ONE DAY we’re celebrating the birth of Jesus, the next we’re preparing for his Crucifixion.
A rather graphic way, granted, to point out that Santa had barely been and gone before mountains of Easter Eggs were in the shops.
But no less relevant a message for it.
Life’s like that these days. It runs away from us like a pensioner’s puppy who’s slipped its collar to chase a fox.
And mostly because we’ve allowed our calendars to morph from a collection of days into a succession of events.
It’s Christmas, then it’s the sales, then it’s New Year, then we’re into Dry January.
Come February, we’re chucking money at Valentine’s Day, then it’s March and Mother’s Day and before we know it April brings Easter.
A couple of May Bank Holidays lead us into Father’s Day in June, followed by the school holidays – and before we know it the shelves are chocca with Hallowe’en stuff, then fireworks, then next thing, you’re walking into Asda for milk and a loaf and Chris fecking Rea’s on the speakers, driving home for another Christmas.
Another year gone, in what feels like the blink of an eye. Taken from us by this obsession of having things to look forward to, things designed to stop us relaxing and breathing and thinking.
Yet that’s the very thing we really SHOULD have ringed in red on the calendar:
ME TIME.
Just as an athlete only knows how fit they are by how quickly their heart rate slows between bursts of energy, our heads only know what’s normal when we stop filling them with information and stress and deadlines and simply live.
That’s why Resolutions don’t work. They’re just more stuff we cram in there, more scribbles on a a To Do list longer than a whale’s wedding tackle.
Because remember, it’s not just all these big events listed above that we’re meant to pay attention to all year round. No, our awareness never gets a holiday, there isn’t a moment when we aren’t either required to shout about our own issues or to listen to others talking about theirs.
•January is National Mentoring Month.
•February has LGBT+ History Month, Children’s Mental Health Week and Eating Disorders Awareness Week.
•March brings International Women’s Day and Neurodiversity Celebration Week, then April is a month of awareness for Stress and/or Autism.
•May sees Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week, Deaf Awareness Week, Dying Matters Awareness Week, Black Inclusion Week and the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia.
•June is Pride Month, punctuated by Carers Week and World Wellbeing Week, it’s South Asian Heritage Month from mid-July to mid-August, early September sees World Suicide Prevention Day, late September sees National Inclusion Week, easing into Black History Month, which runs parallel to ADHD Awareness Month and National Menopause Month.
•October is also dotted with the International Day of Older Persons, National WorkLife Week, Baby Loss Awareness Week, World Mental Health Day, National Adoption week and – 18 days into the aforementioned Menopause Month – World Menopause Day.
•Now we’re into Movember, Anti-Bullying Week, Transgender Awareness Week, International Men’s Day and Carer’s Rights Day, with the International Day of Persons with Disabilities on December 3 bringing the official awareness schedule to a close for 2024.
Though note that I write ‘official’, because even in that little hiatus between December 3 and the start of another National Mentoring Month a year from today, TV ad breaks will be peppered with passive-aggressive reminders of why, while we’re buying food and presents and tinsel, donkeys are being mistreated in Morocco and no one seems to care.
Individually, each of these causes – gender, disability, bullying, menopause, mules with ingrowing toenails – is crucially important to someone. They all matter in their own way.
Collectively, though?
Well, I don’t know about you, but for me this whole mass of external noise – harnessed to the never-ending rotation of Christmas/Hogmanay/Valentine’s/Easter/Hallowe’en/Guy Fawkes/Christmas – is mentally, physically and financially exhausting.
Everyone wants a piece of us, whether it’s our time or our sympathy of (most often) our money. And it’s simply not sustainable if we’re also to maintain some sort of happy, balanced daily life.
So this year, try not to do everything. Try to remember we’re only human.
Embrace the fact that normal life isn’t boring, it’s essential; it’s what makes the world go round.
Don’t force yourself to live a perfect life on social media by being the most romantic, the most caring, the most inclusive, being the best at dressing up, spending the most on rockets that literally burn our cash, creating the most perfect festive home to please everyone but ourselves.
Within it all might lie something really matters to you but not to me or vice versa. So be yourself. Suit yourself. Most of all, take time for yourself.
Because while it’s wonderful to care for those around us, thinking about ourselves doesn’t make us selfish.
And of all the things we need to be aware of in 2024, this is without doubt the most valuable.
There’s a lyric by the band Faithless that cuts right to the chase of our mental health.
It goes: “If you place a thing at the centre of your life that lacks the power to nourish, it will eventually poison and destroy you; as simple a thing as an idea or your perspective on yourself or the world. No one can be the source of your content, it lies within, in the centre. " So many of us have that ‘thing’ messing with our heads.
So many of us have that ‘thing’ messing with our heads.
It can be a bad memory that haunts us, a trauma that changed the way we see the world – but usually, it’s just a story we tell ourselves that we struggle to let go of.
I’m not good enough. I’m not smart enough. I don’t deserve love, happiness, a better job.
It’s just the way I am.
That song, Liontamer, gets it bang on. The longer we hang on to these stories, the more they can poison us, even destroy us.
That’s what my new book, The Reason Everything Happens, wants us to fight against. It encourages us to questions our internal stories, to revisit bad memories and traumas and see them for what they all are: Nothing more than thoughts.
Strip away all the bull***t and that’s all any of these poisonous things are; thoughts, not facts.
Politics, religion, the class system, football rivalries, so many external influences which we’re told divide us, yet none of them are real, just one person’s thoughts pitted against another’s.
The teacher who told us we’d never amount to anything wasn’t telling the truth, just projecting their own prejudice. The parent who gave in to the belief that we had to know our place was only repeating the story their parents passed down.
In The Reason Everything Happens, I invite us to question these thoughts with two little words:
WHO SAYS?
Who says we’re not good enough? Who says we don’t deserve the things we yearn for? Who says how we vote or pray or which team we support has to divide us?
From experience, both personal and from working with others on their mental health, these stories don’t often stand up to much scrutiny from these two little words. And deep down, I think most of us know they won’t.
We’re maybe just a little bit scared to say them.
As the song says, though, the truth lies within us. Until we accept and embrace that truth about ourselves, it’s so much more difficult for us to understand the world around us. And until we’re able to understand the world around us, it’s so much more difficult to become the person we’re capable of being.
When I coach stronger mental health, which I’ve been doing for the past three years after a lot of DIY work on my own mind, I don’t promise answers. My job is to lead you towards your own answers, because only you know what those answers are – and often, we DO know, we either just don’t know we know or don’t want to admit it.
In the same way, this book doesn’t have all the answers, but it pokes us to ask the questions that lead towards them. It questions the difference between social media’s idea of what happiness looks like and what it actually is. It questions the current fads of self-labelling – yes, including labelling ourselves with mental health issues – of being triggered and of feigning offence.
It looks at practical ways of quietening our minds when we feel overwhelmed, it urges us to only try and control what’s controllable, it reminds us that we don’t always need a docto or a therapist to make us feel better.
It even tells us very bluntly at one point not to be a dick.
So, why is it called what it’s called? Simply because of my belief that rather than us being at the mercy of some huge, universal plan, The Reason Everything Happens is that we make it happen through everything we say and do and believe.
It’s up to us to take responsibility for these words and actions, which means working to let go of the past, of bad memories, of traumas, of our stories.
Or, to quote the recently-departed actor Matthew Perry, it’s about realising that:
“I am enough, I was always enough.
I was just the only one who couldn’t see it”.
Let’s start realising the same about ourselves.
Not tomorrow, but today. Right now.