And so I did what I was told. I started to observe my thoughts; to listen to the records playing in my head. It made for grim listening.

  First there was the ‘fat record’. This started from the second I opened my eyes and felt the weight of my chunky thighs as I swung them out of bed. That record went something like this: You’re disgusting. Why do you eat so much? You have no discipline, you ate too much yesterday. This would then lead to a mental inventory of all I had eaten yesterday and a vow not to eat carbs today.

  Then as I went down for breakfast, I’d start the lazy record: Why didn’t you get up sooner? Why did you turn off your alarm? Why did you drink so much last night? You’ve got so much to do today, you didn’t get anything done yesterday. Why are you so shit? Then I’d go through in my head all my productive friends and how much more sorted they were than me . . .

  Then, as I tried to do some work, this record would play: This is shit – why is your brain so foggy? Pull yourself together, drink more coffee, this is waffle. Why are you making such a mess out of an article about tights? For God’s sake, any moron could do this. Other writers could have done this in half the time, they’d have written three pieces by now and, look, you’re still halfway through this crap one . . .

  Then as day turned to night and I’d try to drown out the voice with booze, I’d turn on the ‘I drink too much’ record: Why are you drinking? You said you wouldn’t drink today. You have no discipline, you’ll feel crap tomorrow . . .

  And if I was with friends: People think you’re boring. Shut up, nobody is interested in you, just listen and be nice, people think you’re stupid and self-obsessed.

  Or men: No guys ever fancy you, you have dodgy teeth and a fat arse, and you’re ginger. He thinks that you fancy him and he’s thinking, no way, etc., etc.

  Then, of course, there was the ‘money record’, which could be put on at any point of the day and night – actually usually this one came on when I was trying to fall asleep: You’re a fucking idiot, you’ve messed everything up, you’re a disgusting spoilt human being. People your age have pensions and a house. What do you have? You don’t even have savings. You’ll never afford your own place . . .

  So, there you go: the torturous soundtrack to my day. It was so normal to me I hadn’t even realized it
was there.

  This was the reason I got sick all the time. I was poisoning my body with my thoughts. I thought that I was using this tough line to spur myself on, but it had the opposite effect. My bullying voice took the joy out of everything and drained me of energy. It also paralysed me – I was too busy drowning in past mistakes and imagined future disasters to actually get on with the task at hand. I was too busy hating myself to appreciate the nice life that I had playing out around me. I was in a mental prison of my own making.

  Tolle says that we don’t need to sit cross-legged on the floor in order to be in the Now. He says that taking time during the day to look out of the window for a minute or two is enough to bring us back to the moment. Going for a walk and looking at the sky, trees and birds also helps. As does becoming absorbed in the physical sensations of whatever you are doing – from washing the dishes to walking up stairs. As a general rule, he says, we cannot be in our bodies and in our heads at the same time. So, when your thoughts are racing, he advises that you feel the energy of your body. He suggests you close your eyes and feel the energy in your hands, your feet, your abdomen, your chest. It will calm you down instantly.

  And this is what I did. I kept looking out of the window, taking deep breaths and feeling my extremities while writing an article about a new diet. The ice diet. Yup, you eat ice and it helps you lose weight. On account of the fact there’s no calories in ice. I could not make this stuff up.

  After a week of breathing, talking to trees, feeling my feet, the volume of my negative thoughts had not really gone down. In fact, I discovered something interesting: I was quite attached to them.

  I realized this while eating pasta at Helen’s. The flat was warm and cosy and the food delicious. It should have been an easy evening. But in my head I was really going to town with this cheerful self-talk: You shouldn’t be drinking, you’re a lazy waste of space. But don’t say that, Helen will think it’s stupid . . . and why are you eating more pasta? Your jeans are already hurting you. And you shouldn’t be eating carbs. Every meal you’ve eaten today is carbs.

  I did the ‘be here now’ stuff – took deep breaths and felt my feet – but I kept playing the old records. The truth was that I was getting a perverse pleasure out of my ‘poor me’ doom-and-gloom narrative.