How to Be You in a World That Keeps Asking You to Be Something Else

It started with a gratitude journal

At the time, I was commuting for hours every day around NHS work and feeling increasingly as though I was psychologically coming apart at the seams.

I’d also signed up for a very expensive wellness and fitness programme.

Which was supposed to help.

Unfortunately, being well apparently involved homework.

Among other things, I was expected to sit down every day and write three things I was grateful for.

So I’d sit there.

Staring at the page.

Trying to summon gratitude.

Home. Family. Food.

Obviously I was grateful for those things.

But after you’ve written them repeatedly because a programme requires three entries before you’ve successfully completed today’s Wellness, something peculiar happens.

Gratitude becomes admin.

And the expensive programme intended to reduce stress had somehow become another source of stress.

Another thing I wasn’t doing properly.

Another little obligation waiting to inform me that I could apparently be better at being a human being if only I tried harder.

This seemed somewhat counterproductive.

So we changed the rules

No more compulsory gratitude.

No sitting down at an appointed time trying to think of three appropriately positive things.

Instead:

Notice what actually gets through.

A tiny moment of beauty.

Something funny.

A sudden feeling of connection.

A bird doing something ridiculous.

Light hitting something in a particular way.

A fleeting moment when the world feels unexpectedly right.

Don’t manufacture it.

Don’t rank it.

Don’t turn it into self-improvement.

Just notice it.

We called them glimmers.

And instead of demanding that life provide three of them before bedtime, I simply collected them when they happened.

That worked.

Because they were real.

Then the collection started growing

The glimmers weren’t all cheerful.

Or profound.

Or particularly useful.

Alongside them came observations about bad days, good days, strange interactions, things I’d learned about myself and moments when I suddenly understood something I’d been doing for years.

There were little categories.

Days That Didn’t Fall Apart.

Days That Don’t Quite Hit.

Good Humaning.

Somewhere in amongst all that, we started wondering whether these fragments might eventually become something larger.

A book.

Which presented an immediate problem.

I am spectacularly unqualified to tell anybody how to live

The working title became:

How to Be You in a World That Keeps Asking You to Be Something Else

with the subtitle:

Musings of a Middle-Aged Walking Meltdown in Disguise.

It was never supposed to be conventional self-help.

I had absolutely no intention of producing:

TEN STEPS TO AUTHENTIC LIVING

while simultaneously trying to remember whether I’d eaten lunch and wondering why I’d walked into the kitchen.

I didn’t have answers.

I had observations.

So the book would be fragments.

Glimmers.

Stories.

Meltdowns.

Small discoveries.

Things that helped.

Things that emphatically didn’t.

Possibly illustrations.

Perhaps, taken together, they’d say something useful about trying to remain yourself while life repeatedly hands you forms describing the person it would find more convenient.

Or perhaps they’d simply document one woman repeatedly attempting it.

Either was acceptable.

And then…

I stopped collecting them.

Not deliberately.

Nothing went wrong.

There was no technical catastrophe.

Nobody else published the same book.

Google OAuth was not involved.

My attention simply migrated elsewhere.

The fragments remained fragments.

Which, now I think about it, is rather appropriate.

A book called How to Be You in a World That Keeps Asking You to Be Something Else has so far steadfastly refused to become the book it was being asked to become.

I respect that.

Current condition

Resting in the ether.

There are glimmers.

There are fragments.

There is a title.

There is even a cover idea: a storm inside a lighthouse.

Whether they ever assemble themselves into a book remains to be seen.

I’m certainly not going to pressure them.

I’ve learned where that leads.