Self-care

Yesterday I spent World Mental Health Day having a self-care day, which seems appropriate. In reality you ought to be good to yourself every day of course, but that’s just not plausible for most of us, so for those who need it, it’s important to put aside special days – or even just some hours or moments if that’s what you can spare – to prioritise feeling good and being kind to yourself.

The reason I need self-care days is basically down to anxiety. My approach to controlling my anxiety these days is preventative, because once it’s there it’s basically a straitjacket and the more you struggle the tighter it winds around you. I know the circumstances that set off my anxiety and when I start to eliminate them – coffee instead of food on an empty stomach, alcohol, being disorganised, running out of money, lying – my quality of life gets measurably better. Other anxiety triggers are unavoidable – guilt, emotional friction, fear of violence, bad health, running out of money – while some episodes have no tangible origin whatsoever and you just have to have your tactics to hand for when they arrive.

Two things are definitely true for me: the more I look after my body – yoga, exercise, sex, good food, less alcohol and caffeine ­– the less anxiety I will have to go through; and the more I look after my mind – yoga, reading, learning, meditation, art, new experience, conversation – the less anxiety I get and the better able I feel to deal with the way I live and the world I have to live in. Self-care days help me to sustain all of that.

What my self-care days are

Necessary.

All mine.

An opportunity to think about my mental and physical health.

An opportunity to learn from people going through similar.

A chance to think how far I’ve come.

Truly lovely times.

What my self-care days are not

‘Treat days’. It shouldn’t be a big treat to want to go for a walk for no reason, or make a 5 hour playlist just for yourself, or make imaginary AirBnB wish lists. They’re just simple pleasures that I deserve and that harm nobody.

‘An excuse to bunk off work’. I’m a freelancer, that means I work hard and I work long hours, but I work them when I want to. Also there ain’t nothing wrong with bunking off work anyway.

A day to get over hangovers. My self-care days are all about improving on my default condition, not struggling to get back to an emotional ‘norm’ after self-abuse. If you’re only ever recovering, then you’re never improving!

Things I like to do on a self-care day

Ride my bike with no destination and in any weather.

Notice really small things.

Meditate.

Take ages to do things.

Watch, read, listen to bell hooks. She is my intellectual icon, she theorises love as a survival tactic, she is teachable, she makes me think about my own political accountability, she loves conversation as a method of teaching. All this sustains my brain, I am very grateful to her.

Listen to every single version of a single song that I can find.

Watch TED Talks, listen to On Being.

Yoga, either at home or at a class if I feel like facing people. Classes are great because people pay attention to you in a caring way and everyone is there to feel good.

Reciting Victoria Wood.

Trying to learn ‘Billy in the Darbies’ off by heart.

Getting in touch with friends I’ve not seen for ages.

Comedy comedy comedy.

Long baths.

Give money to charity if I have it.

Re-read things I love.

Write fiction.

Make really insanely optimistic plans for the future.

Things I don’t do on a self-care day

Shopping.

Drugs.

Check messages if I don’t want to.

Read the news.

Worry about money.

Waste time.

I hope you gave yourself some quality time on World Mental Health Day. Try a self-care day, they are fun to curate, fun to do, and have seriously good repercussions. Put one on the calendar, you’re worth it.

Time for a change: Part 2

Back in the lovely café in Dublin. (Clement & Pekoe, by the way). It’s my last day in the city and I’ll be very sorry to leave… The girl opposite me right now is discussing whether she wants to settle in Dublin or Melbourne. Oh Melbourne! Melbourne is a similar type of place to Manchester, insofar as it feels like you could make anything happen there. Or at least that’s how Manchester used to feel. Melbourne is clean, warm, friendly, fun… did I mention clean..? If Manchester has everything except a beach, Melbourne has the beach. It was hard to leave but great to come home in time to host our first New Year’s Eve Drunk At Vogue, which if I do say so myself, was epic fun. We have these parties down to a fine art now, they are simply nights of magic.

Suddenly it was 2014. Before Christmas I had done a ton of DJing to save for Melbourne. It’s an expensive city for sure but if you’ve spent any time in London or the Nordic countries in the last few years you won’t die of shock there. In the end I actually came back with spending money. Coupled with the fortuitously timed savings I mentioned earlier, I suddenly had enough in the bank for my best case scenario: I gave myself January off work. Utter extravagance on the back of a three week Antipodean jolly I know, but I don’t have a strong Calvinist work ethic or anything, I will never be able to combat my debt through working anyway, only through a huge and unlikely windfall, and I actually might never get the chance to do this kind of thing again, so January was the present I gave to myself after fourteen years of office work.

(Some thoughts on working in general: I don’t think work is the best way for people to exist. I’m from a working class family where for the most part work has been insecure, hard to come by, combative, stressful, obligatory. I have no love affair with it. Socialism 101 teaches you that most late-capitalist employment has to be invented and perpetuated to justify capitalism, that salaries are mathematically established to place a life you think you can have forever out of your reach. That’s if you are allowed a life at all, if your work doesn’t kill or maim you, if you are even given the chance to work in the first place. I have and haven’t worked very hard in the past, have and haven’t had job satisfaction, have and haven’t cared much about it, but I’ve always been acutely aware of the position of privilege I am in to be able to work, to have access to the opportunity, albeit one opportunity that I rinsed for over a decade.)

Here’s what I did with January instead of working: sorted out my belongings (chuck, keep, recycle, charity), organised all my photographs and music (epic tasks both), got back into training for the 10K, spent time with my family, replied to all my emails and contacted old friends, cooked loads of great food, let my beard grow, lost weight, discovered loads of new music, read books, tried yoga, learned loads about gay history, hung art on all the walls and made the place beautiful, turned our spare bedroom into a study.

My last day in a real office was December 9^th. I’m three months along the road now, which doesn’t sound much, but if you’ve only ever counted time in terms of monthly paydays, it feels like a lot. So far I am making my money from DJing and club hosting, designing book covers, copyediting books, and doing academic re-writes. Those worlds are sufficiently removed from one another to complement each other nicely. Hopefully the variety of work will continue and even increase. If I could do ten different jobs at once I would, but my main aim now is to get paid for something that I write. I’ve done it before but I've forgotten how it feels.

I have taken to working from home very well. I was up working by 7am yesterday and worked twelve hours. Some days I only work four hours. There have been five days when I did NOTHING AT ALL but watch GIRLS and DJ for myself. Bliss. I might go for a run in the afternoon if it’s get bright, I might run at 8am. All I can say is, everything gets done. I am sick to death of routine and I will never ever miss it.

So, four months in and I am going to start dishing out advice for you:

Learn about being self-employed, get a UTR and start keeping records from the start. Just do it. Millions of people do it successfully every year. The HMRC website is dead easy to use. Don’t forget to look at what you can claim for against tax too, such as a portion of your heating and internet if you work from home. I am going to claim for my office chair and a pair of headphones. Seriously.

Have some emergency money. I don’t have any. Who has emergency money? But you should definitely have some.

Get support, even if it’s just moral support. Get some advice, from anywhere, find out who in your circle is self-employed or can give you accounting advice or who knows about any work going that full-timers can’t do, but you can.

If you have favours outstanding, now’s the time to call them in.

Stand your ground and prepare to be ribbed by people who still work in offices. After working hard one morning (and before I got my office chair) my back was aching so I put on comfy pants and tried a yoga routine for bad backs. My friend came by afterwards, assumed I had just got up and made the typical sarcy comments about watching Jeremy Kyle in my pyjamas. I don’t own a TV. My friend hates his job and his boss. He is forgiven. I went back to work after he left.

Be vulgar and talk about money when you need to. If you need to make some cash urgently, say that you need to be paid promptly. If you need more money when you’re doing the work, say so when asking for your fee. Be fair to yourself and your client with your fees and be really good at what you’re doing.

Be strategic about favours and what you do for free. At this point in my life if I had charged for everything that I’d ever done for free – editing, re-writing, design work, promotions, DJing, advice – I would be typing this on a yacht. If I’m DJing, don’t offer to pay me in beers. If you have money for the beer, pay me for the work I’m doing. I don’t want to write for you for free for ‘exposure’. It doesn’t work. Seven thousand people visited my blog in February. I’m exposed. I want to write something that somebody wants to pay me for because it’s good and because it’s work.

Be prepared for bad luck, and good. I’ve had some of both: I bought myself a cheap but (I thought) reliable laptop to DJ with (recorded as a business expense of course) because it was getting too damn troublesome using the same laptop for DJing in clubs and writing/editing at home, in terms of software, disk space, insurance, safety, everything. Then, while I was out DJing on Valentine’s Day, our flat was burgled. They took my work laptop (where I did all my writing) and my partner’s Mac (where I did all my design). We weren’t insured. Then the new DJing laptop turned out to be faulty. Several laptops and complicated returns and horrible computer shops and borrowed machines down the line, and I am back on my feet. Your computer is your life, look after it. My friends had a whip-round for my birthday and raised the money for a new laptop. It is fast and smart and I love it and I love them.

Cultivate amazing friends who might do something like the above for you in an emergency.

Okay back to work.

Time for a change: Part 1

I am writing this blog post in a lovely café in Dublin. It is a Friday afternoon. There is nowhere else I should be at this moment. How did I get here? Let’s find out…

Symptoms I’ve been bothered with in the last few years that my doctors potentially attributed to stress:

Insomnia

Nightmares

Hyperactivity

Inactivity

Reduced attention span

Bad temper

Recurring sore throat

Strep throat

Chest infection

Skin infection
Dermatitis

Eye infection

Post-viral bronchial hypersensitivity

Nasal drip

Globus sensation

Beard alopecia

... and hypochondria

Things that have made me stressed at various times in the last few years:

Money worries (twenty years of…)

Feeling lonely

Feeling antisocial

Being too bored

Being too busy

Being both at the same time

Feeling overstretched

Feeling like an underachiever

Not knowing what I want to do when I grow up (except be a writer which hasn’t really worked out…)

These circumstances were, to put it mildly, unsustainable, so I decided to make a positive step towards change. If this post starts to read like a self-help book; good, that’s what I want. I read one of those things for the first time recently and it was the absolute worst kind of tosh. I can do better. I think only people who are unsuccessful should write them anyway, that’s much more fun.

I was having no luck with the conventional method of looking for a new job (let alone any enjoyable or rewarding employment). By ‘no luck’ I mean literally no response at all to dozens of applications over several years, and certainly no interviews. On the day I went to collect my Masters certificate I did the sensible thing graduates should so and I spoke to a careers advisor. I was something of an unknown quantity: in my mid-thirties, working in publishing, minor advertising experience, DJing and event hosting on the side as a poorly-paid but successful labour of love, but ultimately craving to make my living as a writer. The advisor was honest. ‘I don’t know much about this whole world you’re in, really,’ he admitted, referring to the ‘jack of all trades’ banter I had given him. ‘But it strikes me that hosting the launch party for an international festival should probably be on the first page of your CV and not under ‘Other achievements’.

In the end I came away from the meeting with two important ideas in my head:

1.     I should have a skills-based CV, not a regular employment CV. (I’d never heard of a skills-based CV before).

2.     I should stop looking for a job, and start looking for work.

The idea of freelancing presented itself, and there followed a series of happy and fortunately-timed events that brought the possibility closer to reality:

I finished paying for my MA.

I finished paying for my BA (fourteen years after graduation).

I moved in with my partner after living alone for six years.

My bank loan was due its annual holiday.

My partner gave up freelancing and took a full-time position worthy of his talents.

Crucially though, the fear of whether I could make a go of life as a freelancer was outweighed by the stress of carrying on as I was. We had already booked to spend Christmas in Melbourne. Figuring there was no better way to book-end a big life change than by going to the other side of the world, I gave notice on the job that I had said yes to in April 2001, and packed my suitcase.