Saturday, March 30, 2024

The Big Feels Club: Mental Health, Finding Your Community and Making Friends With The Hard Stuff

A couple of years ago, I was recommended The Big Feels Club by two people in one week and so I signed on to their regular newsletters; each of which tackled big topics in simple, relatable and empathetic ways. Founded by Graham Panther and Honor Eastly (yes, this is a pair of stand-out names), The Big Feels Club is a community of people who have, well, big feelings and boy oh boy, has this been a year of them.  As we wrap up a big and complicated few months, Capsule has been talking to some of our favourite people in the mental health space about how they have looked after themselves and what they have learned about resilience, success and their selves along the way. Here, Emma talks to Graham about these very topics, and make sure you check out previous summer holiday big chats with Dr Lucy Hone, Suzanne Masefield and more.

In a nutshell, what is The Big Feels Club and what was the original mission statement behind it?
It’s real content about mental health, made by people who’ve been there. We make articles, podcasts, and events, all about how to live when life feels really hard.

I’d spent years going through my own mental health stuff, searching for answers through the usual channels – GPs, psychologists, psychiatrists. I’ve even worked in mental health for fifteen years, but I still feel like shit a lot of the time.

For me, ‘the answer’ has been finding other people asking the same big questions. Other people who find life this hard sometimes.

My girlfriend Honor Eastly had had a really similar experience, so we started to wonder, why isn’t there somewhere you can go to hear from other people who’ve been through this stuff too? People who ‘get it’? So we started the Big Feels Club.

Screenshot of the Big Feels Club website (these are our people, right??)

Has that changed over time?
Big Feels started out as a real life meet-up, in my living room. Honor and I had only just started dating, so we were fueled by that early relationship crushy energy that makes you think you can do anything. Hey let’s invite a bunch of strangers to my house to talk about feelings? Sure! I see no absolutely no downsides to this plan! And it went from there.

Word spread, and within a month we had 1000 people signed up, so that’s when it became a mostly online thing, to reach more people. (Also I’m a massive introvert so writing and podcasting are more my speed than regular events.)

So the method has changed, but the big idea is still really simple: the value of hearing from other people who ‘get it’.

The biggest thing that’s changed for me is my understanding of just who Big Feels is for. Because I think there are kind of two camps when it comes to mental health stuff. There’s Camp A – people who do all the things you’re supposed to do, and end up feeling better. And good for them! But then there’s Camp B, which Honor and me are both in. People who do all the things your supposed to do, do the therapy and try the pills, and those things sometimes help but sometimes don’t. And then life gets wobbly again and…. You get the point.

Those of us in Camp B don’t really fit the nice neat story those bus ads tell us: ‘just ask for help and you’ll feel better right away’. And what I’ve realized through Big Feels is, there’s a lot of us here in Camp B!

But the thing is, nobody tells you that. Nobody tells you that one in two cases of anxiety and depression will last for multiple years. So if that’s you, quietly struggling for years, you think… ‘wow, those bus ads make it sound so easy. I must be really fucked up.’

The only way forward is to do the slow, sweaty, tedious work of self-improvement, but it’s so hard to keep up. Especially if you think you’re the only one who feels this way. So you’ve got to find other people like you. Just one or two – whether you know them in real life or not.

And people tell us, even if it’s just hearing from me – a stranger in their inbox every couple weeks – it can be profoundly useful. It can help them feel like they still belong on earth, even when they feel like shit.

Photo of Graham courtesy of Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System

When did you first become aware of your own mental health, and when did you become aware of the tools that help you maintain it?
I’ve always been a sensitive cat. I used to have different names for that. I used to think my brain was broken, or that I just hadn’t figured life out yet. Shit hit the fan when I was 18 and got my first diagnosis, then again at 23 when I smoked a single joint one night and it really fucked with me for about two years.

I actually had a pretty calm, stable run through to my early 30s, and then shit hit the fan again with a couple of big life events, so my mid 30s have so far been pretty intense! I wouldn’t say I have ‘tools’. It’s funny, I think the biggest shift for me came when I actually stopped trying so hard to ‘fix’ myself. If you spend your life trying to fix yourself, you can really start to feel like you are the problem.

I’m slowly (sloooowly) learning to be more gentle and accepting with my sensitivities. Lately I’ve been thinking of it this way. The hard stuff – the doom spirals, my finely-honed ability to anticipate any and all possible catastrophes well before they happen, the feeling of being on edge all the time – it’s all part of me. I’ve spent so many years trying to make that stuff go away. So what kind of message am I sending that part of me? ‘You know, things would be fine if you’d just fuck off and leave me alone.’

My friend sent me a quote about this just the other day, from Jung (definitely a big feeler). Basically, all that hard stuff that we judge as “worthless”, he says it belongs to us. He says, it “belongs to me as my shadow and gives me substance and mass. How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a shadow? I must have a dark side if I am to be whole.”

So I now see that as my number one job when it comes to this stuff. To make friends with the hard stuff. That’s probably a life-long task, but there you go.

The newsletter that really struck me was the ‘death of ambition‘ article (and podcast), where you wrote about slowing down and changing your definition of success. How have you learned to slow down and what prompted that?

Basically I hit the wall. Then crashed through the wall, then dragged about half the wall behind me for a few months, and then… I just finally got to the point where it was too painful to keep trying to live up to this idea of myself, and so I stopped. I realized I hadn’t had a break in about three years. I mean, I’d take time off sometimes, but that’s when I’d really have to be alone with my thoughts (terrifying) and so I’d just get back to work again.

So this time I took two weeks off. Properly off – away from my desk and my emails completely. That became a month off. And I actually told our Big Feels community I wasn’t sure when or how or if I was going to come back (which was fucking terrifying). Most of our contributing members (who pay the bills) decided to stick around and keep supporting us (they’re truly amazing). And then a funny thing happened. Since doing that, I have slowly gotten back into the rhythm of making stuff, and I’ve ended up putting out about the same amount of content, but feeling way less like I’m on a treadmill of my own making.

This whole process took about two and a half years, starting at ‘burnout’ and getting progressively crispier from there (to borrow one of my girlfriend Honor’s phrases). And I don’t think that’s unusual. It’s really fucking hard to slow down, especially when one of your main coping strategies when life gets wobbly is to ‘just work harder’.

I think for so many of us, our sense of self-worth is tied to how much we get done each day. But it’s not a fair fight. It’s not like, if we get a bunch done, we feel good about ourselves. It’s just that, we’ll feel a bit less empty and hollow inside than we would otherwise. And then we’ll do that for a few days and inevitably run out of steam and have a down day and that’s when the self-judgement really hits.

I could see this pattern playing out for ages. I knew it wasn’t working for me. But you know, shit takes time.

How has your definition of what success is, and what makes for a successful life, changed?
To state the obvious, on a social level, this past year has been one big reminder of how utterly contingent our wellbeing is on other people. Our ability to feed ourselves and our families, to stay safe. In that sense, success is a collective concept that we apply selectively to individuals.

But that doesn’t stop us obsessing over how we’re each doing, individually. For me, I’d say this question of ‘a successful life’ is a real work in progress. Something I’ve been really realizing lately: I’ve spent my whole life trying so fucking hard to ‘get it right’. And when I say ‘it’, I mean everything.

Which really means, I’m constantly afraid I’m getting it wrong, even when things are going okay. It’s something I hear a lot from Big Feels Clubbers. ‘My life is good on paper. But I feel like a complete failure, and it makes no sense!’

So lately I’ve been really just trying to notice that line of thinking. To notice the ways I can get hung up on the idea that I’ve ruined my life – or any and all possible life-ruining events on the horizon (real or imagined). I don’t have an answer, but I do have a question I’ve been exploring. Where did I get this idea that I’m only ever one mistake away from total abject misery for life? I’ve definitely had some hard stuff happen to me, but if anything my life has taught me that I can handle hard stuff. Maybe I’ll always be afraid of ruining my life, even on my deathbed? So lately I’ve been trying to simply notice that fear, to name it without judging it or trying so hard to talk myself out of it.

A lot of people have newly discovered their mental health this year – that it is something to take care of. what is your advice to them?
I don’t know that I have any advice. There’s a lot of advice out there, which can sometimes just feel like another list of things to fail at. (Just me?)

I suppose what I have to offer is a message. If you feel like you’ve already tried all the usual advice, and you still feel overwhelmed by life – it ain’t just you. And the good news? We can’t all be the worst person in the world. (I mean statistically, that’s just not possible. Right…?) What helped me – beyond anything I could imagine – was finding other people who’d lived it. Finding my tribe.

That doesn’t happen quickly, so I recommend starting small. If you want a bit more of this kind of talk in your life, one place to start is the Big Feels newsletter. You can dip a toe at bigfeels.club

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