It's your Jam

It’s your Jam, Babe

Around this time last year I was not in a good place. I met up with a friend and told her that I’d been re-reading the books of one of my favourite authors - Marian Keyes, because I got a lot of comfort from those books. I don’t think I imagined that she baulked with disdain. We all do it sometimes, flinch when someone talks about getting pleasure from something which we ourselves can’t stand, sometimes without having properly watched, listened to, read or tasted the thing itself, we just have this perception that the thing is beneath us. The thing is, why should anybody feel the need to be defensive about the things that bring them pleasure? Who made any individual the arbiter of good taste?

Tribes
When I was a teenager I felt that I had finally found my tribe in the Indie music scene - here were a bunch of thoughtful, sensitive, shy types, they hadn’t been the popular kids at school, but the more interesting ones (ha ha). The music was the thing, the string that pulled us all together and it was our selective, special thing. It didn’t matter that others didn’t get the music - in fact it made it more attractive - the music was a deep pool, only to be understood and dived into by a choice few. We had found our place in the world. Then, suddenly, your favourite band would appear on the front of Smash Hits, be played on Radio 1 and everything was ruined! That was your band, you didn’t want everyone’s grubby mits on them! They were yours to listen to in your tiny bedroom, learning the lyrics by rote and occasionally venturing into the outside world to see them play live.

There is this protective snobbery around the music scene - popular is bad, teenage girls liking it is bad, it is a largely male domain, with the occasional backstage pass issued to the occasional woman. The musos are sneering and dismissive of anything that doesn’t pass their own impossible standards of excellence and artistic integrity. Anything remotely poppy is dismissed as being totally without merit. But the thing is, to slightly misquote Laura Mvula, who made you the master of the freaking universe, love? Who made you the ultimate arbiter of good taste?
I get it, that protective thing, that not wanting the masses, those same masses who mocked you at school, to take this special thing of yours and ruin it. But I felt like that when I was a teenager, I’ve got over it now I’m an adult. I can happily listen to The Smiths (not happily, but kinda guiltily, if I’m honest), Radiohead, Alice Coltrane, Bonobo, Katy Perry, The Beatles, Crowded House, Kendrick Lamar, Ian Brown, Depeche Mode, Harry Styles….etc, etc, with no restrictions on myself and it makes life more varied and fun!

So called low brow

Back to Marian Keyes, one of my favourite authors, lumped into the category of ‘Chick Lit’, yet the first person I came across who depicted depression, in her books, in a way that resonated with me (more than sodding Jean Paul Sartre, babe!). Why would I not love her? Her books make me laugh, entertain me, contain universal truths and make me feel less isolated. There is nothing wrong with this, I shouldn’t even have to spell it out or defend it. I don’t really feel like I have anything to prove with my reading matter, I have my English degree but even if I didn’t, could still happily dive into a range of material without having to defend my choice. I love Jane Austen and Barbara Pym and Agatha Christie and Maria Semple and Jonathan Coe and so many others. The best, albeit bittersweet, feeling is when you feel sad to finish a book.  The characters stay with you, they cling to your clothes and speak to you from the pages. You go back over passages you love, rolling the words over your tongue. Or, sometimes, you might just read something silly, fun and forgettable, to get you through the day. You don’t always want a fancy, open sandwich, made with focaccia bread, topped with olives, roasted artichokes and drizzled with oil, sometimes you just want a cheese sandwich.

The ‘Idiot Box’
Same goes for T.V. I have to be in the right mood for a subtitled film I’m usually rewarded when I make the effort but often I just want to watch First Dates! Again, why should we feel that we have to defend our choices. There should be no such thing as a guilty pleasure, we need to knock that sanctimonious Jiminy Cricket figure off our shoulder and just get on with it.

I know that for self-preservation, I often have to impose a news embargo on myself, it makes me less well informed but more robust, mentally and I’ve gotten over feeling remotely guilty about it. I feel similarly about my choice of books, TV, film and music - a Dolly mixture array of things and nobody else’s business.

So, on that note, I’m going to go off and watch some episodes of Sabrina the Teenage Witch - the original, kinda silly one, I have found that, whilst I really love the darker, modern reboot (The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) I also enjoy the original.
Have a marvellous weekend!

Self-help books - optimism or delusion?

I've always been really drawn to the transformation story; rags to riches, shy, retiring mouse to self-assured dynamo, plain Jane to goddess. The first ones to catch my attention were those ugly duckling, 'fat to thin' photospreads you get in magazines. The ones where, on one side of the page, a huge, marshmallow person stares apologetically at the camera. ‘I’m sorry I exist’ their sad, puffy faces seem to say - ruining your paper with my looks which don’t fit into society’s rigidly defined ideas of what is aesthetically acceptable!

Then, on the opposite page, there’s the transformation pic, the former fatty has shed 6 stone (or however many kilos that translates as) and is holding out their fat person’s, clown trousers out in front of them.
‘Look at what a fat joke I was.’ Their happy grins say, now I can walk down the street happily, without children pelting me with rotten fruit.

The most predictable New Year’s resolution

The thing is, my shameful little secret, is that there is a part of me that is still strongly drawn towards this fat to thin story, so that every now and again I’ll take a sneak peak at My 600 pound life or similar programme, on T.V. I just can't seem to stop being seduced by the lure of the idea that however bad it gets, change is still possible.

By the side of my bed, there is always a pile of books. Usually comprised of self-help books, the novel I’m currently reading and fiction books I started then put aside in favour of something a bit more interesting.
At this moment in time, at the top of the self-help pile is Freedom from Emotional Eating by Paul McKenna. And why do I have this book there, if I’ve claimed to support the body positivity movement and intuitive eating and the rest of it?
The answer to this is that I can never fully climb aboard the whole body positivity/fat acceptance thing because:
a) I don’t want to be fat and don’t feel comfortable at the weight I’m currently at
b) I do still see excess weight as having an emotional aspect to it.
c) I want to be as healthy as possible.

Now, please don’t come down on me like a tonne of bricks about this, I’m saying that I can’t embrace the whole whole ‘fat acceptance’ thing for me, I’m not talking about anyone else. I really do believe that I’ve always been an emotional eater, using food for comfort and not always just eating when I’m hungry and I want to address that. Although Mckenna’s book tends to oversimplify things, it does seem to contain basic truths. The only problem is that, I must have bought it a while ago, and it contains a hypnosis C.D and we have nowhere in our house that plays CDs and the whole point of it is to listen to it privately, on an MP3 player or suchlike but I don’t have the means to burn it onto my device but when I do we’re really going to see some changes! Clown trouser pictures to follow.

The impact of the past

The other transformations I like to hear about are the ones where people were addicted to drugs or alcohol, then had an epiphany, turned  their lives around and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro or something. I don’t think that I’m an alcoholic, I just like the narrative of having a problem to solve - one so huge and which overshadows everything, that needs to be overcome before you can realise your full potential.
Talking of problems to overcome, someone recommended to me a book about trauma, [The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. Kolk, Bessel van der, Penguin 2015 ] The author propounds that trauma and its effects are a lot more widespread than most people think and the repercussions are manifold. Going back to the whole weight thing, one of the things he puts forward is that feelings of panic might be experienced as hunger, causing people to overeat. Also, that people who are disconnected with their bodies, not in tune with signals, may continue to eat past the point of fullness. I’ve encountered versions of this theory since reading Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach (Although she talks of women subconsciously wanting to be fat, as a protection from the outside world).
The book about trauma is a difficult read, detailing case studies of traumatic experiences which can be harrowing, I’d only recommend reading it if you are looking to go into that field of work yourself or if you are feeling emotionally robust and read it in small bursts.

It’s all getting a bit heavy now, let’s move on 

Triumph over adversity: I’m also a great fan of those tales of women who were married to
feckless men (not that this applies to me!) and they had four children and their husbands left them but they picked themselves up by their bootstraps to become bestselling authors/successful business women/human rights lawyers. I bloody love those stories!

Like I said, I don’t have the feckless husband but am often held back by my own lack of confidence and have a tendency to self-sabotage, so to that end, when my brother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I requested the book The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance---What Women Should Know by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman. He kindly got it for me, last December, I just need to read it now, to be brimming with confidence….(In my defence, December was really manic).
Tip 1: to get the most from a self-help book, make sure you actually read it!

Finish what you started

So, perhaps my main New Year’s resolution should be to actually read my self-help books, right through to the end and, in the case of the ‘Emotional Eating’ one, actually watch the DVD, find some way of downloading the CD and follow the techniques. I’ll check in, this time next month to let you know if it’s started to work.