by Poorna Bell
I didn’t go outside of my comfort zone; nothing about this trip prompted any form of introspection. I also blew my entire budget within the first three weeks.
When I returned, it turned out that I had chosen to go freelance at the worst possible time: we were entering the biggest global recession since the 1930s.
Work was scarce, so I decided to apply for a permanent job for more financial security. While applying and looking at the measly salary brackets, I had more or less resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to earn big money. In one way it was fine – I had never aspired to make money, and I was so bad with it that I actually came to view my overdraft as my normal bank balance.
‘Ms Shetty, would you like to come in to review your finances so we can put a plan together for you?’ Lloyds Bank would ask during one of their periodic phone calls.
‘Do I have to? I mean is this mandatory?’
‘Well, no,’ the other person said politely, ‘but it might help you in the long term.’
‘So, just to check, this isn’t because I’m in deep shit with my finances and you’re calling in my overdraft because I’m so horribly inefficient with money?’
‘No,’ they said, half-resigned to what was going to happen next.
‘OkaythanksBYEEEEE,’ and I hung up.
The more time went on, however, the wider the gulf grew between the finances and lifestyles of my friends, and myself. In my industry, there weren’t things like career trajectories or five-year plans.
Beyond the golden apple of the editor-in-chief job, most were standard editor jobs, with varying degrees of responsibility. There certainly weren’t bonuses. Most journalists were guided by the dream of one day doing work they were proud of doing, even if it meant being on low pay.
Rather than having friends who worked in similarly beggary creative industries, mine worked in medicine or finance, and while they weren’t irresponsible with money, it had stopped being this overwhelming presence in their lives.
They had left the pay-cheque-to-pay-cheque existence back in their uni days.
They spoke of holidays, buying property, wazzing money in restaurants and, for a time, I tried to keep up as best I could, but I was also digging myself further and further into debt.
It was pretty embarrassing when a mate would want to take a cab I could ill-afford and I’d try to squirm out of it, or when they’d all want to commit to some expensive adventure on holiday while I had barely managed to pay for my hotel and flights. So sometimes it was easier to pretend as if the money wasn’t real and put it on a credit card than it was to say, ‘Sorry, guys, I’m bum broke.’
By the time I had met Rob, I was still piss-poor at dealing with my finances, but I remember feeling comforted by the fact that he seemed to make money easily, and had actually done things with it such as buying a house and going on holidays he could actually afford. We went out for gorgeous dinners, and when we went on holiday, we didn’t blow out, but we also didn’t scrimp. If I couldn’t afford it, he’d pick up the tab.
It seems incredible that this quality that I liked about him, his financial surety, ended up being so heavily commandeered by his addiction. A year after we got married, Rob seemed to be having cash-flow problems. He’d borrow a bit from me here and there, and always return it, but every month it was the same story.
He co-owned his house in Streatham with a friend, and when that friend wanted to sell, we talked about buying another house. But somewhere along the way of house viewings and sketching out whether we needed two bedrooms or three, Rob eventually said, ‘Honey, I know this isn’t ideal, but I would rather we rented for a year and I can use the equity to pay off my debts.’
I was surprised and a bit disappointed, but I also knew I had debts and no deposit, so of course I agreed.
‘How come you have that much debt, though?’ I asked.
Rob had managed to rack up a £20,000 credit card bill. ‘Wedding stuff,’ he replied, which was odd considering I didn’t remember him spending that much money on the wedding – my parents and his parents did.
A year after that conversation, he confessed that he was addicted to heroin, so it turned out that the ‘wedding’ debt was a drug debt, and, worse still, after having used the equity to pay off his bills, he’d gotten himself back into more debt, around £30,000.
In addition to reeling from the discovery that he was an addict, and trying to process how long and difficult it would be to help him through recovery, the debt made me want to vomit.
In that moment, I had never felt so helpless about the amount of money I earned, and how long it would take to claw our way out. I was angry at Rob for lying to me, for the wreck our life had become, but I also saw how the constant worry about money was etched on his face.
In fact, his shame around money, around not being the one to take care of things financially any more, crippled him right up until his death. He loathed the fact that he owed money to people, that he was still cadging off me, but at the same time was trapped in a vicious cycle of using drugs to self-medicate his shame and loathing around it.
He was stuck in what people now refer to as one of the more insidious aspects of modern-day masculinity, where as a human being your entire worth is measured mainly by your economic value. When men can’t pull in money or keep up appearances, the shame around it can be deadly because they have been brought up to believe that this is their first and foremost function in life. For Rob, it was a circle of dysfunction that he didn’t learn to break.
The fact that I couldn’t help financially made me determined to fix my attitude to money. Because what sat on my overdraft or my credit card wasn’t play money or imaginary. Money at its most base level represents options, and we had none. It wasn’t just Rob who had messed things up; so had I.
Then, while we were in the middle of his recovery, something unexpected and wonderful happened.
By this stage I was working at HuffPost and had developed a great relationship with the founder and now ex-chairman of the company, Arianna Huffington. She was championing a message around wellbeing, around how it was as important as pursuing money and power, and we clicked in our united ideals of it.
She has an incredible energy around her, and I’d looked forward to her visits whenever she came over from New York, because after spending about five minutes in her company, you’d come away feeling like you could run the world.
Our editor-in-chief in the UK had just resigned, and Arianna wanted to know if I would help run the business in the UK.
Ohmygodohmygodohmygod I texted my sister, and we screamed excitedly on the phone for about ten minutes.
Overnight, I went from being an editor who was in charge of a little section to the website’s number two and the most senior woman in the UK for HuffPost while we anointed a new editor-in-chief. I had stock options and an amazing salary.
However, alongside all of this positivity, life was raw and visceral and hard with the effort of Rob and I holding our lives together. For over a year, it felt like the tectonic plates of my two lives were grinding against each other.
The earthquake of his relapses shook our marriage to its core. The aftershocks were steeped in loneliness. I couldn’t tell Rob how high a price I was paying to keep his addiction a secret from my loved ones, and I couldn’t tell my friends, family and colleagues what was really going on.
Barely three weeks into my new job, we faced a fresh set of challenges. Rob and I lived in a lovely, airy three-bedroom flat in Streatham, but we had finally decided to move to a different postcode because we felt the area was not a great place for his recovery. It was soaked in heroin dealers.
Soon after we moved, Rob had a horrible and cathartic relapse, this time on alcohol. We talked about it and decided the best thing was going to be for him to go to The Priory for some intensive treatment.
‘I can’t do it on my own,’ I cried to Priya when I was at her home in Brighton. She had remarried, to my friend Shabby, and they had just
had Leela.
In hindsight, there are a thousand things I wished I had known. That depression is a formidable illness, even more so when its tentacles are wrapped up in the life-sucking leech that is addiction. That we should’ve gotten more help for him earlier considering how huge his problems were.
While Rob was in hospital, I motored on at work. I don’t know how I did, but I managed to keep it together and no one suspected what was going on.
I think I needed work to keep afloat and give me some sense, some hope that there was structure in the world. That I could have a day where I got on the train, muttered dark thoughts at the Victoria line, bickered over the news agenda, agonised over what to have for lunch, bitched about some delightfully insignificant thing with my colleagues.
There is no shadow of a doubt that in some of my most challenging times, work saved me when my personal life was crumbling. So giving it up after Rob died, or not returning to it, didn’t occur to me.
Three weeks after his death day, I went back to work.
I didn’t know then that a lot of people don’t go back to work for a while after a bereavement – six months, sometimes a year, sometimes never. But rightly or wrongly, I didn’t give myself permission to do that. I didn’t put my grief in a box – it woke up pressing my hand, it sent me to sleep stroking my brow. His pictures were everywhere – the song of his life and his death started and ended each day.
But I knew there was a darkness to it, that the song often felt like it began in the throat of a mermaid, trying to pull me to the bottom. If left alone at home, I would’ve crawled beneath the duvet and slept my life away.
So I clung to everything light. And at that point, work was light.
Work made me feel like I was doing something useful, especially when I was able to use it as a platform to create discussions around the problems of masculinity that create this desert of emotional silence, and lure men towards suicide. While my personal life was on this strange, rudderless path, like a submarine with faulty engines, work was within my control.
But at some point, the balance tipped. Work was ceasing to be the thing that saved me and, instead, was preventing me from moving forward. I knew I was lucky to have a job that paid well and was sufficiently senior that I was able to make decisions and shape how our business was being run. But being in the midst of it was also hindering my ability to see the bigger picture.
About a year after Rob’s death, while still in my weightless little bubble, I started beavering away on a book called Chase the Rainbow. There was so much I wished I had known about mental illness and addiction when he was alive, so much that still wasn’t being written about. This was the book I wished I had.
Something to tell me how complex things were, to provide comfort and some sort of explanation as to why Rob found it so impossible to ask for help despite his life falling apart around him.
At the same time, I also had my day job. In addition to the day-to-day running of things, we were understaffed and trying to launch special projects simultaneously.
Emotionally and psychologically, I was reaching an event horizon.
From the outside, I am sure most people thought I was vaguely handling my grief well, because, for the most part, I did my job well. I socialised with people and I was capable of holding a conversation. But the reality was that I was just very good at removing myself from situations when I knew I was going to break down or start crying.
I cried when I ran, I cried just before I went to sleep, I cried when I saw people in love do a delicate dance of kindness to each other, when Crosby, Stills and Nash came on the radio, when I saw bloody meatballs on a menu because Rob had a special pork meatball recipe that only he knew how to make and would never make again.
Much in the same way ahead of the arrival of violent diarrhoea, I felt a tingle that everything was not okay and that I needed to go somewhere quiet to cry or I’d explode.
The end result of this was that once I acknowledged there was a huge set of emotions that I couldn’t control, I was ruthless about anything else that made me sad, upset or stressed out that was unrelated to grief.
And although it had saved me once, and I had a big capacity to deal with things that were challenging, my stress levels at work were wobbling dangerously close to making my grief worse.
For so long, work had been a presence in my life that was reassuring and constant. I had worked hard because that’s what our parents did, so that’s what we did. The goal of work was to have pride in what you did and be good at doing it. But it was also to earn money to build a life, and that life would consist of a partner, maybe some kids. A house in the countryside, holidays somewhere sticky and sweet with ice-cream and sunshine.
But now that this future no longer existed, what was work really doing for me? While I was proud of what I had achieved, it seemed relentless both in workload and the number of fires I seemed to be putting out constantly.
As I listened to people talk about their challenges, career advancement, petty quarrels that would break out over the wrong arrangement of words, I would stare at the ceiling and think: Did Rob die, and my life get destroyed, so I could sit in a room and defend why someone I manage hasn’t replied to an email?
In my personal life, things were no different. I talked mostly about work, my friends talked mostly about work. We spoke about problems, promotions, bonuses. We never spoke about projects we were proud of, just their final outcome and what that meant to our bank balance.
I had continued with work after Rob died because I didn’t know what else to do.
But I knew, when I saw him in the funeral home, that I was learning something extremely important. By the pricking of my tears and the cracking of my heart, something much bigger than me was telling me to remember this. That everything in life comes down to this, so I’d better have a long think about what I wanted to have achieved, felt and done by the time it was my turn to lie on that table.
So, clearly, once the mist cleared around my existence, it was evident that some fundamental questions needed to be asked about just what the fuck I was doing with my life.
In the movies, life realisations are almost always framed in a dramatic way.
Perhaps time is a factor here: if you don’t cut corners, how else can you capture something as complex as the evolution of a human life in ninety minutes?
So it is transmuted into sharp, steep life choices: selling all your possessions, moving across the world, running, running, running towards this future that holds the answer to the sadness in your current life. The problem with this kind of conditioning is that we believe these changes will yield instant results.
Once the risk and the journey are undertaken, we expect the knowledge to drop into our laps arbitrarily, the jewel that sorts our messy lives out and says, ‘Lo! I have the solution to your fucked-up life, and if you just follow this plan, you will un-fuck it!’
There is nothing wrong with plans, lists or the aspiration for a life well lived and full of love. But while our existence may be rooted in science and chemicals and numbers, our lives are not mathematics so easily solved by following a certain formula.
When you undergo a life change – whether through experiencing illness, divorce or the death of a loved one – there will come a point when you must gather the blocks of your life and rebuild. There is a hard horizon ahead, in which you will have to confront the fact that the life you had no longer exists.
It was not as simple as leaving my current life and buggering off around the world. Unless you are good at compartmentalising or medicating your life, your troubles, your sadness, your disappointments do not operate to postcodes, latitudes or longitudes.
I knew that a product of Rob’s death was that I was learning something far deeper and more profound about the nature of life. But figuring out how I was going to rebuild my life after it was never going to arrive in a thunderclap.
One foggy morning, I was circling the block near my office. Amid the little blue pl
aques announcing the lives and deaths of the great and the grimy, this block is well worn by the feet of people working in nearby buildings. A river of stone that has seen a million stress-outs, heard countless bits of gossip about the rise and fall of careers and regrettable office party shags.
Tucked around one corner is a sexual health clinic conveniently placed under a set of damp arches to deal with the consequences of these careless liaisons, while a few doors down is the UCLH Macmillan Cancer Centre.
Now that my grief was marginally less intense, I started to think about my future. And there was a dissonance created by where I should be, and where I actually was. The catalyst for all of this was work, which was making me feel like I couldn’t breathe. I had spent the past two years since Rob had passed away approaching work at such a full-on pace that I had nothing left to give.
We use that phrase ‘burned out’, and that is what it felt like. I was a field of scorched earth, a neutron star expected to blaze with light but instead filling rapidly with inky decay.
And so, early one afternoon, I was crying on the phone to Priya. She had spent the past two years in the French countryside commuting to work in nearby Geneva and was an excellent sounding board for perspective outside the London bubble.
Earlier that morning, things with work had been challenging, and I found myself emotional and overwhelmed in the office, in a spot I thought no one could see me. Except a senior colleague did see me and asked me if I wanted to talk.
‘You need to brush this off,’ he said. ‘This is why you have the big salary, this is what you get paid for. You’re supposed to be able to deal with this.’
I knew enough about mental health to know that this is the worst thing someone could have said to me. Actually, to anyone. If you’re crying uncontrollably, you’re probably not thinking, ‘Wooo! I’m in total control of my life! I’m a legend!’
You’re probably thinking, ‘FUCKING HELL, get it together, I can’t believe you are this pathetic, this weak, GET IT TOGETHER.’ And then along comes someone else, who doesn’t have access to your brain, who says out loud the worst things you are already thinking about yourself.
