Ariane Sherine's Blog, page 13

Things are getting better

Things aren't so bad right now. It helps to remember that there have been far more difficult times in my life than this - pretty much all of it, in fact.

Ages 3-17, living with my violent and abusive dad and my mum who pretended his behaviour was normal, and being bullied severely throughout school.
Ages 18-23, depressed and struggling to work out why I couldn't accept love.
Age 24, pregnant by an abusive boyfriend, whose violence led to me having an abortion.
Ages 25-26, suicidal, extremely anxious and claustrophobic as a result.
Ages 27-28, starting to succeed but each day marred by OCD.
Ages 29-33, having a major nervous breakdown while pregnant, then struggling with severe mental illness. On three pharmaceutical drugs for life.
Ages 34-35, finding it hard as an unemployed single mother.

Compared to those times, I'm in a really good way right now. I have a beautiful daughter, who is now at school so that makes life easier (in terms of not having to pay for childcare).

I have a fantastic writing job, fun colleagues, a great friend, some good not-so-close friends, and lots of people looking out for me online. I like where I live, though it is a bit dodgy and I feel like an old person when I moan about the amount of litter. (There is a lot of litter. Most of it seems to be cigarette butts, fried chicken boxes and the odd fly-tipped mattress, covered in stains.)

Yes, I've lost my husband, who was also my best friend, and that sucks. I don't make friends easily. I find it really tough to relate to people who have had easy lives, and I imagine they find it difficult to relate to me too.

But life goes on, and life is incredible, and I'm very lucky. I just have to remember that.

Yo' mama's so fat...

Forgive my exuberance, but I don't fully understand why everyone healthy isn't leaping around going "Woop-de-doo! I'm WELL!!!!!" We (including myself, generally) take our rude health for granted and fixate on all our other problems, given that being sick isn't on the list anymore.

Anyhow, I'm going to try and be more grateful for my health, because it's super-important (and because being ill is wretched). Thanks for all your sympathy and support.

My new project for this week is planning my little girl's seventh birthday party. She's not so little anymore - I remember when she was born, so tiny and angry, wrapped in a towel, snarling at life. And now she's turning seven! It's crazy. I've really loved age six - my favourite so far.

Six-year-old: Which Disney princess do you think you look most like?

Me: Er... Jasmine?

Six-year-old: I think you look like Pocahontas.

Me: Thank you, sweetheart!

Six-year-old: But fat.

Now I'd better go and clean the house, because I don't want all the mums at my daughter's school thinking I'm fat AND that we live in squalor...

Have a wonderful Saturday.

Yo' Mama's so fat...

Forgive my exuberance, but I don't fully understand why everyone healthy isn't leaping around going "Woop-de-doo! I'm WELL!!!!!" We (including myself, generally) take our rude health for granted and fixate on all our other problems, given that being sick isn't on the list anymore.

Anyhow, I'm going to try and be more grateful for my health, because it's super-important (and because being ill is wretched). Thanks for all your sympathy and support.

My new project for this week is planning my little girl's seventh birthday party. She's not so little anymore - I remember when she was born, so tiny and angry, wrapped in a towel, snarling at life. And now she's turning seven! It's crazy. I've really loved age six - my favourite so far.

Six-year-old: Which Disney princess do you think you look most like?

Me: Er... Jasmine?

Six-year-old: I think you look like Pocahontas.

Me: Thank you, sweetheart!

Six-year-old: But fat.

Now I'd better go and clean the house, because I don't want all the mums at my daughter's school thinking I'm fat AND that we live in squalor...

Have a wonderful Saturday.

Sick again

So I lasted one day back at work before feeling worse. This virus has now lasted two weeks, and at this stage, I'm just hoping it's not permanent!

It's crazy: while I was happily married, I was rarely ill and certainly never had to take more than a day off work at a time. My marriage breaks down, and BAM! I'm bedridden.

I'm very lucky that I have an understanding boss and can work from home. My plan is to stay in bed for the next three days, except for the odd excursion to the toilet or fridge. I just need sleep and not to think about the divorce.

This is easier than done: the post just came, containing two things for my ex. I sent him an email a couple of days ago. He wrote back that he needed time to find his feet.

I may be a comedy writer, but I resisted telling him where they were.

Back to work

I’m on my way to work, squashed into a Tube like a small brown sardine in the middle of a load of bigger fishes. Because I’m 5’2”, I’m always sandwiched under a man’s armpit, and he invariably smells like a biological weapon. Also I don’t want to hold onto the hand rail because it’s full of germs, so I jolt about wildly whenever the train moves, to a soundtrack of other passengers’ tuts. Maybe I should invest in a glove?

I’m glad I’m going back to work though. Friendly people and writing news stories will hopefully distract me from the fact that I’ve hurt my best friend in the whole world. From the fact that I couldn’t even make a marriage work with such an affable, kind person. I don’t feel very good about myself at the moment. I have therapy again next Wednesday, and it can’t come soon enough.

In the meantime, I have a house to clean and tidy, while dancing to my ‘happy’ playlist on Spotify. I have my daughter’s 7th birthday party to plan, lots of presents to wrap, a film to see at the cinema with John, and the local gym to join. If I throw myself into all these things, hopefully the pain will gradually ease, and I’ll be able to look forward to the future instead of feeling so stuck. Thank you for coming with me on this journey.

Excommunication

I'm working from home today, and hope by tomorrow the hacking frog cough will have gone. I miss seeing other people, and I'm lucky enough to work with an amazing team of funny, successful and interesting creatives who are great fun to hang out with.

Speaking of feeling lonely, I called my husband yesterday. He didn't answer, so I texted him, and getting texts back was like getting blood out of a stone. It's his total right to excommunicate me, yet it feels so sad and weird, after nearly a year of marriage and 21 years of being best friends.

I'm more grateful than ever for my friend Jon Bon Jovial (AKA John Fleming), who has been coming round to cheer me up, bringing me food and looking after the little one. There's nothing like his friendly voice in person or on the end of the phone to give me a lift, and his silly jokes make me laugh.

Part of the reason I'm feeling low is that my daughter has now gone away with her dad for ten days. She is the sweetest, kindest and funniest girl, and I am going to miss her incredibly much.

But you are reading this, and I am feeling better physically, and things are going to be OK. So many people have sent me kind messages and left lovely comments, and I've reconnected with some great friends I'd lost touch with (including S. John Ross, who created the font used for the Atheist Bus Campaign).

Life has its ups and downs, and I'm going through a down, but as they say: "If you're going through hell, keep going." I promise I will.

Ariane Sherine: licence to ill

I was sitting at my desk yesterday at work, making hideous coughing noises like a frog with emphysema, when my amazingly kind boss came up. He said "Ari, go home, and don't come back until you're better."

So I'm now at home, huddled up under the duvet, getting better. I thought I'd better post this just so you know I'm OK. Thank you for all your lovely comments on Twitter and Facebook, and get well soon messages. Like my boss, you're the best.

5 reasons why Tony Robbins is wrong about #MeToo

So life coach Tony Robbins has criticised the #MeToo movement at one of his famous seminars, aspersing the women who bravely stood up against the men who had sexually assaulted them. He said “If you use the #MeToo movement to try to get significance and certainty by attacking and destroying someone else… all you've done is basically use a drug called significance to make yourself feel good." 
He also said that #MeToo was "being used by all these women who don't want to deal with their own problems and they think being a victim is a way to work out their pain by making their perpetrators suffer and that doesn't help them. It happened years ago and they need to let it go."
Here are five reasons why Tony Robbins is wrong about #MeToo:
#1: He says women who join the movement are trying to get "significance" by "attacking and destroying someone else". Well, the first courageous women to come out against Harvey Weinstein, helping #MeToo gain coverage, were Hollywood actresses. These included Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Salma Hayek, Lupita Nyong'o, Kate Beckinsale, Uma Thurman, Mira Sorvino, Cara Delevingne, Daryl Hannah, Lea Seydoux, Ashley Judd and Rosanna Arquette. These women are hugely famous and already more "significant" than virtually anyone else on the planet - certainly more significant than Robbins. They didn't need the extra fame or exposure, and I'm certain they didn't want to be thought of as "victims", as Robbins alleges. They were just bravely telling the truth they'd felt they had to keep secret for so long.
#2. Robbins says that women in #MeToo are "attacking and destroying" their assailants. In my view, they deserve to be attacked and destroyed (verbally and legally, of course), but this isn't generally the case. Many of the other women who have joined the #MeToo movement are unknown with unknown attackers. I came out in 2014 about my attack by a boyfriend in 2005, but I didn't identify the man in question, so he was definitely not "attacked" or "destroyed". In fact, this was so far from being the case that in 2016 I had the unpleasant shock of his name appearing next to mine on the cover of a national magazine. If his reputation had actually been ruined, I'm fairly sure that no one would have been running op-eds by him unless they were mea culpas. I just wanted to tell my story, not gain "significance" from it - so initially, I didn't sell it. I just published it on this blog, and then the Guardian asked to run it.
#3: Robbins suggests that joining #MeToo is a strategy to "make yourself feel good". Yes, you read that correctly: he actually thinks that reliving a traumatic experience will make women feel good. He couldn't be more wrong. Perhaps the resulting support and camaraderie can help a woman get over the experience (if she receives any - I know I didn't when I told people back in 2005) but the actual retelling of the story is hellish. It feels like vomiting: a necessary evil. It's not something I talk about these days unless I need to make people understand what I've been through (like boyfriends), and it's certainly not something I want to dwell on or think about every day. I've tried to move on from it and "let it go", even though it "happened years ago" (thanks Tony), but life doesn't always work out that way - especially as I'm still dealing with the extreme anxiety and claustrophobia from the incident 13 years later.
#4: Robbins claims that when you join #MeToo, you're "making yourself significant by making somebody else wrong". Well, I hate to break it to him, but when you're a man and you sexually or physically abuse a woman, you've already made yourself wrong. It is entirely your fault, never the woman's, and it's our absolute right to talk about it - especially as so few of us will see justice done through the courts. This idea that women are "victimising" ourselves by joining #MeToo is victim-blaming at its worst, and disregards the fact that the men have forced us to become victims of abuse by their actions. We're calling these actions out to highlight how widespread and horrific the issue is, and to protect other women from this happening in future - not because we want to victimise ourselves or gain "significance and certainty".
#5: Robbins doesn't know what he's talking about. How could he? He's a muscle-bound 6 foot 7 inch man, which suggests that he doesn't have a clue what it's like to be sexually assaulted by someone much bigger and stronger than you. He hasn't experienced the fear and dread women who are part of #MeToo have had to deal with, and yet he claims to have all the answers as to what we should do and how we should behave. On the evidence of this video, he has none of them, and should stop talking about #MeToo until he's developed some empathy.
And now, as per #3, I feel awful and like I need to take a shower. Brrrrrrrrrr.

When nobody cares

This morning I woke up to a tweet about my blog from a Twitter follower: 'Get a grip - nobody cares.'

Reader, I blocked him. But his tweet got me thinking. You see, far fewer people care about what I write than they used to, and this is something it's taken me a while to come to terms with.

I always wanted to be famous. I grew up in an abusive family, and the only attention I ever received was critical and negative. I was bullied mercilessly throughout school and had zero friends. I wanted to be a pop star or a writer. I thought that, when I grew up, if I was adored and became famous, it would make up for all the hellish experiences I'd had as a child. I would finally feel loved.

Fast forward 20 years...

In 2008, I was achieving those dreams. The Guardian used to call me every week and ask me to write for them. (This is my favourite piece I ever wrote for them.) I'd get friendly emails from editors like 'Looking for a touch of Sherine comedy magic for the pages!' And I loved that the best newspaper in the world, the paper I'd grown up reading, wanted me to write for them.

Soon, editors at other papers read my columns and also asked me to write for them, so I started writing for the Sunday Times, the Observer and the Independent. Then the atheist bus campaign catapulted me to semi-stardom. All of a sudden I was an atheist sex symbol. I was interviewed by Joan Bakewell for The Times, the Independent did an interview with me, the Guardian put me on the front page, the Sunday Times flew me to Jamaica with Virgin Upper Class to write the cover feature for their travel supplement. I was on the phone to Richard Dawkins a lot; I socialised with AC Grayling and Ben Goldacre, and met Howard Jacobson in the Groucho Club. I joined Twitter, and every time I tweeted, I got around 50 replies.

Journalists from around the world wanted to interview me about the campaign, and it spread across the globe. I compiled and edited a book, The Atheist's Guide to Christmas, featuring contributions from celebrities including Richard Dawkins, Brian Cox, Derren Brown, Charlie Brooker, Simon Le Bon, David Baddiel, AC Grayling, Jenny Colgan... I received hundreds of lovely emails from atheists who loved the campaign and book, and also hate mail from Christians who hated it.

I appeared on BBC Breakfast several times, Radio 4 several times, The Alan Titchmarsh Show, where I got booed by the entire audience... I started scripting and presenting a video series for The Guardian. Then I fell in love with someone I shouldn't have fallen in love with, and my head started to go wrong. People were too interested in me. People were going to kill me. I was going to die, and it was all my fault. And I started screaming in my head, then screaming out loud. I got pregnant, but I couldn't enjoy my pregnancy, because I was going to be killed. I lay in bed and shook and shook.

I cancelled the video series, all my appearances, all my columns. I refused to go on social media. I screamed and cried and trembled. I was put on antipsychotic drugs which knocked me out and made me gain five stone. I was no longer a sex symbol; I was obese. I went on suicide forums, planned my suicide and wrote to someone who was also planning their suicide. Thankfully, we never met up.

Then I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Over the next two years, I got better, a lot better, thanks to three brilliant pharmaceutical drugs. When my daughter was 17 months old, I split up with her father, because he had fallen out of love with me due to my mental illness, and our relationship had become untenable. I found myself single, in a tiny flat with a baby who wouldn't stop screaming and crying.

I decided to restart my career, but everything was different. When I tweeted, very few people liked or commented on my tweets. When I tried to write for the Guardian again, all my editors had left, and the new editors didn't want to know. I would eventually write eight more pieces for them, over four years. I had previously written 70 pieces for them in two years.

I had no luck at the Sunday Times, or the Independent, or the Observer. No one at those papers ever commissioned me to write for them again. It felt strange, so strange, to suddenly be a non-entity once more. I watched writers I knew who hadn't had nervous breakdowns soar into the stratosphere, becoming famous and getting book deals. I sat in my room, screaming toddler in my arms, and cried.

I became depressed. I spent my daughter's third birthday upstairs in my old bedroom at my parents' house, crying as everyone celebrated downstairs, because I couldn't face the fact that I couldn't support my daughter doing what I did best, the only thing I'd ever been good at. I had no money and fell deeper and deeper into debt.

My mother saw how miserable I was, and said "Why don't you start a business? We'll support you with a loan." So I said "I've been writing these comedy songs. They're rude and funny - I'll play you one." And I played her a song. Somewhat comically, my prim and proper mother was horrified. She said, "This is disgusting! It isn't what we had in mind at all. We definitely won't be supporting this!"

I sold my beautiful tiny flat in the safe affluent area where my daughter's dad lived, and bought a horrible house in a dodgy area ten miles away. I did it up from scratch, made it pretty and rented it out to lodgers. I was still in debt, but at least I had an income.

A friend became an editor at a right-wing magazine called The Spectator, and asked me to write for them. I'm left-wing through and through, but thought, "Well, the left-wing don't want me anymore. I'll try this." They were very nice to me. I wrote controversial columns for them for eight months, including a cover story, thinking that if I became the next Katie Hopkins, at least I'd have money and a career again. I wasn't prepared for the amount of hateful comments from readers on the left and the right. My friend left the magazine, and I never wrote for them again, though I tried.

Then my daughter began to grow up. She didn't know anything about fame and success. She didn't know that her mummy was a has-been. She didn't care that I was fat and single, or that I didn't have the amount of followers on Twitter that I'd like - she didn't even know what Twitter was. But she had a kind heart, and she loved me.

She once asked me, "Is it true that there are people who have no one to love them?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Maybe we can stick up for them and love them?" she suggested.

I realised that if I'd never had a nervous breakdown, I'd never have had her. And, now almost seven years old, she is more beautiful and meaningful than any amount of fame and success. So despite it all, I am lucky, so very lucky. My daughter and I fall sleep holding each other, and tell each other that we love each other, over and over. She is my everything.

Every writer wants to be read, and every writer wants to be a success. No writer ever wants to be told that 'nobody cares' about something they've written. But there are things that are more important than success and fame and riches. There is love, and love is happiness. So as long as I have that, I'll be okay.

Why I am blogging again

Hello, people of the internet.

I am writing this blog again for a few reasons:

1. SAFETY. I'm getting divorced, and for the first time, I am living alone in a house in bit of London that isn't the safest. I confess that this is partly my fault for kicking my husband out, but I digress a little. I have an absolute motherfucker of an alarm system - seriously, all bells and whistles - but writing a daily blog is an extra added level of security. If I haven't blogged by the end of one particular day, contact me and say 'Where the hell is the blog, Sherine?!' and if I don't reply, please RAISE ALL HELL.

2. WRITING. I just stumbled across this Guardian interview from ten years ago and thought sadly, 'I used to be funny.' Then I thought hopefully, 'Maybe I can still be funny?' Because I like being generally amusing. I first discovered this aged 11 in assembly at school, when I used to sing the boring religious hymns very loudly in an exaggerated Indian accent. The girls around me (who didn't even like me) would fall about laughing, and our evil teacher who enjoyed bullying kids would hiss through gritted teeth, 'Ariane, sing in your normal voice!' Then I would reply in a sing-song Indian accent, 'But I am Indian!' (And she couldn't very well send a letter home to the parents of an Indian girl saying 'Ariane is singing in an Indian accent'.)

3. CATHARSIS. I've been best friends with my husband since I was 16. That's over 21 years. His absence from my life is going to leave a hole (this is where you insert jokes about him filling my hole). And frankly, he doesn't want to hear from me, and I don't want to hear from him. We are a bit sick of each other. But I only have one other very close friend, John Fleming (whose blog is here). He is a wonderful man, and is so good at cheering me up I call him Jon Bon Jovial, but I don't want him to have to listen to all my woes non-stop, so I thought maybe you might want to read about them instead. And even if you don't, at least I get to write all about them (I do have a therapist, but I only talk to her for 50 minutes a week).

4. ROMANCE. Maybe, just maybe, I will eventually - maybe after I turn 38? - find someone new through blogging. Possibly not right now, because I'm not on the rebound, plus I'm hideously overweight and people are superficial. And also I can't date again until my divorce comes through, because that is legally considered infidelity as I'm technically married - even though my husband won't sleep with me, and is 100 miles away in any case, so NO SEX FOR ARIANE BY LAW! So if I'm not allowed to have sex or romantic intimacy, then maybe I can dream that some amazingly sexy man is reading this blog and thinking 'I'll hit up Sherine when her decree nisi comes through'. And if that's not a sizzlingly hot phrase, I don't know what is.