A few words on dealing with the world around us, when you feel powerless to affect things that are going on.
A very warm welcome to the part of the Film Stories site where we chat about mental health, things that sometimes get on top of us, and, well, stuff. It’s a weekly series that’s continuing into 2024, and hopefully there’s something that we pen that’ll be of use to you over the coming months.
It’s traditional to start the year with this column writing something about new year, resolutions, January blues. But heck, traditions are there to be broken, right?
Instead, I want to talk about an episode of Desert Island Discs. It’s taken me ages to catch up, but I finally listened to Lauren Laverne’s superb interview with Adrian Edmondson, that’s available to download in extended form as a podcast.
The delight of Desert Island Discs is that in many ways the music is a Trojan horse, certainly in the podcast version where the tunes are truncated. Instead, you get a really interesting longform interview, and I was hugely moved by Edmondson’s words.
He then talked about an approach he uses to cope with difficult things.
I know it’s a fairly known one, but I do think it’s a case of if you know you know, if you don’t, it has the potentially to be hugely useful. And it’s about how to cope with big things and problems that you can’t effect, that are having some degree of impact on you.
There are loads of moments in life where I feel powerless – just look at politics, for instance – and it does sometimes get to me. There are moments in my life too where it’s difficult, and I can’t seem to change things for the better.
But what Edmondson reasoned was we can’t change events or things happening a lot of the time. Yet what we do have control over is how we emotionally respond to them. It’s a theory I don’t know the source of, but it’s true, isn’t it? We do have some agency over even the worst things, even if it doesn’t feel like it. And, bluntly, even if our responses are imperfect and don’t really make things better. But we’re not utterly without some influence over how we respond.
I’ve been mulling this for weeks now, and of course, Edmondson puts this across a lot better than me. But I’m going to give it a go, particularly given what looks like a full-on few months ahead.
This column will keep going throughout them, and will return next week. Until then, thank you for listening, stay safe, and take care.
