Here’ s a little essay I wrote…
but you might not want to sing it note for note…
DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY
Please go to my Substack here to find the same article with all the links.
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I am Jess, a psychotherapist and an author, specialising in addiction and anxiety (more specifically, OCD). I write about life, often through the lense of literature, TV and other mediums. Please feel free to contact me here to book a therapy session, or get in touch with me about writing projects. You can also go to my website, http://www.jessica-drake.com
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The wonderful Raymond Carver (1938-1988)
…. what am I really getting at when I write? What’s at the heart of all of existence? It’s why I keep coming back to Hamlet, and I don’t need to spell out the most known quote of all time … to be or not to be… etc. Shakespeare hit a nerve as raw as sushi to the human psyche. Hamlet and his other creations have endured the test of time. We are still asking that question. I would say we are all living out that question. It’s at the heart of addictive processes, OCD and more. In fact, let’s just say that it’s at the heart of being human. We are all on some kind of spectrum of acting out. The brilliant Johann Hari tells us in his book Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs that mammals are predisposed to seek out what makes them feel good, and sometimes, at whatever cost.
I could go into the light dusting of knowledge I have on epigenetics, but I suggest you use the World Wide Web for that, save to say that as people enter into addiction, their genes can change (and on the flip side, be reversed in recovery). Those genes are then different genes that would have otherwise been passed down to your descendents. The great Gabor Maté explains this in an essay you can find here.
If love is the answer and antidote to addiction (which I think it is – for a start, it’s at the heart of the 12 step programme) what, as Raymond Carver once asked ‘are we talk[ing] about when we talk about love?’ The opposite of love is hate, but I would go further and say that it’s fear of loss, fear of death, which I think can transfix humans more than hate. Look at the mid life crisis, the purchase of a Porsche and a younger lover rubs up against the existential fear that our time on planet earth is finite. Booze and drugs quell, if momentarily, our angst against that one real certainty (maybe taxes, too).
Fear of ‘not being.’ I doubt the rioters in the UK, marauding vitriol over the month of August on a battered United Kingdom were conscious of this, but I would say their hate was fuelled by fear (although I doubt any of them said that in the police station).
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How do we connect love and hate through art?
As well as Shakespeare, many great artists of all mediums have expressed the dilemma of being and not being, love and hate. TV is one of them. I stumbled upon an INCREDIBLE and what us early millennials used to call ‘box set’ last month on Amazon Prime called Ex Pats, based on the novel The Expatriates by Janice Lee.
Nicole Kidman is in it, and is sublime, a la her Big Little Lies days (also one of my favourite shows). It is always a test for me when my husband says ‘you continue, this isn’t really for me,’ due to limited time to watch TV solo, and because it makes me doubt myself (my stuff, not his), but I am glad I pushed through that one and carried on. Pushing through doubt is a sure fire way to gain more self love, after all. I talk about this with therapy clients a lot, I am an advocate for feeling the fear and doing it anyway. That’s also the title of a book you can find here.
Ex Pats is one of those near-perfect, beautifully written, acted and produced shows. Strong female characters, gut wrenching themes, luscious, evocative ‘something’s going to happen’ lighting and sound.
Three women are intertwined, Mercy, Hilary and Margaret (Kidman). All living on a little island – Hong Kong, where money, hedonism and the subsequent consequences are in ample supply.
Each one is affected differently by this fast paced lifestyle on the ex colonial island in the tropics. Each one, to varying degrees, is affected by the disappearance of Margaret’s young son, who was at the time he vanished, being looked after by Mercy in a crowded night market. Kidman hardly knew Mercy when she entrusted her with her child, but was somehow bewitched by her charm and beauty. Like many other stories where the ‘what if’s’ scream out from the TV set, we all think we may have done it differently, but in that moment, would we? When we start posing these questions to ourselves, then we are engaged in a journey inward, the whole point of great art. This is what we talk about when we talk about love, I think.
Ex Pats is up there with The Affair, interestingly also about the loss of a child and the subsequent effect it has on the main characters’ relationships. I guzzled The Affair down in one month, all fifty episodes, in the summer of 2021 when we were in some kind of lockdown and my baby twins still had a lunchtime nap that I stretched out in order to inhale the spectacle. I had to delay the very last episode because I was so enraptured by how everything turned out that I wanted to delay the pain of finishing a great drama. It was then that I started to sketch out notes for a novel, along the same themes, with a different setting, which I will leave as a vague surprise.
Why do these shows proverbially asphyxiate me like Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (see this earlier post)? I’ve told you they pose questions, but as yet I haven’t given you answers. I had an amazing massage this week and felt a real soul connection to the practitioner. She’s called Hayley and if you live in Hertfordshire or nearby you can find her here.
Hayley was and is quite clearly a really special person. I ‘randomly’ found her online, but is anything down to chance, or is it, as my earlier paragraphs argue, cause and effect?
When the student is ready, the teacher really does appear. I ended up in rehab in 2012 apparently ‘by accident.’ But there are no coincidences really. My colleague at work had shown me an article of someone I knew who ran a treatment centre, I congratulated him on the press coverage, and he rang me straight away and said ‘how’s your drinking?’ The rest is history. The right question was being asked at the right time. The mark of all good therapists. I am forever grateful to you, Cosmo at Start2Stop.
This has been proved to me time and time again. When we are ready to go to therapy, get sober, recover from OCD or whatever it is, and we tell whatever higher power we believe in, all sorts of things happen for the better. This woman said she is going to be one of those annoying people that gives me my problem, but I have to find my solution. The solution is self care, but she didn’t say how that would manifest. Writing this essay is part of the self care scheme.
Here is what I have come up with in terms of why those shows banjax my consciousness, which I hope is not too long winded and left field.
DEATH AND BIRTH ARE MORE ALIKE THAN WE MIGHT THINK
… So… I thought this would be two separate articles from the Ex Pats theme above (it is amazing that one month on from watching the show, I really don’t feel I can talk about it any more because it has since gone, and we’ve watched some great drama, namely The Son on ITV X, where Pierce Brosnan shows us he really does still have it. It’s an ambitious, generation spanning family drama – you could say it has nothing to do with the aforementioned shows, but here I am writing and discovering that they’re all to do with death and birth, or children, families, what glues us together, love and loss. Writing is so cathartic for me because when I put my thoughts down here I can see the stream of consciousness that binds me together, as I mentioned above. I have had trouble with my novel, real hair tearing out trouble, and it’s because I have had to go back to the drawing board of what is at the heart of everything. What am I really writing about? What do we talk about when we talk about love, Raymond? Help me!
Just focusing on the birth bit – I am back in therapy after a year off. Last year I had pure CBT therapy with a fantastic woman who really helped me tackle my distorted thinking as it pertains to OCD. If my thoughts were sheep in a pen, as my current therapist explained to me, then I had somehow opened the gate and allowed them to go running all over the field. Last’s year’s therapy was the sheep dog that rounded them up. I blew the whistle. It is always us who has to blow that whistle and ask for help. It is also always us who opens the pen in the first place. For the most part, unless a crime has been committed, we are the creators of our own monsters. It’s a hard truth to swallow but if we do swallow it, real change is possible. Decent therapy can really help with this, because a good practitioner will bring this idea into our awareness as we delve deeper and deeper. More levels, more devils.
At the start of this year I went back to my psychiatrist and got a diagnosis for ADHD, which came as absolutely no surprise whatsoever. Ritalin, or a very mild dose, has helped, I think. Each time I increase the dose to the suggested amount, I get jittery, a feeling which I hate. I was told to give up coffee and I haven’t. I can’t. Well, I can, but my justification is that I don’t do much else these days, and I’ve got to have some kind of vice, haven’t I? I am perhaps a prime example of that mammal Hari talks about – I am searching for dopamine, some kind of hit. everywhere I go.
Along with the OCD, the ADHD and the coffee addiction I know I am a drug addict and alcoholic, so that gives me top marks, really. The holy trinity of OCD, ADHD and addiction, as I have called it on here before. I’m getting a bit metaphysical now and when I go to edit this I will probably think to myself, ‘what the hell are you banging on about now….?’ You see, I still don’t have a great dialogue with myself after all these years of recovery, therapy, meditation etc. The massage lady picked up on this, as my body keeps the score, as the Bessel van de Kolk explains in his brilliant book.
Meetings, therapy, yoga, meditation, writing and more REALLY WORK, but as someone in a 12 step group once said to me ‘an eight hour walk into the woods is an eight hour walk back.’ I will be 13 years clean in January but I still haven’t been sober for as long as I drank. Not quite. I will take that accolade so reassuringly popular with recovery folk at 17 years. Sober at 30, drank from about 13, or definitely acted out from the early teenage years, anyway.
However, as my youngest brother wrote in a wonderful letter to me thanking me for writing and reading out a piece of prose at his wedding, ‘you have a very wonderful way of looking at the world, and we love you very much.’ It is one of the most supportive things anyone has ever said to me. I felt so seen. I will treasure that letter forever, even though it has a stain on it from when my daughter spilt a glass of water, which feels symbolic. I have lost count of the amount of times this summer I have had coffee and water cups and glasses tipped over next to sun loungers, low tables and more. A charmed life, with epic annoyances, maybe. I love the Melody Beattie reading for The Language of Letting Go – a daily reading book that I turn to each morning and I recommend either in book or app form if you travel where she talks in January about the new year and about life being a mixed bag. People say ‘how was your Christmas’ or at the moment, ‘how was your summer’ and I can honestly say I don’t have an answer. It’s a mixed bag. It’s been brilliant and it’s been crap. There’s been amazingly euphoric times with my kids and there’s been times when I feel like I am going to lose my mind with tiredness. It’s just not linear I am afraid, and I am not interested in answering black and white questions any more.
I have got everything I had ever wanted when I got sober, but I can still really, really struggle. If I had a pound for the amount of times I have heard clients say to me ‘you must think I am pathetic, compared to what others have to go through,’ I’d have a lot of pounds, basically. We minimise and punish ourselves for our surface level problems I think because we don’t want to talk about the root causes and conditions (what we talk about when we talk about love). They are scary. They are the aforementioned themes, and it’s much better to read about them in a novel or engage with them on a TV screen. However, books and TV are like therapy, well the good bits of both are, because I think a great story encourages you to reflect and talk about it with the people around you. To ask the question I have been repeating on here.
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Birth always means the death of something, and vice versa. It is the cyclical nature of our existence and the more we can see that, I think the more peace we might have. In early motherhood I couldn’t accept the death of my old life, and it caused me great strife. Cause and effect is everywhere, and acceptance is key.
If you want to write a good story, you have to pile on the ‘this means that.’ Something the creators of the above shows get with aplomb.
I said I was back in therapy many paragraphs ago. I offered this pearl to my therapist about death and birth, and he loved it. He said us neurodivergent tribe (for which he belongs, which is probably why we get on so well) have to learn to manage our fate of having mental illness, or it manages us. Are we on top of our mental health, or is it on top of us? Our brains can be used to supersonic capacities if we strive for the former. Go to therapy, get on the yoga mat, in my case (exercise is so key for me), attend a 12 step group, read, read read. That’s my method, anyway. Contact me here if you connect with this, and we can book a therapy session in.
I wrote the title to this article weeks ago. I was about to scrap it or post a little article saying I can’t remember why I wrote this but here it is, and start a new post. I’m glad I didn’t, because I now see that this means that for this article. A real mouthful of a notion, but it is true. I think we are really writing about death and birth in all things, really.
PS. There is no silver bullet. It’s possible that Jesus is not coming to save us all, despite if you are waiting for this Uber driver 🙂 – click here to read. A little bit of humour and a thank you for staying with me and reading to the end 🙂
Jessica Drake - OCD / Anxiety Psychotherapist 