‘Take a risk a day – one small or bold stroke that will make you feel great once you’ve done it.’
Wednesday 1st January and I’m standing on a wooden deck, looking down at the mud-brown pond. Icy air is whipping my legs and it’s starting to rain.
A blackboard propped on a chair announces the temperature of the water: five degrees Celsius. Nearly freezing. Goosebumps stand to attention on every inch of my skin.
‘Have you swum in the Ladies’ Ponds before?’ asks the matriarch standing guard by the water. Her voice is as bracing as the weather and her accent suggests she may own half of Hampshire.
‘No,’ I reply.
‘The water can be quite dangerous at this time of year. It’s extremely cold.’
‘OK,’ I say.
‘When you get in you should take a long breath out.’
‘OK.’
‘That will stop you hyperventilating.’
Oh, God.
I look around at the huddle of middle-aged women with damp hair holding cups of steaming tea. If they can do it, so can I. Right?
I put my first foot onto the icy-cold metal step and then my second. Then down another step. My right foot hits water. A shot of pain.
‘Fuck!’ I say.
My left foot goes in. I shriek again.
I don’t want to go any further. This was a really bad idea. I am not the kind of person who swims in the middle of winter. I get cold standing by an open fridge.
I turn around and see a queue forming behind me. I can’t back out now, everyone is looking at me.
I keep going until I am in up to my waist. I gasp for breath. Then it comes: the sensation of being stabbed by a million tiny icicles.
The icicles were Sarah’s idea. She might not be a fan of self-help but she would cheer me on no matter what I did. I could have told her I was becoming a Scientologist and she’d say ‘Cool, you’ll meet Tom Cruise!’
‘I was thinking about scary things you could do in January,’ she said, when we met before Christmas, in a pub off Charlotte Street.
‘I was watching Kitchen Nightmares last night and was thinking you could work in one of Gordon Ramsay’s kitchens and have him swear at you,’ she continued, shouting over Slade wishing everyone a Merry Christmas on the speakers.
‘That would be scary,’ I agreed, to humour her. There was no way on earth I was going to do that.
‘And Steve says you could streak at a football match . . .’
‘Right . . .’
‘Or shave your hair off . . .’
‘I don’t want to shave my hair off!’ I said, unable to indulge this line of thinking any longer.
Sarah looked at her phone and read out more suggestions from a list: ‘Dump a friend and tell them exactly why you hate them. Not me, obviously . . . Oh, and this is the best one! You could write an erotic story and send it to your mother!’
‘Oh my God. Why the hell would I want to do that?’
‘It’s scary, isn’t it?’
‘No. It’s just gross.’
‘It’s scary gross.’
‘Where are you getting this stuff from?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know, I was lying in bed last night and they just kept coming to me!’ said Sarah.
‘The point is to face fears I have in my everyday life – not do a load of random stuff which is going to get me arrested. And anyway, how exactly am I going to get into a Gordon Ramsay kitchen?’ I asked.
‘You’ll figure it out – you’re a journalist, aren’t you?’ said Sarah.
‘I write about mascaras.’
‘So what are you going to do, then?’
‘I don’t know – things like open my bank statements and answer the phone, do my tax return . . . the real things I’m scared of.’
‘You’re going to spend January picking up the phone?’ said Sarah in a tone that made it clear that I was not going to be allowed to do that.
‘I think you should start by jumping into Hampstead Ponds on New Year’s Day. Face your fear of the cold.’
And actually that was a good idea. I really was scared of the cold. Sarah and I once went to my best friend Gemma’s house in Ireland in February. I was so freezing I went to bed wearing every item of clothing I’d packed – including my coat. I spent most of the week too scared to leave the radiator.
And so it was that on 1st January I took an outdoor swim on one of the coldest days of the year.
Sarah did not come with me. She had been out till 4am and was now lying in a darkened room sending me text messages with splashy emojis. Gemma was cheering me in spirit from Dublin, where she was looking after her newborn baby, James.
Instead my friend – and new flatmate – Rachel had agreed to come. Just before Christmas, she’d taken pity on me, offering me her spare room so that I could get out of the bankrupting basement.
She’d promised to swim with me as if it was no big deal. I didn’t think she meant it. I figured that she’d wake up on New Year’s Day, look at the stormy skies and suggest we do lunch instead. I’d be able to get out of it and blame her. It didn’t happen that way. Rachel knocked on my door at 10am, with a towel over her shoulder.
‘Ready?’ she asked.
‘Are we really doing this?’
‘Yes, of course. It’ll be fun.’
‘But look, it’s raining outside, it looks horrible.’
‘We’re going to get wet anyway.’
‘We could just go and get some lunch somewhere . . .’ I said.
‘Don’t be a wimp. This was your idea.’
And that was the problem. I was good at ideas. I was also quite good at talking about ideas. Doing them, though, well, that was different.
As we walked through the dense wooded path to the ponds, the chatter of voices got louder. We arrived to find at least thirty women, dressed in woolly hats and padded anoraks, gathered around a makeshift table full of sausage rolls, mince pies and a giant vat of mulled wine.
It looked fun. If only we could skip the bit where you get into the water.
‘Is it very cold?’ I asked an elderly woman getting dressed in the changing hut.
‘It’s over very quickly,’ she said, smiling with blue lips.
And it was.
At first the water felt so cold I thought I was going to die.
I panted and splashed my way through it like a frantic puppy.
Within seconds I could feel a cramp in the back of my neck and another in my right foot.
It hurt. The water hurt. Every bit of my body hurt.
I kept moving though and, slowly, I started to feel warmer. Well, maybe not so much warm as numb, but that was fine with me.
I started to calm down.
Everything went silent bar the sound of my heart pounding in my ears.
I looked at the weeping willows watching over me, as my limbs cut through the silky water.
This is what it’s like to be alive, I thought.
I kept moving.
It was beautiful.
And then it was done. I grabbed the silver rails and pulled myself up the steps.
A woman in an orange swimming hat was rubbing herself down with a towel. She must have been seventy and was wearing a pair of pink Marigolds. She beamed at me.
‘Can you think of a better start to the year?’
My body flushed with warmth. I was tingling and grinning from ear to ear. Every inch of me felt alive.
‘No, I really can’t,’ I said.
And I meant it. In that freezing five-minute dip, I had crossed a major line – the line that takes you from being someone who talks about things to being someone who actually does them. The world felt full of possibility. My year had started.
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers was published in 1987, the era of shoulder-pads, Margaret Thatcher and Cosmopolitan magazine.
While other self-help books at the time were written by men, telling women how to find love and keep love, Feel the Fear was written by a woman telling other women to just go out and do something – do anything. Not for someone else but for themselves. Its tone is upbeat but no-nonsense – and as I re-read it during the no man’s land between Christmas and New Year, I felt a familiar rush of motivation. The trick now was to act on it, just as I had in my twenties.
Susan’s basic premise is that if we sit around waiting for the day that we feel brave enough to do the things we want to do, we’ll never do anything.
The secret of happy and successful people is not that they are any less scared, she says, but that, you guessed it, they ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’.
In fact, according to Susan, we should be scared every day because that’s a sign that we’re pushing ourselves and moving forwards. If you are not feeling any fear you are not growing.
‘Basically, I have to do something scary every day,’ I said to Rachel, when we were back at the flat making bolognese after our swim.
‘So what is the scariest thing you can think of doing?’ asked Rachel.
‘Stand-up comedy. The thought of it makes me want to be sick.’
‘Hang on,’ she said – running off to the living room and coming back with a notepad. ‘Write that down.’
‘Why? I’m not going to do stand-up.’
‘Yes, you are.’
‘No, come on. I’ll do scary stuff, I promise, but I don’t need to go that far.’
But it was no good. She’d written ‘STAND-UP’ in capital letters.
‘What else?’ she said, pen in hand.
I felt panic rising.
‘Um. Asking a guy out or chatting up a guy, or anything guy related.’
‘You should ask a man out on the Tube in rush hour.’
‘What?’
‘Just to make it interesting.’
‘No way. I’m not doing that.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘OK,’ I answered.
By the end of the evening, we’d come up with a list of scary things for me to do in January:
That night I couldn’t sleep. My brilliant idea now felt very real and I didn’t like it. I did not want to jump out of a plane and never in a million years did I think I’d do stand-up comedy. That was for other people. Wacky, thrill-seeking, masochistic people. People who were, possibly, a bit nuts.
Was I a bit nuts?
I started small on 2nd January – with a spot of parallel parking. Not exactly dramatic, but I hadn’t tried it since my driving test when I was seventeen. On the rare occasions I did drive, I preferred to park three miles away than to suffer the stress and embarrassment of trying to get into a spot while cars piled up behind me. It seemed so stupid to let such a tiny thing, a thing that people do every day, become something I avoided my whole life.
Susan says there are three ‘levels’ to every fear. The first level is the ‘surface story’ – in this case the fact that I hate parking. Underneath this fear is the ‘Level 2 fear’ – which is the deeper ‘ego’ fear of looking like an idiot. Susan writes: ‘Level 2 fears have to do with the inner state of mind, rather than exterior situations. They reflect your sense of self and your ability to handle this world.’ But underneath this fear is the deepest fear of all, the fear which Susan says is underneath all fears – a fear that you won’t be able to handle the feeling of being an idiot who can’t park. Susan has one answer to this: ‘YOU’LL HANDLE IT.’
I’d gone back to my mum’s flat outside London to collect some stuff, so I borrowed her battered Peugeot 205 and drove to the local town, Ascot.
It is famous for the races and not a lot else; I grew up there and worked in the local cafe. My heart always went out to the poor tourists who would come in to ask, ‘Where is Royal Ascot?’
I’d have to tell them, You’re in Ascot. This is it. The petrol station, cafe and Martin’s newsagents. This is all the glamour you’re going to get.
So anyway, it’s not exactly a metropolis but it was surprisingly busy for 2nd January. I circled the area three times before I saw a space. It was a bit tight and I got flustered when a white van came up behind me. I went in too steep and hit the pavement.
My heart started pounding and my sweaty palms slipped on the steering wheel.
I tried to fix it but I just seemed to get more wedged in. I worried that the white van was going to start tooting. I imagined the two men in it were laughing at me. I felt a stress totally disproportionate to the situation. In a panic I mounted the kerb. The white van went past.
The road was quiet now. I tried to drive out and get back in a couple of times but it didn’t work. I kept going up on the kerb.
But strangely this didn’t bother me.
A park of vague parallelity took place and according to Susan: ‘You’re not a failure if you don’t make it, you’re a success because you try.’
And I really did feel like a success, kerb or no kerb.
Susan says that avoiding small things can have a big effect. Putting off driving on motorways, opening bank statements or picking up the phone adds to the belief that the world is scary and that we can’t cope. Every time we avoid doing something it makes us feel weaker, while facing a fear, even if it’s a small one, makes us feel strong, empowered and in control. And that’s how I wanted to feel. Not just with driving but with everything.
At home my bold step into the world of fear-fighting was not greeted with excitement.
‘I just did a parallel park!’ I told Mum, swinging the car keys on my fingers like a man of the road, an easy rider. She looked up from the sink full of dishes.
‘Does your book tell you to park?’
‘No, it’s just about doing scary things. Confronting your fears. And parking is scary.’
Mum looked bewildered. She didn’t find parking scary. She could fit a truck on a postage stamp and would make no big deal about it.
When she was my age she had three children and a house to run, she wasn’t ‘challenging’ herself by parking or jumping into icy ponds.
She didn’t have time for self-discovery or, as she puts it, ‘I was not brought up to contemplate my toenails.’ Funnily enough, self-help wasn’t big on the farm in rural Ireland, where she grew up, one of seven children.
When I had told her about my idea at Christmas, she opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. Then she opened it. And closed it.
‘Most people would say your life is already very good, Marianne.’
‘I know it is, but what’s wrong with wanting to be a bit happier?’
‘Nobody can be happy all the time. It’s just not the way life is.’
‘Well, that’s miserable.’
‘No, it’s not. It’s realistic. Maybe you would feel better if, instead of always looking for more, you were grateful for what you have.’
The familiar wash of Catholic guilt poured over me.
So on 5th January when I drove to see an old schoolfriend – via the M25, M3 and M4 motorways – I kept my act of breathtaking bravery to myself.
The next afternoon I was on the Tube home, listening to Rihanna on my phone, when I remembered that I should be chatting up men.
Anyone who lives in London knows that it’s not socially acceptable to look people in the eye on public transport, let alone talk to them. It’s why all over the Underground there are posters advertising dating sites, which pretty much say: ‘Do you fancy that guy/girl opposite you? If so log on to our site so that you can sift through tens of thousands of people in the microscopic hope that you may see him/her again.’
The option of just smiling and talking wasn’t an option. Until now.
I did a mental inventory of how I looked. OK jeans on, my good coat (Whistles, £300 down to £150), scruffy Converse and unwashed hair.
No.
I couldn’t chat up a stranger with greasy hair.
Definitely not.
I’d do it next time. When I had good hair.
But I knew that that was a cop-out. Susan says that we are only fooling ourselves when we put things off. She calls it the ‘when/then’ game – we tell ourselves we’ll approach the guy we like when we’re slimmer or we’ll apply for the promotion when we have more experience. We think that fear will go if we just wait for the right time but when we get to the right time we find more excuses. Doing something new is always going to be scary. The only way for it to stop being scary is to do it.
I looked around for a target.
Directly in front of me was a guy with shaven hair and a baseball jacket. A heavy bass thudded out of his giant headphones and he was nodding in time with the beat. No, not him.
To my left was a man in a dark navy suit. He was holding a battered old brown leather briefcase. He looked like a barrister or something clever. I wondered if I’d be too stupid for him. I looked down at his hands. He was wearing a wedding ring.
I started a train of thought about how all the good guys are married and how, at thirty-six, I’d missed the boat . . .
Focus, Marianne. Focus.
Standing by the doors was a tall, skinny, pale guy, also in a suit. He was good looking but not too good looking. He had a knackered-and-fed-up-with-life expression on his face. I’m not sure what it says about me but I liked knackered and fed up.
Normally I couldn’t even smile at a guy I liked, let alone talk to him. Instead I imagined all the reasons he would not be interested in me: too fat, too ginger, too badly dressed. It was a fun game I played.
But this was not normal me. I was now Fear-Fighting Me. So I moved over to be nearer him. I looked down at his hands. No ring.
Right. OK. You can do this.
I opened my mouth to say ‘Hello’ but nothing came out.
Maybe I couldn’t do this.
I should say at this point that, despite the fact that the train was packed, it was strangely quiet. Almost silent, in fact. All the commuters were locked in their own post-work misery, reading books or listening to music. If I started a conversation everybody would hear it.
Pull yourself together, Marianne. Say something.
‘Is the train always this crowded?’ I blurted out.
Mr Knackered-but-Handsome looked up from his phone, confused – as if I’d just woken him. He had watery blue eyes.
‘Er, yes,’ he said before looking back down at his phone.
‘I don’t usually travel at this time,’ I continued. My heart thud-thud-thudding in my chest.
He raised his head again with an expression that said: Why are you telling me this? Why are you talking to me? Don’t you know the rules?
I kept going.
‘Where do you live?’ I asked. I realized as soon as I said it that it was a very stalker-y question.
I was also aware that we now had an audience. A woman standing next to us, in a pencil skirt and trainers, had taken out one of her white headphones and the man sitting on the seat nearest to us was smirking.
Mr Knackered-but-Handsome looked scared now. I could see he was torn between not wanting to be rude and worrying that he had a nutter on his hands. Politeness won out. He informed me he lived in Bermondsey.
‘Is it nice?’ I asked.
‘Er, yeah,’ he said.
I kept going: ‘Have you lived there long?’
‘Yes, WE’VE lived there a couple of years’ – heavy emphasis on the ‘we’. Message received, loud and clear. He had a girlfriend, but just to ram the message home he informed me that ‘WE’VE just bought a house.’
The guy who was smirking let out a snort. He actually snorted.
I carried on smiling and chatting, just to let Mr Knackered know that my world had not ended because he had a girlfriend (which it hadn’t) and I could see him relax. We made small talk about property prices and then he got off at Waterloo.
And that was it!
I’d done it! I couldn’t believe it but I had! I had seen a handsome man on the train and I had talked to him.
It wasn’t exactly a successful attempt at chatting up, but I did it! Yes, it was embarrassing but so what? Embarrassment doesn’t kill you, it turns out!
I felt electricity charge around my body. Or adrenalin. Electricity, adrenalin, whatever! I was lit up.
Until I locked eyes with Mr Smirker, who was still smirking. Then I felt a hot rush of embarrassment followed by fury. Sod him, with his hipster beard and hipster jeans! He had no idea that I was facing my fears and seizing the day and being the best me I could be! I bet he wouldn’t have the guts to do that!
So I made a strange decision: I would show him that I was not remotely embarrassed by what had happened by . . .
‘What are you reading?’ I asked, sitting down next to him.
He smirked some more, bemused that he was now the target of my attention.
‘It’s The History of the World in 100 Objects,’ he said. ‘It was a Radio 4 series.’
‘It’s very big.’ I said.
‘It is,’ he agreed.
There was a pause. I didn’t know what else to say. My nervous energy was waning now and I was beginning to wish that I hadn’t got on this stupid train.
‘I bought it for my brother for Christmas but I ended up keeping it,’ he added.
Yay! He’d filled the silence. And he read clever books!
‘It looks like a good book to read on the toilet,’ I said.
‘Er, yes, I suppose so.’
Why did you have to bring the loo into it, Marianne?
‘So did you get your brother something else?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, I got him a t-shirt.’
‘Cool.’
I hate how much I say ‘cool’. I’m thirty-six, I should have found a better word by now.
We carried on chatting. There was no mention of the royal ‘We’. I started to see his smirk as a lovely smile.
‘Where are you heading to?’ I asked.
‘I have to pick up some stuff from a friend’s house, then I’m going home.’
‘Cool. What do you do?’
‘I’m an artist’s assistant.’
‘What kind of art?’
‘Conceptual stuff.’
I didn’t know what ‘conceptual stuff’ meant but I imagined all the tasteful art work our house would have.
I wondered what it would be like to kiss someone with such a big beard and whether it mattered that it was a bit ginger . . .
I once went on a date with a fellow redhead and when he went in to kiss me, I panicked. ‘People will think we’re brother and sister!’ I said. The email I sent the next day, offering to dye my hair brown, did not get a reply.
‘Where do you work?’ asked Mr Smirker.
‘I work at home. I’m usually still sitting in egg-stained pyjamas at this time,’ I said.
His face didn’t know how to arrange itself in response to this comment.
Why do you say these things?
‘This is me,’ I said, as we got to Archway.
‘Me too,’ he said. Smiling. We walked up the escalators together and then went through the turnstiles and hovered for a second.
‘Well, bye, then . . .’ he said.
‘Bye . . . it was nice to meet you,’ I replied.
‘Yeah, you too.’
‘Have a nice night.’
‘You too . . .’
He gave me a final smirk/smile and went on his way.
For half a second I let myself dwell on the thought that he didn’t like me because he didn’t ask for my number, but then another part of me thought that maybe he was too shy to ask.
And even if it was a rejection, weirdly, I didn’t care. I was too delighted with my total and utter HEROISM.
The next morning, high on my triumph, I made plans for the rest of the month.
Life was already feeling different. Susan says that every time you take action you get in touch with your ‘Powerful self’ and she was right. I felt powerful. Like I could do anything. Then I saw the words ‘stand-up comedy’ on my list and I immediately felt less powerful. I made the executive decision to wait until the end of the month before I tackled that one. Instead I would warm up with a bit of public nudity.
I googled ‘life modelling’ and sent an email to a local class asking if I could take part. Then I researched public speaking.
Most people fear public speaking more than they fear being buried alive, according to one of those polls that crop up every year. (Other common fears are men with beards and wooden lollipop sticks, apparently.)
My only experience of public speaking was at two friends’ weddings. Both induced panic so great that I decided I’d rather pay for a honeymoon than get up behind the pulpit and read another Love Is . . . poem. Even talking in meetings of two or three people brought on a hot flush.
Rachel suggested I try speaking at Speakers’ Corner, but I pretended I didn’t hear that. Instead I found a local Toastmasters group – an organization that meets every week to help people practise public speaking – and got hold of Nigel, the vice president.
He told me that it would go against every rule in their book to let a stranger come in and talk straight away.
‘There’s protocol,’ he said on the phone.
‘Of course there is,’ I said.
I persisted and he told me that he’d talk to his president to see if an exception could be made. Many high-level phone calls were made and, four minutes later, Nigel called me back. ‘You’re in,’ he said. ‘We meet on Thursday nights, in the church hall opposite the curry house.’
I got an email telling me that my speech would need to be five to seven minutes long. There would be a traffic-light system timing me (green when I’ve reached my minimum time, amber to tell me I’d reached six minutes and red to warn that I had thirty seconds to wrap up or be disqualified). I would have an ‘Evaluator’ assessing me, as well as a ‘Grammarian’ who would count the number of ‘ums’ I used. I could talk about anything but was not allowed to read from any notes.
I decided I’d talk about my self-help mission.
It was now Tuesday morning, which meant I had two days to prepare. By which I mean pretend it wasn’t happening. On Thursday morning I could pretend no more.
As I practised my speech in my bedroom, I worried I’d get up on the stage and forget everything. Nothing would come out of my mouth and everybody would be staring at me and I would want to die. I kept telling myself that it didn’t matter – that there was absolutely nothing riding on it. It didn’t matter if it was a total disaster: I wouldn’t have to see these people again. Still I was terrified. Why?
I read articles online. One explained that in our cave woman days we relied on being part of the group for survival and so doing anything that sets us up for potential rejection feels terrifying because how are you going to fight off a sabre-toothed tiger if you are on your own? It was something I’d never thought about. Another article suggested I imagine that I had to either do a quick speech or face a sabre-toothed tiger. They reckoned that when we compare public speaking to vicious mutilation, the talk seems OK.
So, basically, it all came down to tigers.
I did my speech for Rachel while she timed me on her phone.
What I thought was seven minutes turned out to be just over three.
‘But it did feel longer,’ admitted Rachel, who was worried I had a cold.
‘No, I’m OK,’ I said.
‘It’s just that your voice sounds croaky and kind of monotone. I thought maybe you were coming down with something.’
‘I think that’s my voice when I’m scared.’
‘Marianne, you’re talking in a church hall to probably twenty people, it’s not exactly the O2.’
OK. Good. Perspective is good.
As I walked through the graveyard, I thought of Jerry Seinfeld’s routine about how most people are so scared of public speaking that at a funeral they’d rather be in the coffin than giving the eulogy. Too bloody right.
The brightly lit hall was full of people chatting by plastic chairs. At the front was a rickety music stand with a blue satin Toastmasters sign hanging from it.
There were three speeches before mine. First up a fabulously surreal one about a Custard Cream factory at war with the Jammy Dodger manufacturers.
Then one about why the area needed a new sex shop.
‘Imagine how much happier people would be if they had access to whips and nipple tassels!’ said a white-haired man who looked like Captain Birdseye.
Finally a talk on the benefits of smoking – ‘It keeps people who make those oxygen canisters in work,’ said a young man in a Bob Marley t-shirt. ‘What else would they do? Would you really want their families to starve?’
They were as funny as anything you’d see on television.
Then it was me. I made my way to the front, bumping people’s knees and apologizing. My blood fizzed with fear.
‘My heart is beating so loud I think you might all be able to hear it,’ I said.
The audience smiled encouragingly.
My tongue felt like it had tripled in size.
‘I haven’t done this before, so please be kind . . .’
They kept smiling but this time there was a hint of ‘OK, love, get on with it’.
The lights felt bright. I blinked a few times.
Come on, Marianne. You can do it. It’s seven minutes of your life. Go, go, go!
‘How many of you read self-help books?’ I asked. It felt like a bold opener, going in for audience participation straight away.
I was amazed to see that almost all of them put their hands up.
‘And how many of you think self-help is for losers?’
One old man in the corner and the young Bob Marley guy.
‘Well, I am that loser,’ I explained. ‘I am that sad soul whose only company in bed is a copy of Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus, the one who has the Little Book of Calm on her messy desk . . .’
I got a few giggles at the mention of the names and then I relaxed a bit. I shared statistics I’d found about how self-help sales were booming: up twenty-five per cent in Britain since the 2008 crash. ‘We all need guidance in times of uncertainty,’ I explained, feeling very wise as I said it. I then made the argument that self-help was modern-day philosophy, dropping names such as Aristotle and Socrates, despite having read neither.
‘And far from being American, did you know that the first self-help book was written by a Scottish man called Samuel Smiles in 1859?’ I asked.
After what felt like one minute, a green light came on at the back of the room to signal I’d been speaking for five. Then a red light was telling me my time was up. There was applause and I rushed back to my seat, cheeks on fire, knees shaking, heart pounding.
I’d done it!
Afterwards over tea and ginger nut biscuits, everyone was very kind.
I was a natural! Engaging and funny! Was it really my first time? My head started to swell. ‘You made eye contact throughout the speech, which most beginners don’t do,’ said Captain Birdseye. ‘It’s called the Lighthouse technique and is usually done by advanced speakers.’
‘The first time I spoke I was so nervous I didn’t even make it to the end of my speech,’ he said. ‘That man over there –’ he pointed to Jammy Dodger man – ‘wasn’t able to get a word out, his lisp was so bad.’
‘I couldn’t hear any lisp,’ I said.
‘He’s worked on it. He came four years ago when he had to do a father-of-the-bride speech and then he stayed. We have fun. It’s a good bunch.’
And it was. There was a glow in the room, a glow of support and encouragement, a glow of people helping each other to face their fears. This crowd was the opposite of my usual night-life in some too-cool-for-school London pub where the only time people look at each other is to size up the competition.
At the end of the evening I was given an award for being the best newcomer. Jane, the president, called me to the front of the room.
‘Usually we give chocolates but after Christmas I know that we’re all watching our weight so I’ve got you this instead.’
She handed me a box of yoghurt bars.
‘Only seventy-three calories!’ she said.
‘Brilliant!’ I beamed.
Then I was given a certificate and my photograph was taken. It was pretty much the Oscars.
On the bus home I tried to get my head around the fact that it had gone so well. I wondered how many other things I might actually be quite good at that I’d always been too scared to try?
Maybe if I faced my fears instead of running away from them, I could be a whole different person. Maybe if I could get over my fear of looking like an idiot in front of other people, I could actually live life instead of always watching from the sidelines. And maybe if I didn’t always have my guard up, waiting for people to judge me, I might realize that they are there to support and help . . . because deep down we’re all as scared as each other.
As well as daily fear-facing, Susan says we should build up a library of inspirational books and tapes to listen to instead of the news. News is bad, apparently; it only brings us down. This was a bit of a technical hitch, seeing as I was a journalist who had started every day of her working life by reading the papers. Oh well.
As well as reading positive books, Susan recommends that you repeat affirmations throughout the day, such as ‘I am alive and full of confidence!’ or ‘I can do anything I want!’ The idea is that by repeating these statements over and over again, we drown out the more negative thoughts we usually have.
These affirmations should be in the present tense and be positive rather than negative; so rather than ‘I will no longer put myself down’, I was to say: ‘I am becoming more confident each and every day.’
You can listen to recordings of these affirmations, repeat them to yourself, or use the most valuable of self-help tools: the Post-it note.
Susan says the best thing to do is to write affirmations on Post-it notes and leave them everywhere – your bathroom mirror, by your bed, by your desk . . . on your dashboard.
‘Go overboard,’ says Susan. ‘Be outrageous until your friends ask you what’s going on.’
So instead of doing work, I channelled my newfound confidence and positivity into scribbling uplifting messages such as: ‘I love and approve of myself’, ‘I love my life’ and ‘Money flows to me’ on Post-it notes which I stuck on the wall behind my desk.
I put the ‘It’s all happening perfectly’ Post-it – which is one of Susan’s favourite catchphrases – on my bedroom mirror. Susan reckons that no matter what is happening – even if it seems awful at the time – events are unfolding just as they are meant to.
‘The idea is that we replace our usual negative thoughts with positive ones,’ I explained to Mum, who called in the middle of my scribbling.
‘You mean you delude yourself?’ she asked.
‘No, you just try to focus on the good rather than bad,’ I replied.
‘You’re not going to go all American, are you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know . . . happy,’ she spat out the word. ‘People don’t like that, Marianne. It’s not real.’
Sunday 12th January. My day of nudity had arrived. On God’s day, no less.
I sat under a bus stop outside the hall trying to psyche myself up for yet another uncomfortable experience. The adrenalin that had carried me through so far had run out. I was tired. I didn’t want to fight fears anymore. It was raining. Again. And it was dark. I called Sarah.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Watching Sherlock, eating a curry. What about you?’
‘Getting my kit off for strangers.’
‘Oh God, yes! How are you feeling?’
‘Terrified and hungover.’
‘Did you get a wax?’
‘No, damn . . . I didn’t think of that. I wasn’t thinking of it like a date . . .’
‘Don’t worry about it, they probably like to keep things real.’
‘I would pay a million pounds to be on the sofa watching telly with you, right now.’
‘You were the one who wanted to get out of your comfort zone.’
‘I know. Now I just want to stay in bed,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘You always want to stay in bed.’
And I did.
Sleep was one of my favourite things on the planet. I once wrote an article about a movement that was encouraging women to ‘Sleep their way to the top’ except instead of sex, it really was just campaigning for sleep. It was one of the best ideas I’d ever heard.
‘Come on, it’s exciting. Think of all the cool stories you’ll have in the pub,’ said Sarah.
‘That’s true.’ Pubs were another of my favourite things.
And so, I took a deep breath and got naked. Came home and ate four slices of cheese on toast. As all the best models do.
Tuesday 14th and I now had the most random to-do list in the world:
I could do with adding: ‘Wash hair’ to it.
And ‘Do some actual paid work.’ Fear-fighting seemed to be taking up every waking hour. To kickstart the day I went out for a power walk, muttering: ‘I do it all easily and effortlessly . . .’ I didn’t know if this was a smart way to reprogramme my subconscious mind or just a new form of procrastination.
Thursday 16th and my head was reeling. Life had become too weird.
I went to a spin class with Rachel, thinking it would be an easy one to tick off the list. It wasn’t. After twenty minutes my legs gave way. I sat motionless for the rest of the class, while people with rock-hard calves went hell for leather in expensive Lycra. It was humiliating, worse than the naked modelling.
Rachel promised me it got easier and I promised her that I had ‘felt the fear’ and gone spinning but I would never be doing it again.
Afterwards I flopped out on the sofa and watched The Exorcist. Despite the fact that I get scared by Murder, She Wrote, I was not freaked out by the green puke and the flying furniture and neither did I get any satisfaction from ticking this fear off the list. Maybe because at the same time as watching the scariest film known to man I was googling open-mike comedy nights. A bit of demonic possession seemed like child’s play compared to being heckled in a sticky-floored London pub. My life was starting to feel like a Japanese game show and I didn’t like it.
I did no fear-fighting for the next four days. Instead I watched old episodes of The Kardashians (Kim having more Botox) and wrote an article on thermal tights.
The Positive Post-its on my bedroom wall kept falling down.
Monday 20th and I was forced to get back to fear-fighting with a hospital and a dentist appointment on the same day. Who says the universe doesn’t have a sense of humour?
When I was eighteen, I found a dodgy mole on the inside of my left calf, which turned out to be a malignant melanoma – one of the most serious types of skin cancer. I was meant to be starting university but instead I was in hospital having a tennis-ball sized chunk of flesh removed from my leg while the words ‘cancer’ and ‘chemotherapy’ hung in the air. The kind I had is fatal in thirty per cent of cases.
The doctors believed the surgery was successful, but for five years I had regular check-ups to see if the cancer had come back. It was a scary time.
Every time I had to strip off and lie on a paper-covered bed, while a consultant felt for lumps and bumps, my chest would tighten and I would think: ‘What if this is the time they find something? What then? I don’t want to die!’
Fortunately I was given the all-clear when I was twenty-three and had – more or less – got on with life since. Then I’d noticed a dark spot on my back just before Christmas and so, in the middle of my fear-fighting month, I found myself walking through the same hospital reception as I had all those years before. As I lay on the same paper-covered bed and looked up at the same tiles in the ceiling, I remembered what it was like to be eighteen and not wanting to die.
Here I was, thirty-six and still not wanting to die.
I wasn’t ready to go yet. I’d wasted too much of my life worrying! I hadn’t done it right yet!
Why did I worry about small stuff that just didn’t matter? Really, why? And why hadn’t I learned that lesson the first time – when I was eighteen? Surely that brush with death should have left me with a ‘life’s short, seize the day!’ mentality? But it hadn’t. Instead it taught me that things can – and do – go wrong.
I was seeing a different consultant this time. This one looked ten years old.
‘I can’t say for certain until we do the tests but I’m not worried,’ he said.
I was so grateful I wanted to hug him. Imagine having that job. Every day telling people whether they are going to live or die. Especially when you’re ten.
I left the hospital feeling the same way I had after every appointment all those years ago – relieved but unsettled. I sat on a bench outside and had a little cry. I walked through the park and vowed to appreciate everything and not worry about stupid stuff anymore. I promised to be nicer to my mum and to be a better friend. I bought a cinnamon pastry.
After all that life-and-death stuff, the fillings were easy. I had three done with no injections. The dentist’s assistant told me I was very brave. I had another cry.
I’d like to say that after the hospital appointment the thought of stand-up comedy felt like child’s play – but it didn’t. The upside of cancer is that you don’t have to be funny about it. And, on the whole, people don’t boo you.
But I didn’t have cancer, thank God or whoever is up there. What I did have was a slot on a weekend comedy course, in a pub in Paddington. I had also arranged to do karaoke and eat offal during the same weekend in a last-ditch attempt to tick off as many fears as I could before the end of the month.
So at 10am on the last Saturday of January five of us congregated in the basement of the Mitre pub, hoping that comedy genius would strike amidst the smell of stale beer and Pledge.
Ian, our teacher, asked us to introduce ourselves and talk about why we came. First there was a Finnish guy whose wife had given him the course as a Christmas present (‘She’s telling me I’m not funny anymore,’ he said), then there was a Greek Woody Allen who had booked the course while drunk, followed by a ‘six-foot-five poof from Liverpool’ (his words) and Jenny, an advertising manager from Manchester who had made a New Year’s resolution to do more fun stuff. And then me.
Ian asked us to share who our favourite comedians were.
I struggled to come up with something. The truth was that I hated stand-up. Even the good comics made me uncomfortable. It’s their neediness. Find me funny! Like me! Love me! I find the whole thing excruciating.
I didn’t say any of this, of course. Instead I said, ‘Joan Rivers.’
I gave them the whole fear-fighting spiel and they laughed. I told them about chatting up the guy on the Tube and about the naked modelling, they laughed again. I began to alter my views on comedy. Clearly I was a natural.
We were then asked to do an exercise called ‘Rant and Rave’ which involved finding five things that drove you crazy and ranting about them for three minutes. I prattled on about hen dos and being single at a wedding, like some sort of tragic Bridget Jones and then half-heartedly moaned about the phrase ‘Let’s put a date in the diary’.
‘I work from home,’ I said. ‘I’m doing well if I leave the house most days . . . but everyone else is acting like they’ve got a schedule like Obama.’
It wasn’t funny. My classmates were confused and I was embarrassed. I left at 5pm feeling like a woman with a death sentence to eat cow’s brains with Rachel at St John – a restaurant described as every vegetarian’s hell. I washed down the animal innards with buckets of wine so that by the time we got to the Bird Cage pub in East London, where I would be doing karaoke, I was in the perfect state of inebriation – still upright and able to read the lyrics but too drunk to care.
I got home around 2am, with ‘Baby Don’t Hurt Me’ going around and around in my head. I woke up three hours later, half drunk, half hungover in a panic.
I had to write a comedy routine. I had to stand up in front of people and say it that night. The thought made me want to be sick. And so I was.
Back in the pub basement, the group agreed that I had some good lines but I had to work on my delivery. Ian asked me to speak with ‘attitude’ but I could do only one style of delivery: terrified.
He gave up: ‘It’s OK. Even if you deliver it as flatly as you have just now, you’ll still get some laughs. Your desperation comes through. You’ve got that woman on the edge of a breakdown kind of vibe.’
Great. I was going for self-deprecating.
I practised my routine with Rachel before the show started. She didn’t laugh once.
‘I just feel bad for you,’ she said. ‘It really is hard being single at a wedding . . .’
I ordered a large glass of Chardonnay and paced back and forth in small circles by the bar.
I felt a strange numbness in my limbs and a high-pitched buzzing sound in my head.
I ordered a second glass of wine. The acid liquid landed in my acid stomach, making me feel even more nauseous.
I told myself that in an hour or two I would be home, on the sofa. Then I could watch television and eat some toast. Nobody was dying, nothing depended on this and, however badly it went, I could handle it.
The room filled up with paying punters.
My eyes were twitching with nerves and tiredness. My armpits were wet.
Greek Woody Allen was up first. He talked about his therapist asking the same questions every week. He figured it was a therapeutic technique but actually the guy had Alzheimer’s. Jenny did a routine about a first date bringing out spreadsheets. And the tall guy from Liverpool pulled a blinder – turned out his dad was a Catholic priest who had left the priesthood when he met his mother! ‘And look how God repaid him – with a giant poof!’ he said. Comedy gold!
Then it was my turn.
The buzzing in my head returned.
I stepped under the white spotlight. I picked up the mike from the stand.
Bloody hell. You are actually doing this. It’s happening. You’re on a stage about to do stand-up comedy.
I took a breath and looked out at the silhouettes of heads in the audience.
I waited for a wave of panic to come but, well, it didn’t. I was so tired I had gone past caring.
I started talking. I told them about my fear-fighting month.
I acted out the ballet poses I had done in the life modelling class. I could hear laughs. I told them about Mr Sweater making my arse look bigger than Australia and about Mum worrying that self-help would make me ‘all American’. More laughs. Not uncontrollable give this girl a Perrier Award laughter, but real, honest laughter.
I talked about being put at the kids’ table at a wedding.
‘There’s nothing like sitting with a bunch of teenagers playing Angry Birds to make you wonder where you’ve gone wrong in life,’ I said. That got another laugh. It might have been a pity laugh but I didn’t care.
And then, in a flash, it was over. My comedic debut, done. I floated back to my seat. Rachel looked amazed. ‘It was funny!’ she said. ‘Really!’
I sat in dazed silence as people started to gather their things, ready to go home.
I went into the loo and looked at myself in the mirror. My skin was greasy with sweat but my eyes were beaming. I’d done it. The most terrifying thing I could think of, something that most people would never in a million years do . . . I’d done.
In the cab home I told the driver.
‘You didn’t,’ he said.
‘I did, I swear.’
‘Tell us a joke then.’
‘It wasn’t like that – I was just talking about my life,’ I said.
‘What, is your life that funny then?’
‘Sort of,’ I said.
I told him about my month and we ended up having a conversation about things that frightened us and he told me he hated going to parties since he’d split up from his wife. ‘But it’s all in our heads, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Cos, if I make myself go, it’s all right and I wonder what I was worrying about.’
At the end of the journey he refused to take any money off me. ‘I think what you’re doing is great, love,’ he said.
The thing is, so did I.
I had never felt prouder of myself in my whole life.
Compared to the stand-up, nudity and chatting up strangers stuff, I figured jumping out of a plane – my last challenge – would be quite easy. There was nothing I could fail at or be embarrassed about – my two main fears. And I wasn’t going to be rejected – my other main fear. All I had to do was show up, strap myself to a stranger and fall through the sky. How hard was that?
The jump was at 7am in a Suffolk airfield, four hours away, so I drove up (more motorways, tick, tick, tick) and checked into a local guesthouse the night before.
As I lay in the bath, the madness of the last month flashed through my mind like a video montage of a soap opera’s best bits. The icy dip, the karaoke, the nudity . . . I’d done more crazy things in January than I’d done in a lifetime.
But had any of it helped me? Changed me?
Well, yes. I’d once read that our fear is not that life is short, it’s that we don’t feel alive when we live it. But during my fear-fighting, I felt alive. Exhaustingly alive. Every day felt like a day when something could and would happen.
I’d learned a lot too. By jumping in the pond, I saw that life begins the moment you decide to switch off the telly and get off your arse. With public speaking and the stand-up I learned that I was capable of way more than I’d realized. From karaoke I’d learned that life is much more fun if you just lighten up. And with the everyday things like parking, motorway driving and phone answering, I was surprised what a rush of confidence you can get just from doing the little things that you normally avoid. It was the opposite sensation to the energy-sapping worry and stagnation I normally lived with.
But I was aware there was stuff that I had not ticked off the list. I hadn’t done anything about my fear of confrontation, I hadn’t lost my temper or found out what people thought of me – but maybe the reality was that they were not thinking about me at all.
The next morning, I woke up at 6am and drove to the airfield. The sky was stony grey and the radio gave a storm warning but I was strangely calm as I signed the waiver saying that if I died it was not their fault. I was even calm when I got into the tiny aircraft that looked like it was made from tuna cans. I didn’t bat an eyelid when our instructor started telling us to scream as we jumped because it would help us to breathe.
It was only when I was hanging off the side of the plane, the wind blasting my face, my legs dangling into the clouds, that I stopped being calm. Then terror hit me like a punch to the guts, but before I could tell them this had been a terrible mistake, it was too late, I was falling through the sky attached to a man whose name I could not remember.
The cold air and wind were a shock the like of which I’d never experienced. They made Hampstead Ponds feel like a jacuzzi. We were told that the actual temperature was minus fifteen degrees Celsius but with the wind chill it would feel infinitely cooler.
It was only then that it hit me: I was dropping through the sky at thirteen thousand feet. That’s two and a half miles up in the sky.
No human body is designed to do this.
For forty seconds we fell. At 150 miles per hour.
It was like hell.
I honestly worried that I would have a heart attack. Surely people do have heart attacks doing this? But we kept falling, and I kept staying alive. Then we jolted upwards as our parachute opened. Our descent slowed. This was the part that most people enjoy, the peaceful bit where you look at the views around you and feel all at one with the beauty of the world. I looked at the muddy patchwork of fields and felt furious. I didn’t need to jump out of a plane to see grass! I’m from Ireland, for God’s sake. I was practically born in a field! Well, not really. I was born in Surrey near an A-road, but I’d spent every childhood summer knee-deep in cow dung.
Psychologists say that there are two sources to all our fears. The first involves our physical safety – so people are scared of heights, snakes and fire because they can kill us. The second source of fear is of social isolation, which is why we are so scared of looking stupid in front of people or of being rejected.
I realized while hurtling through the sky, that I got no reward from facing my physical fears. My fear of heights was a natural one and was not so extreme that it held me back in normal life – I didn’t need to conquer it.
The first words on landing hard on my arse in a muddy field? ‘I’m never doing that again.’
I didn’t realize then, driving home through hailstones, that falling out of the sky would seem like a walk in the park compared to what was coming next.