Time To Talk Day – my “little episode”

February 3, 2023February 3, 2023 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ 1 Comment

I’d been feeling a bit lost for a few weeks. Maybe a few months even, I’m not too sure. A while, anyway. Not completely without purpose, but lacking a little… something. “Not feeling it” as they say. It’d been a time of introspection, not all of it particularly useful, coupled with a fair bit of time wishing I weren’t so introspective. It can all get quite meta when I’m thinking about how I feel. And how I feel about how I feel. You get the idea.

I get like that sometimes. It’s kind of exhausting, to be honest. I get into my own head and get stuck there for a bit. Outwardly I’m fine – perhaps a little skittish or distracted – but inside I’m spinning.

When I’ve been like this in the past, there’s always the internal monologue that just says I need to snap out of it. To follow the good old masculine trope and for fuck’s sake just MAN UP.

But of course, I know that bit of me doesn’t solve anything. Rejecting how I’m feeling, pretending it’s not real, or (even worse) beating myself up for even having these silly, selfish, weak things called emotions is a road I’ve been down before, and it’s always ended up at a dead end. [If you’re interested in one of those roads – perhaps the first dead end I found, actually – then you can find my story about my anxiety here.]

Unfortunately knowing all this in your more calm and more rational moments doesn’t necessarily help when you’re in the middle of it, because when you’re in the middle of the forest you can’t see the wood for the trees. And I was right in the middle of the forest.

Allow me to explain…

A long time ago I decided that if I was going to be leading people, in any way, big or small, I’d do that in a way that felt genuine and authentic to me. I’ve always known that the best way to bring people together was to try to connect with them – and to connect them to each other – with shared passion and values and purpose and all that good stuff. I don’t need to tell you that you only build trust through vulnerability, and that’s what I’ve done, for years.

This philosophy requires me to be emotionally open, genuinely caring, and empathetic not just to the individuals but to the group that individual is a part of too. If I’m not all of those things, all the time, then the connection doesn’t work in the same way. I’ve doubled down on vulnerability, time and again, because that’s what I believe in. There’s no question that it’s made my working life richer than I could have hoped for, but I can’t pretend there aren’t times when I’ve wished I could shut off the emotional side because it does take a hell of a lot of energy. You can’t reverse back out once you’ve started with an open, honest, vulnerable relationship because if you were to do so, the trust you’d built up would break into a thousand pieces, never to be put together in quite the same way again. Once you’re in, you’re in. And I’ve always been all in.

The result of that can be neatly summed up by this little gem from the visual artist Adam JK (you can learn more about him here if you like), who put it thus:

And that, mes amis, is the life of an ‘all-in’ leader, especially in the strange razor-edge world of running an advertising agency, where every success means people are working too hard and burning out and freaking out and you can see that they’re struggling and you wish you could do something… and every little failure means you might have to send someone home without a job. Someone you know, and care about. Someone you really, really like. Whose family you’ve met.

It’s always been personal for me. And the last couple of years only heightened that.

Authentic, vulnerable leadership is hard at the best of times, but leading through two years of global pandemic, where people’s expectations of their employer changed overnight and never changed back, has taken its toll on leaders the world over. I’m no exception to that. Overnight I felt responsible not just for the agency I run or the jobs of the people who work in that agency, but for the people themselves, too. We were the de facto community that people were missing. Work was, for many, the only human contact people had.

And so through two years of sustained growth in lockdown, I knew people were allowing their commute time to be subsumed by work, and working longer hours than ever. To help with that we were trying to hire people so quickly that there was no way we could be doing a decent job of embedding them into the group and setting them up for success. I could feel that we were cashing in all the “emotional currency” we’d been banking through the previous years.

Emotional currency is an idea I’ve talked about for a good few years now, and it’s simple enough – when things are going well and work feels good and morale is good and the mood is good then all that good stuff gets banked in people’s minds but more importantly in their hearts. The more the good continues, the more you bank. And then when things aren’t so good for a while for whatever reason, you have some good in the collective emotional bank which means you get some leeway – some time to get things good again. But here’s the rub – it’s not fair. You might have two years of good in the bank, but once you start withdrawing it’ll be gone in six months.

I could feel that the bank was getting empty. Not in the red, but not snow angels in the banknotes either.

And then as the shared experience of lockdown and Covid became smaller in the rearview mirror, everything happened. All at once.

Work got messy. The razor edge was sharp and painful. We were under pressure and I was out on a limb, fighting for what I thought was the right thing to do time and time again, holding on so tight that I couldn’t release, and in my own head so much that I started to question my instincts on things. And I’ve always trusted my instincts. Always.

Life got messy. An old friend took his own life, which rocked me in ways I still don’t really understand. Family members were in and out of hospital for operations which of course were always going to be fine but of course there’s always that bit of your mind which likes fucking with you in the middle of the night because WHAT IF..?

My head got messy. Losing sleep. Losing perspective. Losing myself.

It all came to a head on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday morning at the end of June. My wife told me that she was going away with my sons for a few days in the summer holidays and I’d be at home for about 10 days on my own. My reaction wasn’t “sounds great, I’ll sit around eating pizza in my pants and get the lads round to play poker”. It was “I’ll go fucking crazy here on my own”.

The way I’ve described it since is by using the analogy of holding a mental tray. You’ve always got a decent amount of stuff on your personal tray, and most of it you put on there yourself so it’s all balanced in a way that you can handle. But if you keep on putting more and more things on it, then eventually you’re going to struggle. And then if other people stick some stuff on it as well, and aren’t as careful balancing…

I just about managed to put the tray down before I dropped it. Just.

I spoke to my team at work and agreed that I’d take some time off in the summer.

Which I did. A month away. Time to get some more stuff in my toolbox. Started some coaching and some yoga and meditation. Started going to the gym, too.

I can’t say the return to work was gentle, though. If anything it was worse than before the break: intense and toxic and kind of disgusting really. If you ever want a case study on how not to handle the return to work of a leader who’s been suffering with their mental health, give me a shout.

When, like me, you’ve spent your entire adult life ‘showing up’ as self-confident and full of energy, it’s actually pretty easy to fake it. To turn it on and turn up and get through and get out. So I tried to be what I thought people needed me to be. No one needs a leader who can’t trust his instincts. Who can’t trust himself at all, really. I was so wrapped up in my own stuff that I couldn’t really be the support that people needed, but I couldn’t tell them either because that would be putting more on them and they were already covering for me. I thought I was doing okay because the time off had given me a chance to get my nose just above the flood waters so I could breathe, but I was still only one slip from going under again.

I had a panic attack one morning before going into the office. I called my wife and she talked me down and I went into M&S and got some fruit and went into our offices and up in the lift and sat down and didn’t say a word about it to anyone.

I couldn’t take more time away because people needed me. Or at least that’s what I thought. But looking back, I wasn’t completely there anyway. By the time I started getting cluster headaches [read about the delight of those here if you fancy it. TLDR – they are horrible] towards the end of the year I was just limping towards the alluring finish line where 2022 would finally be consigned to history as the shittiest year of my life. Beating the year my mum died takes some doing.

BUT…

Lovely word, right? “But” makes everything that comes before it irrelevant. It turns the story.

But that was last year.

Yeah, I know that nothing magical actually happens at the end of December 31st, and that the whole idea of a “New Year” is just yet another construct that we’ve created – a story we’ve all decided to believe. But I needed to go with the romance of a new beginning. The turning of a page.

And as I sit here today, I do feel like I’ve turned the page.

Over the last six months since what I’ve euphemistically been referring to as my “little episode”, I’ve put a lot of time and energy into getting more things in my self-care toolbox that I can pick out as and when I need them. I’ve been going to the gym with a couple of friends who also could do with reshaping the dad bod [which considering I’ve been “Gym Free Since ’93” is quite a shift for me]. I’ve been doing a 1-2-1 yoga class every week since July. I’ve had some professional coaching which has helped me to get a better sense of my own values and what I need to be fulfilled. I’ve had a sprinkling of therapy along the way. Then just before the break in December, I learnt to meditate and now I’m doing that once or twice every day,. Last year I changed my meds and then this year got some advice and changed the dose which has helped. Hell, I even spent last weekend at a yoga retreat where as well as doing more yoga than I’ve ever done I also opened up to a load of complete strangers and chanted around a fire with a couple of shamen women for crying out loud [don’t worry I’m not converting – I just love a fire]. And perhaps above all, I’ve got my wife, and my two boys, and my dog, and the huge oak tree in the woods over the road.

I’m coming into this year feeling more centred and more solid than I have in a long time. Maybe ever.

At the same time, I’m also very conscious that all this is part of a journey and I can’t let myself be either complacent that somehow I’m magically “fixed” or concerned that “it’s only a matter of time before I crash again”. I just have to be whatever I am right now and be okay with that. I’m okay today. Tomorrow is tomorrow.

So why the hell am I telling you all this?

Well, there are a few reasons, actually.

The first one is then when I’m writing this, you’re not here. So I’m kind of talking to myself really – starting with the man in the mirror and asking him to change his ways [yes that is a Michael Jackson lyric – I couldn’t help mysefl and it’s lightened the mood a bit hasn’t it?]. It helps me to organise my thoughts, and as a result it’s kind of cathartic.

I’m also telling you because there’s a massive stigma around talking about mental health, especially in men, and if I can talk about it then at least I’m doing something to break down that stigma in some way. For me it’s just health -I’m not ashamed of my mental health problems any more than I’m ashamed of the fact that I need glasses or got diagnosed with gout at the age of 30 [a family disease for the Bartletts]. I take my pills for my brain at the same time as I take the ones for my liver. I take vitamins too. Sometimes I take something for allergies. It’s all the same. Talking breaks down barriers and stigmas and I have a lot of privileges in life so if I can’t talk openly about all this shit, who can?

If you’re a regular visitor to these pages, you may also have gathered that I’m a talker anyway, so this isn’t new news for a whole load of people. My immediate family know, and some of my extended family do too. A decent amount of the friends I’ve spoken to in the last 6 months know, because it would feel horribly inauthentic if they were to say “how have you been” and I were to say “yeah, fine thanks”, so I’ve tended to ditch the small talk and go for the big talk. And at work, I started off telling my immediate team, then thought it felt right to tell the whole agency about it because it’s real and I want them to know that it’s okay to not be okay. And then somehow I found myself in a really open and honest conversation with the new big boss in New York and I took a punt that he would get it and told him and he did get it and that felt good. So now a lot of people know I guess. Everyone, without exception, was kind and considerate and caring.

And now you know.

Which leads me to the last reason, which is actually all about you, dear reader

You see, the reason I overthink things and then write about it here is so that you can learn from my mistakes and avoid them (whilst, of course, making a whole set of completely different ones). Call it a friendly nudge, or wake-up call, or even a kind of non-specific remote intervention, but if you’re carrying your own tray and you’re wobbling, then please trust me, it’s not just going to magically fix itself. Yes, there may be light at the end of the tunnel but it’s no fun living in a tunnel on your own either and maybe, just maybe, a nudge around TIME TO TALK DAY might be the right time to maybe talk to someone about what you’re going through. It will help, I promise, and they will care, just like you would if the tables were turned. The truth is, they probably know already.

And on this day of all days, if you’re actually doing pretty well, actually, then you can make the world a better place by making a point of being emotionally available for the people around you who seem like they’re probably fine but actually might not be…

The colleague who always seems like they’re a step or two behind where they think they should be.

The family member who’s gone a bit quiet recently.

The friend who hasn’t made it the last few times you all got together.

Maybe they are fine, and you just have a nice chat and a catch-up and perhaps arrange a time to spend a bit of time together because it’s been too long, hasn’t it? But maybe they’re not, and you’re exactly the person they needed to talk to but just didn’t realise it. Either way, you get to talk to someone you care about.

Hey, don’t let me keep you. I’ve got a call to make anyway.

What have I done?

June 17, 2022June 17, 2022 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

Though it was still early in the morning, it was already becoming hot in the Jornado de Muerto desert, about 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico. On this day, the sixteenth day of July, 1945, the world was about to change forever.

At 05:29, the United States Army detonated the first ever nuclear weapon. As huge sunlight flash subsided and the mushroom cloud rose into the air, amongst the 425 people in attendance was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory where the bomb had been designed, Dr J Robert Oppenheimer. He later said that the sight of the explosion brought to mind words from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita:

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Developing the technology behind such a device had been his life’s work, and within days of that morning in the desert the dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August the 6^th and 9^th respectively, effectively ended the Second World War. The only nuclear bombs to have been used in combat, they killed between 90,000 and 146,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000 and 80,000 people in Nagasaki, with roughly half of those dying on the first day. 95% of those who died were civilians.

There’s no knowing how long the war might have continued without those bombs of course, or at what cost in terms of lives. History changed course at that point, leaving those stark figures as the epitaph to the largest war the world has ever known.

Oppenheimer’s moral conscience about his place in this history as “the Father of the Atom Bomb” was complex and nuanced. Two years after the bombs had extinguished both life and war at the same time, he would tell his peers that they had “dramatised so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war”, and connected science to the idea of sin like never before.

Yet when asked to reflect later in his life, he claimed to carry “no weight on my conscience”, seeing the scientist’s role as distinct and detached from the governments who decided to use their work. Scientists do science. Governments do war.

I’m not sure I could disconnect myself from the responsibility for my actions quite like that. But then I’ve never been indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in a flash. Perhaps that would be the only way to live with it.

And here we are, a month under 67 years later, and the mere threat of those same bombs that Dr Oppenheimer came up with allows a country to invade another and no one can do anything to stop them, just in case.

Oppenheimer never could have imagined. At the very first, it was all about the science. As Jeff Goldblum’s character memorably says in the first Jurassic Park movie:

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

It makes me wonder about all the other people who started out with good or decent intentions, and ended up making the world worse.

The people behind Twitter is an obvious one. Created as a way to connect people all over the world, it’s ended up being a place where the positive connections and sharing and love is vastly outnumbered by the division and demarcation and disunion. Where people can anonymously shout and threaten without consequence, and conflicting interested parties can choose to create and curate hatred and vitriol.

Google was set up to “democratise information’. Now they sell our personal data to whomever wants it so they can convince us to buy shit we don’t need, with money we don’t have. They could, and didn’t stop to think if they should.

Facebook was set up by pretty grim people for pretty grim original reasons, and then morphed into something that was nice for a bit but now is as bad if not worse as Twitter. For every local community group, there are ten more sowing dangerous lies, giving legitimacy to lies which in times gone by would have died on the edges of society. Connect enough crackpots and they’ll convince each other they’re all right.

[There’s no question this extreme online discourse has leaked into society as a whole. If you haven’t seen David Baddiel’s excellent documentary on the BBC then check it out in iPlayer here.]

There’s an old cliché that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”, but it’s a cliché because it’s true, of course. And on much smaller levels we all have it in our own lives.

As I say, I’ve never invented an atomic bomb, but I have been so desparate to avoid having to make people redundant that I ended up making things worse in the long run. I have allowed loyalty and hope to cloud my judgment. I have had times when the utopian working environment I was aiming for looked more like a sweatshop. I have tried to make someone laugh with a joke that actually made them cry. I have tried to hold everyhing together for everyone else and ended up forgetting myself. It”s no bomb, but I can learn from my “what have I done?” moments anyway.

You’re not Dr Oppenheimer either. But imagine for a second that you could undo the thing you did that’s put you in the situation you never planned for and don’t want to be in right now. Compare that to inventing the atomic bomb. One thing can’t be undone, but I wonder if the thing you’re thinking of can?

If it can, fix it. It doesn’t matter how, although I can give you some tips on a good sorry I wrote earlier here.

If you can’t, then don’t push it away and deny it, like the good doctor. But don’t carry it with you either like a stone in your shoe. We all make mistakes, even when the intentions are good. Instead just acknowledge, learn, and move forward.

It’s not about what you’ve done. Because there isn’t a damn thing you can do about that. It’s about what you’re going to do next which makes things better.

So go. Do that.

Routine, in every sense.

February 4, 2021February 4, 2021 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

Our little habits and routines are crucial parts of our lives. Once we’ve done something the same way a few times, our brains create a kind of short-cut, low-energy running mode which means we can do things whilst only using the minimum of our internal working brain. Brushing your teeth, making a cup of tea, packing the dishwasher. It’s all done on your brain’s equivalent of standby mode.

This can even kick in when we’re doing quite complicated things, too. I’m sure you’ve experienced driving a route you know well “on autopilot” and arriving at the station or your Mum’s house or wherever and thinking “I didn’t really concentrate through any of that” and wondering how it all just happened.

But just happened it did. We’re actually bloody good at it, and it’s really useful, because if we had to think about everything all the time our overworked little ape brains would, without any shadow of a doubt, explode within 30-45 minutes, maximum.

That routine, that habit, just doing something without thinking – that does more than just save our brain power. It’s that same sense of being on ‘autopilot’ which can bring an element of stability to our lives. The familiarity of getting a coffee at the station every morning, standing in the same place on the platform, walking the same route to the office: yes it’s because “who wants to think about that stuff”, but it’s also familiar, and comfortable. We like that, us humans. We’re simple animals, and we like things to be the same. Same is simple. Same is known. Same is safe.

Ooh, hang on. SAFE. That’s quite a big word, isn’t it? [And I don’t mean just because I put it in ALL CAPS, although I concede that does indeed make it bigger, well done if you spotted that, you get a cash prize of 10p please contact me on MySpace for details].

Feeling safe is really basic to us as animals. Right down towards the bottom of good old Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it’s a foundation of the pyramid, something we need before we can start to think about more lofty ideas. So much so, that once we have that safety, the idea of giving it up can actually make us feel very uncomfortable, very unsure.

Perhaps, when the world is so uncertain, it’s even more important? Because when the world is uncertain that means nothing is the same and won’t be the same again. And if same is safe and the world will never be the same again then that means…

Especially when the world – that place out there, full of masked strangers and signage and arrows and rules and fear – is actually full on proper actually scary in its own right.

So we close in. Our new routines, our new habits, become our new safe. Get it right and it can actually get quite comfortable really. At a stretch you could even convince yourself that it was your decision somehow. A smaller life, more constricted. Habits that keep you safe when the world cannot.

And so we lower our expectations, to the point when the only expectation is to make it through the day, the week. To cope, somehow. To get to the weekend… where we do the same things, in the same places. We stop living and we exist from day to day, week to week. We drink too much, or stop drinking completely because we worry about drinking too much. We wait for something new on Netflix but and we feel the grief of TV bereavement when we finish something we like because that was a habit for a bit and habits make us feel safe.

We didn’t get any snow last week. Not a fucking flake. My social media feeds were full of bloody snowmen and sledges and sublime scenery and we got drizzle, for two days. I was livid. Not because I’m desperate to throw a snowball which by chance hits my younger son Jack right in the face so he starts crying immediately and we have to go home and everyone hates me for the rest of the day (true story) but because it would have been different. A break from the norm. A break from coping, getting by, managing.

Oh brilliant, snow selfie is it mate? Yeah yeah whatever

But then, the same day that every other bugger in the whole country got the snow, we had a power cut. A proper, old fashioned, 1980s power cut!! I was genuinely giddy with excitement! The strange “oh my God where are the candles??” excitement of a power cut! What would we do? Maybe read by candlelight or play a board game? Is it out all over the village – yes look it is, not a light anywhere, I wonder what’s happened…

And then, in the time it’d taken me to find a match and light the first candles, it all came back on. The TV hummed into life; the lights all over the house [All together now: “It’s like Blackpool bloody illuminations in here!”]. Like a cruel joke, the house lights of normality chased the dramatic darkness of difference into the corners and away under the chairs.

And there we all were again, all the people in the village, suddenly right back where we started. In the old routines.

Coping. Getting by. Managing.

Is this life in 2021?

I say this is not good enough.

I say we deserve more than just coping.

I say that the habits we have built may keep us safe but they limit our expectations of life.

If we let our routines become our lives then we let our lives become… routine.

But make the choice to break your habits, to bend your routine, and that life can rush back in. Because it’s always there, ready for you. Life’s dependable like that.

If you’re a regular reader [what, nothing better to do with your time than read the latest emanation from my fragile psyche? You’re very kind, thank you I do appreciate it.], you’ll know that last week I went for a walk in the woods with my friend Joe. Well since then I’ve walked most mornings – this morning with the good doctor once again [hi Joe!].

I don’t go every morning, partly because sometimes it’s pissing it down and I’m not a total maniac, and partly because it’s the lack of routine to it that makes it so refreshing. As well as filling my lungs and getting my blood pumping around my increasingly corpulent carcass first thing [still proudly “Gym Free Since ’93”], it allows me to see the world at a different time of day, in a different light, with different smells and sounds. It makes me want to paint a picture or write a poem [neither of which I can do, but a boy can dream, right?]. It’s pulled me out of my routine, and made things less routine.

And in case you’re wondering, I haven’t done the same route twice.

Listen, I can’t tell you how to live your life. What I can tell you is that those new routines, and habits – the ones that aren’t just about keeping your brain free but more about keeping your soul safe – they will need to be challenged at some point. Because whatever comes next [and trust me when I tell you that although everything seems uncertain, this too shall pass] we both know it will need you to let go of some of those new things… just like the situation we’re all in at the moment forced us to let go of all the old things, in a single moment.

We didn’t have a choice before. And we didn’t have the chance to prepare.

Now we do have a choice, and we do have the chance.

So, tell me: what’s today going to be like?

[As a small post script, I just want to say how much I fucking love our crazy language. That one word – “routine” – can as a noun mean those commonplace things we regularly do, and as an adjective means dull, conventional and unremarkable is fascinating and joyous to me. I love the idea that our language is so furtile and full that we can push it around and play with it, like a cat toys with a ball of string, lost in a world of simple pleasures. Sorry if I lost you in the double meaning anywhere – I couldn’t help myself.]

Being kind

May 20, 2020June 5, 2020 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ 1 Comment

This week is Mental Health Awareness week in the UK. The theme of their activities is ‘kindness’. Isn’t that just the most perfect, simple expression of all that’s good in the world rolled up into a word that means just as much to my 6-year-old as it would to his 92-year-old Great Grandfather? [on my wife’s side – my grandfathers both having long since departed I’m sorry to say]

Kindness doesn’t expect anything in return. Kindness is selfless, honest, truthful. If it’s not… well actually then it’s not kindness at all, it’s something else.

For young Jack [6 and a half, to be accurate – and that half is VERY important] being kind is about helping someone who’s fallen over; sharing a particularly good stick; giving his big brother Ben [10 now – I know, I can’t believe it either] one of his sweets. It’s different to helpful (tidying up) or nice (an unexpected hug) – it means doing something for someone else simply because you can.

[No, these are not my two boys but I know it would have been such an unbearable hassle getting them to pose for a picture without attacking each other that I only really considered it for a second before dismissing it as a fool’s errand. I feel good about that decision.]

For Bob [92 and change] in his little village in the South Wales valleys, kindness is just as simple, and probably not even considered anything out of the ordinary. If someone’s fence needs fixing, you help fix it. Not because your fence might need fixing (trust me, Bob’s fence is pristine) but because that’s what you do. Simple, small acts of kindness, as a way of life.

[As a side note, I’ve always been fascinated by Bob’s little community where a whole chain of give and take has developed over the years. Check this out: Bob grows tomatoes – not because he particularly likes tomatoes, but because the bloke down the road does and he has chickens, so Bob gives him tomatoes for some eggs… not because he particularly likes eggs, but because the lady up the road needs eggs to make her cakes. And Bob does like cake.]

The word ‘kind’ actually comes from an old Middle English word meaning ‘nature’. It used to be that if someone was kind it was because Mother Nature had done a really bloody good job with them. Hundreds of years later, and we still talk about someone being “good natured”. And then as the words travelled like a stream through time, diverging into different meanings all from the same source, the same word that became “kind” also became “kin” – our tribe, our family. Kindness and human connection interlinked through language, over centuries.

Research from The Mental Health Foundation (which you can find here) has shown that the idea of kindness and mental health are deeply connected – that kindness is “an antidote to isolation and creates a sense of belonging”. There are proven connections to stress reduction, improved relationships. And kindness to ourselves allows self-esteem, optimism and resilience to blossom.

All just through kindness. Kindness always has an effect.

So perhaps we can think of every small act of kindness like a pebble being thrown into a lake, with the ripples of that kindness spreading far wider than the little pebble ever could have imagined.

Perhaps kindness has an energy that can pass from person to person, ripple by ripple, across geographies, across cultures, across every difference you can imagine. Even across time, for ever.

If you want to hear the most exquisite explanation of kindness, then I implore you to watch this 2 minute clip of the poet Maya Angelou, who sadly left us in 2014. She talks about kindness as trying to be “a rainbow in someone else’s cloud” and I promise you’ll catch your breath with the beauty of her words.

130 Best Poetry images in 2020 | Poetry, Poems, Words — Maya Angelou, 1928-2014

And so until next time, I thank you for the kindness of reading these words of mine, and leave you with some worthy words of another poet: this time an Englishman who came from a simpler time perhaps, but who nevertheless sums things up just right.

“The best portion of a good man’s life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.”
William Wordsworth

Sending you kindness and love, this week and in those to come, too.

[For more information about Mental Health Awareness Week, visit https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/campaigns/mental-health-awareness-week. And remember, kindness still does all that good stuff every week.]

Time To Talk Day: my anxiety

February 6, 2020February 6, 2020 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ 2 Comments

Today is Time To Talk day in the UK. It’s part of the Time To Change campaign (https://www.time-to-change.org.uk/) which aims to change the way people think and act about mental health problem, led by the charities Mind and Rethink Mental Illness.

It does what it says on the tin really – a day where people are encouraged to be more open about their own mental health, talk about the mental health of others and try, piece by piece, to remove the stigma that exists around mental health issues. At home and at work.

I’ve always been able to handle a lot of stress. Even when things are kicking off, I can get through okay. Maybe a bit tetchy with people at work, snappy or grumpy (or just plain exhausted) at home, perhaps lose a bit of sleep here and there. Still able to have a joke and a laugh, just maybe a little unpredictable I guess. I’m sure I’m like a lot of people in that when I’ve got a lot on it’s tough to turn off or relax, especially when you’re going through all the possible scenarios in your head and they get worse each time you do it! Nothing a couple of glasses of wine before bed won’t help eh?

Yup. That’s been me, for as long as I can remember.

Sometimes it takes something big to change the way you see the world. A birth, a death. Perhaps love. For me it was a little post on Facebook whilst on a business trip somewhere in Germany.

A little context…

For a good few months, I’d been rolling through the mantra at the top – I’m fine, just got a lot on, nothing I can’t handle, etc etc, you know the drill. I was almost snapped out of that one morning early last year. I’d woken up in the middle of the night, work stuff rattling through my head like an old train, unable to get back to sleep and getting more annoyed about the fact that I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about work and all that. So rather than wrestling with the bed clothes and waking my wife I decided to just quietly get up, get dressed in the dark, and go to work.

I live about 90 minutes from the office door to desk, and I was at that desk by about half 6. God knows what time I woke up originally, but by mid-afternoon I was grumpy as hell and dead on my feet. I got home that evening and my wife asked me what time I’d left and I’d explained the night time scenario. I could see her worried face and tried to reassure her.

“I’m not stressed out, I just can’t stop thinking about things and I’m finding it hard to sleep”.

To which she quite rightly replied: “that is stress, you idiot”.

Hmm. Maybe I’ll have a think about that.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’m sitting on a perfectly on-time, quiet and non-rattling train going through the German countryside, alongside a colleague and [dare I say it] friend [yes I dare]. It’s the end of a long day and I’m scrolling through my Facebook feed, wondering why I’m friends with people on Facebook with whom I’m not actually friends in real life, and wondering if I should just immediately unfriend anyone who uses #hashtags on Facebook post (#holiday #celebrate #blessed #lovemylife) when I come across this…

It’s like I’ve been slapped in the face.

I read the list again. I can tick off maybe a dozen of these without thinking about it. Another handful if I do.

I turn to my amigo/co-worker and show him.

“This is me”, I say.

Those words, on that train, were the start of a journey of my own. The very first step was admitting to myself that being really, really good at dealing with lots of stress whilst simultaneously hiding it isn’t the superpower that I thought it was.

In fact, it’s bloody Kryptonite.

Left unacknowledged, unspoken and undercover, that stress can damage everything I hold dear – my work, my family and ultimately my life.

I won’t bore you with the details of precisely what happened next, but the first step for me was talking. Talking to colleagues, friends, my wife [hey honey – how’s your day going?], then my GP, then a counsellor. Then back to my GP and since the beginning of last year I’ve been on some medication which I’ve found really helps.

[By the way, it’s still a massive deal to “admit” that I’m on medication to help with my anxiety, because of some weird stigma and shame that exists about it. Perhaps I’ll unpack that in a separate post…]

Nearly 2 years on I’m a lot more content, more calm, more connected with the world around me, with myself and with my emotions than I ever thought possible. Sure, I still get nervous about things, and I still get pissed off about things – I’m human, not superhuman, remember? – but I know I’ll never confuse a superpower with Kryptonite so easily again.

And every single person I’ve told has been totally supportive. Just like I would be if it were the other way round. Turns out quite a few people feel the same. I know, right?

So over time, I’ve started talking about it more openly with my agency friends and family too. Because if I can show that I struggle sometimes, it makes it “okay to not be okay” and, hopefully, we can support each other through all the stressful times with a bit more honesty and vulnerability.

And I know I’m still on the journey I started that day, and that I probably always will be. That’s okay. That’s my decision and something I’m proud of, in a weird way.

But what I will say is this:

If you’re reading any of this thinking “fuck, that’s me”, then this is your slap in the face. From me to you.

You’re welcome.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Remember that the very first step is to talk.

And given that it’s #TimeToTalk day, maybe that’s something you might consider doing today?

Talk to someone who cares about you – a friend, a partner, a colleague – and you’ll find that they will be just as kind and thoughtful as you would be if they came to you.

Best of luck, and please, do take care of yourself.