Help Me!: How Self-Help Has Not Changed My Life

by Marianne Power

For nine months I’d thought of nothing else but me, myself and I, analysing every second of my life and every facet of my personality. There was hardly a minute in the day when I didn’t think, Why did I say that? Why did I do that? Am I self-sabotaging? Am I scared of being rejected?

One of the arguments against self-help is that if any self-help book worked we’d buy one and that would be it – we’d be cured! I’d downloaded five in the last week. The more self-help I read the more I wanted to read. I kept thinking that the secret to happiness lay in the next book, the next book, the next book. It no longer occurred to me to figure anything out myself. Instead I kept turning to the men and women in my head.

I’d been doing all this self-help stuff wrong. I didn’t need angels and affirmations: I needed to focus on being a good person rather than a happy one! Think of others rather than myself!

I topped up my wine and zoned out as chat moved to holiday plans and stories from some debauched party they’d been to. Usually this kind of afternoon would have been my idea of heaven but now I felt so removed from it all. Why wasn’t anyone taking life seriously? Why couldn’t we talk about big things? Like what made a good life? Or what was the purpose of it all?

I looked around the pub – at all these people drinking, laughing at stupid stories and talking about nothing at all. I didn’t know if they were lost or I was.