Edition 3: Balance

MIND CAFE EDITION 3 - BALANCE

ON BEING PRESENT

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Welcome MAGAZINE DIRECTOR: EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: CO-EDITOR: DESIGN: PHOTOGRAPHY: FOUNDER:

CONTRIBUTORS

I L L U S T R AT I O N

Adrian Drew Gemma Steele Adrian Drew Lee Caple Joseph Marchant Adrian Drew

Danielle Copperman, Big Zuu, Patty Walters, Dottie James, Gemma Steele, Adrian Drew, Poppy Okotcha, Jordan Gross, Georgia Lock, Leanne Maskell, Ed Cunningham, Brian Pennie

Christy Thynne

PHOTOGRAPHY COVER: MAGAZINE:

Joseph Marchant Joseph Marchant, Adrian Drew, Hedi Sersoub, Poppy Okotcha, Owain Ulyet

Everything is about balance. We’ve heard it time and time again ‘everything in moderation’. Never too much, never too little. Observing the importance of balance, however, is an entirely different feat to the act of cultivating it. Discussing work-life balances, balance in our relationships, in our diets and in the ways in which we live our lives is futile unless we take steps towards incorporating it into our lives.

But first, we should answer a simple question. Why is balance necessary? Well, it would be simpler to discuss where it might not be necessary. If we wished to lead a chaotic existence, void of routine, direction or vision, we might forego our quest for balance and simply move forward aimlessly. Achieving equanimity in our lives, however, enables us to more clearly envisage the trajectory of our time on earth.

It is our morals and values that provide a stable foundation on which to build, whatever ‘building’ might mean for each of us. Yet we find ourselves repeatedly pulled by the same carnal desires and impulsive urges, steering us off track. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the pursuit of mindless pleasure. But balance ensures that we remain on track, moving forward in a positive direction as we grow and evolve.

This concept is, of course, nothing new. Even ancient philosopher Plato highlighted the importance of balance in his chariot allegory. Our soul (or call it what you will) is endlessly being tugged in opposing directions by two horses. One horse wants to soar into heaven, pursuing noble desires and moral actions and driving us to become a wholly good person. The other prefers the pursuit of fleeting pleasures and instant gratification. Neither is right or wrong. There is a time and place for both wholesome endeavours and mindless indulgences. Yet it is our duty as the jockey of these horses to find a middle ground between these two extremes. That is, to control both simultaneously, enabling us to live in alignment with what’s important to us.

Whether it’s the choice between junk food or nutrition, sex or celibacy, television or books, there is never an absolute ideal. Rather, a healthy balance between both, based upon our own values and principles, is what we should all strive to achieve. Alas, as we said in the beginning, talking about balance is all well and good. Finding it is infinitely more difficult. Thankfully, this perfect-bound collection of insightful stories, pearls of wisdom and stunning photography will arm you with the tools you need to satisfy both your impulsive urges and your deep-seated desire for long-term fulfilment. Let’s dive right in.

C OV E R M O D E L Dottie James is a poet and writer famed for her whimsical, lyrical style. You can find her article about rejecting black and white thinking on page 78. You can follow her on Instagram via @dotttiejames.

WELCOME

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In This Edition T H E I M P O R TA N C E O F S AY I N G N O : S I X B O O K S F O R F I N D I N G S TA B I L I T Y - P 2 8

Given the chaotic nature of life in the 21st century, finding stability is more important than ever. Let Ed Cunningham from ‘A Need to Read’ teach you how.

H OW B I G Z U U R E M A I N S G R O U N D E D O N H I S JOURNEY TO SUCCESS - P44

Bafta-nominated Big Zuu has made enormous strides in his career in recent years. In his interview with Joe McNally, Zuu discusses the keys to remaining balanced on the way up in life.

THE ART OF BALANCING SELFISHNESS WITH SELFLESSNESS - P76

In a society that values altruistic behaviour so highly, Gemma Steele explains how finding space to be selfish every now and then is crucial to our mental wellbeing.

N U R T U R I N G N AT U R E : H OW P E R M A C U LT U R E C A N A LT E R O U R P E R S P E C T I V E O F B A L A N C E - P 1 0 2

Channel 4 star, Poppy Okotcha, is renowned for her expertise in all-things nature. In this interview with Gemma Steele, she sheds light on a few insightful links between the plant world and modern life and some important lessons we can all learn.

R E C O G N I S I N G YO U R PA S T : F I N D I N G B A L A N C E AFTER ADDICTION - P112

Addicted to heroin for eighteen years, Brian Pennie learned some harsh but crucial truths about what it means to be happy. In this interview with Adrian Drew, he shares those important lessons with us.

SHARP EDGES - P122

Fame wasn’t all that world-famous As It Is frontman expected it to be. Years into his groundbreaking success, Patty Walters lets his guard down and shares the truth about his journey to stardom.

Find us online Website: mindcafe.co Instagram: @mindcafemedia Facebook: @mindcafemedia Twitter: @mindcafemedia LinkedIn: @mindcafemedia

Mind Cafe Media Ltd. 2021 (ISSN 2635-0793)

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IN THIS EDITION

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Joe Marchant

L O C AT I O N

Various

The Story Behind

THE BRAND

AUTHOR: ADRIAN DREW

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ind Cafe was never meant to be a business. I’ve said that time and time again, and will continue to do so simply because I’m still baffled by how much has happened since I started this project in 2018.

Back then, I’d barely left sixth form before my world came crashing down. My girlfriend of six and a half years was diagnosed with brain cancer almost out of nowhere. With no warning, a series of unusual symptoms began to permeate her day-to-day life. Before I knew it, I was sitting in a hospital waiting room being told that the love of my life had eighteen months left to live.

Somewhere amongst the wreckage, I salvaged an idea. As a lifelong advocate of reading and writing self-improvement books and articles, the first thing I did was turn to the tomes that had helped me conquer adversity in the past. Devouring books on everything from mindfulness and stoicism

to cancer-based nutrition and cell biology, I decided my best chance at coping with this awful situation was to strengthen my own mental resilience, whilst doing everything I could to reverse Charlotte’s prognosis.

Unfortunately, all of the science books in the world wouldn’t have been enough to save her. Powering through reports and texts about cell apoptosis, the role of the p53 gene in cancer development, the blood-brain barrier, the revolutionary success of immunotherapy and the repurposing of alternative drugs: nothing seemed to work. Her tumour wasn’t going anywhere. And there was nothing I could do about that. But I became stronger.

Infinitely stronger, actually - more resilient and level-headed than I’d ever been before.

The books I was reading were helping.

Through the stories and experiences of others, I was learning how to navigate this horrific and unexpected storm I was now part of.

T H E S TO RY B E H I N D T H E B R A N D

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Bizarrely, almost within weeks of Charlotte’s departure from this earth, Mind Cafe’s growth was taken to a level that not even I could fathom.”

A Q U OT E BY A D R I A N D R E W

But I felt selfish. Learning so much valuable information and so many insightful lessons about coping with adversity, it didn’t feel right to keep these things locked away for myself.

I had to share them. And so, I launched a publication on Medium, called it Mind Cafe, and started writing about what I was experiencing. At the same time, I invited others to join me and share their stories too, and Mind Cafe became this fast-growing community of self-improvers, all seeking to become better versions of themselves.

Sadly, Charlotte is no longer with us anymore. Her eighteen-month prognosis was almost spot on. Regardless, her family and I were able to make that last year and a half as memorable and precious for her as possible. Seeing her smile during what must have been absolute hell for her was the most

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bittersweet experience, and I think we did a fantastic job of ensuring that her smile didn’t fade.

Bizarrely, almost within weeks of Charlotte’s departure from this earth, Mind Cafe’s growth was taken to a level that not even I could fathom. The timing was perfect, since I now had something new to focus on to distract me from the grief and trauma that lingered in the back of my mind. Continuing to run the publication with the support of my team, a few thousand monthly readers quickly turned into a few hundred thousand. And then five-hundred thousand. Before long, we were consistently reaching over two and a half million people every single month - a figure I’d never anticipated when launching this tiny publication in a hospital ward with zero expectations.

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And now, here we are. I’m not sure where you picked this magazine up from.

Maybe it was from our online store, or maybe it was in a high-street shop in England, Ireland, the United States, Poland, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, or any one of the many countries that now stock this little book of wisdom.

Regardless, all I can say is thank you.

Thank you for supporting my dream and enabling me to continue in my pursuit of helping others find the happiness and fulfillment that I found for myself.

Without you, I’m not quite sure where I’d be today. And with your support, I have no idea where we’ll be in a year’s time.

All I know is that we’re going up. And you’re coming with us.

T H E S TO RY B E H I N D T H E B R A N D

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ON BEING PRESENT

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Hedi Sersoub

MODELS

Danielle Copperman

L O C AT I O N

France

Balancing Doing With Being AU T H O R : DA N I E L L E C O P P E R M A N

H

aving worked in the wellness industry for almost ten years now, I’ve heard the quote “We are human beings, not human doings” more times than I can count.

It resonated with me at an early stage in my personal wellbeing journey, uttered, I assume, by a yoga teacher as I lay enjoying one of my first ever savasanas. But it stuck with me and, still to this day, it is something I come back to whenever I feel rushed off my feet, exhausted, overwhelmed, or like I’m endlessly chasing my tail - but it also soothes me when I feel I’m not doing enough.

As I sit and write this piece, it’s the first week of the New Year. I’m in France, where I have been since last April, almost exclusively isolated in my boyfriend’s family’s home in the countryside. It’s a strange time of year, this.

There comes a slow lull after the energy and busyness of Christmas, shifting from boiling point back to a steady simmer. But it’s not a simmer of sameness, of staying still, it’s a simmer of newness; of being ready for what’s to come, with a new sense of intrigue.

I think this time of year is the perfect time

to talk about balance. It is a time when we can pause momentarily to both reflect on the old and prepare for the new. It is also historically a time for making resolutions and setting goals, but thankfully the approach to these things, it feels, is beginning to shift. It’s now more about setting subtle, personal and meaningful intentions, with no restriction and much less pressure, not conforming to society and hastily making lists based on what you think you ‘should’ be doing and bettering about yourself.

At New Year, all year in fact, we have the autonomy to choose whether we want to hit the ground running, or tread gently and ensure we’re doing the right things, for ourselves. I speak for myself when I say it takes significant effort for me not to dive head first into my inbox without looking back. But this year, I’m making a commitment to being more conscious about how I’m spending my time, in a bid, more than anything, to ensure I retain some kind of balance throughout the rest of the year; something that normally falters a few weeks in, despite my best intentions. I want to be a human being rather than a human doing.

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It’s a concept that has gained more popularity in recent years, as we’ve come to care less for extreme diets, rules and resolutions, and more for slowness, stillness and the ability to just be. Of course we’re still (and maybe now more than ever), in an age of constant success-driven striving. But now, I think we’re more aware: aware of how unsustainable it is to exist exclusively like this, and aware of the importance of balancing it out with other things, things that really matter, keep us well and make us happy.

These days, if you’re not constantly complaining about how stressed or time-poor you are, it’s assumed you’re not doing enough or working as much as you could be. We have come to glorify busyness, as if the doing itself is more a sign of success - worthy of validation - than the actual achievements themselves. It’s just not impressive to anyone to hear someone talk about how great they slept last night, or how nice it was to get out in nature with friends or family in the middle of a normal working day. They want to hear about other

people going through the struggles that they themselves endure to keep up with the pace of modern life.

But it’s no wonder we have evolved into such chaotic beings. It’s no wonder we are constantly chasing our tails, constantly striving, so focused on doing well. Success these days is focused on several things.

Firstly, there’s jobs: whether we have a good job with a good position; whether we get impressive promotions; how much we earn.

Closely after comes wealth: how much money we have; how many expensive belongings we own; how many holidays we take.

Then, relationships: whether we have a partner, a family, kids; whether we’re married and who our other half is, maybe even what they do; how popular we are, how many friends we have.

Then there’s our homes: where we live; how big our house is; whether we rent or own.

And finally, material things: what kinds of belongings we own; how we dress; what car we drive; the list goes on.

“We have come to glorify busyness, as if the doing itself is more a sign of success than the actual achievements themselves.”

A Q U OT E BY DA N I E L L E C O P P E R M A N

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MAKING WELLNESS A HABIT

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But who exactly decides what success is, in any area of life? When you really dwell on this question, you come to realise that actually, success, other than something defined by society, corporations and the media, is something we can control. We set checkpoints and milestones for ourselves based mostly on other peoples’ achievements and where we think we should be at certain points in our life.

With this in mind, it’s also no wonder we constantly feel we are not enough. We can never be doing enough, so we never quite feel good enough. We’re constantly on the brink of burnout, so it’s no wonder we’ve become a society of people constantly anxious, constantly doubting ourselves or fearing the future. Being successful is supposed to reward us with happiness, contentment and a feel of fulfilment. But the journey, the never ending journey, is not enjoyable in any way.

Is that happiness? Is that satisfaction? Is that living fully? Or are we sacrificing day-today contentment and our basic mental and physical wellbeing for the constant promises of a brighter future - which always seems to

be on the other side of our goals and list of things to achievement?

Living in an age of consumerism and social media doesn’t help. We are constantly bombarded with information, from brands, but also insights into the lives of others. With people uploading their highest moments, their biggest achievements, publicly, we have so many variations of perfection to compare ourselves to, and thus, feel we need to keep up with. So, not only must we constantly be doing things and achieving better, we must do so perfectly - flawlessly, in fact.

Reframing your idea of success immediately reduces pressure around how “well” you are doing, and can do. It immediately allows you to set your own pace and be okay with not always catching up with people who are, by your standards, ahead of you. And believe me, once you can just be more, you’ll appreciate more too, and then you’ll quickly come to realise how little you actually need.

The race and constant striving quickly seems a laughable way to live when you begin to notice how good the mundane moments can feel.

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And believe me, once you can just be more, you’ll appreciare more too, and then you’ll quickly come to realise how little you actually need.”

A Q U OT E BY DA N I E L L E C O P P E R M A N

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BALANCING DOING WITH BEING

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COVID-19 has changed a few things here though and, if I’m honest, despite it having abruptly pulled the rug from beneath our feet, I think it has been a much needed reminder that living too fast (and too focussed on the future) is unhealthy, unsustainable, and unenjoyable. On the other side of pain and relentless hardships COVID-19 has brought an opportunity and (perhaps most vitally) permission to just be, rather than always having to do.

In 2020, the world was forced into isolation.

The entire planet shut down; everything closed, many stopped working while others worked from home, and we were all advised to stay indoors. With normal life on pause, and with everyone in the same boat, we surrendered our restlessness and our anxious need to always be doing. If I could have left the house, I’m sure I would have heard the whole world take a huge, energetic sigh of relief. It was like admitting defeat: not to the virus, but to the demands and duties of modern life. Sure, many of us remained working, and responsibilities around the home still existed, but we had the chance to be stiller than ever, and to justify not reaching certain goals, or not completing everything on our to-do lists.

This time has also taught us that, no matter how prepared you feel or how planned out your life is, there is so much beyond us that we don’t have control over, and things can change in an instant. Whilst we try (in our quest to achieve all-encompassing success) to avoid the discomfort of uncertainty and the unknown, we have momentarily been reminded what is left of life after all of that. We are reminded, in the seclusion of things, of the smaller, slower moments, and the simpler things like how it feels to just be alive. And we are reminded, in the uncertainty of things, of our natural ability to take things one day at a time, and how good it feels to do so.

When I feel most in flow in my life, it just happens to be when I am trying less and doing less. When I am constantly striving and busying myself, I feel assured that I am doing enough, certain I am on the path to success, but this gets accompanied by more struggle and frustration too. I overthink more, I doubt myself and, although I can justify my time spent, it doesn’t necessarily feel productive.

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However, when I let go a bit - loosen the reigns, reduce the need to control, streamline my to-do list and get focused on what work matters most, things seem to come to me in ways they never do when I’m relentlessly grinding.

Deepak Chopra describes this as the ‘Law of Least Effort’ in his book The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, and if you’re familiar with ‘The Law of Attraction’ by Esther and Jerry Hicks, their teachings are built on similar ideas.

The Law of Least Effort is Chopra’s principle that less effort leads to less resistance, and I can second that, first hand. The main foundations are to practice acceptance of what is; to take responsibility for your own life and actions; and to practice defenselessness, that is to be open to all possibilities, avoiding the need to defend yourself if your decisions don’t match those of others’ - or society’s.

The Law of Attraction focuses more on helping people to shift their mindsets from one of negativity and lack to one of acceptance, openness, positivity and potentiality. Esther and Gerry Hicks emphasise how when we really want something and try hard to go after it, especially when it’s not coming naturally and feels like a struggle, it is because the energy behind our thoughts and actions communicates a sense of lack and desperation. In this sense, you struggle to attract the things you want because you exist in a constant state of lacking and needing.

However, when you shift your mindset into one of having more than enough, knowing you have potential for the things you achieve and trusting in the process, you immediately become more magnetic to the things that match your mindset and demeanour. They teach that it is okay to want things in life, but not to need them. It’s a much more enjoyable way to go through life, even if it does perhaps sound a bit woo woo.

Despite having studied these things, I lose my flow very often, but what brings me back is often a combination of the following practices.

They are all incredibly easy, requiring just a little bit of time and space to find stillness, get clear on your goals and refine your mindset and attitude towards life and where yours is going.

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I find that finding regular stillness in any form is a way to ensure you can remain present and experience regular peace.

“In stillness, the soul speaks”. It is in these moments your thoughts have a chance to organise themselves more coherently, and thus, the most important things can finally be heard.

Stillness is crucial for reducing mental clutter and finding inner balance. It allows you to filter out the unhelpful thoughts that perhaps keep you negative or make you miserable.

Regular stillness - in the form of meditation, mindfulness, movement or something you simply enjoy - can help you reach a positive and abundant frame of mind. Find something that works for you, whether it’s taking a walk, reading a book, doing something creative, or sitting doing nothing. Just prioritise and maybe even schedule in an allocated time allowance each day where you can just pause and take a moment.

I also find writing and journaling helps me to be present, spend time with myself and really allow myself to lean into the idea of slowing down without feeling bad about it.

Journaling, brainstorming, mind mapping, vision lists, vision boards: there are many different methods of self expression and intention setting. However you decide to do it, it is a powerful habit to get into in order to ensure you are on the path you want to

be on in life, and in order to ensure you are working towards the things you really want.

This is a useful practice to get into as it helps, again, to declutter the mind, but also to really outline what you want to work on and achieve.

Journaling allows you to capture and sort of materialise your hopes and dreams in a way that doesn’t require you to constantly work on them. It is like planting a seed: once it’s planted, you let go of the need to control it, as well as your expectations, trusting that it will, in some way or another, at some time or another, come. Like a seed, your ambitions and desires can’t be rushed, they will flourish as and when they are naturally supposed to.

It is crucial to understand that mindset plays a fundamental part in finding the balance between doing and being. It is important to know how to keep a positive and open mind, while allowing yourself to sometimes do less.

I am constantly trying to adopt a mindset of openness, acceptance and excitement. I am open to anything, even things that are different to those that I have planned for myself or really, really want. I accept that everything happens for a reason and I accept all situations and scenarios out of my control as necessary and just part of the process. And I remain excited by life. I try to replace feelings of fear, doubt and uncertainty with feelings of anticipation and enthusiasm.

“I find that finding regular stillness in any form is a way to ensure you can remain present and experience regular peace.”

A Q U OT E BY DA N I E L L E C O P P E R M A N

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It is about relaxing your mindset a little, and knowing that sometimes things are working themselves out for you behind the scenes.”

A Q U OT E BY DA N I E L L E C O P P E R M A N

And a final tool which helps me to remain calm and grounded even when I feel guilty for not working ‘til the early hours of the morning, while all those around me are awake and in action as ever, is trust. Having trust or faith in things working out (rather than feeling you must always have everything figured out, even in the presence of obstacles) is an instant mind-clearer and also a powerful way to shift your mindset and energy into a more positive and abundant one. It, again, may sound a bit new-wave and far-out, but there is no harm in trusting that things will work themselves out exactly as and when they should.

For me, when I’m busy with work I feel easily drained and not so easily satisfied or fulfilled. But when I can relax a little, and work more smartly and with more focus, I feel balanced. What’s more, I actually enjoy the process of working on things without having to know what the outcome will be, or having every little detail thoroughly thought through and figured out. This is living without reserve, without a constant sense of “what if ”, without

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worry, doubt and fear, and often with less struggle, stress and disappointment. Learning to trust the process, and trust that sometimes things beyond your imagination are finding their ways towards you, is a much more empowered and inspired way to live.

There is more to life than always being busy. And you do not necessarily achieve more by doing more, either.

There is a way to find balance, and it is all about finding what lights you up and achieving the lifestyle you want to live - one that is fun and nourishing - while also doing well at whatever you set your mind to. It is about relaxing your mindset a little, softening a bit, and knowing that sometimes things are working themselves out for you behind the scenes, regardless of how hard you’re working.

I guess I’m giving you permission to slow down, and know that it is not counterproductive, but in fact, potentially, even more productive. Churchill supposedly took 3 naps a day, so it really can’t hurt too much to take a break every now and then.

ON BEING PRESENT

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Owain Ulyet

MODELS

Ed Cunningham

L O C AT I O N

Clapham, London

The Importance of Saying No: Six Books for Finding Stability AUTHOR: ED CUNNINGHAM

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alf of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough,’ Josh Billings.

COVID-19 forced people to do a lot of things that, pre-pandemic, would have been unthinkable. A tip-of-the-hat to the banana bread connoisseurs, the Strava soldiers, the quiz masters and the podcasters. I fit into two of those categories. I make an average-good banana bread and host a good-great podcast with a focus on books and getting people back into reading, something I hadn’t given much thought to before the world went wild.

I’m lucky enough to be a ‘podcaster’ for a job now and also a person thousands turn to for their weekly book recommendations. I haven’t always been so reliable. It was only two years ago that I was forced out of a job due to my mental-health troubles. You could call it imbalance, depression, anxiety or an existential

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crisis; all of those shoes fit.

Like a lot of others, I’d slipped into the work hard, play not-very-often lifestyle. After one too many Monday morning panic-attacks, I realised I needed to do something about my lack of balance, so I turned to books. I’d seen a bright orange book circulating on social media that claimed to be a ‘counterintuitive approach to living a good life’ and had the word ‘f*ck’ in the title so, naturally, I was sold. I took to reading Mark Manson’s Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck, and it changed everything for me.

It was the first book I’d read cover to cover since Harry Potter and The Order Of The Phoenix, and I finished that when I was 11. I was like a sponge, ready to take on everything Mark had to say, to start living a ‘value-driven life’ and work out where I needed to allocate my ‘f*cks’. It took only nine words from this book to truly change the lens I viewed life through - ‘If it’s not a f*ck yes, it’s a no’.

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“If it’s not a f*ck yes, it’s a no.”

A Q U OT E BY M A R K M A N S O N

Life, as it turns out, is far more about what you’re willing to say no to than what you will routinely say yes to. And the power of a ‘no’ cannot be understated. If you doubt that, remember Rosa Parks and the impact her ‘no’ had on the world we live in today. That two letter word holds the power to liberate your time. And it opens up room to say yes to what matters: things that excite you, things that you want to say ‘f*ck yes’ to, and that is revolutionising.

I decided my first and biggest ‘no’ would be to the corporate world, so I moved to Australia. I then found myself with a new problem. I needed to work out how to balance unemployment with a sense of progress. But now I knew that books held the answers to my worries.

Since then, balance has been at the forefront of my mind. It helps that there are so many great leaders and entrepreneurs valuing balance above all else. There are plenty of examples of CEO’s of large companies that value stillness and balance with their busy lives, none more prominent than a story I found in Stillness Is The Key by Ryan Holiday.

Through Holiday’s words I learned that even Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and all-round busy man, takes two weeks out per year to ‘think’ in a secluded lakeside cabin. Although

somewhat extreme and not accessible to all, it’s an important reminder that if Bill Gates can take some time off to recharge, then you can too.

If you needed more examples of high performance individuals valuing saying no to things that no longer serve them to create balance, there’s an excellent book by Tim Ferris called Tribe of Mentors. Of the hundred or so brilliant minds he interviewed for this book, he asked a large percentage of them this question: ‘In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to?’ There is such variety in the answers, so if you read the book cover to cover, you’ll be inspired to balance your life by those who have accomplished incredible achievements, whilst managing to live well.

With a nod-of-the-head to ‘saying no’ in every fourth or fifth book I picked up, this reaffirmed my decision to stick two fingers up at any activity, event, person or project that didn’t give me energy. Not in a selfish way, either. You can give far more to those who really matter in your life when you worry less about the people that don’t. Saying no can push everything into equilibrium. But no book is more prominent in the ‘saying no = balance’ school of thought than Essentialism

by Greg Mckeown.

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Becoming an Essentialist means becoming a master in the disciplined pursuit of less. Greg Mckeown had the realisation at the birth of his first child that he was doing too much in the pursuit of a successful career. He realised that if he didn’t take charge of his life, then someone else was going to take the reins. It was then that the idea of Essentialism was born. This book explores the importance of everything from cutting your losses and setting boundaries to routine and ‘adult playtime’ (no not sex, actual play). If your life is dragging you in every direction it possibly can, then Essentialism is for you.

It wouldn’t be right to talk about all the things you can and cannot do in the pursuit of balance without having a look at the other side of that coin: doing nothing. Doing nothing does not make anyone feel totally comfortable. There is a sense that if you’re not doing ‘something’ then you’re not making progress. But there is a strong argument for doing ‘nothing’ made by yoga nidra (yoga for sleep) instructors James Reeves and Gabrielle Brown in The Book Of Rest.

I used to think rest was an exclusive activity, reserved only for those recovering from an illness. That was until I read The Book Of Rest and got a grasp on what relaxation really

is and, more importantly, what it is not.

Trying to grasp the concept of rest left me scratching my head at times. Rest is not something you can actively try to achieve, although somehow you must achieve it. You don’t need to focus on your breath, or even shut your eyes. You just need to allow everything to be. No, really, you cannot try to rest, because rest comes when you cease trying altogether. It’s a bit of a paradox, and it’s bound to leave you slightly confused. But when you grasp the concept, you’ll understand how much you need nothing.

I’ve since tried to incorporate it into my day as often as I can remember to do so and, as with all helpful daily-hacks, that’s not as often as I’d like. But when I’m struggling, I turn to an ancient Chinese philosophical concept found in Taoism known as oWu-wei. It was brought to my attention when reading The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. Winnie the Pooh is the master of not-doing and is still often the accidental hero in Hundred Acre Wood. He embodies the ‘Pooh way’ which doesn’t only sound awfully similar to the Wu wei, but gives a great example of it too.

So, perhaps when it comes to rest and balance, the answer may be that you don’t need to be doing much at all.

“If only you’d stop looking, you’d find there is something fundamentally right with you” A Q U OT E B Y G A B R E I L L E B R OW N

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Joe Marchant

MODELS

Georgia Lock

L O C AT I O N

Flora & Fauna Studios, London

What OCD Taught Me About Finding Balance in Life AUTHOR: GEORGIA LOCK

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’ve always enjoyed New Year’s Eve. I quite like the hope which comes with that countdown. But two years ago, as we shouted ‘one’ and everyone cheered and welcomed in 2019, I was introduced to something else, too. It felt like something in my brain just switched, like it broke. I couldn’t understand it. It was terrifying.

Every semblance of balance I had in my life disappeared - it felt like I was falling. OCD had entered my life. Two years on, I like to think that every day I’m learning more about how to live with this disorder (whilst gently reminding myself that healing isn’t linear).

Balance is often discussed as a choice: as a lifestyle that, if followed, automatically brings equilibrium and serenity to your doorstep.

With OCD, and with many other mental health conditions, it is not that easy. When OCD first showed up, I was scared I was going crazy and felt like I couldn’t trust my own mind, so ‘balance’ wasn’t this prescriptive lifestyle I could choose, it wasn’t even a possibility. Now, I do see elements of balance in my life, and I am able to make more choices based on my values, rather than fear.

How the world perceives OCD couldn’t be further from the truth. Often thought of as a love of order, or a penchant for excessive cleaning, the acronym OCD gets thrown around as a casual phrase and adjective. I’d love to have the stereotype of OCD (I’m the messiest person I know), but the reality of OCD is much darker. Yes, OCD can sometimes manifest in cleaning compulsions for the sufferer, but compulsions are never enjoyable. They are torturous.

So, if Obsessive Compulsive Disorder isn’t how it’s portrayed in films, what is it? OCD’s obsessions are unpleasant, unwanted thoughts, images or urges which repeatedly enter your mind, causing feelings of extreme, unbearable anxiety. And the compulsions are repetitive actions which a sufferer feels they need to do to temporarily relieve the unpleasant feelings brought on by the obsessive thought. Compulsions may provide temporary relief, but they can still be extremely exhausting, often deeply upsetting to engage in and, in the long run, they fuel the OC cycle. Compulsions can be mental acts as well as physical ones.

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“As a therapist told me once, bad people don’t go around worrying that they’re bad, Georgia.”

A Q U OT E BY G E O RG I A LO C K

Writing in 1850, the French psychiatrist, Jean-Pierre Falret, used the term ‘folie du doute’, which translates to ‘madness of doubt’, and this is perhaps why OCD is thought to have been unofficially known as the ‘doubting disease’ in England for many years before there was more research and understanding of the condition. Excessive doubt and the inability to tolerate it are common features of the disorder. Sufferers are often constantly bombarded with terrifying ‘what if ’s. One of OCD’s greatest hits is ‘What if I did something terrible and I just don’t remember it?’

An obsession might be: ‘what if I accidentally kill my partner in my sleep? That would be so terrible!’ And then the compulsion might be to stay awake all night. What’s more, if you did try to get some z’s, OCD might berate you with how selfish and irresponsible you are. When OCD sufferers have unpleasant obsessional thoughts, like harming a loved one, they would never actually do the thing they’re worried about (OCD is ego-dystonic), but we’re just so terrified by the very idea of it that the fear makes the thoughts “stick” OCD can attack absolutely anything, but it often attacks things we value the most. For example, people of faith might have Religion OCD. Some other common OCD themes include Harm, Contamination, Relationship, Sensorimotor, and Existential. The list is endless. OCD can change themes, perhaps one obsession will be more prominent one month and then another the next. It’s important to note that all of these different subsets are all OCD, just sometimes we name them in this way for ease of talking about them.

Sometimes it just shows up one day, like for myself, or sometimes it comes over time, and then there are others

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who don’t remember a day without OCD. My friend was putting herself in a ‘time out’ at 3 years old because she was sure she deserved it and had been ‘bad’. Being ‘bad’ is a common worry of my own. As a therapist told me once, “bad people don’t go around worrying that they’re bad, Georgia”.

OCD is debilitating, it’s earth-shattering, and yet in the mainstream media it’s met with jokes and ignorance?

Battling a condition that people misunderstand and even idealise is not easy, as if OCD isn’t hard enough as it is, but nonetheless it’s taught me the importance of advocacy and courage. I guess in a sense, I’m trying to balance the misinformation around OCD by making more people see the truth. As with all hardships, it’s often difficult to find any light, but I find it comforting to think that perhaps I’m going through this so, in the future, I can help someone.

I would never have thought what I was going through was OCD, I felt like I’d lost my mind, and I too had heard incorrect stereotypes about the disorder- I thought it was about liking things organised. I found out how wrong I was in a very painful way. I learned it was OCD after a month or so, and I am very aware of my luck - it often goes undiagnosed for many years. It’s really a cruel disorder, but it’s a special kind of cruel when you don’t know what you’re dealing with. That’s why it’s so vital that OCD becomes more understood- people can’t get help if they don’t know what they’re suffering with. OCD as a condition is chronic, but with the right help it can get so much more manageable. We can’t change the fact of having OCD, but we can learn the tools we need to live with it - and the way OCD’s represented, that’s something we can change.

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The truth is, everyone in the world has ‘intrusive thoughts’- it’s just for people with OCD, they get stuck. We worry about what they mean about us as a person, when they don’t mean anything: a thought is just a thought.

Thoughts do not define us. Often the process of assessing the thoughts happens so quickly because we panic and flag them as ‘bad’, and we almost automatically try to rid ourselves of them. But, in reality there are no good thoughts, and no bad thoughts. Alternatively, we might engage with the thought and perhaps mentally check for ‘proof ’ (a compulsion) that the thought is wrong, or revisit moments from our past for ‘evidence’ that the thought isn’t true, grappling for the unattainable 100-percent-certainty that so many OCD sufferers unsuccessfully strive for in search of peace.

If you’ve got OCD, you’ve probably Googled ‘how to stop the thoughts’, at least once. This is not possible, and the thoughts are not the problem, it’s our reaction to the thoughts that is. We know thought suppression never workswe’ve all heard the old adage ‘don’t think of pink elephants’ - and of course, straight away, that pesky little pink elephant has immediately set up home in your mind. Sometimes it’s so intense that there’s the feeling of being ‘thought-stuck’, there’s really no respite, no distraction works. Just the same sentence/thought/image on a loop all day, constantly, and

then it infiltrates your dreams, and then you wake up and it’s the very first thing you think of when you open your eyes too. For me, those were some of my darkest days, I felt completely trapped in my own mind with no escape. Those were the days when I couldn’t even fathom the idea of balance. OCD steals tenses; I was doubting the past, fearing the future, and thus losing the present.

However, there’s a word, a word which may well strike fear into the hearts of those with OCD, but ultimately, is freeing. The word is Maybe. The best way to talk back to OCD’s nonsense is to simply say ‘maybe’ to every single thing it says. This might sound terrifying, because it really does produce some scary thoughts and imagines terrifying possibilities, but we have to show that we’re not listening to it and, in time, this will likely make it quieter.

I think ‘maybe’ is a magic word for everyone. It creates a world of opportunity and frees up endless possibilities, without pressure or expectation. In the same tone (and it’s definitely easier said than done), I try to remember that anxiety itself is nothing to fear and so I make space for it. Sometimes I like to say out loud, “I feel anxious, and I say hello to that”. Slowly but surely, the ‘maybes’ that we say to OCD will encourage a feeling of balance to re-enter our days as we begin to take the power back from OCD.

“In the same tone, I try to remember that anxiety itself is nothing to fear and so I make space for it.”

A Q U OT E BY G E O RG I A LO C K

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To start saying maybe is difficult. OCD often pipes up to tell you that if you don’t engage with those subsequent compulsions it wants you to, then you’re extremely careless.

The disorder is chronic, but recovery is possible in the sense that it’s able to get to a place where it isn’t so debilitating.

Exposure Response Prevention can help you get there and help you start whispering those two syllables that feel so terrifying, until one day, you’re saying them with a smirk: take that, OCD! ERP is the gold standard therapy treatment for OCD. This involves actively making ourselves anxious, and then resisting the compulsions. In its most basic form, ERP is effectively ‘facing your fears’, and implementing it will help restore some balance and prevent fear from dictating your decisions. But, of course, it is easier said than done! ERP can be painfully tough for the sufferer.

Pushing yourself through these difficult exposures, whilst remembering to shower yourself in compassion, (even/ especially on the days where you don’t do as well as you’d have liked), and finding the energy to battle onwards to the next day is no easy feat. What’s worrying is that even in the field of therapy, this disorder is misunderstood, and it’s actually quite difficult to find a therapist who teaches ERP. This is vital, as some traditional talking therapies can be unhelpful and, to be honest, dangerous to those with OCD. For me, my OCD now is like night and day to how it used to be. It’s still a fight, and not too long ago I was in tears, shutting my eyes as I walked down the road because I felt compelled to ‘check’ everything I saw. I still burn my hands sometimes when I wash them to make sure I’ve ‘killed the germs’, and I spend a long time staring at taps and switches I know are off. But, I can be present in my days: I can laugh with my boyfriend, I can do things I enjoy, I can live. In the beginning I felt like I wasn’t sure who I was, or who I used to be. A real loss of self. I was suddenly terrified to be alone, and petrified to talk to

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people except my partner and my family. I could barely eat from the anxiety and guilt that OCD was shrouding me in.

I was living in conversations from months before, stuck in them and over-analysing them. I thought ever being able to laugh again was out of the question.

However, now I’m having dinner out by myself again, and not only speaking with old friends but connecting with new souls too, not to mention the amazing people within the OCD community, who inspire me with stories of such strength, and listen with such care. There’s a real kinship there, made even more tight-knit because the disorder is so misunderstood, and we know we totally understand each other.

There are days I find myself mourning who I was and my life before OCD, but slowly I’m coming to terms with accepting that I’ll never have it back and, rather than wasting it on impossible wishes, I’m trying to channel my energy into leaning into this new life, into OCD advocacy, and into recovery. I try not to get upset with myself when I feel nostalgic for the past, because sometimes we struggle and that’s perfectly okay, we should approach our harder days with no judgement. Self-compassion takes practice, and I’d be lying if I said I had mastered it (or even remotely had a grip on it). It is difficult to achieve, but for anyone struggling with mental health problems, please be kind to your soul, you’re doing so well, and to balance out all the horrible things your disorder might say, do try to speak to yourself with an abundance of kindness and remember your strengths. Celebrate small victories. Better days can come, even if that feels impossible right now.

Thanks to ERP, time, and knowledge of this disorder, I am gradually seeing more balance in my life than when OCD first “showed up”, which, for a while there, I wasn’t sure was possible. No matter how hard things may seem, please remember there is always hope. A feeling of more balance isn’t an unattainable dream.

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Joe Marchant

MODELS

Big Zuu

L O C AT I O N

Flora & Fauna studios, London

How Big Zuu Remains Grounded On His Journey to Success AUTHOR: GEMMA STEELE I N T E R V I E W E R : J O E M C N A L LY

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oom we’re here, man’s about to get interviewed in this old-school yard, stuff is happening.” Big Zuu, one of the UK’s most talked-about grime artists, has only been in our studio for two minutes, yet the whole team are already grinning from ear to ear. His energy is electric.

As a writer, it’s hard not to go into an interview without expectations or even a mere idea (however vague) of how an interview will go. It’s often why you strive to book a particular interview in the first place. You fall in love with the resulting article before you’ve even conducted the interview. I expected to find Zuu funny.

I expected his confidence, his loudness, his energy, but what I didn’t expect was his vulnerability, his humility, his determination.

Big Zuu, whose real name is Zuhair Hassan, seems to thrive on superseding expectations. “If you always feel too comfortable, you kind of get lost in the sauce and that’s how you end up not progressing, that’s how you end up

just staying stagnant”, says Zuu. There’s no way you could accuse Big Zuu of staying stagnant. Having released his EP in 2017, Zuu shot to fame when he featured on renowned YouTuber, KSI’s track, ‘Uncontrollable’, which has now been streamed almost 23 million times on Spotify. Two years later and Big Zuu has maintained his successful music career, but also, quite surprisingly, Big Zuu isn’t just big in the recording studio, but in the kitchen too: he now has his own cookery TV show on Dave. “I always want to learn”, explains Zuu. “there’s always the next step, and for me, that’s what I’m chasing.”

The first series of Big Zuu’s Big Eats saw Zuu and his two best mates cook for some of the UK’s biggest comedians, including Jimmy Carr, Ed Gamble and Phil Wang. It’s recently been commissioned for a second series that promises to feature big names like Maya Jama, Harry Redknapp and James Acaster to name a few. The most recent string to Big Zuu’s bountiful bow is his hotly anticipated debut cookery book.

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“When you get too excited and things go wrong, you get even more upset.”

A Q U OT E F RO M B I G Z U U

Zuu is almost bashful when we congratulate him on his impressive successes. Zuu exudes confidence, but he is far from cocky. “Whenever I go into a new craft, there’s going to be someone that’s a master at it. When I go to a new place, I’m going to be terrible. When I went into TV presenting, I thought, okay, this is not my chosen forte.

How can I become better at this? And I did it. And now I feel like a comfortable TV chef.” Zuu talks with a smile that reveals his gratitude in a way that words couldn’t.

“It’s a challenge. And I love that. That’s what keeps me grounded. I know I’m not the best chef in the world. I’m not the best musician in the universe. But if I try it, then that’s when good things happen.” Zuu has no plans of slowing down any time soon either, he has plenty more in his pipeline of new challenges. He cheekily reveals how he’s taking his first steps into the acting world, but he doesn’t betray any further details.

Zuu’s tenacity and eagerness to learn is how he has managed to stay so grounded despite his growing success.

But it’s also allowed him to build up a strong resilience that prevents him from getting knocked off-balance. As he says, “When you get too excited and things go wrong, you get more upset. For me, if Big Eats got cancelled tomorrow, of course, I’d be upset. But my life would go on because I tried. And I tried my hardest. If all the acting and all the radio stuff goes, I don’t mind because I know that it was all just me trying.” There are, however, limits to Zuu’s buoyant optimism. “but If I fail music, I’ll be devastated!

That’s my life!”

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Zuu attributes a lot of his mindset to his upbringing, so it seems almost too poetic that as we chat, the sound of a school playground across the road drifts through the open window. “Everyone is a product of the ends that they grow up in”, Zuu explains. “I lived across the bridge from Ladbroke Grove. Ladbrooke Grove was always an area that was known for having innovative, creative people.

Whereas we were just next to them. People like Akala, Ms Dynamite and Lowkey were coming from Ladbroke Grove. But in my ends, it was the mandem, it was the gang youts.”

The shadow of inspiration that Big Zuu lived in didn’t make him love his own area any less, but it alerted him to what he could have. It was the summer between school and college when Zuu and his friends started freestyling. The local youth clubs gave Zuu the opportunity to work with sound engineers and learn to use the software to create his own music. Zuu’s days at the youth clubs instigated a profound impact on Zuu. A few years later, he was studying for a degree in Youth Work at Goldsmiths University.

Although Zuu’s blossoming music career prevented him from getting his qualification, one listen to his music and

you’ll realise that, even without a qualification, Big Zuu is still a youth worker. His tracks like ‘Remember Remember’ and ‘Great to Be’ are laced with remnants of his upbringing and the hardships that came with it.

The video of ‘Great to Be’ perfectly captures Zuu’s relationship with his success. Cutting between scenes of Zuu drafting lyrics on the bank of the Thames, punctuated with the sound of sirens, to Zuu walking onto a regal theatre stage, supported by a string quintet. Zuu’s success is impressive, lavish and miles away from a west London youth club, but his music remains intrinsically connected to his roots and his community. ‘Great to Be’ saw Zuu collaborate with the Young Urban Arts Foundation to feature four young artists on a remix of the song. With numerous youth clubs closing up and down the country, a collaboration like this gave young people hope and inspiration: for those involved in the track and for those who simply listen to it. Zuu knows his success gives him a pedestal, and he’s clearly determined to use it in ways that empower and inspire. As the lyrics explain, “we’re in it together trying to find peace, you’ve got to help other people in a tight squeeze.”

We’re in it together trying to find peace, you’ve got to help other people in a tight squeeze.”

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It’s not just giving back to the younger generation that Zuu is invested in. He is also tremendously close to his friends and family. “In the hood, it wasn’t normal to have a nuclear family. Mum, dad, brother, sister. If you had that, we used to think, yo you have a great life. Most of my family live in Sierra Leone, so I grew up with a great support system of friends who became my family.” Zuu grew up with his mum and his younger brother, while his dad lives in Africa. “In a sense you know, we’re doing this together”, he begins, “when I do a headline show and I can see my mum with all her bredrins, and I can see my brother with all his friends, having your family around you, those are the moments.”

It’s refreshing to speak to someone like Zuu, who has become a social media heavyweight in recent years but still rejects the materialism that so often comes with that renowned blue tick. “Everyone from the hood always says, yeah I want to buy my mum a house, and I think that happens with so many entrepreneurs and people that want to be successful. They spend all their life gaining money and wealth to make their parents have a materialistic thing and then disregard the relationship that they have with them when they’re alive. Grind and get your money, get on your money, do your thing. But don’t lose yourself and don’t disregard the people around you. If you’re on the grind every day, you’re not home. You don’t see your mom, You don’t see your dad, you don’t talk to them, you don’t know what’s going on in their life… but you’re like, ‘Hey guys, I bought you a house.’ What does it mean? Apart from posting a photo of the keys on Instagram, what does that mean? Don’t get me wrong though, if you buy your parents a house, you’re a G. But just don’t get lost in just the materialistic side of it.”

Considering Zuu’s modest upbringing on Britain’s breadline, you’d forgive him for being money-oriented.

In fact, I almost find myself longing for him to be more materialistic, if only just to make myself feel better about my own money-driven attitudes, but he’s infallible.

His modesty has changed how he frames success too.

“Everyone’s waiting to blow up. That’s what everyone in music says: ‘I’m going blow [find fame] soon. One day I’m going to blow’. People think blowing is earning a milli, signing a record deal. That’s not blowing, that’s just doing well. One day I thought: why do I keep wanting to blow?

Waiting to blow? I am blowing. What I’m doing is blown.

Whether it’s performing on stage, writing songs in the studio: for me, that’s blown.”

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While it may sound like Big Zuu’s got this balance and happiness thing down to a tee, he’s quick to point out that it isn’t all plain sailing. “Music is a tough game” he admits. “it’s a lot of pressure, a lot of sacrifice and then there’s a lot of comparison in music. I say comparison is the thief of happiness. You look at artists and you might think, why am I not getting the opportunities that he gets? Or maybe I’ve worked harder than this person. And you kind of get lost in this: this thought process of watching what’s around you rather than appreciating what you have. You’ve got to be used to putting out a song that maybe won’t get the reaction that you wanted or hitting up an artist that might air you.”

For a man of just 25, Zuu is acutely aware of how the music industry is laced with rejection which, for a lot of young artists, leads them down a dangerous, traumatic path, but Zuu seems relatively unphased. “You have to realize that it’s all energy. So as much as that song didn’t bang, maybe the next one is going to bang. And as much as one artist didn’t shout you, maybe this next artist is going to shout you.” Zuu’s not ashamed to admit that his friends play a big part in maintaining his balance. “there have been times where I’m like, forget this, man, this is long. There have been times when I’ve just been in that negative headspace where I’ve not wanted to continue.

And I’ve had friends that have picked me up and told me, yo, you got this.” Zuu explains how he makes sure his friends know what he’s up to on good weeks so that when bad weeks come, they can pull him back up again. “when things go wrong, they [my friends] are able to say, don’t you remember last week you was doing that? and you’ve got to do this next week… like, bruv, you’re good. They’re then able to support me through it.”

In the self-improvement industry, there’s a lot of chatter about letting things be and trusting that life will balance itself out on its own, but Zuu doesn’t exactly prescribe to this. “I don’t believe that someone else’s energy can control whether something good happens to me or not. I believe it’s up to me if it happens.” Perhaps this is born out of an acute awareness of where he might have ended up had he not worked hard to develop his talent in music. In a music

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interview with ADTV in 2018, Zuu explained that while most people work hard to make their mum proud, Zuu wanted success because anything less would be an injustice to how hard his mum had worked for him. He tells me, “I never grew up going to like Sylvia Young or drama and singing classes. I never did any of that. So, for my family, they were completely surprised. They’re so proud of what I do, they always motivate me to just keep going.”

Zuu has the energetic exuberance of a child who’s eaten too many blue M&Ms, but his words exude the pragmatism and tranquillity of a Buddhist monk. This balance and complexity shines through Big Zuu’s music too. Some of the lyrics and topics he chooses are heavy and sombre but he spins them with an excited beat and energy. His altruism and compassion is balanced with vigour and fun. One of his latest tracks, a collaboration with D Double E called ‘Variation’, is no exception, with a high-octane, melodic chorus that promises to get everyone singing along.

Zuu explains, “Music has definitely been a way for me to express myself and let my subconscious talk,” and that’s abundantly clear when you listen to his music. His tracks are Big Zuu, just written as a melody. They encapsulate his pace and his erraticism because, of course, we didn’t just talk about his mental health and how he stays balanced in our interview with him, we skipped from chats about veneers to internet speeds, from cycle to work schemes to lasagne. He doesn’t see himself as some esteemed oracle of positivity, he isn’t. In fact, it’s only when I listen back to the interview that I realise how profound and refreshing his insight really is. He’s normal, he’s restless, he’s multifaceted, he’s raw. He bears the authenticity and openness of a good friend yet I still finished the interview knowing that we’d only scratched the surface. Big Zuu is a work in progress and I think the steep trajectory that he is progressing at is what’s so captivating.

It’s clear Zuu’s growth has been all-encompassing too.

“Back in the day, all I made was lasagne. Now I can chef anything. I’ll make you a laksa. I bet you don’t even know what that is.” He chuckles and, unsurprisingly, we all find ourselves chuckling with him.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Joe Marchant

MODELS

Leanne Maskell

L O C AT I O N

Flora & Fauna studios, London

Balancing Ambition with Compassion AUTHOR: LEANNE MASKELL

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ast year, I opened my mental cupboard of Unfinished Projects and finished writing a book, ‘ADHD: an A to Z.’ It was excruciatingly painful, but within a matter of weeks I had a copy in my hands, feeling proud, happy and excited as I posted a picture of it on my Instagram.

I looked at the picture and spotted an easily fixable, obvious mistake on the cover and suddenly, anxiety, overwhelm and decision paralysis took my mind hostage, ripping my self-esteem to shreds, along with the book. The shame spiral had proved to me what an imposter I was: it either had to be ‘perfect’ or it was a catastrophic failure.

ADHD comes with a Ferrari brain and Chevy brakes – we can’t control our enthusiasm, we can’t balance it, especially when it’s driven by emotions. It revs us up so quickly that before we know it, we’ve acted on our ideas, setting expectations to ourselves and others that are simply impossible to meet. Our brains are in overdrive until we crash into the tree right in front of us, and then we’re reduced to crawling along the side of the motorway, until we hijack another Ferrari. Most crippling of all is the loneliness. Most people would ask why we didn’t just drive sensibly in the first place. At a minimum, they’d expect us to be able to learn from our mistakes, instead of repeating them.

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THE HABIT OF RESILIENCE

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I had previously treated mental health with the same derision, something I should be able to just ‘get over’. My family motto had been, ‘be a tank’ - be strong, no matter what. I had always been able to pull myself together, until one day my life fell apart and I couldn’t pull it back together again.

Upon graduating, I lost the structure of full-time education. I didn’t apply for jobs, because my brain blanked out at the application pages.

I spontaneously broke up with my boyfriend of five years. I moved out and into a new house, over and over again. I had a succession of extremely unhealthy, short-lived relationships. I started and stopped many projects, each one reinforcing my belief that I would never be able to fit into ‘normal’ society. Within a matter of months, I was so overwhelmed that the making of simple decisions was enough to trigger suicidal ideation on a near constant basis.

Yet externally, I just seemed like a fun-loving, young woman in her twenties with the world at her feet, free to do whatever she liked.

Internally, I was the furthest from free I could possibly be, because I wasn’t in control of my own life. ‘Driving’ sensibly, or learning from my mistakes, simply wasn’t an option that my brain remembered how to do anymore.

It’s like being strapped into a chair, having your eyes sellotaped open, and forced to watch your life play out on a television screen at the same time as everybody else. I would wake up and dread whatever spontaneous decision I would make by the end of the day, from starting up a business, to moving across the world. It wasn’t something I had any control over but felt like I should - that is the paradox of suffering with our mental health. It’s all in our head.

How do you explain this to another person? I felt like an attentionseeking drama queen, and that it was all my own fault. When I tried, I was told to think of the starving children in Africa, and reminded of how lucky I was. My Instagram feed displayed a picture-perfect life of a model, frolicking around beaches and photoshoots, clubs and catwalks. Contemplating how to properly ask for help when I was living under so many layers of ‘perfection’ was too overwhelming. I thought it would be self-indulgent to explain to a doctor how I woke up every day wishing that I hadn’t woken up at all when I was so privileged. There was nothing objectively ‘wrong’ - no one I knew had died, and there certainly wasn’t a global pandemic (yet). I had no right to be unhappy.

These are the traps that our minds can build for us. The beliefs that pattern the walls of our brain, causing subtle malfunctions in our ability to triage the world around us. They suffocate us silently, causing our internal world to collapse, whilst from the outside, we appear to be okay, condemning us to fighting it by ourselves.

It’s the boiling frog syndrome - you can’t accept that you’re being boiled alive until it’s too late.

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I had always been able to pull myself together, until one day my life fell apart and I couldn’t pull it back together again.”

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I remain extremely privileged to have been able to get an ADHD diagnosis, something many people have to wait up to seven years for in the UK through the NHS. Accepting that ADHD was a real, neurological condition freed me to be able to choose how I wanted to live, working with my brain, instead of against it. After getting the help I needed, my brain learned how to drive at a sensible speed, and how to use the brakes.

In the polarising, social-media obsessed and conflict-driven world we’re all living in now, finding a balance is near impossible for anyone, let alone if your brain is predisposed to ‘all or nothing’ type thinking.

Living in moderation has actually become the new novelty: being able to fix our mistakes instead of being cancelled for them, recognising that we’re human beings who are growing every day. Publishing ‘ADHD: an A to Z’ has helped remind me of one crucial truth in a world of untruths. Everything comes down to self-compassion. We’re all putting so much pressure on ourselves to live up to these absurd standards, but they only really exist in our own minds.

Before officially ‘unpublishing’ the book and pretending it had never happened, I flicked through it, landing on an exercise to write myself a letter.

‘If you had read this book aged 18, 21 or 25, you would have been so overjoyed to realise that someone else understood how you were feeling - that you were not alone. If your best friend had published this, you would be so incredibly proud of them, and the mistake wouldn’t matter one bit. Please, remember to treat yourself in the same way.

This book doesn’t have to be grammatically perfect or a New York Times best seller to help potentially save someone’s life. All you ever wrote it for was to help the people who wanted to be helped.’

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Joe Marchant

MODELS

Ben Loader at Linden Staub

L O C AT I O N

London

Multipotentiality and The Well-Rounded Life AU T H O R : J O R DA N G RO S S

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nd now, we have a special award.

It’s the award for Best All-Around Student. This is a person who seems like he can do it all. This is a person who has a broad range of interests and pursuits. This is a person who will receive this award because of his commitment to bettering his life in academics, athletics, social, community and volunteer efforts. And this person is…”

When I was in college, I created a system for evaluating my life. I’d come home after finals, and my parents would ask me how I did. “In which category?” I’d ask them. Perplexed, they humored me and allowed me to explain what I meant. My college experience was not simply based on how I did in school. Rather, each class I took had three distinct evaluators: grades, social interactions, and atual learning I didn’t want to base how I did solely on a number on a piece of paper, from a single test, which lasted no longer than two hours. So, I decided to grade myself in other

categories. These categories helped me remain balanced in school, and not focus too heavily on my grades or social life. I had to perform satisfactorily in each bucket.

A colleague recently shared with me that I was the most balanced person she had ever met. “I’ve only known you for a few months, but you just seem like you have so many things going on, and you never feel overwhelmed.

How is that so?” she asked. My answer?

Multipotentiality.

In entertainment, there’s something called an EGOT. To be honored with the prestigious distinction of EGOT, one must have won an Emmy award for television, a Grammy award for music, an Oscar for movies, and a Tony for plays. Emmy + Grammy + Oscar + Tony = EGOT. Very few performers in history have been dubbed an EGOT winner, but for those who have done so, their fame, their popularity, and their legacy are cemented in Hollywood forever.

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I’ve always been fascinated by people who have won an EGOT. Not so much because I love the entertainment industry or have any desire to be an entertainer, but rather, because I am drawn to their multiple interests. I am drawn to their multiple curiosities. I am drawn to their daring ambition to even consider going after a feat like this, let alone having the courage to go ahead and do it.

I once sat on a park bench with an elderly gentleman who revealed to me his entire life story. He owned multiple companies in various industries, he traveled to many different countries, he loved playing sports like tennis and golf, but he also enjoyed taking dance and piano lessons. He read and wrote books, and he even tried bungee jumping. Skydiving was practically a weekly hobby, swimming with sharks elevated his heart rate and deep-sea fishing lowered it back down. He truly was one of the most interesting, well-versed men I had ever spoken to.

Not too long after this conversation, I quit a job that had been restricting a lot of my creativity and holding me back from fulfilling the various buckets of my life in which I wanted to thrive. When asked what I was going to do next, I thought of the elderly gentleman on the bench.

I would write and speak and coach and edit. I would take up a new language, read

poetry and travel around the country. I would start my own business, and maybe even pursue a non-profit idea. I would have a vibrant social life and find something to talk about with everyone I met. I would go to sporting events, networking conferences, and, one day, accept an Oscar award for creating the best animated short film the world had ever seen. I would end homelessness. I would find love.

Being multi-passionate like this will make 99% of people walk the other way. “One thing at a time.” Or “slow down, let’s start small,” the majority would react. But then I found multipotentialites.

In a 2015 TEDx talk, Emilie Wapnick outlines the characteristics of the elderly man on the park bench. She describes people who never said they wanted to be racecar drivers, astronauts, or teachers when they grew up.

They wanted to be all three.

Multipotentialites have a wide range of interests and are not afraid to explore them.

They often have multiple projects going on at once, and they may even have multiple jobs, not out of necessity, but on purpose.

They are able to balance these projects and be well-rounded in many different areas.

Throughout their lives, they will have a rich set of experiences and stories that lead to a fulfilling life.

“Multipotentialites have a wide range of interested and are not afraid to explore them.”

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And after hearing this, I knew I was a multipotentialite. Before diving into the how and why multipotentialites lead a balanced and rewarding life, it is only responsible to mention the potential drawbacks.

Firstly, while multipotentialites may be good in many different aspects of life, they are not particularly great at anything. This is okay depending on the level of good or life you desire, but being a multipotentialite definitely favors the generalist over specialist in that debate.

More, sometimes, being a multipotentialite can be used as a crutch, a tool that delays a person from really living. People may lean into multipotentiality to resist actually settling down, focusing on a career, and building a long-term plan. It’s important to remember that multipotentialites are not just hobby enthusiasts. They are careful and articulate planners with wide-ranging near and far-off pursuits.

Despite these minor drawbacks, there are a number of key advantages to being a multipotentialite. For one, being a multipotentialite broadens your range of conversation, thus positively impacting your ability to make relationships with anyone. The world becomes more fascinating when you’re a multipotentialite. You’re interested in others because you are curious about so many different things. Others are interested in you because you have exciting stories from so many facets of life.

As well as this, being a multipotentialite opens the door to live life with an emphasis on creating meaningful stories to tell in the future.

You will try different ideas, fail, succeed, debate, discover, explore, encourage, and feel so many emotions as you journey through life uninterrupted by the overwhelming force of settling on just one thing.

Lastly, when you have the wealth of interests multipotentialites have, it becomes difficult for any single one to overpower the others. If something doesn’t work out, you have other interests and opportunities to search next.

This all sounds well and good, but how on earth should we go about becoming a multipotentialite in our quest for balance? Well, there are a few simple ways to start. And if you already are one, these suggestions are already within you. Now it’s time to bring them to the forefront.

1. Stay curious: We often stop asking questions when we finish childhood. Don’t. Stay curious, ask why, and you’ll discover things you never thought were possible.

2. Do it scared: Multipotentiality exists at the edge of your comfort zone. It presents opportunity after opportunity to try something for the first time. This can be terrifying, but multipotentialites simply do it scared. They realize that fear and excitement are friends, not enemies.

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Multipotentialites assess their life by creating certain metrics which matter to them most.”

A Q U OT E BY J O R DA N G RO S S

3. Live for the story: Multipotentialites have climbed Mt. Everest. They have made a million dollars and then lost it in a matter of minutes.

They have hiked with strangers on their backs and they have walked blindfolded into lion’s dens. Multipotentialites have the best stories. They live for them.

4. Split your life into buckets: Multipotentialites are balanced.

They ensure they have equal amounts of adventure and safety; worry and stability; social time and family time; rest and recovery.

Multipotenitalites assess their life by creating certain metrics which matter to them most. And then they make it a priority to fill those buckets equally and live a life of balance and well-intention.

So now, I would like to offer a special award. It’s an award that goes to a person willing to take a chance. It’s for a person who is ready for something transformational and completely life-altering. It’s a person ready to forego the mundane realities of normal life and reinvigorate their love for the unknown. This person is fierce. This person is ambitious. This person is audacious. And this person is…

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Joe Marchant

MODELS

Gemma Steele

L O C AT I O N

Flora & Fauna Studios, London

The Importance of Balancing Selflessness With Selfishness AUTHOR: GEMMA STEELE

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here was a time when you were a blank canvas. A time before the long tendrils of life pushed and prodded you, drained you of your childhood exuberance and manipulated you into adulthood. For nothing but a mere second, we are unblemished: naked, not just physically, but mentally too. And then we start to learn. Like some sort of superpowered vacuum-sponge hybrid, we absorb any and every lesson we can. Some lessons are instinctual: we’re born with a predisposition to eat, sleep, breathe, (and repeat). Other lessons are picked up through imitation, like learning that chairs are for sitting on, or that the weather is always, always a reliable topic of conversation. Then we have explicit lessons.

That is, lessons that are taught with the good

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intention of teaching.

‘Treat others how you would like to be treated’ is probably one of the first explicit lessons children are taught. It’s woven into children’s books; it’s the foundation of almost every major religion; it’s even frequently referred to as the ‘golden rule’, yet I wish it wasn’t.

It’s not that I don’t believe in this ‘golden rule’. It holds generosity, compassion and altruism at its core, so it’s fairly easy to get on board with. Even admitting my disagreement of such an agreeable, altruistic rule summons such feelings of guilt. I promise I’m not evil. I wouldn’t say I’m unkind or uncompassionate.

In fact, I only disagree with the golden rule because I’ve absent-mindedly followed it my whole life.

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That’s the darker side of the golden rule: it conditions us to prioritise the feelings of others over our own.”

A Q U OT E BY G E M M A ST E E L E

I don’t think I’d be able to tell you how many times I’ve nonchalantly brushed off the question of ‘how are you’: the number of times I said I was fine when I wasn’t, not because I didn’t want to talk about it, and not because I felt I couldn’t talk about it, but because my want to treat others well led me to prioritise that person’s time, energy and comfort over my own. In the name of generosity, I tethered an anchor to my feelings and sunk them deep inside me; I left them to fester.

That’s the darker side of the golden rule: it conditions us to prioritise the feelings of others over our own. That’s fine in moderation, but when it’s glorified in isolation, we don’t see that it can be as detrimental as it is helpful. We need to make selfishness an explicit lesson: we need to balance selflessness with selfishness.

Naturally, we assume that the antithesis of something good is something bad. Heaven has hell, sunshine has rain, optimism has pessimism and selflessness has selfishness.

It’s a somewhat natural thought process that is aggravated and perpetuated by societal

conditioning. The ‘golden rule’ has cast selfishness as the villain and now, even the word ‘selfish’ has been condemned as a most scathing insult.

The golden rule thrives off of two human emotional processes. Firstly, we enjoy feeling cared for, feeling well treated. Secondly, and most detrimentally, we enjoy feeling appreciated when we treat other people well.

More still, we ache for it. The problem is that this feeling of appreciation is conditional.

When you treat others well, the gratification isn’t guaranteed. So many people become enslaved by this golden rule, tirelessly mining for a fleeting feeling. Treating others how you’d like to be treated encourages dependence on relationships; be them familial, situational, platonic or romantic.

It is, in essence, the thief of independence.

Perhaps that’s why so many people found the pandemic so cavernous and challenging.

Confined to our own houses and homes, we were limited on which others we could treat well, limited on whose gratitude we could feast on… so we went hungry.

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Humans are naturally social characters, but in this age, we’re constantly being told what we need, from human dependence to technological dependence to consumeristic dependence. We’re conditioned to ‘need’ so much that we forget the capacity of our own mind and body, our own power. We depend on our individual bodies to run marathons, climb mountains, write novels, discover disease cures, yet we can’t depend on ourselves for our own contentment.

How can we yearn to be appreciated by others but clam up at the thought of appreciating ourselves? It’s an illogical order.

Think of a safety procedure on an aeroplane, the one you’d find written on a dog-eared piece of card in your seat’s magazine holder. It stipulates that, in the event of an emergency, you should put on your own oxygen mask before you help children, companions or others with theirs. We should learn to treat ourselves well before we begin to treat others well. You would struggle to teach French if you didn’t know a word of it yourself. Treating yourself well primes you with the tools to treat others better. To quote every tacky gossip magazine agony aunt ever, ‘you can’t love someone until you love yourself ’.

Treating others how you want to be treated leaves too much room for interpretation. It’s almost egotistical to assume that how you want to be treated will suit someone else. In the cheesiest of analogies, if there was an initiative that asked you to give a friend the

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best cheese, I would give a camembert, but I would be thoroughly disappointed (if not a little insulted) if someone gave me a mild cheddar. When we know how we want to be treated, why would we relinquish total control of that? It’s the moral equivalent of ‘it’s the thought that counts’. Presents are almost always given with good intentions, but that doesn’t make the sweater that your nan knitted you any less itchy, and it definitely doesn’t make the dead mouse that your cat brought you any less disgusting. Treating others well is certainly kind, thoughtful and compassionate, but treating yourself well is certainly beneficial and proactive as well.

Treating others how you would like to be treated is exclusionary too. It provides no infrastructure that ensures everyone gets treated: well or at all. Treating others well is almost an unnecessary, sketchy middle man that makes the whole process more complicated, less reliable and less effective. How could it be simplified? By treating yourself well.

But even the golden rule only talks about your own treatment as a hypothetical situation. Treat others how you’d like to be treated. It conditions us to see our own good treatment as slightly unattainable, a theory rather than a reality. When we fail to examine the way we are treated in real, concrete terms, we starve ourselves of the tools we need to right it. Perhaps we do want to treat ourselves well, but the problem is that we don’t know how.

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Treating ourselves neutrally would be a step in the right direction. It’s not only that we don’t treat ourselves well, it’s that we treat ourselves badly. If the rule was ‘treat others how you treat yourself,’ then civilisation would descend into anarchy. I regularly see the consequences of selflessness materialise in my own life. In the pressure-ridden throes of the modelling industry, I would compliment other models as if compliments were the only words I knew. Yet when I looked at myself in the mirror, I couldn’t find peace, let alone compliments. All I could find was resentment.

I was the same height and measurements as those other models. I had long blonde hair, blue eyes and a strong bone structure like most of them too. But still, I looked at them and saw beauty... I looked at myself and saw nothing more than inadequacy and mediocrity. The more I built other people up, the more hollow and empty I became.

Entrepreneur and influencer Grace Beverley detailed a similar attitude in Scarlet Curtis’ anthology, It’s Not Okay To Feel Blue.

She recalled getting out of social engagements by claiming it was her ‘friend’ that needed support and compassion when, in reality, it was her. It was not the subject of the issue that she struggled with, she struggled with the fact that she was the subject of the issue. I get that. Admitting that you need to take time to care for yourself instigates two worries. First is that people might think you’re self-centred and selfish, and the second is that the person you admit your struggle to might worry and then you’ve compromised their comfort too.

These worries ensure that caring for yourself carries a guilt-ridden sense of indulgence that prevents it from feeling as good as it should have anyway. It becomes, in essence, not that worth it.

This isn’t a takedown of compassion and selflessness. If we didn’t think of others and only thought of ourselves, we

wouldn’t collaborate, progress or share. It’s about striking a balance between the two, combatting the years of golden rule-oriented conditioning by ramming the perks of selfishness down your throat. The scales have been so heavily weighted toward selflessness that there needs to be a hell of a lot of proselfishness-promo to rebalance them.

In the last decade, the self-care and wellness industry has grown exponentially. People are recognising that they need to treat themselves better but it has gotten irrefutably tangled and knotted with consumerist brainwashing.

Truly treating yourself well will not come from a £1.50 sachet of facemask, and it won’t come from anything with luxury in its name either. As Pandora Sykes explains in her essay collection, How Do I Know I’m Doing it Right, self-care is just ‘a seven-chakra bandaid to cover our fears, desires and unedifying habits’. We need to normalise selfishness, not its wishy-washy, more attractive cousin called self-care, but it’s unadulterated, unashamed and brazen self, wholly focussed on treating yourself well. Self-care is just selfishness made palatable for the comfort of other people.

Learning to be selfish when you’ve been taught to be anything but selfish.

It’s an intimidating standpoint to finish a self-improvement article at, with years of conditioning to reverse. Plus, selfishness only helps yourself. When you’ve been trained to serve others and ignore yourself, there can be very little acceptable incentive to entirely subvert your behaviour. However, selfishness and selflessness are not binary opposites. They require the same emotions; they have the same genetic makeup. They both revolve around generosity, compassion and kindness: their only difference is the direction in which those emotions are sent.

So, why don’t we stop thinking about golden rules and start thinking of ourselves as golden people?

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Joe Marchant

MODELS

Dottie James

L O C AT I O N

Brighton

Black and White Thinking: Living in the Grey AUTHOR: DOTTIE JAMES

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’m learning a lot about living without absolutes, no matter how much I crave them. Living without absolute certainty, absolute peace, absolute joy, absolute sadness, absolute love, absolute friendship, being absolutely sure this is the right thing to have for dinner tonight (spoiler alert - there is no ‘right thing,’ eat the damn noodles).

As a person with OCD, I’ve journeyed through cognitive behavioural therapy for my obsessions, my black and white thinking, my need for things to be ‘right’, and I’ve begun to notice just how often concepts like certainty, absolutes, and a sense of ‘rightness’ pervade today’s motivational rhetoric, especially in more recent forums such as TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram. Following your heart comes up so often on these websites that I’ve started to skip over anything insinuating that there’s a hidden part of me that ‘knows’ what direction I need to go in: There isn’t, it doesn’t, and I don’t. I personally choose to believe there is no secret ‘desire’ that has been hiding in my bowel region, otherwise called your ‘gut feeling.’ Although undoubtedly helpful for many, when it comes to OCD at least, you are quickly told that gut feelings are overrated. For me, seeking the type of certainty advertised by motivational and spiritual rhetoric has only led me down paths of ever-out-of-reach-perfectionism and ‘just rightness’ that are difficult to escape from.

To help with this, I’m learning to live in the grey. Grey, as a colour, does not evoke much excitement or exuberance, but the following two steps speak to the happy medium that lies between the certainties in your life, balancing out that pervasive black and white thinking.

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Humans don’t like not knowing these things. But unfortunately, absolute certainty is not owed to us.”

A Q U OT E BY D OT T I E JA M E S

Step 1: Don’t Find Yourself Humans are funny creatures, a jumble of contradictions walking around in a pair of trainers. Being such a mess of atoms, we don’t make much sense, even when we try very, very hard to make a lot of it. What I’m alluding to can be explained far better and in fewer words by comedic author and generally outstanding humorist, Douglas Adams, who states the following: ‘We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!’

In other words, we desire control even in our efforts to release it. When first beginning to accept uncertainty, things can get complicated for our brains, brains that are addicted to knowing everything - right when we want to know it; we’re developing a nasty habit of knowing things and knowing them now. We are unaccepting of the grey, the unknown, the incomplete, even in our attempts to be very accepting of those things.

Beginning to live in the grey, balancing between black and white, feels tricky at first. We don’t mind being uncertain about our outfit for tomorrow, or whether we’ll enjoy a new film, or whether the horoscope we read will come true. But the trouble arises when we’re uncertain about the things that matter to us: our relationships, our careers, our life path, our sexuality. Humans don’t like not knowing these things.

But unfortunately, absolute certainty is not owed to us.

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Why am I telling you this? When you started reading this article, you might have hoped it contained a few optimistic assertions that you will figure everything out, that you’ll find yourself soon, to just wait and hold on till then. Of course you did, you’ve been trained to expect that from decades of motivational speeches, TED Talks, and self-help books. Unfortunately, this article doesn’t contain those particular falsehoods, and you definitely shouldn’t wait until you find yourself before you do anything. The milk would go off before I made it to the supermarket if I had to be certain of exactly who my truest self is and what groceries ‘she’ wants before I left the house. The fact is, you are already you. You don’t have to find out who you are before you start doing the things you want to do.

Are you reading this with your eyes, or hearing it with an ear? If you can, look down at your arm, and if you can’t do that, look at or think about a body part you do have. Is it there?

Congratulations, you’ve found yourself. Revisiting my initial query, then, why am I telling you this? In my answer I’ll throw an unbearably overused quote from Henry Cooke at you: ‘Life is what happens to us while we are busy making other plans.’

For the longest time, I found myself preoccupied with discovering my true self, or more accurately, I sort of waited for her to arrive. This was fueled by a desire to be certain, a black and white way of thinking, that I needed to navigate life from the dead centre of myself and not an inch to the left, otherwise, I thought, how else could I know if I was being the most authentic, most absolute ‘me’? This is ridiculous, of course, and so, with a lot of patience, self-compassion, and therapy, I set out to begin to live in the grey areas. I set out to become a weed between paving stones, grow where I least expected it, to bloom even when I didn’t feel like it. And it’s hard.

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Step 2: Starting Before the ‘S’ Arrives i.e Starting Before You Are Ready In black and white thinking, thinking that sorts each experience into boxes labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ there exists the wondrous land of ‘tomorrow’ where everything… happens. It happens because, in this place, lives something called feeling ‘ready.’

I’ve waited for ready before, but I’m not sure we’ve ever been in the same place at the same time. As a sufferer of OCD, I often find myself delaying my own recovery until I feel ‘ready’ drawing near, near enough to start living again. Even answering texts can become an internal battle of waiting until I’m ready to give a good response, ready to start life, start anything. Unfortunately (and once again, I must throw an overused sentiment at you), life doesn’t wait. Recently, instead of waiting until I’m ready to start, I’ve been deciding to ‘tart’ instead and stop waiting for the ‘S’ to arrive. So, I’ve tarted. It’s helped. More and more, with every rebellious act against a brain that deems me ‘not ready’ for something, I’ve proven that actually, I sort of am.

Common features of ‘tarting’ include (but are not limited to): - Forcing yourself to do things when you don’t feel like it - Finding out that you actually do feel like it but only when you’re in the middle of doing it - Being incredibly uncomfortable almost all of the time - Being fine with that Those last two bullet points are daunting, incredibly difficult, yet crucial aspects of living in the grey. As I said before, self-help rhetoric seems to be littered with absolutes and certainty, humans are not. Shouldering the discomfort of doing something you’ve been avoiding in a self-declared state of ‘not readiness,’ is hard but worth it once the anxiety inevitably dissipates.

So far, I’ve spoken a lot about the little things and how to live in the grey regarding those. Perhaps because it’s easier to write about those. Perhaps I am, as I type this, attempting to cling to the ‘rigidly defined areas of doubt and certainty,’ spoken about by Adams, areas that don’t necessarily scare me too much to note down. Or, perhaps dealing with the uncertainty of life’s little things can help us when the really big uncertainties come. Brains are a mess but they love the familiar.

If we can make ourselves comfortable with (or at least accustomed to) discomfort, that should make it easier to ‘tart,’ right?

The last thing I’ll say is that if living life in the ‘grey’ feels too bleak, live it in the yellows, the pinks, the deep oranges. There are a lot of colours between black and white and with more balanced thinking patterns. We get to experience them all.

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Joe Marchant

MODELS

Aaron Unknown

L O C AT I O N

Flora & Fauna studios, London

Love, Passion and Balance: How Unknown Came to be Known INTERVIEWER: ADRIAN DREW I N T E R V E W E E : A A R O N U N K N OW N

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s an artist that’s becoming more prolific and influential with every move he makes, it’s somewhat ironic that Aaron Gatward’s artist name should be ‘Aaron Unknown’. Unknown as an adjective is, in many ways, the opposite of what Aaron’s explosive trajectory in the past few years reflects. But unknown isn’t an adjective. It’s a philosophy. A movement. Through his lyrics, Aaron communicates so much more than the average rapper, sharing his beliefs, ideas and encouraging his listeners to love one another.

Rapping for fourteen years, Aaron’s career began with his breathtaking freestyle session for Jamal Edwards’ SBTV - a creative platform for up and coming rap artists. Since then, it’s been a whirlwind. Before his debut, Aaron was rapping without a name, writing lyrics from his bedroom in South London

and sharing his message to a small group of friends. Now, Unknown means so much to so many people. ‘Rather than being a brand name, it’s more of a philosophy,’ explains Aaron. ‘And it blew up out of nowhere. You drop a little pebble in the water and at first the ripples are so small. But through time, that keeps going, and eventually that same little ripple that was in the centre reaches the end of the lake.’

Sitting opposite Aaron, now a good friend of mine since our paths collided, there’s a certain energy about him. A presence. You can feel the truth in his words - a truth that resonates on a deeper level. There’s character.

It’s hard to explain, but Aaron seems to be one of those rare people you meet in life that leaves such a lasting impression, inspiring you to pursue your wildest dreams with the utmost tenacity.

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There’s this whole idea that two people become one in a relationship, but I hate that. Two becoming one is negative. It’s a minus. How about two become four, or eight, or sixteen? Why can’t we come together and expand rather than shrink?”

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What started with lyrics scrawled onto pieces of paper in his Brixton bedroom has since transformed into a fastgrowing movement, driven forward by millions of loyal listeners and fans all resonating with Aaron’s message. ‘What is that message?’ I ask Aaron as he sips his coffee. ‘What do you aim to teach through your words, what’s the point in it all?’ ‘Above everything, I want to teach people that they can love themselves. A lot of people seem to think that love has to come from something external, or someone other than themselves. But it doesn’t. Loving yourself is perfectly possible.

There’s this whole idea that two people become one in a relationship, but I hate that. Two becoming one is negative.

It’s a minus. How about two become four, or eight, or sixteen?

Why can’t we come together and expand rather than shrink?’

Having risen to such astounding heights in a relatively short space of time, Aaron goes on to highlight the importance of balance. ‘Everything is a duality,’ he explains. ‘There’s balance in everything.’ Keeping his ego in check and ensuring to prioritize creativity over money or fame, for instance, required Aaron to seek balance in all facets of his life as a means of self-preservation. ‘But that aside, balance is necessary in all areas. I wrote about it years ago in one of my earliest tracks. You can’t have up without the down, you can’t have sky without the ground, you can’t have dryness without the clouds, you can’t have monsoons without the droughts, you can’t have humble

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without the loud, feelings without the doubts, can’t have smiling without the frowns and you can’t have silence without the sound. Each are complete opposites, but the message is clear. Life is all about balance.’

Aaron and I spoke at length about the constant struggle between light and darkness. That is, finding glimmers of hope in difficult times and enabling positivity to balance out pain and suffering. ‘Light always overpowers darkness,’ he explains. ‘When you spark a lighter in a pitch black room, you can see. But a small patch of darkness is virtually invisible in a bright, open space.’ That’s the power of love. Even in the worst of times, you can still overpower darkness and difficulty with positivity and kindness. In many ways, Aaron shares the same message in his lyrics, imploring people to open up their hearts and embrace self-expression.

To round off, I asked Aaron where he sees the next few years taking him. ‘Well, I see the next few years taking me to a place that I’m not even ready for - and that’s fine because I have the support and energy that I need around me. I’m realising that I can actually make that impact and change. There’s no materialistic goal, I just want people to see their full potential,’ he continues. ‘I see myself as becoming this beacon of unconditional love. That’s my aim, and I want to share that same love with everyone on this journey.’

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Note from Aaron: First of all I would like to thank you for taking the time to read this passage. My mental health journey has been a tender one, and something I have struggled with opening up about until recently.

My first experience of suffering was probably when I was about seven years old when my parents separated. My anxiety went through the roof and it affected everything, from my focus, to my temper and even going on to cause stress-induced asthma. That was also my first realisation of mental health deterioration correlating to physical health.

Growing up in South London was challenging as a teenager, especially during the early 2000s when we began to enter the digital age and were faced with an information overload once we discovered the internet. One thing that was highly prominent in young teenage males was (and still very much is) toxic masculinity - I wish I could write a whole passage just about this subject as it’s so unspoken. Men are so pressured from a young age to ‘man up’ or ‘dry your eyes mate’ when faced with emotions.

I was lucky to have a father who, although I didn’t see him as much as I needed to as a boy, always taught me to embrace my emotions and live through them as much as possible - to help others touch their own emotional side. This was where I realised I’m an empath, and hold the ability to embody others’ feelings and emotions which could aid as a coping mechanism for them.

Growing into manhood I realised just how sensitive I really am, and delved vulnerably into the divine feminine. After all, we live in duality so it made sense to digest and understand the yin to my yang. I really focused on becoming as vulnerable as possible.

Hypothetically speaking, I turned on the ‘emotional tap’ and purged my emotions consistently. I fell into a deep and dark depression as a result and was overwhelmed with all my own demons that I had previously locked away. Once this depression began to subside I chose to leave the tap running, as to not build up these emotions and to keep them flowing as and when they come, as to not build pressure in my ‘emotional plumbing’ if you like.

The greatest lesson I can take from all of this and the one I would like to leave with you all is that it’s never too early or late to tap into your own emotions. The time is always now.

Please do not hesitate to reach out on social media if you’re struggling or just want to release some of these emotions. @aaronunknown

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Poppy Okotcha

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Poppy Okotcha

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Devon

Nurturing Nature: How Permaculture Can Alter Our Perspective of Balance AUTHOR & INTERVIEWER: GEMMA STEELE INTERVIEWEE: POPPY OKOTCHA

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have this setting on my iPhone that tells me how long I’ve spent on my it each day. It’s an awful setting. I hate it. Last week it had the audacity to tell me that I had spent a grand total of thirty-eight hours on my phone. Thirty-eight hours: that’s a third of my week’s waking hours spent scrolling on Instagram, swiping on Tinder, or trawling through TikTok. But most ironically, this horrendous, guilt-ridden notification didn’t make me put my phone down. Instead I just stared at that bar chart for at least 10 minutes, convinced it had malfunctioned or mistaken me for someone else. I don’t think I’m alone in this technological addiction - at least, I hope I’m not. We spend our lives with our eyes trained on our phones, often while residing in other man-made inventions: cars, houses, shops, beds. We all strive to have so much, yet very few of us feel totally content, totally balanced. Poppy Okotcha, a fashion model-turned TV horticulturist, left behind her consumerist materialisms in search of something more simple, more balanced, more abundant. She found it underneath her feet, not in a carpet, or tarmac, or tiles, but in the earth.

“Permaculture is basically an ethos that tries to bring a deeper level of sustainability to all areas of life, stepping

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away from our carbon dependency and eliminating waste, creating systems that tick over without excess human input,” Poppy explains. “Think of a natural landscape like a woodland. No one has to go in there and interfere with it - it maintains itself. The pests and diseases are managed by the ecosystem. Permaculture revolves around stepping back to observe the natural world and seeing what parts we can replicate to try and be sustainable.”

It’s a concept that feels very modern, very Greta Thunberg, if you will, but Poppy tells me it’s been around for years. “Permaculture is really a collection of ancient indigenous wisdom that’s been repackaged in a way that is accessible to a western mind. A lot of the practices of people who follow the permaculture ethos will be things that have been done for many, many years by various communities around the world.”

With all this time spent amongst and around nature, Poppy has learned a wealth of knowledge about the natural world.

Yes, she knows her geraniums from her pelargoniums but, more than that, nature has taught her lessons about resilience, intuition, balance and contentment: lessons that don’t stay locked in the soil but permeate into her own life too.

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“Nature does have balance, but it also rectifies balance.”

A Q U OT E BY P O P PY O KOTC H A

“I think a really beautiful lesson we can learn from nature is that balance is fluid. When we think of balance, we think of this idea of scales that sit constant and steady, but nature’s not like that, it’s constantly wobbling around.”

Poppy continues, “Nature does have balance, but it also rectifies balance. Inbetween the balance there are moments of chaos or motion, as I like to call them. So, on a really large scale, when we move from season to season, we have summer and winter and in-between that we have spring and autumn. In autumn we have all the leaves falling off the trees and in spring we have huge amounts of growth. And then it all levels out as we reach the equinox. Balance within nature is flowing; it’s not stagnant or static.”

I’m personally moved by Poppy’s explanation of the pragmatism that permaculture is laced with.

“Permaculture looks at the world from a solution-based perspective,” Poppy begins. “Rather than going ‘oh, that’s broken there’s nothing we can do’, a problem simply means we can create a solution. My vegetable garden might have a massive slug problem that is absolutely decimating my crops. In my mind, that is an ecosystem that is out of balance. Rather than being like, ‘okay I’m going to buy slug pellets and kill them all’, I think, ‘okay, well slugs are part of an ecosystem’. What’s actually going on here is that there’s not enough of the slug’s predator, so maybe I’ll bring ducks into the garden. Plus, high levels of diversity lead to greater resilience and a better kind of balance, and so, by adding ducks, you’re also diversifying your ecosystem. That pest or ‘problem’ is proliferating because there’s nothing to keep it in check.

The lesson? Meet something that’s out of balance with a counterbalance for it.”

Honestly, I never thought I would relate so much to a slug analogy. When we, as humans, feel out of balance, we jump to feelings of exasperation, of hopelessness, failure

and defeat. Permaculture highlights how it doesn’t have to be this way. One small pest can throw an ecosystem out of balance; one bump in the road can throw us out of balance. And just like an unbalanced ecosystem isn’t unfixable, neither are we. If we could step back and look at that issue as one thin layer of our being, pragmatically not emotionally, then we could balance it out with other aspects of our life. Excessive emotions, like slugs, don’t crop up for no reason at all, and it’s better to address the reason rather than just the symptom. And, as Poppy affirms, reclaiming balance increases resilience. Unbalance isn’t a failure, and we’re certainly not broken: we’re just in ‘motion’.

“I’m still young, but from what I’ve seen so far, humans do have seasons in life,” Poppy agrees. “There are ups and downs, and it balances out somewhere inbetween. There are moments where it’s balanced, but inevitably the ups and downs will follow, just like in nature.”

While observing nature can improve and evolve the ways in which we live our lives, immersing ourselves in nature can directly affect us too. “I do a lot of foraging as part of my process as a grower in order to understand wild eco systems better. You get such a sense of gratitude because you suddenly realise that, without doing very much, there’s food. Without doing very much, there’s medicine. And it’s all just there on our doorsteps. You start to understand the true cost and value of food. For example, you feel gratitude when you have a potato on your plate. It’s not just this carbohydrate that tastes quite good, it’s got this whole story of how the soil had to be cared for, or how the ground had to be dug, or how the potato had to be washed and scrubbed because they’re so covered in dirt when they come up. All of these things come together to bring something to your plate. The gratitude that comes with that is really great.

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“When we surround ourselves in nature, we start to recognise that we are not on the outside looking in, we are a part of nature,” Poppy continues with a smile. “The sense of gratitude of being a part of that family is huge.

When you’re sitting outside and you have a moment of realising: ‘woah, I’m a part of this’, and my body will die, and it will rot down into this, and it will join this whole cycle of life and death, it feels really incredible to be a part of that, and that makes me grateful.”

While nature is this divine, great and powerful entity, so is humanity. “We often think of ourselves as creatures that break stuff, corrupt stuff and put stuff out of balance, but we also have the capacity to bring in balance: in horticulture, but also within life as well,” admits Poppy.

“We have this incredible ability to be able to look at something, learn from it and then develop it. For example, in the garden I’m working in now, the soil is okay, but it certainly needs some TLC. If I were to leave the garden, it would take years for the soil to regenerate, but I’m a human so I’ve got a complicated mind. I’m able to make compost heaps, bring in manure, and do all these things to try and stimulate the regeneration of a site.”

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Poppy talks with a contagious buoyancy that even a classic Zoom-call-delay can’t spoil. A new interpretation of the ‘grow your own’ concept, it seems Poppy has grown her own happiness, her own peace, her own balance. It’s a bold lifestyle for a young twenty-something, and I have the authority to say that as a fellow young twenty-something who views life almost exclusively through an Instagram filter.

Poppy found her sanctuary in nature in one of her life’s ‘chaos’ stages. Working in the incredibly hectic, materialistic fashion industry, struck down by IBS and haunted by the bleak global warming statistics, Poppy found herself craving reform. “Emotionally, spiritually, I just wasn’t looking after myself,” Poppy admits. “I realised that reprogramming my mind to look after myself, and not see my body from this extractive perspective was the same thing that needed to happen with my relationship to the earth. Human wellbeing is totally dependent on the planet.

So, there isn’t any point in doing personal wellness if we’re not practicing larger scale wellness, too. When all is said and done, if the planet is out of balance, we’re all out of balance. Inevitably, the way that I behave will be, in some way, connected to the way that nature balances out.”

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Starting from a seedling of a humble interest in the earth, Poppy has now nurtured a blossoming career, sharing her love of permaculture with the public. Having regularly appeared on BBC’s Gardener’s World and the RHS podcast, Poppy has most recently been a lead presenter on Channel 4’s new show, The Great Garden Revolution. It seems the transformative benefits of the natural world are weeding their way into living rooms everywhere. And demand is growing, Poppy’s most recent show found itself in Channel 4’s prime spot - Saturday night at 8PM. The power of plants is clearly not to be underestimated.

Poppy’s tumultuous embrace of nature and permaculture isn’t the only approach. There are small practices we can all partake in to feel the transformative effects of nature. And, if the size of Poppy’s smile is anything to go by, we should all be giving it a go.

“Something I find really grounding is going out without any tech, so don’t bring your phone”, Poppy jests. “Either sit still or walk - don’t move fast, just be still because it gives you a chance to notice small things. Find a big tree and think of its long, long, long lifespan and then find some ants or any other tiny insect. To that small insect I’m like a tree because, to them, my lifespan is just unimaginably long. Looking at the tree makes me feel small, but then looking at the ants makes me feel big. It’s funny, it sets you in this context which is quite grounding.”

Regardless of how small or urban your home is (a concept Poppy knows all too well, having lived with her partner on a snug houseboat on London’s Thames), nature’s power is never too far away. “Learn plant names,” Poppy urges. “It means that when you’re walking around, you notice the plants and you kind of feel like you know them. Rather than them being this anonymous wash of green, you start to recognise familiar faces.”

Perhaps if I’d have interviewed Poppy a couple of

years ago, I might have found her description of plants having ‘familiar faces’ a little contrived - the cynic in me might have suppressed an eyeroll. But today, as the tethers of the third pandemic lockdown start to loosen, I am utterly enchanted by her words, by the unadulterated giddiness she finds in something more commonly known as ‘dirt’. “Interact with the soil,” Poppy continues. “Take off your shoes, touch it with your hands. It can seem kind of woo-woo, but the soil actually incredibly has bacteria that acts like an antidepressant, increasing the release and metabolism of serotonin, which is responsible for good mood and cognitive function.”

I started this conversation thinking it would revolve around learning lessons about nature that we could utilise in our own lives, but now I think that this separative, optional approach is a part of the problem. Perhaps if we stopped seeing nature as a thing, and started seeing it as an extension of ourselves - perhaps if we saw ourselves as a part of nature rather than as a guest or commander of it - then maybe we might be able to harness a better perspective on balance. Plunging your head into a wheelbarrow of soil won’t automatically make you feel balanced, and neither will hugging a tree or chewing on a dandelion head. But, recognising nature as something more than an aesthetic Instagram photo opportunity will help us reframe what balance means to us. We may not feel balanced in this moment, in this year or even this lifetime, but permaculture teaches us that we are part of a bigger balancing process, a process that spans billions of people and billions of years.

If I asked you to describe where you lived, how would you reply? Would you describe the location of your home, or would you describe your home itself ? Would you state a street? A town, city or country? Strip all of that away, and you’d still have somewhere to live, somewhere to ground yourself. You’d still have a home: It’s called planet earth, and it’s nothing short of incredible.

“It’s called planet earth, and it’s nothing short of incredible.”

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Richie Stokes

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Christy Thynne @thynillu

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Recognising Your Past: Finding Balance After Addiction INTERVIEWER- ADRIAN DREW AUTHOR- GEMMA STEELE INTERVIEWEE- BRIAN PENNIE

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ry everything once’. There’s probably been a wealth of self-improvement articles published under that title.

Articles championing adventure, courage, ambition and fearlessness. But, for Brian Pennie, that quote led him down a dangerous path of drug and substance abuse. Drug addiction can rob its victims of their jobs, relationships, homes and lives: that won’t come as a surprise to anyone, and probably wouldn’t make for inspirational reading. But, what’s remarkable about Brian’s story is his recovery, and the evolution, peace, growth and opportunities he’s found hidden within it. Now, twenty years since his addiction took hold, and eight years since he got clean, Brian is working as a university lecturer in neuroscience, and he has just published a book about his experiences: Bonus Time.

Although impressive, the titles and the accolades aren’t what this article is about, as Brian explains, “My life isn’t about the

academic stuff, it’s about showing people that change truly is possible.”

Brian is an open book, and he speaks about his experience of addiction and recovery with such authenticity and honesty. It’s as if those experiences didn’t happen to him, but are an extension of him. Getting clean after addiction is so often discussed as a ‘clean slate’ or a ‘new chapter,’ perhaps in a bid to wipe that ‘past life’ from memory, but with Brian, it’s not like that. He wears his history of addiction like a scout badge. It’s not as if he is proud of his addiction, I’m sure there is a part of him that wishes things had been different… but they weren’t. Brian exudes such an awareness of how those experiences, those vices, those struggles, led him to where he is today. He knows that the balance he has found today is intrinsically connected to the chaotic unbalance that preceded it. More still, perhaps Brian wouldn’t have found such balance had he not experienced such trauma and hardships.

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For Brian, it’s impossible to discuss his drug addiction without discussing the anxiety that stalked him for as long as he can remember, long before the drugs. “I say I didn’t have an addiction problem, I had an anxiety problem that I medicated with heroin,” explains Brian. Brian links his anxiety to the illnesses he suffered with when he was a young child. “I came out of my mother’s womb with a condition known as intestinal malrotation, which in layman’s terms literally means twisted gut.” Misdiagnosed several times just weeks after birth, Brian quickly lost half of his birth weight.

“It was only in 1985 that the medical practice realised that infants should be given general anaesthetic,” he explains.

“They didn’t think infants experienced pain like normal human beings. I basically went under the knife without general anaesthetic when I was just an infant. I literally cried for the first year of my life.”

Although infants of this age are unable to store recountable memories, Brian is sure it is this “that set the tone for me to be a very anxious person and compulsive worrier as a kid.” He continues, “I was classically conditioned to fear the world for the first year of my life. I associated everything with pain and bodily sensations. I was afraid of my heartbeat, afraid of my pulse, afraid of my breath.

“My parents were a loving family, but they were alcoholics. Some of my earliest memories as a young kid were waiting behind the netted curtains three or four times a week for my mum and dad to come home from the pub, screaming at each other. It was only when they went to sleep that I could start to relax.”

Brian’s turbulent, anxiety-ridden childhood, coupled with a teenage obsession with Jim Morrison and The Doors, led him towards a reckless, daring young-adulthood that saw him ‘try everything’. “We used to take acid, blow petrol, smoke hash, drink alcohol,” Brian explains. “We were all about expanding the mind, or so we thought.

That’s what spurred us to try heroin - once. And then I became an addict for eighteen years.

“I was a very functional addict for a long time, keeping a job and maintaining the facade that I was okay. People on the outside didn’t know how bad it was. It was only in the last few years that it really fell apart. I lost my job, my health, my mind and every important relationship in my life, owing thousands to lenders and drug dealers.”

But it was only in his bleakest, darkest moment that Brian surrendered. Two days into an incredibly risky selfmanaged detox, Brian woke up on his living room floor, surrounded by blood having bitten through his tongue during a grand-mal convulsive seizure. A few hours later, he woke up in hospital. “I was physically and mentally broken,” Brian explains. “I tried to get up off the trolley I’d

been put on but couldn’t do it. I turned my gaze to a red fire extinguisher nearby, but I couldn’t seem to understand what I was seeing. It was like my verbal world didn’t make sense anymore. And that’s when I thought, “Ah man, you’re fucked. It’s brain damage”. I waited for the panic and anxiety to overwhelm me again, but it didn’t. I realised that I just couldn’t do this anymore.”

Earlier, Brian told me that, in the early days of his addiction, heroin “was like a soft warm blanket wrapped around his soul that took him away from his demons and anxiety.” But it seems that, in this moment of bleakness, Brian realised that a blanket isn’t too far removed from a shroud. Heroin was covering his anxiety, but it wasn’t comforting it, it was suffocating it, smothering it: it was distracting from it, but it certainly wasn’t getting rid of it.

“This sense of peace then washed over me,” Brian explains. “I stopped fighting reality. A feeling of acceptance and contentment, totally alien to me, pervaded my mind. I finally stopped fighting my anxiety. I genuinely believe that it was that moment that enabled me to change my life.”

‘Enabled me to change my life’. Even with all the hardships, the trauma and darkness, I think that’s the key phrase. It wasn’t the seizure that changed Brian’s life, it wasn’t the time spent in hospital: Brian changed his own life. “We are what we think,” explains Brian. “We are the stories we tell ourselves. If you change your self-talk, you change your life.” In an industry littered with conversations about fate, divine intervention and serendipity, Pennie’s championing of autonomy is welcome - necessary even.

It seems that, if you want to find balance, or better still, maintain balance, then that behaviour starts with you.

Brian believes “lots of lessons came from addiction”, but at the root of it all is acceptance. It seems fairly reasonable to me. If you want to find balance then you need to recognise and accept what you need to balance. Brian agrees, “you need to feel your feelings. In my experience, I was afraid to feel what I actually felt: so afraid that, not only did I fail to tell other people, but I failed to tell myself. My book isn’t about addiction, it’s about self-deception. I was a black belt in self-deception, and I could cross any boundary by telling myself a lie and believing it.

“It’s important to be true to yourself,” continues Pennie. “be true to your wonderfully weird self. You’ll attract what you need and repel what you don’t. If you’re putting a mask on and trying to be someone you’re not, you’ll attract the wrong people. Not everybody will like you - that’s a fact of life, but if you’re true to your authentic self, you’ll attract what you need and repel what you don’t. If people reject you, that’s great, it simply means they weren’t meant to be in your life in the first place.”

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“I’ve become the observer, not the sufferer.

I’ve stopped fighting anxiety. Fight anxiety, and you’ll always lose.”

A Q U OT E BY B R I A N P E N N I E

In the interest of being transparent, I found Brian’s story a little intimidating. Brian as a person is certainly not intimidating, quite the opposite actually: he is bubbly and smiley and has a melodic Irish accent that I could listen to all day. But, as a middle class, privileged twenty-three-yearold, his story is overwhelming. I almost feel inferior in his presence, like the balance that he’s found outweighs my own because he’s been through what he’s been through.

But now, as Brian discusses the lessons he has learned through his recovery, his insight is so applicable: I feel so encompassed and accepted, so at home in the gaps he leaves between his words.

Brian is humble and grounded, too. He recognises that he can’t necessarily cure his mental health issues, but he can redirect them; balance them. “I still get anxious,” Brian explains. “But I have a healthy relationship with anxiety. I observe it, see it, and say ‘there you are’ - and then I let it pass, and it goes. I just see it as something that’s a part of life, and I watch it come and go. I become the observer, not the sufferer. I’ve stopped fighting anxiety. Fight anxiety, and you’ll always lose.”

He has a similar approach to his addiction. He reasons that he can’t rid himself of addictive tendencies, but he can redirect them towards things that are less damaging and dangerous. Now, he satisfies those addictions by focusing on

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learning, being healthy, and exercising, but his self-awareness is what helps to keep these ‘healthy’ addictions in place.

“That’s where balance comes in”, muses Brian. “I’d like to think that I have the self-awareness to recognize when my body needs to slow down, when I’m working 16 hours a day and I simply need to switch off and rest. Balance between that drive and passion and looking after myself properly is crucial to my long-term success.”

Brian seems to know every inch of himself, but I still feel like I am chatting to a snapshot, a freeze-frame of an Olympic sprinter in motion. The next freeze-frame is sure to look different to the last. “Right now, I value boldnessputting myself on the line and embracing failure,” Brian smiles. “I probably won’t value this as much when I’m 90 years of age, however. Then, I will likely focus more on connection and compassion. Some days, you might be pro-career, and other days your mental health might need more attention. Finding balance between these two areas is key.” Brian’s experiences, although traumatic, have made him acutely aware of how malleable and mobile humans are, mentally, and emotionally.

“Adversity helps you grow if you lean into it in the right way,” Brian tells me. And perhaps that’s what balance is all about, not serenity or perfection, but a gnarly, tumultuous and, crucially, ongoing process.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Joe Marchant

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Patty Walters

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Sharp Edges A U T H O R : PAT T Y WA LT E R S

I have sharp edges. I was ten years old when I chose the path I would pursue throughout my teens, and the destination I would reach in my twenties. There I was, just a kid watching music videos in my friend’s living room, when the naïve dream of touring the world in a punk rock band corrupted and contaminated my innocent little brain. There comes a crucial time in all of our lives when we must seriously consider substituting our unrealistic expectations for something that is realistic, something sensible. The unfortunate fact was, and still is, that music is the only thing I’ve ever been even halfway decent at.

So, one record deal and a small lifetime later, I’m sitting across from a therapist,

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and we’re discussing exactly what I’ve just described, and it’s exclusively for the worst reasons. I’ve hung this mission statement over everything I’ve ever done, to reach this singular and seemingly attainable destination, all to discover that the summit beneath my feet looks a little different to the summit I’d painted in my mind; still beautiful beyond words, just different. This is where a bit of balance (ambitions outside of my singular pursuit, a mild interest in a hobby or two, maybe even a social life) might have done me a world of good. I remember saying to my therapist at the time that it felt like I’d spent nearly two decades exercising one muscle, and letting every other muscle atrophy in its shadow. Like I said - sharp edges.

The longer I adventure through my one and only life, I find that ‘destinations’ really are few and far between. We all tend to project a false sense of finality onto the things we chase, when in reality, each of us is just a constant work in progress. More so, the reaching of the destination often feels unfulfilling when you’re not at all the person you would choose to be once you arrive, deficient in perspective and appreciation, unbalanced and unhealthy.

The journey is of equal importance to the start and finish lines, and occasionally of more importance. It would feel unfair to blame my ten-year-old self for something that would take me so many more years to understand, but it is an overly simplistic way to view the world.

I’ve been driving in the same direction down the same road (some days at twenty miles per hour, some days at two-hundred) for what feels like my entire life. I’ve found genuine purpose and profound joy in imagining and materialising a reality for myself that remains true to the aspirations of the kid I once was, but I can’t help but feel as though I missed an opportunity or two to experience some smaller, more scenic roads along the way.

But pit stops and detours were two things that had absolutely zero appeal to me,

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“I learned that selfhatred is flammable, like gasoline, and it got me to where I wanted to go.”

A Q U O T E F R O M PAT T Y WA LT E R S

partially because they took me away from the destination and objective in my mind, but mostly because they often require a heavyfooted slamming of the brakes, something I enjoyed avoiding at all costs. Momentum isn’t easy to maintain, and sometimes you have to propel yourself using the most convenient fuel at your disposal. For me, the fuel was undiluted discontent, for myself and my surroundings, and that fervent desire to be absolutely anywhere and anyone else. I had milestones in mind, but they weren’t half as important as escaping the unspeakable and unbearable pain of being me. For better or for worse, I learned that self-hatred is flammable, like gasoline, and it got me where I wanted to go - far away; very far away. It was incredibly effective, but not exactly what you’d call sustainable. Not unsustainable in the sense that I had depleted my body of this invaluable resource. I still hated my guts, some days more than the day before, but I was burnt out.

This was ultimately unsustainable because mining that resource came at the direct

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detriment of my mental health, and when I found myself at rock bottom, I naturally wanted to turn my life around. But the distant day I would learn to love myself would be the same day that my method of momentum would have to be permanently abandoned.

It’s not always easy to distinguish self-love and self-destruction. I know that sounds absurd on the surface, but to differentiate the two can require a keener eye than it might appear.

I’ve spent a lot of time and energy walking in the direction of my own best interest, only to discover that I’ve either lost my way, or never had my bearings to begin with. And it’s at that very moment that I press the metaphorical play button in my head, and my ever-doubting inner monologue takes off. Am I making exceptions, or am I making excuses? Am I looking after myself, or am I looking for a way out? This too demands balance, and it still feels like I’m learning to walk more days than not. I know it’s crucial to be kind to myself, but I’ve been found guilty of taking advantage of my own kindness one too many times.

No one is without their weaknesses. I can reject mine, I can embrace mine, or I can ignore mine altogether, but they’ll always be precisely where I last left them. But one of the more important things I’ve learnt throughout my respective successes and failures is that teamwork and partnerships give us all superpowers. As the single most introverted person I know, collaboration is not always comfortable for me, but it’s how my ideas end up in the ears of others, the one thing I’ve wanted most, the ethos that has guided me here. I need others, even though it’s more comfortable to be and work in isolation.

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So the sharpest of my edges is my raw, unfiltered creativity. That doesn’t mean that I’m not still my own worst enemy and critic, if there’s even a difference between the two when you’re an artist. I remember a conversation between myself and a friend about songwriting. We took turns describing what sitting down and writing a song looked like for each of us, and I learned a lot from the process she painted. Her experience is instinctive, effortless, an exercise in keeping out of her own way, trusting her intuition, never overthinking if thinking at all, and allowing the music and lyrics to inexplicably fall into her head. My process couldn’t be any less similar.

It’s pain. It’s criticism. It’s perfectionism never satisfied because nothing I’ve ever created has been (nor will be) perfect. I can’t even say that I don’t enjoy the process in my own sick and

somewhat masochistic way. But every now and again, I need to find the balance and take my friend’s advice, learn from her process, back away and breathe, and trust the partners in my pursuits. They have sharp edges that I don’t, that I never will, and together we are more than the sum of our parts.

We all have sharp edges, and we can’t change that. Maybe I’m wrong, and I hope that I am, but I’ll be working towards selfacceptance instead of holding my breath, just in case. And I won’t lie, it’s an unfamiliar experience for me. I’m not convinced I will ever feel comfortable investing invaluable time and effort into sharpening my less sharp edges, or relying on others. But I can and will continue to invest in myself, and attempt to add a little more colour to what I recognise all too clearly as the monotony of me.

There are moments when I wish I could roll back the clock and take all the sadness away, but I have a feeling that if I did, the joy would be gone as well.”

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Afterword

BY GEMMA STEELE

I

f we were to strive for balance in the broadest sense of the word, we’d be wanting every instrument in our life’s orchestra to be playing harmoniously.

Balance is, in all but its name, a synonym for perfection. I try to avoid notions of perfection and I feel similarly about this idea of total balance. Total balance is unattainable. It’s not that we as humans don’t have the capacity to find total balance; we do. But it’s the external factors, the storms that weather us, that have the potential to capsize us completely.

In a lot of ways, it seems a strange time to release a magazine about balance. The coronavirus pandemic has been one hell of a storm. We had time to journal, to read magazines like this one, to navigate the maps of our minds and bodies. And yet there were mornings when my legs felt irrefutably heavy, afternoons when equilibrium felt as distant a memory as pub gardens and international

holidays, evenings that made even a single bed feel cavernous, cold and lonesome.

Balance has been quiet and fleeting this past year, and that’s okay. A lack of balance isn’t a failure, it is only when you experience a lack of balance that you begin to understand what you need to establish it. Lean in to it.

And then, when you can, look to offset it.

What I like about the notion of balance is the individuality of it, individuality that sings off the pages of this edition.

While society and social media holds up intimidating ideals of perfection, balance is personal. Your perception depends entirely on what is in those (metaphorical) bags you’re holding.

Your bags may be filled with a mortgage, with a career, with fitness, relationships, hobbies, pets, dependants. But they might not be. Your circumstances dictate the parameters of your balance: not Instagram, not your parents, and certainly not the Kardashians.

Your circumstances dictate the parameters of your balance: not Instagram, not your parents, and certainly not the Kardashians.”

A Q U OT E BY G E M M A ST E E L E

A F T E RWO R D

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Joe Marchant

MODELS

Cora Rose at Linden Staub

L O C AT I O N

London

The beauty of balance is that it is a process, it’s not an on and off switch. This magazine isn’t about total equilibrium, it’s about finding glints of it, morsels that may, one day, fill you up. Total balance might be doing a perfect, effortless headstand, but that shouldn’t detract from the balance you use every single day, just in order to put one foot in front of the other. When you start to look at balance as a process, you find hope and possibility rather than pressure and expectation. You have a lifetime

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to level out recklessness and waywardness. There is always tomorrow. That’s why we’ve released a magazine about balance at the tail end of a devastating pandemic. There is always tomorrow.

Balance is a noun, but it’s a verb too. The process of balancing, the activities that lean towards it, are fiercely valuable. Finding time to breathe won’t gift you with total, perfect balance, but it is an act of finding balance, an act of levelling out life’s precarious scales, it’s a step.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Joe Marchant

L O C AT I O N

Cornwall, England

ON BEING PRESENT

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MIND CAFE - ISSUE 3 £11.99

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