It started small, like all the most insidious addictions. A moment of indecision over what podcast to listen to next – more Brexit analysis or another gruesome cold case centred on a woman’s corpse? – and I was sucked in. Now, I mainline two or three a day. But at least if the problem becomes unmanageable, someone will have a solution to offer me.
For my entire adult life, I have not merely scoffed at but actively militated against the self-help industry. On a macro-level, I resented the simplicity of the solutions on offer, seeing them as capitalist sops designed to winkle out their victims’ weaknesses and create a cycle of cash-rich dependency. On a personal level, they offended my carefully nurtured, aggressively deployed intellectual defences; where I would bring Proust, they brought a Hallmark card. How stupid did people have to be to sign up to their vacuous bullshit?
But life moves on. It was a chance exchange on Twitter that began it: a writer I like and respect recommending a podcast that dealt with weight loss to one of her followers. I tracked it down; it was good, sensible, interested in the emotional causes of overeating and calamitous yo-yo dieting, entirely nonjudgmental.
But it was also a million miles from any aural aesthetic I would normally gravitate to – upbeat, California, determined. And its host, the fantastically named Brooke Castillo, with her theories of how to bypass the busy, naysaying part of your brain and engage the bit that knows what’s best for you, has a strategy for everything: shedding the pounds, cutting back on the booze, making gazillions, organising your sock drawer, building a windfarm in your back garden (OK, not that one, but I bet she’s working on it). In they drop, these little bursts of can-do, must-do, will-do enthusiasm, once a week, all tied up by Brooke – who’s known hard times, let me tell you – enjoining you to have a wonderful week while she’s walking her dogs. I listened to her entire back catalogue, and then began to venture more broadly into the world of the motivational, seeking out experts in all manner of things that might ail you.
I would not say I was a woman with problems; not unless you count poor impulse control, specifically in relation to red wine and rich cheese, a reluctance to exercise, a tendency to procrastinate when faced with anything involving a degree of uncertainty (tax returns, thank you letters, travel arrangements and, most worryingly for my chosen profession, writing), separation anxiety, attachment anxiety, unpredictable attacks of nameless dread. The usual. Amazingly, my lifelong devotion to literature, despite its ability to look deep into the human heart, has not yielded much in the way of targeted five-point plans. Nor, apparently, do these issues melt away as the years accrue; rather, bad and self-destructive habits appear to become more entrenched and guilt-ridden.
But here’s what made the difference: a simple decision not to fixate on whether these nuggets of basic, and occasionally schmaltzy, wisdom were rooted in the kind of philosophical and moral correctness for which I revere George Eliot, nor the delicate apprehension of human consciousness that I get from Virginia Woolf. But instead to ask: “Might they help me to tackle my inbox or say no to an unwise extra glass?”
It turned out they did. I have no idea why, but somehow the messages I listened to while driving or making dinner or going to sleep seemed to take root and reappear at useful moments. And my other fear – that this level of what has come to be called self-care is just a cover for next-level narcissism – has also been unfounded. It turns out that when you’re not waking up every day cringing at your own shortcomings, you have more time to spend turning your face out to the world.
The hunch that allows me to maintain a degree of brainy amour-propre is that the content of such self-help panaceas is only part of the deal. Perhaps the greater portion is the willingness to admit that one’s imperfections can have their edges smoothed off without a full-scale psychodynamic investigation and consequent dark night of the soul. Perhaps someone else can chip in with a word of advice, a tactic, a regime. Perhaps those thorny areas can, like all those unused apps on your phone, be offloaded until they’re once again needed; and perhaps that will be never.
So here I am, utterly incapable of solving the world’s problems, having sat beside enough hospital beds to know I can’t turn back the tide of illness or mortality, still surrounded by piles of paperwork and still, sadly, in pursuit of the ability to jump up in the morning, walk five miles and eat a probiotic breakfast. But I have, in the mantra of one of my favourite podcasts, decided to rescind permission to be cruel to myself as a result of these failures. There will be a nice voice to tell me how I can go back to try again and reassure me I haven’t got it all wrong. And that, in these brutal times, is not nothing.