Help Me!

by Marianne Power

  My heart sank.

  The next day I texted him to say thanks for a lovely date. He didn’t reply all day. At 8pm a short message saying it was great to meet me too. No request for a second date. I had to rescue this! ‘Would you like to do it again?’ I texted.

  Two hours later, the reply: ‘I’m away a lot for work over the next few weeks so the timing isn’t right.’

  I’d blown it.

  For years I’d thought I didn’t have boyfriends because I wasn’t pretty enough, skinny enough, blonde enough. I now realized this was bullshit. I didn’t have boyfriends because I was terrified.

  I could meet guys, it turned out – much more easily than I had thought. And I could chat to them happily. The only problem was when I met a guy I might actually like. Then I ran scared. And all the dating tips in the world probably weren’t going to help me. If you’ve been single for as long as I had, there is always deeper stuff going on . . .

  17

  Daring Greatly, by Brené Brown

  ‘Connection is why we are here.’

  ‘Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.’

  ‘I’ve never been in love and nobody has ever been in love with me.’ The words hung in the air. The room silent. Twenty-five pairs of eyes looked at me from a circle of plastic chairs.

  ‘I’ve never had a proper relationship. Never lived with anyone. Never got close.’

  The eyes kept staring. Silent. Impassive.

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me . . .’ My voice and legs were shaking.

  ‘I–I–I don’t think that anyone decent could ever love me.’

  And there it was: the truth. The truth I didn’t know was there. The truth that was under everything.

  I did not feel that anybody in their right mind would want me. I thought there was something wrong with me. I could not be loved the way other people could.

  Now I was crying so hard I couldn’t catch my breath. Snot mixed with tears and I felt like my legs were going to give way.

  I had never felt so exposed and vulnerable in my life.

  Before I’d started my self-help adventure, a friend had told me about this crazy therapy week her sister had gone on. There was a lot of secrecy around the whole thing but from what she could tell it seemed to involve telling her deepest darkest secrets to a bunch of strangers and bashing cushions with a baseball bat. There was also talk of letting go of ‘baggage’ and getting in touch with your ‘inner child’.

  The whole thing sounded hideous.

  ‘I mean, how desperate would you have to be to put yourself through something like that?’ I said to my friend at the time, while I filed the name in the back of my mind, half suspecting that one day I would be that desperate.

  And so it was that I found myself on something called the Hoffman Process, falling apart in front of twenty-five people in a country house in Sussex.

  When I finished my incoherent ramblings, I went back to my seat and someone else stood up to share their story but I wasn’t listening. Instead I was replaying the words I’d spoken. I had said more to these total strangers than I had ever said to my friends – had ever even admitted to myself . . .

  My legs wobbled as I stood up for the break time. I kept my head down as I walked to the kitchen and joined the queue of people making tea. I couldn’t look at anyone. There was a shell-shocked hush in the air. Everyone stunned by what was happening. I felt nauseous. I left the queue without making any tea and went outside.

  It was cold. Grey. A robin hopped along the frozen grass. I felt like I’d fallen off the edge of the world. Was that really what I thought? That nobody would love me?

  The crunch of gravel behind me and a woman with cropped blonde hair and a pencil skirt was standing next to me, cigarette in hand. I looked up and smiled weakly. Normally now I’d turn on the charm, I’d ask lots of questions, listen, smile and be as likeable as I possibly could be. But what was the point now? The whole room had seen me naked.

  ‘That was very brave,’ she said.

  Was that code for ‘embarrassing, stupid, pathetic’? Was she judging me, in her perfect pencil skirt and short chic hair?

  ‘I could relate to everything you said,’ she continued, but she was just trying to be nice. She’d talked about being under pressure at work. I bet she was some senior person in some massive company with a big house and a husband and family and a life. We were nothing alike.

  She kept talking.

  ‘I was a coward. I didn’t say the truth. My husband left me and I spend my weekends locked in a one-bedroom flat chain smoking and watching hours of crap on television. I eat chocolate until I feel sick. Then I make myself sick. I tried to kill myself last year.’

  Oh.

  We stood in silence for a few minutes, watching the robin. She dragged on her cigarette.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said.

  She nodded.

  There was nothing more to say.

  The bell rang to bring us back into the room.

  She put out her cigarette and we walked towards the house. By the door a tall, tanned man was also finishing a cigarette. He was wearing a soft grey jumper and had the kind of poreless glowing skin that only the very rich have. I could not look at him; I was too ashamed that he’d seen me in such a snotty state. But I had nowhere to hide. It was done. The cat was out of the bag. I was a mess. I looked up at him and gave him a weak smile.

  Then something incredible happened. This man with expensive skin leaned over to me and put his arm around my shoulders and just stood there.

  We said nothing. Three strangers standing in silence. Alone. Together. More tears streamed down my face. He handed me a handkerchief.

  ‘Shall we go back in?’ he said.

  And we did. Together.

  For eight days we sat in circles, talked about our feelings, our lives, and our families. We ranged in age from nineteen to sixty-five and came from all walks of life.

  As warned, we bashed pillows with plastic baseball bats while screaming at the top of our lungs to get rid of our anger. We stood in muddy fields, pretending to be burying loved ones in order to say the things we needed to say. We even buried ourselves – or rather the worst parts of ourselves – which meant that together with the funeral exercise I’d tried in 7 Habits, I had now gone to two of my own funerals.

  With every new exercise, I’d think, ‘This is my idea of hell . . .’ then we’d be given the next one, which would surpass it – ‘No, THIS is my idea of hell . . .’ and on it went.

  Some parts were so ridiculous, I suspected we were being filmed for some sort of Ruby Wax documentary – ‘Look what these nutty, first-world people have to do to be happy!’ she’d say as the camera panned to us stroking a velvet cushion that was meant to represent our inner child.

  The week was even more hideous than I’d been expecting.

  But it was also one of the best things I’d done in my life.

  I shared my worst bits with people and they didn’t run away – quite the opposite. They were unfailingly kind. For the first time in my life, I did not feel alone. It felt like a miracle.

  But the greatest miracle of all was that despite the fact that we all had different stories, it soon became clear that underneath everything we were all the same. We all felt flawed. Not good enough. Not loveable.

  Without realizing it, the problem I had shared on the first day – the problem I was so ashamed of, the guilty secret I had been keeping even from myself – happened to be the most common source of pain for all human beings. A problem which had been alluded to in all the self-help books I’d read but which I had not picked up on until now.

  ‘We’re all afraid we’re not enough,’ Tony Robbins says. ‘At the core, there’s a place where people feel they’re not smart enough, young enough, old enough, rich enough, funny enough, something enough. And it’s the worst feeling because, underneath that, our fear is then, “I won’t be loved.”’

  Eckhart Tolle
agrees. He says: ‘that feeling that something is wrong with you, is not a personal problem of yours. It is a universal, human condition. You may be surprised to know that there are millions . . . billions of people on the planet who have the same thought pattern. It is part of the human ego.’

  After coming home from Hoffman I discovered a woman who has become famous for articulating this feeling. A few years ago, Brené Brown did a TED talk to a few hundred people in her home town of Houston, Texas.

  In a world obsessed with positive thinking and productivity, her subject was not upbeat, it was quite the opposite. It was about shame – something she defines as that ‘intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging’.

  The talk went on to become a viral hit, watched by tens of millions of people around the world. It turned into a book called Daring Greatly in which she explains that people often think shame is reserved for people who have survived trauma but that’s not true. Shame is something we all experience. In fact, Brown says that we are in the middle of a shame epidemic – where nobody thinks they are good enough, thin enough, smart enough, rich enough, successful enough, well dressed enough.

  A few people had mentioned Brené Brown’s TED talk to me before, including, surprisingly, the Tinder guy who wanted to go back to mine on the first date. But I’d never investigated further until getting home from the Hoffman Process, when I watched the talk over and over again and read Daring Greatly cover to cover. Three times. It seemed to capture the essence of what it is to be human. It also seemed to capture patterns of behaviour that had governed my life but which I’d been totally unaware of. It captured just why a week spilling my guts to strangers had changed me in a way that the self-help books couldn’t.

  Brené says that when we feel shame we do several things. First, we try to be perfect. We think that if we can just get thinner, smarter, more successful, then we’ll feel OK and people will love us and we won’t get hurt.

  When that doesn’t work – and it never does – we try another approach: we numb our feelings of shame. We watch television. We drink. We eat too much. We take drugs. Brown thinks that numbing is why obesity, addiction and depression are so rife.

  Then when the numbing and the perfectionism doesn’t work, we go down the third route: we cut ourselves off, shut down our feelings, decide to go it alone.

  Brené was basically describing my life – both before and after self-help. After all, what had this whole project been except a misguided attempt at perfection? And what had I done when that attempt failed? I’d got drunk, watched television and stopped talking to my friends.

  I had not gone down the route that Brené says is the only one that works: connecting with others. Showing our real selves to people who will love and accept us – warts and all.

  Being vulnerable.

  Brené writes: ‘If we share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.’

  To this end, Brené is not a fan of the term ‘self-help’.

  ‘I don’t know what it means,’ she said in an interview. ‘I don’t think we’re meant to do it alone. Healing comes from sharing your story with someone worthy of hearing it.’

  She was right. I saw I’d been doing the self-help stuff all wrong. I couldn’t do it alone. After spending my whole life telling myself that I was strong and did not need others – it turned out that I did.

  It was petrifying to show my real self to other people at Hoffman – but it was exactly what I needed. In my snotty and tearful state, I felt accepted and loved and seen in a way I had never done in my life. And even though I didn’t realize it, that is all human beings ever really want. Not new jeans, new job, new house, new boyfriend, new car – but the feeling that we love and belong.

  Brené writes in an earlier book, The Gifts of Imperfection: ‘A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all women, men and children. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.’

  I had spent a lifetime breaking, numbing, hurting and getting sick. A lifetime of going it alone. It was time to stop, with the help of Brené Brown – and my friends.

  Brené writes a lot about friends. ‘I carry a small sheet of paper in my wallet that has written on it the names of people whose opinions of me matter. To be on that list, you have to love me for my strengths and struggles . . . You have to love and respect that I’m totally uncool.’

  She calls these her ‘move the body’ friends – people she could call in the middle of the night and they would come and do whatever she asked, no questions asked.

  I missed Sarah. More than anything I wanted to be back in a sticky-floored pub drinking too much and giggling with her. She loved me as I was. She made me laugh at my flaws. She made me feel like a million dollars even when I was spotty and hungover.

  She knew me. Really, really knew me. And I knew her too. I knew that she was much more sensitive than she ever let on. That she believed in God and was kind to everyone. I knew that she thought that one of the worst things anyone could do was leave people out. She was always the one making friends with the girl in the coatroom or the awkward colleague standing alone at a party. She’d melt them with her love and humour and soon they’d be dancing and she’d make them feel like the funniest and most fascinating person in the room.

  It hit me that I’d done the very worst thing to Sarah. I’d left her out. I’d left her out of my new life. I’d thought I had to improve myself on my own – but the truth was the opposite. You can only grow with other people.

  I had to call her but I was terrified. I’d left it so long. What would I say?

  ‘Hello, I’m sorry’? Then what? What if she just hung up on me? Or was silent? Or told me what a cow I was?

  For two days I picked up my phone then found a reason not to call her. A job that needed doing. A trip to the Post Office. Or an urgent need to call Mum. Finally, on Saturday afternoon, alone on my bed, I picked up the phone and pressed her number. A number I had pressed a million times before. My hands shaking. I didn’t know what I was going to say.

  It rang. And rang. Then it went to answerphone. I could hear her voice. Bright. Cheery. I panicked and hung up without leaving a message.

  I pictured her looking at my name on the phone and pressing silent. I pictured her at home with Steve on the sofa. I wanted more than anything to be there with her, getting an Indian and watching a film before falling asleep on the sofa after too much wine and Dairy Milk. I suddenly missed her so much it hurt. How had I been such an idiot? So cold?

  I texted: ‘I’ve been a self-obsessed idiot. I’m so sorry. I miss you. Mx’

  For the rest of the night I couldn’t sit still. I was so scared of what the answer would be I switched my phone off. Then turned it back on again. Then off. Then on. No response. The next morning, I woke up at 7am and checked my phone. Still nothing.

  ‘Give her time,’ said Rachel over breakfast. ‘Come on, let’s get out. Go for a walk.’

  And so we walked on the Heath and walked up to the ponds we’d jumped into fifteen months earlier. A couple of middle-aged matriarchs were doing breaststroke. The energy and optimism I had felt after that swim, on my first day of my self-help mission, felt a million miles away from where I was now.

  ‘Shall we go in?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘We didn’t bring our swimsuits.’

  ‘They always have spare ones in the changing rooms.’

  I knew that I probably should do it, just to keep pushing myself, to get out of my comfort zone. Again. But I didn’t want to.

  ‘No, I don’t want to get cold. Let’s get lunch.’

  We had Sunday lunch at St John. Seeing normal gangs of friends and families doing the most normal of things, eating together, drinking wine, read
ing papers – it was bliss. A few months ago, when I was busy planning my funeral, I’d have looked at these people and thought they were running and hiding, but now it looked like happiness. This was the stuff of life. Friends eating together and chatting.

  Halfway through my lamb my phone beeped. I reached into my bag.

  It was Sarah. I felt gripped with panic.

  ‘What does she say?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Open it.’

  ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘Come on.’

  I clicked it open. There was a picture of a woman in a massive Aran-knit onesie with a hood.

  Underneath the message: ‘Saw this weeks ago and wanted to send it to you and then I remembered that we were dastardly enemies . . . Let’s not be. I prefer it when we’re friends.’

  I shrieked and jumped up and down in my seat.

  I passed Rachel the phone.

  She looked confused.

  ‘We went to Ireland together one winter and it was so cold I went to bed with my puffa jacket on and three jumpers underneath. Ever since then she’s sent me pictures of thermal vests and long johns.’

  Sarah knew me.

  She knew that I was always cold. She knew that I lived for big jumpers. She knew that I was also messy and that I would sleep twenty hours of every day if I could. She knew that I loved Christmas with a passionate love that was only rivalled by a passionate hate of coloured fairy lights.

  ‘Oh, God, you’re not crying again . . . ?’ Rachel smiled.

  And I was.

  I was so happy.

  I replied: ‘I totally want that onesie!’

  Sarah: ‘I’ll knit you one.’

  Me: ‘You knit now?’

  Sarah: ‘Yes. A lot has changed in the last few months.’

  Me: ‘How are you? I’m having lunch with Rachel if you want to join?’

  Sarah: ‘With Steve’s mum today. We’re in Westfield. I hate Westfield. Another time?’

  Me: ‘Dinner tomorrow?’

  We met at Pizza Express at 6pm the next evening.