Help Me! Read online

  Marianne Power

  HELP ME!

  One woman’s quest to find out if self-help

  really can change her life

  PICADOR

  To G – my person

  Mum: About this book . . .

  Me: Yes.

  Mum: Please tell me you don’t use the word ‘journey’ in it.

  Me: I don’t.

  Mum: Good.

  Me: I prefer the term ‘spiritual path’.

  Mum: Oh, Marianne . . .

  Contents

  The Life-Changing Hangover

  1: Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, by Susan Jeffers

  2: Money, a Love Story, by Kate Northrup

  3: The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne

  4: Rejection Therapy, with Jason Comely

  5: Rejection Therapy, Take Two

  6: F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way, by John C. Parkin

  7: The F**k It Fallout

  8: Unleash the Power Within, with Tony Robbins

  PERFECT ME – THE 10-DAY TONY CHALLENGE

  9: Broke

  10: Angels, with Doreen Virtue

  11: Sick

  12: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

  13: Depressed

  14: The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle

  15: Get the Guy, by Matthew Hussey

  16: Get a Husband?

  17: Daring Greatly, by Brené Brown

  18: You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise Hay

  So Does Self-Help, Well, Help?

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  The stained office chair is covered with grey, scratchy material. I try not to think about the origin of the dark splodge as I let my fluffy dressing gown drop to the floor and sit down. Naked.

  The cool air of the draughty hall hits my skin. My heart pounds.

  I am naked. In front of people. Naked. Under a spotlight. Naked.

  My thoughts race. What if someone I know walks in? Someone I work with? Or an old teacher?

  ‘Just find a position you are comfortable in and relax,’ says the teacher from the back of the room. ‘I promise you nobody will be thinking of your nudity – they’ll be too focused on their art.’

  Patronizing sod, easy for you to say in your jeans and jacket. You are one hundred per cent more dressed than me right now.

  I cross my legs and put my arms in my lap, just to cover something. I look down at my mozzarella tummy and the blonde hairs on my white legs glowing under the bright lights. The noise of pencil scratching paper is the only thing to distract me from the voice inside my head. A voice that’s yelling: What the hell are you doing here? Why aren’t you at home watching telly like a normal person? And why didn’t you shave your legs? Surely that’s the first thing you do when you are about to get naked in public? Some basic bloody hair removal?

  Out of the corner of my eye I see movement. Someone has come in late. It’s a man. He is tall. Dark curly hair. I raise my head slightly. He’s wearing a navy jumper. God, I’m a sucker for a nice jumper . . . The reality dawns: a hot man has walked in while I am sitting with no clothes on in a village hall.

  This is the stuff of nightmares.

  I stare at a ball of fluff on the floor like my life depends on it.

  I take a deep breath and worry that breathing makes me look fat. Fatter.

  Stop it, Marianne. Think of something else . . . like what you will have for dinner when you get home. Maybe a chicken stir-fry? Or cheese on toast?

  ‘OK, Marianne, why don’t we try a standing pose? Perhaps with your back to the room? And your arms up?’

  My legs shake as I turn.

  I wonder how these budding Michelangelos are going to capture my cellulite. Is this something they get taught how to do? A bit like learning perspective and how to recreate the sky? I wonder what Mr Jumper is going to think of my bum? He’ll hate it, I’m sure. I bet all his girlfriends are perfect size eights and have bums like peaches . . .

  I think about cheese on toast. I wonder what kind of bread we have left.

  My arms burn with the effort of keeping them up. Two drops of sweat trickle down the side of my body. Then the teacher’s talking again.

  ‘Feel free to move to a better position,’ he tells his students. ‘Move closer to the model. Find a good angle to work from.’

  Chairs scrape on the wooden floor. Mr Jumper is now sitting three feet away from me. He’s so close, I can smell his aftershave. It smells clean and sea-like.

  I bet he thinks you’re a weirdo for being naked in public on a Sunday night. I bet he thinks your hairy thighs are huge and ugly. I bet . . . Stop it, Marianne!

  I go back to the fluff. I wonder why the floors of halls are always so dusty and whether I can get away without doing any laundry when I get home. Then the teacher is telling me to get dressed.

  The minute he does, I feel even more naked. He’d told me to bring a robe – conjuring up images of Parisian garrets and models in silk gowns – but all I had was a fleecy dressing gown. I put it on, take a breath and move over to Mr Jumper.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m a bit out of practice,’ he mumbles, looking at his easel. ‘I didn’t get your nose right, and the forehead is a bit big . . .’

  I look at the outline of my naked form in chaotic charcoal strokes. ‘Sod the forehead!’ I want to shout. ‘You’ve made my arse the size of Australia!’

  I go into the toilets and try to dress quickly on the icy, chipped tiles. I struggle to get my tights back on in the confines of the cubicle. I sit on the loo.

  I feel more embarrassed than empowered.

  Why am I doing any of this . . .?

  The Life-Changing Hangover

  There comes a point in every woman’s life when she realizes that things cannot carry on the way they are. For me that point came on a hungover Sunday.

  I don’t remember what I’d done the night before – except, evidently, drink too much and pass out fully clothed, with my make-up on. When I woke my eyes were glued shut with crusty mascara and my skin was an oil slick of foundation and night sweat. My jeans were digging into my tummy. I needed the loo but was too lazy to move so I undid the zip and lay with my eyes closed.

  Everything hurt.

  Sometimes with a hangover, you get away with it. You awake feeling bleary but cheery, euphoric even, and you bump your way through the day until your hangover makes a soft landing around 4pm. This was not one of those hangovers. This was a full-frontal, no-ignoring-it hangover. My head felt like a bomb had gone off in it. My stomach was churning like a washing machine full of toxic waste. And my mouth, well, as the saying goes – someone, or something, had died in it.

  I rolled over, reaching for the glass on my bedside table. My hands shook so much the water spilt down my front and onto the sheets.

  The strip of light coming through the curtains hurt my eyes. I closed them again and waited for it to come . . . Oh yes, there it was . . .

  That tidal wave of anxiety and self-loathing that washes over you after a big night. That certainty that you have done something very bad, that you are a bad person and nothing but bad things are going to happen to you for the rest of your pathetic life, because this is what you deserve.

  I was suffering from what my friends call The Fear but it wasn’t just a hangover making me feel this way. The feelings of dread, anxiety and failure were always there, humming in the background. The hangover just turned up the volume.

  It wasn’t that my life was bad. Far from it.

  After spending my twenties stressing my way up the career ladder in newspapers, I was now a successful freelance writer living in London. I got paid – actually paid – to road-test mascaras. A month before this life-defining hangover I’d been sent to an Austrian spa, where I hung out
with rich housewives paying thousands to eat nothing but broth and stale bread. I was given the trip for free, lost five pounds and came home with a fancy collection of miniature shampoos.

  Shortly before that I’d been given a masterclass in seduction from Dita Von Teese in her suite in Claridge’s for a newspaper article. I’d even interviewed James Bond and listened for weeks to the voicemail left by the late, great Roger Moore thanking me for the ‘bloody good piece’.

  Professionally, I was living the dream.

  Outside of work, life looked good too. I had friends and family who cared about me. I bought over-priced jeans and drank over-priced cocktails. I went on holidays. I did a pretty good impression of someone having a good time.

  But I wasn’t. I was lost.

  As friends re-grouted bathrooms and planned villa holidays, I spent weekends drinking, or lying in bed watching The Real Housewives or The Kardashians.

  When I did go out, my social life consisted of a string of engagement drinks, weddings, housewarmings and baby christenings. I smiled and did my bit. I bought the presents. Signed the cards. Toasted their happiness. But with every celebration of somebody else’s landmark I felt more left behind, alone, irrelevant. At thirty-six, my friends were ticking off the various life stages while I was stuck in the same life I’d had since my twenties.

  I was always single, I didn’t own a house, and I didn’t have a plan.

  Friends would ask me if I was OK, and I said I was. I knew I was unhappy but what reason did I have to be unhappy? I was lucky. I was obscenely lucky. And so I moaned about being single because that seemed to be something that people could relate to – but I didn’t even know if that was the source of my unhappiness. Would a boyfriend solve all my life’s problems? Maybe, maybe not. Did I want to get married and have kids? I didn’t know. Either way, the point was academic. Men were not falling at my feet.

  The truth was that men still scared the hell out of me and this was a huge source of embarrassment. Why couldn’t I do this thing that everybody else could do? You know, meet someone, fall in love, get married.

  I felt defective.

  But I didn’t say any of this to anyone. Instead, I’d nod as people assured me that I’d meet someone soon and then we’d change the subject and I’d go home alone and continue my slow descent into nothingness, if I wanted to be dramatic about it. Which, given the hangover, I did.

  I looked around the squalor of my bedroom in the exorbitantly expensive basement flat I was renting. Old tights and knickers on the floor, a damp towel next to them, a bin overflowing with face wipes and empty water bottles. One, two, three half-empty coffee cups . . .

  Surveying the scene, I heard a voice from deep within me:

  What are you doing?

  And then again, this time louder and more insistent:

  What are you doing?

  This is always what happens at these rock-bottom moments in books, isn’t it? A voice comes from nowhere, telling the protagonist something has to change? That voice might be God, or a dead mother, or I don’t know, the ghost of Christmases past – but there is always a voice.

  I never believed in that kind of stuff, of course. I figured it was just a literary device cooked up by over-dramatic attention seekers – but it turns out it’s true. Sometimes you really do get to the point where you hear voices.

  Mine had been coming at me for months, waking me up most mornings at 3am, when I’d find myself sitting bolt upright in bed, heart pounding as this voice demanded:

  What are you doing? What are you doing?

  I did my best to ignore it. I went back to sleep, back to work and back to the pub. But as the months passed it was getting harder to push down the feeling that something wasn’t right. The truth was I had no clue what I was doing with my life. And the cracks were beginning to show. I was finding it hard to keep my smile up, and the tears that were usually confined to my bedroom were now making public appearances – in the pub, at office dos, friends’ parties – until finally, I’d become that woman at weddings, the one who lurched from drunkenly dancing to Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ to sobbing in the bathroom.

  I’d never ever wanted to be that person. But there it was. It had happened.

  The phone rang when I was on my fourth hungover hour of hanging out with the Kardashians. I still hadn’t showered.

  It was my sister Sheila.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked. Her voice bright and breezy. She was walking.

  ‘Nothing, I’m hungover. What about you?’

  ‘Just been to the gym, and now I’m going to meet Jo for brunch.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘You sound miserable,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not miserable! I’m just hungover,’ I snapped.

  ‘Why don’t you go for a walk? That always helps.’

  ‘It’s raining,’ I said. It wasn’t but Sheila didn’t know that. She lived in New York, in her fancy apartment with her fancy job and her fancy friends who had fancy brunches. I pictured her bouncing down her Manhattan street, all clean and buzzy from exercise, her expensive highlights shining in the sun.

  ‘What are you going to do with your day?’ she asked. I hated the judgement implicit in that question.

  ‘I don’t know. The day’s nearly over, it’s 4pm here.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, I’m just tired.’

  ‘OK, I’ll leave you to it.’

  I was going to hang up, to let her get on with her fabulous life, and continue my slide into self-pity but instead I found myself crying.

  ‘What’s wrong? Did something happen last night?’ Sheila asked.

  ‘No, nothing like that.’

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ I said, my voice cracking. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m unhappy all the time and I don’t know why.’

  ‘Oh, Marianne . . .’ Her voice lost its usual abrasive edge.

  ‘I just don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve done all the things you’re supposed to do – I work hard, I try to be nice, I pay stupid rent on this stupid apartment, but what’s the point? What’s the point of any of it?’

  Sheila couldn’t give me the answer, so at three in the morning, unable to sleep or tolerate any more of the Kardashians, I turned to someone, or rather something, that would.

  I was twenty-four when I read my first self-help book. I was drinking cheap white wine in All Bar One by Oxford Circus, moaning about my crappy temping job, when my friend handed me a battered copy of Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers.

  I read the tagline out loud: ‘How to turn your fear and indecision into confidence and action . . .’.

  I rolled my eyes before turning it over and reading the back: ‘What is stopping you from being the person you want to be and living your life the way you want to live it? Fear of tackling an issue with your boss? Fear of change? Fear of taking control?’

  I rolled my eyes some more. ‘I’m not scared, I’m just in a crap job.’

  ‘I know it’s cheesy but read it,’ my friend urged me. ‘I promise it’ll make you want to go out and DO stuff!’

  I couldn’t see what it had made her do other than get drunk with me, but no matter. That night I read half of the book in a wine blur. The next night I finished it.

  I might have been an English lit graduate with literary pretensions but there was something about the shouty capital letters and exclamation marks that was intoxicating. That American can-do attitude. It was the exact opposite of my English/Irish pessimism. It made me feel like anything was possible.

  After reading it I quit my temping job even though I had no other work lined up. A week later I heard that a friend of a friend of a friend was working at a newspaper. I called her and when she didn’t pick up, I kept calling. And kept calling. I showed a tenacity that was entirely new to me. Finally, she called me back and told me I could come in on
work experience. Two weeks later I was offered a job.

  That was my start in journalism. The risk paid off.

  After that I was hooked on self-help. If a book was promising to change my life in my lunch hour, give me confidence/a man/money in five easy steps and had Oprah’s seal of approval, I’d buy not only the book but the t-shirt and the audio course.

  Books such as The Little Book of Calm, The Rules of Life and The Power of Positive Thinking were all read, cover to cover. Passages underlined. Notes in the margin. Each one seemed to promise a happier, saner, more fulfilled me . . . but did they work?

  Did they hell!

  Despite reading I Can Make You Rich – written by Paul McKenna, a former radio DJ turned hypnotist who had indeed made himself very rich with his new brand of self-help – I was a disaster with money. Give me a tenner and I’d have spent twenty by the time you put your wallet back in your pocket.

  Even though I’d read Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and Why Men Love Bitches, I was always single.

  And while Feel the Fear had got me started in my career, any further success was not thanks to reading The Success Principles – it was down to an all-consuming fear of failure, which made me work obsessively.

  While helping me pack for one of my many flat moves, my friend Sarah found it hysterically funny that in every room there was a stash of self-help books. Under the sofa, under my bed, stacked next to the wardrobe.

  ‘A lot of them are for work,’ I argued. Which was true, to a point. Sometimes I did write about them. But most of the time I’d bought these books for another reason: I thought they were going to change my life.

  ‘Don’t they all say the same thing?’ asked Sarah. ‘Be positive. Get out of your comfort zone? I don’t get why they need 200 pages to say something that’s summed up in a paragraph on the back.’

  ‘Sometimes the message needs to be repeated for it to sink in,’ I said.

  Sarah picked up a book which was sitting on top of the fridge next to two phone chargers and a pile of takeaway curry menus.

  ‘How to Stop Worrying and Start Living,’ she said, reading out the title of a well-thumbed book.