Self-help, and other illusions

Every post I write here is an exercise in self-doubt. 

This was going to be a post about self-care, full of helpful ideas for getting through hard times. That didn’t happen. To start with, I hate the term self-care. It has something of self-flagellation about it, in my head at least. A boss once responded to a plea for help – a call saying I needed sick leave – by asking if I was doing it. Are you doing enough self-care? What I should have said is that asking for time off was the greatest act of self-care I could have made. At the time, as low as I was, I took it as accusation. This is your fault, you haven’t done the work. I felt it was justified because who else could be to blame but me? Now I think: why must the onus be on us, ourselves, all the time?

So that article got scrapped. 

I then started writing about the pitfalls of self-employment. Loneliness, instability, pyjama paralysis – a phrase I saw on a poster in a hospital ward last year. The theory is that living in your pyjamas is a physical manifestation of failure, a self-fulfilling first step into the abyss. Another stick to beat myself with, then; my pyjamas have more use than any item in my floordrobe. 

Another piece in the bin. 

So I read all the comments on my last post. And it struck me that what really helps is not about the self at all. The self is where the problem starts. Thinking we have all the answers. An extension of an endemically individualistic culture: if we are authors of our own success then surely we are authors of our own failure too. Self-blame flourishes in such an environment.

Reading your messages gave me a glimmer of hope. Stories of the particular muck you find yourselves swimming in; messages of hope from those who have been there and aren’t any more; wise acknowledgements of the state of fear; meditations on the limits of the self-help narrative. The healing was in the variety and the bravery and the truth-telling. Crowd-sourced care and honesty. 

Honesty. I feared it so much last week. Friends subscribe to my posts; how would I go about reassuring them all when they read it? Clients read it too; will they ever employ me again? Vulnerable people with their own muck to wade through; surely they don’t need mine as well? 

But honesty is, I find increasingly, the only option. Honesty to ourselves, and to each other. A friend came over last week. She told me her pain: a sister on the brink of psychosis, her inability to save her. We took turns crying, letting the fear and guilt and shame out. Then something happened; something that can only really happen when interacting with another human. We started laughing. We began retelling our most pathetic stories of the week, poking fun at our fears. I told her about all the things that had made me cry this week. I’ll share some of the most ridiculous cuts with you:

• I went into the garden to look at the new shoots of rhubarb. Ah, a moment of mindful bliss, just like they tell you to do on Headspace. It was only afterwards, when I’d been up and down the stairs not once but twice, that I realised I’d stepped in cat poop. Two trails of ferociously stinky faeces, a kind of neon yellow – had this cat eaten turmeric? – all the way through the house. Later I found myself crawling on all fours, sniffing the floor, sure I could still smell it. Ghost poo, forever haunting my stairs. 

• Hot water bottle injuries. I used to think this was a myth my Nana made up. Hold the bottle right or the boiling water will BURST out and BURN your hand off, she used to say. Of course, Nana, of course. But woe betide those of us who ignore our Nanas, because as I poured scalding water into this supposed vehicle of comfort last Friday, I hit a massive air bubble and experienced a backwash that burnt a huge patch of skin off my thumb. Now it looks like I have impetigo.

• I spent a full hour writing an email to an author. Rewriting and rewriting. Much like this article, there were so many drafts I could have created a piece of post-modern art with the transcripts. If I owned a printer, which is another thing on my list I haven’t done. The email I ended up writing was this: ‘Thank you for coming back to me. I’ll have a think and come back to you.’ Booker Prize, here I come. 

• I lost an earplug. I can’t sleep without them. I didn’t have spares, and the shop seemed too far. Where did it go? I looked everywhere, but nothing, only cat hair and lost hairclips rebuking me from under the bed as I sobbed.

• I didn’t wash or brush my hair for four days – for me, owner of the lankiest hair in history, this is grave. I finally pushed a comb through on day five. Onto my floor, unearthed from where it had been living in the back of my hair nest, and certainly visible to anyone I’d seen that week: an earplug. 

Other than self-mockery – sometimes the laughter becoming tears of self-pity again, I won’t lie – my greatest act of self-compassion has been accepting I couldn’t do a couple of jobs I had booked in. As I live hand-to-mouth at the moment it meant I dipped into a terrifyingly small pot of savings. But the space it has given me has allowed me to start to navigate this episode differently to before. It doesn’t look much like the self-care the manuals prescribe. I am not shaking off the pain, not forcing myself on a run that ends in a panic attack. Some of it simply looks like feeling the fear, doing nothing, then feeling the fear again. But I am also seeing friends, doing small things. I even scrubbed at the ghost poo again. I am rewriting my own internal self-help manual, which looks much more like asking others for help. I hope you will think of what your own might look like, even if it’s nothing like the glossy publications you see on the shelves. 

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Thank you for reading and sharing this experience of muck-diving with me. Thank you for every comment you share with me and each other. Thank you for your pledges, which make me think the muck has value. Thank you to the authors and publishers who still employ me despite my occasional madness. Thank you to my friends who know that I will be OK even when I don’t. Thank you.

Katy 

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash