What Would Beyoncé Do?! Page 13

  I had shouted so loudly a nurse came in. I immediately sat back down. My brother just sat in silence, both of us stubbornly crying.

  The nurse leaves and my brother says, ‘See what I mean? Nobody loves me, none of you love me.’

  With gritted teeth I said, ‘Nobody loves you? Nobody loves you? I broke your shit up with a stick!’

  I don’t know how we all got home; we were nervous and anxious around each other and especially around my brother. We put him in the spare room and wouldn’t let him close his door, just kept checking on him every few moments. No one really slept.

  It was Christmas morning, and my mum had students over from China, two young girls, so we had to pretend nothing had happened the night before. She was somehow trying to make Christmas dinner as normal as possible. My brother didn’t join us. My mum made some excuse that he was hung-over. It was Christmas after all.

  I lasted until about 4 p.m. before I screamed and cried at my mother. Why are we pretending nothing is happening? This family is fucked! He just tried to kill himself and you are telling people he’s hung-over? We shouldn’t be living like this! My mum got upset but said what can she do? She started crying and was defeated, she had no money, no house, no savings, teaching was all she could do, at least these students would cover the bills for January, what else could she do? Send them back to China on Christmas Day? She needed the money.

  I resented her for it. I hated that we didn’t have money to look after ourselves properly, that my mum had to work and I couldn’t get my brother in front of a proper doctor. I hated feeling this stuck by circumstances. If I was rich and famous I would have him in a clinic, he would get taken care of, my mum wouldn’t have to work. We wouldn’t have to live in this stress. I hated living like this. Beyoncé does not live like this; Beyoncé would not be living like this at all.

  Then it’s Boxing Day and my friend Jason Patterson texts me and suggests we meet up. Jason Patterson has a complete heart of gold and is hilarious to boot. It was the last thing I felt like doing but it was good to get out of the house. We met at the South Bank and found this great restaurant in Covent Garden. Jason is one of the kindest, most easy-going, humblest human beings on the planet.

  We had dinner and I told him all about Klaus and all about my brother. We talked for hours and Jason made me really laugh and just feel better for having someone to tell it all to.

  He had to do a gig and so I went with him, and he suggested I get up and do five minutes. It was the last thing I felt like doing, I didn’t want to stand in front of people and try and make them laugh when I felt like I was crumbling underneath my own skin. I was ready to fall, I felt so weak and vulnerable.

  Just do a short set, he said. So I got up, and I didn’t really know what to say, so I told the audience about my shit Christmas, about Klaus, about how I had seen him with somebody else and how the last two days were some of the most stressful I have ever known.

  I told them about the hospital and I told them how loved my brother is, and how I wanted to tell him how loved he is, but instead I called him a dickwad and had a go at him for being selfish.

  The weirdest thing happened, there were only about 20 people in the room, and the audience laughed, they really fucking laughed.

  Not in a ‘laughing at me’ way, but in a shit I have been there, I recognise that hardship way. And that did more healing for me and gave me more comfort than I had known in the last three months.

  Something about that laughter and recognition and realising that I am not alone and people get it made me feel better. It gave me a break and made me feel at peace and like God or the universe or some higher power was looking after me and saying ‘I’m here, you are not alone, there is light.’

  I finished my set by talking about Klaus. I told them all about how upset and mental I had been over him. I ended my set with fake crying on the floor singing ‘Someone Like You’ by Adele. As I got up and said my name, people stood up. I got a standing ovation from about ten people in the audience. I could have cried. I probably did.

  Afterwards several people came up and thanked me for talking about a really shitty Christmas. But then again, these were people who spent Boxing Day on their own in a comedy club, so I had found my people! People who wanted hope.

  I will never forget that gig; it was the start of me finally listening to what I had always known. That truth is funny, truth is what is precious and valuable and truth is what will connect people. Don’t look for jokes, tell the truth. I am funny, funny I have got, but tell the truth. Life is fucking hard, but be honest about how hard it can be, and trust that the funny will follow. Once again comedy was saving me.

  15.

  SENDING THE EX AN EMAIL

  Now these emails start with the best of intentions: short, concise, you’re just going to get a few things off your chest in a calm and reasonable manner. You are hurting, and it’s painful and exhausting not being able to talk to him about it and explain how you are feeling. There is so much left unsaid. Admittedly most of it has been said before but that is not the point. It still hasn’t given you your answer. Like U2 said, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Despite this, despite all this pain, baby girl, don’t email him. What would Beyoncé do? Be Yoncé.

  Reasons to never send your ex an email

  Don’t give him the satisfaction of letting him know how much he has hurt you. He does not deserve this attention.

  Write it all down and turn those lemons into lemonade, a genius body of art that summarises all your hopes, fears and feelings whilst never directly naming anyone in particular.

  I know you are hurting and emotions are high, but this is not the best time to communicate effectively with someone who has seen you naked.

  This is just the part of you that is desperate to know why he doesn’t love you any more. It’s horrible, I know, but his actions are enough to show that he doesn’t. Listen to those actions.

  It leaves you vulnerable to whether or not he responds. You are already vulnerable. Do not give him more power.

  He is not going to suddenly change his mind and think, shit! She is right; I should totally get back together with her.

  He will have physical recorded proof of your mental fragility.

  You will only be refreshing your laptop or phone waiting for a response.

  He might not respond.

  If he does, it is never, NEVER the response you want . . . SAID EVERYONE I KNOW!

  However, as much as ‘I bet it sucks to be you right now’ is an anthem, it doesn’t quite scratch that unavoidable itch that just won’t let you sleep. Sorry Beyoncé, but in this hour of need, you need to step aside. It’s time for an intervention, it’s time for our ultimate bad bitch alter ego; channel your inner Canadian and ask yourself: What Would Alanis Do?! ‘I want you to know that I’m happy for you, I’m not quite as well, I thought you should know’ (in an email, phone call, Facebook status, iMessage, WhatsApp).

  Reasons to email him

  Hello?! Lemonade is genius, what’s the point in writing genius if you’re not going to share it? Why should we care about his satisfaction? Hello, you did that for the whole time you were dating, it’s mamma’s turn now. Let’s talk about your satisfaction. You shouldn’t be the only one carrying around all this pain. Someone needs to tell him all about himself, and you, my friend, are the perfect, most qualified woman to do it!

  This isn’t about giving him attention; it’s about listening and attending to your own needs. This is about having your voice heard. He is almost irrelevant in this.

  Since when did we give a flying fuck about his feelings?! Email him, don’t email him, his opinion of you doesn’t matter; your opinion of you does.

  In this moment of darkness, it’s imperative to do whatever you can to make yourself feel better. PS Alcohol helps.

  Yes, you are vulnerable, but this is taking control and fighting back. This is your fight song, take back your rights song. You are not a doormat, you are a woman, l
et him hear you roar!

  Of course emotions are running high, yours would too if you were dropped like this. But in the same way that when you are drunk you tell the truth, I have learnt that it is only when you are truly crying that you can really articulate what is actually hurting you.

  Of course you will be hoping for a reply that you may not get. The likelihood of him turning around and realising that he has made a mistake is 0.001 per cent. HELLO?! Someone has to be that 0.001 per cent! Be the exception, not the rule. Do you think Beyoncé is the rule? No. Exactly!

  So he will think you are mental or an idiot . . . GOOD! He probably thought that anyway, that’s why he dated you. Let him. In a few years’ time he will be so insignificant that you genuinely won’t care, and he will wish fondly that he had someone who had mad love for him and paid him the same attention.

  How do we get strong? We get strong by fighting, by fighting and losing and falling and learning. This is all learning. Maybe it is a mistake, maybe it’s not; either way, mistakes are important. In fact, they are imperative to your growth. You already feel like crap. You regret everything anyway and have lost most of your dignity, what’s a little more for the drain pipes? If you’re going to fail, fail hard.

  Listen babe, go big or go home. You are home and you are crying. So what’s that say? That says you have reached rock bottom. Well done, you are here. And it’s only when you have reached rock bottom that you can rise and soar, like a phoenix, like a hot, sexy, covered-in-motherfucking-ash phoenix. So you light that fire, baby girl, send that mental, hurting email. Go on *insert name*, you can do it! I believe in you.

  And does she know how you told me you’d hold me until you die, till you die, but you’re still alive, and I’m here to remind you, of the mess you left when you went away.

  And most importantly above all else, fuck him, we need him to know, with absolute certainty, that we know for sure, that he knows, without doubt, that we think, fuck him. Fuck him, fuck him. Fuck him.

  Now my only rule for all of the above, and I mean only rule, this is the only one you cannot cheat on, is that if you are going to send an email, for the love of God show it to your best friend first. Yes, send a mental email, but for the love of God let her proofread the grammar first. There is nothing worse than trying to make someone feel guilty by writing ‘Ijst donet know why you made me feel like you lveod me whn the whole time it just felels lkike tyiou were totally lying ebout everything you ever said to me.’ Babe, if you had sent me this, I too would have left you.

  So I sent Klaus an email, a concise, to-the-point four-page double-sided email (I know you can’t send double-sided emails, OK so it was eight pages, and what?). On 31 December 2011 at 7 p.m. Listing everything I had ever wanted to say, I think I read it back about twelve times and sent it to two of my friends. Both approved it (well technically both of my friends said no don’t send it but they knew that would make me send it, so they took the bullet for me and edited my grammar) and then, at 7.03 p.m., I got the following reply to my four/eight-page email:

  ‘Hi Luisa, sorry to hear you are feeling like this, we could talk but I don’t think it would help.’

  Oh. Well. That’s not the response I was hoping for. What does that even mean? What does he mean, ‘wouldn’t help’? You don’t know me, you don’t know what would help me.

  And breathe.

  He was done. Just like that, done. My family were done, my ex was done, I was done. And it’s time I allowed myself to let it go. My friends were left to pick up the pieces.

  The following few months were long. Everything took ages and people told me it would take me months to feel better, if not years. I started seeing a therapist. Every day felt like an effort. I would cry all the time, every day, most nights, just cry. I hate goodbyes, I find them so traumatic, and here I am in the storm of my Achilles heel. My once-a-week therapist was helpful, but that was only temporary relief. Even though I was keeping myself busy, I would often not want to get out of bed. I just didn’t feel good, I don’t know why. I just felt heavy and I couldn’t stop crying.

  I went to the doctor, crying for the third time in a week. She suggested that alongside therapy perhaps I should go on antidepressants. This made me cry again. Great, now even my doctor thinks I’m mental.

  She was so lovely and did her best to make out like it was no big deal. How was it not a big deal? I am mental, clearly, I felt like the outsider again, the freaky Polish kid. I didn’t belong in the world and I hated it. She said, ‘Luisa, its fine, one in four people are on them.’

  One in four? I didn’t believe that. I took the prescription and left.

  I hid my face when the pharmacist called out my name on the prescription, quickly threw the packet into my bag and ran home. I was embarrassed walking down the street with antidepressants in my handbag. It would be just my luck someone would come and steal it and they would see the citalopram and hand the bag back to me. Well maybe not, but I still held on to it tightly. I didn’t want anyone to know.

  One in four people were on antidepressants. One in four, that was huge. I had no idea it was that many. I didn’t know anyone who was on them. I kept thinking, if I am on a bus, and the bus is full, likelihood is that the person I’m sat next to is also on them. It can’t be that many, surely? That statistic has got to be wrong. One in four?

  Why is it in my face every day of the week, my physical health, what I can do to look fitter, younger, slimmer, sexier? Why is the notion of a thigh gap something that is part of my vocabulary?

  Why am I aware that I need to be skinny but not too skinny, because no one likes them when they are too skinny do they, babe? And if it’s not skinny its ‘don’t age’. Every face cream I buy is anti-ageing cream. My mum is 64 years old, she has the most beautiful face I have ever seen, I love my mum’s face. I love every one of her wrinkles, I don’t want to buy my mum anti-wrinkle cream, I want to buy my mum ‘fuck me, you’re amazing, thank you for being a legend’ cream, that’s the kinda cream I want to buy my mother!

  Why is my sex, my shape, my age used as a currency to value me every day of the week, so much so that the messages for me to change are part of my daily peripheral vision and set as ‘the norm’. But it’s not on my radar, that if I am feeling sad, desperate or vulnerable, that too is actually very normal.

  And there might not be a particular reason why I am feeling sad, because no one has died and life is seemingly good. And yet there is this heaviness in me that won’t shift, and it has come from trying to cope for too long without respite and no matter how much I try to avoid this feeling of drowning, each time I avoid it, it comes back harder to bring me down.

  Why is it not in my face, that one in four people have experienced mental health problems? So if I am feeling that sad and desperate and vulnerable and I am sat on a bus and the bus is full, the likelihood is that the person next to me or the person behind me has felt just as sad, just as desperate, just as vulnerable. And actually there is some comfort in knowing that, because that connects us to another human being, and all we ever want to do is connect to another human being. So why is that message not in my face, that it is very normal and very human, and very much a symptom of our modern life existence to suffer from depression?

  It is OK for you to not feel OK. It is good for you to reach out and get the help that is out there because you, my darling child, deserve it.

  I started looking at people differently. I would be shopping in Sainsbury’s and wondering if the person serving me was on antidepressants, and if they were, how would I know?

  I met up with my friend Ellie, who was amazing. She told me that one of her best friends had been on antidepressants for years. That really took the sting off. Then I told another friend. ‘Yeah girl, my mum takes them, has done for ages, it’s fine.’

  I slowly became more confident in asking people about them. It became clear that most people I knew were on them or knew someone who was taking them.

  So I literally swallowed the pi
ll and started taking them. I was worried about how they were going to change me. I was worried I had somehow failed at life. I felt guilty for swallowing the first one.

  As soon as I started taking them, the weirdest thing happened. I stopped crying. I couldn’t cry. What? I love crying. Why can’t I cry? I hated that I couldn’t let tears out. Forget what other people thought of me; now I felt like I was mental because I had absolutely no control over my emotions; sure, I’d been crying too much, but now not being able to cry at all felt horrible.

  I tried everything I could think of to make myself cry. It’s my party. Launch ‘Operation Cry’. John Lewis Christmas adverts . . . nope. The big one, Adele on repeat, ‘Someone Like You’ . . . not a flinch, not even a drop. The bit in The Lion King where Simba’s dad dies . . . nada, not a single tear.

  I even tried cutting onions, but nothing was working.

  It took a couple of weeks but eventually I started to feel better. Not even better; I just didn’t feel shit. I felt normal. And normal felt good. I could cry, I was able to cry, but nothing made me feel like crying, and that was kinda nice.

  I can’t really describe the difference they made, but by removing the self-loathing I could get out of bed and start doing things with my day. I still had to teach and didn’t want to let my kids down. Antidepressants aren’t for everyone but they definitely helped me.

  The main difference I noticed was how I would react to disappointment. Say for example I have a friend who I’m meeting for coffee on Friday and she texts me on Thursday saying, Sorry I can’t make tomorrow’s coffee any more. Before I started taking antidepressants my response to that situation would be ‘WHY DOES EVERYONE ALWAYS REJECT ME IN MY LIFE?’ *WAILS UNCONTROLLABLY*

  Whereas after I started taking the tablets, the same situation would happen but instead my response would change to ‘Hey, they’re busy . . . and that’s all right!’ *high-fives the universe and skips off*

  A few months passed and then I got an email from Klaus. It had been a while and he asked if I wanted to meet up. I didn’t really want to see him, plus a recent Twitter stalk revealed that he was still dating the singer.