The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  I wanted to be helpful, but I couldn’t tell her why. I knew I couldn’t have worked much harder. I didn’t think I could have done a much better job. I had, for example, recently done a big campaign to raise standards in nursing that had had a record response from readers and been mentioned in a debate in the House of Commons. I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t so naïve as to think that hard work would always be rewarded, but that nothing in my life had prepared me for this.

  I had a wild urge to tell her about my father’s seventieth birthday dinner, some years before. He had cancer and we knew he was dying and my mother made a speech. My mother talked about my father, and some of the things he had done. She also talked about the guests. She talked about how they had met, and what their friendship had meant.

  There were six couples round that table and they all met their partners when they were young. Like my parents, they got married in their early twenties, had a baby and bought a house. Like my parents, they then had more babies, in most cases another two. They didn’t have to worry all that much about how they were going to pay the mortgage, since they had jobs – in teaching, the civil service or the NHS – that were theirs for life. They didn’t need to worry about retirement, either. When they hit sixty, or, if they weren’t quite so lucky, sixty-five, they would have the kind of pension that meant they could carry on living pretty much as they had before. They could still go to the theatre, and eat out. They could still have foreign holidays. And they would have plenty of time to spend with the grandchildren, because that, as they all say, is one of the big joys of getting old.

  In my parents’ world, I wanted to tell Harriet Harman, you knew what you should be doing. You had to feed your children and you had to pay your bills. To do these things, you had to go to work. It was important to do your work well. You should do your work so well that you get promoted every few years without ever having to boast about yourself on Twitter. But a job was how you showed your responsibility to your family. A job was not a bridge over a void.

  In my parents’ world, you didn’t wake up on a Saturday morning in your forties thinking that if you wanted to speak to a human being in the next two days, you’d better try to make an arrangement. You didn’t think that, if you ever wanted to have sex again, you’d better force yourself to do some internet dating, and then hear a man say, on your fifth date, just after you’ve had really rather adventurous sex, that he’s ‘determined to hold out for something good’.

  I had, I wanted to tell Harriet Harman, faced plenty of difficulties before. I had had to deal with illness. I had had to cope with sudden death. I had never thought I would face my middle years without a family or a man to love, but I had tried very hard to make the best of it. I had my career. At least I had my career. But now I didn’t.

  In a corner of my study, behind the filing cabinet and the printer, there’s a secret shelf. On it are the kinds of books that sprang up on the Amazon page of a computer I once shared with a colleague. He, it was clear from the ‘Related to items you’ve viewed’ section, was ordering books on Eastern European poets. I, it was clear from the same section, was ordering books with titles like Men Who Can’t Love and I Can Make You Thin. When I realized he was getting my recommendations, I went hot, then cold.

  It started with a book I begged my mother to buy me when I was thirteen. It was written by Vidal Sassoon and his glowing wife Beverly, and called A Year of Beauty and Health. Vidal and Beverly said you should start the day with hot water and lemon and continue it with a run. Then, after ‘dry-brushing’ your skin in the shower, you were meant to have a breakfast of egg whites or oatmeal, and then prepare a packed lunch of raw vegetables and sprouted seeds. I didn’t do any of this, of course. I had toast and marmalade for breakfast, school lunch, with spotted dick or jam roly poly for pudding, and a Dayvilles ice cream or a Twix on the way home. As an adult, I’ve bought The Hip and Thigh Diet, The Red Wine Diet, The Food Doctor Diet, The Easy GI Diet, Dr Atkins New Diet Revolution, The South Beach Diet, 6 Weeks to Super Health and Stop the Insanity!, which probably sums up the rest of them. And I’m not even fat.

  The diet books, which I usually read with a cup of coffee and a big slab of cake, aren’t hidden behind the filing cabinet. They’re next to the cookery books, which look as if they’ve hardly been opened, because they haven’t. The diet books aren’t hidden, because women are supposed to worry about their weight, even if they hate cooking, don’t weigh themselves, and eat whatever the hell they like. And because there’s only one shelf behind the filing cabinet, and it’s pretty jam-packed.

  People judge you by your bookshelves, and I don’t really want any of my guests to see Wanting Everything, Instant Confidence and Awaken the Giant Within. I particularly don’t want them to see How to Meet a Man After Forty, and particularly since the jacket is pink. I wouldn’t want to explain why I’d bought a book called You Can Heal Your Life, or one called Happiness Now! I think I’d be embarrassed by the exclamation mark.

  If any of my guests did peer behind the filing cabinet, I’d have to explain that the self-help books, like the diet books, hadn’t changed anything, but it probably didn’t help that I hadn’t followed any of the instructions. I’d have to say that you couldn’t actually read War and Peace or The Waste Land, and then pick up a book with a title like Change Your Life in 7 Days with anything like a straight face. These books weren’t about solving anything. Like an action movie, or a rom com, they were about escape. They were about taking you, for a couple of hours, with a nice glass of Sauvignon and a bowl of Kettle Chips, to a simpler, perkier place.

  I have never yet found a book called I Feel So Awful I Don’t Know What to Do. If I had, on a few occasions in my life I might have snapped it up. Instead, I have bought books with titles like A Grief Observed and Prisoners of Pain. I have read books about people in refugee camps, and people who live in slums, and children who have been abused. I have certainly learnt a lot about how other people live their lives, but have ended up feeling ashamed that I sometimes seem to be making such a mess of mine.

  I was once jealous of someone who was at Auschwitz. I’m not proud of this, but I’m afraid it’s true. I was lying on a hotel bed in Turkey, drinking a cup of tea, and reading about a man who was trying to stay alive in a place where people were being starved, and tortured, and made to dig railway tracks in frozen ground, in a place, in fact, where people were sent to be slaughtered, and I actually thought, at least for a moment: it’s all right for you.

  I had ordered Man’s Search for Meaning on Amazon, because I felt my own search for meaning wasn’t going well at all. I had met a man who had promised to be my ‘rock’, but turned out to be more like one of those houses in the Bible that are built on sand. After he left, I felt as though my life had turned into the lyrics of one of those soul songs where everyone wears a tight satin suit. ‘What becomes of the broken-hearted?’ sings a man with an Afro and a very big collar. ‘I know I’ve got to find,’ he sings, ‘some kind of peace of mind.’ Unfortunately, he doesn’t tell us how he does it.

  The days that followed after my lover left were bad enough, but what happened two weeks later was much, much worse. I stopped even thinking about ‘peace of mind’ and wondered how I would get through it without cracking up. I thought it might help to hear how other people had got through things that would make the things I had to face look like a walk in the park. So I ordered Man’s Search for Meaning, and on page 49 I found the answer. What had kept him going, said Viktor Frankl, through the hunger, and the pain, and the screams of anguish from the bunks around him, was the thought of the woman he loved. He had found his strength, he said, in the ‘contemplation of his beloved’. And I thought, perhaps just for a moment, but a moment is enough: it’s all right for you.

  When a book about a concentration camp makes you feel a cold thud you have learnt to recognize as envy, take it from me, that doesn’t make you feel good at all.

  *

  ‘What will survive of us’, said t
he poet Philip Larkin, ‘is love.’ He says this in his poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’, about a stone knight and his lady who, even in death, are holding hands. The tone of the poem is ironic, but the simple beauty of the words is stronger than the tone. Even Philip Larkin – miserable, moaning Philip Larkin – can’t help agreeing with Viktor Frankl. In the end, what matters is having someone to love.

  Most of us want love. Most of us want satisfying work. Most of us want a family. We want a place, and people, to call home.

  So what do you do if you haven’t got it? Or if you had it and lost it? What do you do when you’ve made the best of what you have and then lose the thing you care about most? How do you ‘search for meaning’ when so many of the traditional ways of finding it seem to have gone? And how on earth do you keep picking yourself up when life keeps finding ways to knock you down?

  Life, as Boris Pasternak said, ‘is not so easy as to cross a field’. It never has been, but for many of us there are fresh challenges now. Nearly a third of us live on our own. More of us are single than ever before. And if you do get married, you have almost a fifty–fifty chance that your marriage will fail.

  You could throw yourself into work, but the digital revolution is wiping out jobs. Some economists say that about half of us will lose our jobs in the next twenty years. Some of us – particularly in areas like journalism where the business model is failing – might struggle to get a job again. We can, of course, all become ‘entrepreneurs’, but the average annual income of a self-employed person in Britain is about £10,000. You try having a lovely life on £10,000.

  If this was a self-help book, I could tell you what to do. I could be the teacher and tell you all about success. I am not a teacher, and for big chunks of my life I have felt I have failed.

  At the end of that phone call with Harriet Harman, I said that I didn’t think there was anything much that could be done about my lost column and my lost job. If someone doesn’t think you’re ‘fresh’, I said, you’re not likely to change their mind.

  But no one can stop me from being a journalist. However I earn my living, I will always be a journalist. I know how to ask questions. I know how to listen. And in the weeks following that phone call I decided it was time to ask different kinds of questions and to listen in a way I had never listened before.

  I can’t tell you what to do when your heart is broken and your spirit has been crushed. I can tell you what I learnt, and what I did next.

  Part I

  Falling

  ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans’

  Woody Allen

  Kafka, eat your heart out

  I have never had a heart attack, but I think I now have some idea what it’s like. For days after I walked out of that office on Kensington High Street, I felt as if I had something crouching on my chest. I’m normally keen to lose a pound or two, but even I was shocked to lose eight pounds in three days. The day after the editor threatened to call security, I got an emergency appointment with my doctor. I told her that I couldn’t stop shaking. My heart, I said, felt like a bomb that was about to go off.

  I never thought losing a job would be easy, but I always thought so many things would be worse. I had been through quite a few of the things that are meant to be so much worse. They didn’t seem all that much worse now.

  It was the psychologist Abraham Maslow who came up with the idea of a hierarchy of needs. He talked about life as a pyramid, where your need for food and shelter come first. After that, there’s a need for safety and then for ‘love, belonging and esteem’. Shelter I had, at least for a while. Food, for once, I didn’t want. And love? Love was a luxury I couldn’t worry about now.

  When mice go through changes in status, it affects their immune system and their ability to move. No wonder humans can’t stop shaking when they’re suddenly pushed from a perch. One moment, you’re being invited to go on The One Show and speak in seminars at the House of Commons. The next, you start talking about work in the past tense. It makes you feel as though you have been knocked down by a bus, and are somehow still functioning even though you have been technically certified as dead.

  In John Lanchester’s novel Mr Phillips, a man sets off with his briefcase, in a suit. Instead of going to the office, he sits on a bench in the park until it’s time to go home. He doesn’t know how he’s going to tell his wife or sons that he has lost his job. Not long after I shouted at the editor, I met someone who did something similar. After he lost his job as an executive editor of a national newspaper, Grant Feller rushed out of the house before his children got home from school, and then strode in with his briefcase, telling them that ‘Daddy was home early again’. It took him three days to pluck up the courage to tell them that he had been marched out of the office with his things in a cardboard box.

  ‘I can remember every single moment of it happening,’ he told me. ‘I can remember being approached by the managing editor and tapped on the shoulder. I can remember the walk. I remember being sat down. I remember the look on his face and the sun coming through the shutters on the window overlooking the Thames. He said, “The editor has lost faith in your ability and we no longer want you to work here.” I went cold.

  ‘It was,’ he admitted, ‘a brutal environment, but secretly I loved it. I loved being pushed to my limits. The adrenaline, the testosterone, the thing you feel when you get that great pat on the back when you’ve done a great column, or even when you’ve written a great headline, that’s the most amazing gift.’ Oh yes, that thing you feel. That terror. That excitement. That thrill. But the pressure mounted, he said, as the budgets were slashed. ‘I never, ever, ever put in a bad day’s work,’ he said, ‘but I just didn’t fit any more. My wife says, “Didn’t you see it coming?” And the reason I didn’t was that I was good at the job.’

  When Grant walked out of that meeting with the managing editor, he found security guards waiting outside the door. Newspaper editors love the grand exit with security guards. It’s a way of showing the whole office that you have turned, on the flash of a whim, from friend to foe. ‘I said to the managing editor that I’d appreciate it if we didn’t have any security guards,’ Grant told me. ‘We shook hands. I left. It must have been about ten-thirty in the morning. I got on the train. It was a completely empty train, full of old people and students and tourists. There was a kind of numbness and a sort of feeling that you’re not quite in this world, almost as if all people had disappeared and you were just on your own, like in those westerns when that tumbleweed rolls across the desert.’

  The next day, he said, was the worst. ‘I just couldn’t tell the children. I walked them to school, came home, did stuff in my T-shirt, then put my suit on at about quarter to five and went for a walk and then came back when I knew the children were there. And they said, “Daddy, home early again?” And I said, “Easy day.”’

  Grant took another sip of his wine and then he gulped. ‘When you don’t have work, and you look into your children’s eyes at breakfast time . . . they don’t quite understand what losing a job means. But when they start worrying about money, it’s just the worst thing. Being the provider that society deems a man to be, that was right at the core of things for me.’

  I nodded, as if I knew exactly what he meant. I knew I should have thought that I was lucky not to have had to worry about having other mouths to feed. I didn’t feel lucky. I felt as if worrying about my own livelihood, home and future was something a woman’s magazine might tell you to do when you’ve had a hard day with the kids. Like a bubble bath, with a scented candle and perhaps a tiny glass of wine. ‘Me time’. Because I’m worth it. Even if I now have a horrible feeling I’m not.

  ‘I was fortunate,’ he said, ‘to live in an affluent part of London, but it makes things difficult. You start to measure your life in terms of what you possess or own. And also how you define yourself: I am a doctor, I am a lawyer, I am a journalist. And then there was a time when it was: I’m looking for something else to do
, and you can’t walk into a room and say that.’

  Well, you can, but the trouble is that other people don’t know what to say. I am an ex-journalist. I am a recovering journalist. I am a journalist who may no longer be able to carry on living in my home. ‘There was a period,’ said Grant, ‘when there was a “for sale” sign outside the house, two or three months after I lost my job. That was awful. One morning,’ he said, and he seemed to be half wincing at the memory, ‘I pulled it out of the ground. I looked at it and thought “no way”, and told the estate agent, “It’s not for sale.”’

  I first met Grant at a professional networking dinner organized by someone we both knew. We were each asked to say something about ourselves and he said that losing his job was the best thing that ever happened to him. At the end of the dinner I rushed up to him and told him that for me it had felt like one of the worst. I couldn’t understand how he had managed to be positive and upbeat and all the things the self-help books tell you to be when you lose your job, while I had been staggering around as if I was carrying a corpse. When we finally met for a drink to swap stories of newspaper battlefields, he set me right. ‘I was monumentally depressed,’ he said. ‘And I was angry, so angry and so bitter and so full of poison. Honestly, there were days when I wanted to do the most terrible things to the people I felt had wronged me.’

  I poured us both another glass of wine and had to fight the urge to cheer. I had been talking to a radio producer about making a programme about compassion, following some work I’d done on nursing and the NHS. ‘To be honest,’ I told the producer, ‘I’m currently more interested in making a programme about revenge.’ I was joking, and was quite surprised when he said it was ‘a great idea’. We put together a proposal. We would, we said, look at the history and psychology of revenge, from Medea to the contemporary armed forces and the judiciary. We would ask whether the import of ‘honour’ codes from the South and East had affected Britain’s traditional Christian/liberal humanist idea of turning the other cheek. But all I really wanted to do was plunge The Independent’s management in boiling oil.