On the self-love causes that teach the sad to be happy
After making two suicide attempts, Julie Burchill is keen to discover if there is any cure for sadness
I’ve never been a stranger to self-love in its various forms, from adolescent self-abuse through adult self-promotion to the selfies on social media. One recent development on the solipsism front which I have no time for, however, is the repulsively named “self-care”; the notion that life in the free West is so harsh that we must ceaselessly be telling ourselves to wrap up warm, sleep tight and all sorts of sorry slush. I can’t help thinking that this is little more than the latest safe-space wetland of the special snowflake.
Though wary that it may have more to do with soppy self-care than enjoyable showing-off, I was fascinated to see something called I LOVE YOU, ME: A SELF-LOVE IMMERSION WEEKEND going on just 10 minutes away, under the tutelage of one Tara Love Perry. Her website informs me that she is known as “The Spiritual Midwife”, a naturally gifted intuitive energy worker with an ability “to see, hear, feel, communicate and empathise with ranges of energy, from your cells and DNA to your Soul and Eternal Spirit.” Her talks have taken her to nine countries over three continents, with, her website tells me, “many thousands of souls, including spiritual leaders, political leaders, corporate leaders, coaches, authors, CEOS and artists having benefited from her unique methods.”
I’m quite excited. I’ve experienced quite a few sorrows in the recent past, from the suicide of my beloved son in 2015 to the onset of tinnitus at the end of last year, which sent me so berserk it led me to attempt suicide (twice!) by taking an overdose the week before Christmas and another the week after, just for luck.
Astonishingly, a few months on, I somehow seem to have bounced back more bumptious than ever. I think I may just be irretrievably tough, but my experiences have left me far less contemptuous of fragile souls than I once was, and I’m keen to see if sad people really can be made happy.
The lobby of Brighton’s Mercure Hotel is littered with bickering couples wrangling grizzling tots and I think, predictably, of Philip Larkin – “Man hands on misery to man/it deepens like a coastal shelf/get out as early as you can/and don’t have any kids yourself.”
Tara’s lot, the Live In Light Academy (LILA), on the other hand, are all hugging and telling each other how beautiful they are. My cynicism is challenged for the first time; in a world where people seem hell-bent on sleepwalking into their own personalised purgatories, is it really so bad to make a determined effort to pursue happiness? And surely you can’t be happy without first finding yourself intensely agreeable?
There are about 50 of us – mostly attractive young women, just a few fellow middle-aged types, a handful of men, a high proportion of Angloindians, all perky. Tara enters the room; good-looking in the manner of a fit Sixties folk singer, her long white dress and lack of lipstick makes it clear to us that she is not here to be objectified – worship will do just fine. She ascends to the stage and stands slap bang in front of the gold-on-white I LOVE YOU, ME banner logo, so that the heart hovers over her head like a halo and the attached angel wings stick out from her shoulders. I’m here for the first time on the second morning of a two-day event, so am not in a position to judge when Tara tells her audience how much happier they’re looking today – something which is immediately contradicted when one of our number stands up and starts crying over her undeniably sad-sounding childhood.
Tara gets her up for a big hug and then we all have to tell her we love her and instruct her “tiny self ” to “come home”. Tara, using her mystic insight, says: “Did you speak a different language when you were a child?” “No,” comes the response and we move right along.
An Irishwoman, Mary, clad in some sort of patchwork poncho, is up next. Mary used to be an engineer, but has now seen the light and goes around telling people to love themselves for a living; part of me scoffs at this, as surely an engineer adds much to the sum of human happiness. But on the other hand, I’ve had a lovely life doing a non-essential job I adore, so why not other people?
Inspirational quotes flash up. Some are sensible – “Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself ” – but some are frankly insane: self-love described as “the bravest thing you can do”. Tell that to a fireman!
I feel infantilised, to say the least, as we are encouraged to repeat after Tara “Hello, Me. I Love You, Me. Me – are you the one I’m looking for?” There’s a predictable meet-up with our Inner Child but I wasn’t bargaining on having to meet and forgive (they’ll be lucky, with THIS nose!) my Inner Ancestors too. When we are told to visualise our fathers, my adored dad’s horrified face – he was a hard-headed Stalinist-humanist with an unparalleled loathing of mumbojumbo – appears, and I have quite a bad coughing fit. Despite the tearjerking talk, the mood in the room remains resolutely jolly, and I feel a rush of love not for myself for once, but for the phlegmatic nature of our island people. At times the look on Tara’s face reminds me of the way Jerry Springer complained after he tried his luck here that it was very difficult to make the British lose control of their emotions; she loses her cool a few times, yelping somewhat
‘I’m tough – but I’m less contemptuous of fragile souls than I once was’
petulantly “Am I talking crap here, or is this real?” (At one point she calls humanity “a horrible condition” which seems somewhat at odds with Living In Light.
‘She’s very good… very personable… but she’ll go in for the sale now,” a fellow classmate opines when I reveal myself as a sceptic. And sure enough in the second half we’re asked to recite “Hello, Valuable Me. Me, how do I treat you as Valuable?” before you can say VAT. On the glowing blackboard, the LILA modules come up – four levels of them, to be taken over four years – “or faster!” – for a fiver shy of £4,000. “Everyone can do this – it’s not rocket science!” Tara urges. “Who likes making money for not doing very much at all? Because if you refer someone, you get 10 per cent commission! Does that sound cool?”
At this point, I made my excuses and left, lest my savage amusement disrupt the tranquillity. Walking home, I wondered whether the sort of love that can be taught in a weekend has any chance of hanging around for the long-haul; surely self-esteem can only come from achievement, be it professional and/ or personal? Then statistics show that happiness comes when the highest number of boxes on a fixed checklist can be ticked; volunteering, religious faith, a happy marriage, being one’s own boss.
Yet another survey claims that by studying the reactions people have to major upheavals in life and seeing how quickly people returned to their baseline contentment with life, we can gauge that levels of happiness are inherent.
Yet, I despise the sort of fatalists who say you can’t take control of your life. As someone who has behaved with extreme selfishness in the pursuit of happiness, who am I to say that these people’s weekend tickets were £67 foolishly spent? So I get home very happy indeed, feeling a big wave of self-love coming on as I think how non-judgmental I’ve become in my old age.