Something to remember me by...
IWAS listening to uplifting self-helpy podcasts, with Americans, who sounded tanned and toothy, telling me how to feel better. I lulled myself to sleep with them at night, thinking they might have some secrets as to how I could snap out of my mood. But they were making me feel worse. Because before they got to the solutions, they kept talking about the problems, and in a really judgmental way. And I was usually asleep by the time they got to the solutions. I may as well have been trying to put myself to sleep listening to a tape that just repeated “You are a piece of sh*t”.
I’d been feeling a bit flat for a few weeks. I think the end of the summer kicked it off and then it just spiralled a bit. I felt I was going through the motions with life. I was having trouble seeing the good in things.
I did all the things you’re supposed to do. I tried to exercise a lot despite not feeling like it. I didn’t really drink, despite feeling like it. I kept putting one foot in front of the other, while all around me, everything and everyone was really annoying me. But I didn’t blame them, I blamed myself, obviously.
This bad mood was lasting longer than usual and it was wearing me out. And then
‘We eked the last bit of joy out of the bouncy castle and out of the summer’
something happened.
On Fridays I go through the new music releases on Spotify. Last week there was a new song Something To Remember Me By by a goth/shoegazy/dreampop band I sometimes like called The Horrors. So I had a listen to it. And suddenly I remembered why it was good to be alive. It’s a wistful summer pop song commingled with a kind of poppy house record that you might have heard in Ibiza 20 years ago. It was the sound of nostalgia for summers past, mixed with a semi-banging techno song. And something in it stirred my soul. There was something lifeaffirming and transcendent about it. I listened to it repeatedly for a few days and every time I did, my bad mood melted away.
At the weekend it was my Mary’s birthday. She is seven, and as you will know if you have kids, you never imagine that they will one day be seven. Or eight, or nine, for that matter.
Because Mary has a different struggle to the rest of us, each birthday seems like a triumph, like a defiant act of survival, not just for her, but for her mother, for her sister, for all of us, for our little family.
The actual party was Friday, so I missed that. But the bouncy castle stayed for a few days, so the festivities continued all weekend. I was still slightly going through the motions at this point, but I tried to jolly along with things, or else stay out of the way, refilling the well.
When the weekend was almost over, and with it the summer, there was a slight air of melancholy. We went out for a nice birthday Sunday brunch, which was vaguely disappointing and irritating, and we came back home slightly cranky. Everyone went to their own corners to recharge a bit. For some reason I turned on the bouncy castle and laid down on it reading the papers. And then, one by one, my three girls arrived. They laid next to me or on top of me. And then I noticed that it was a beautiful summer’s evening, the like of which we haven’t had all summer. After lazing for a while, people started bouncing. I set the elder one challenges and started throwing the younger one around on the castle. I asked if they wanted to bring the kids from the street in for a last bounce, before it was taken away. But they wanted it to be just us, as we eked the last bit of joy out of the bouncy castle, out of the weekend, out of the birthday and out of the summer.
It was nearly time for bed and we headed in. I was flicking through things I’d recorded on TV and I found a Madness concert. My kids love a bit of Madness. So I called them in and they danced around the room to Madness (the song) and then the birthday girl insisted we keep replaying It Must Be Love and we all sang along with her as she did these dramatic, opera singer-style arms she does: “It must be love, love, love.”
And it struck me that when you find yourself unable to see the good and are just going through the motions, focusing on the problem is not the thing to do. The best self-help, to reconnect with the world, is to seek out the things that feed your soul, like music and singing and bouncing and the joy of kids. And get stuck into the world again.