Happiness is accepting I don’t have to be ‘happy’

BRYONY Gordon has mixed emotions about perimenopause.

The 43-year-old journalist and mental health campaigner says it gave her insecurities and a lack of confidence.

“It was like all the confidence I felt I’d built up had been taken away,” she says.

“But there was almost like a ‘witchy magic’ to it, like my body and my brain were saying: ‘Are you going to deal with this now, Bryony, because if you don’t, you won’t live the next 43, or whatever, years of your life happily?’

“I thought I’d dealt with confidence but I realised it was actually all kind of masking stuff.

“The way I had dealt with a lack of self-esteem was trying to adapt myself to the world as it is, you know, whether that’s patriarchal or whatever, although I’m not sure how much the colonels of Henley will agree with that.

“Then in my forties I realised that you have to live the way that suits you and if you don’t start doing that now you’re never going to be happy.

“That’s really the premise of my new book. I can’t try to create my own happiness on someone else’s level. I have to do it my way — I have to be true to myself.”

Bryony, who has been writing newspaper columns since she was in her twenties, is coming to Henley to talk about her latest book, Mad Woman, a follow-up to 2016’s Sunday Times bestseller Mad Girl.

She has previously chronicled her struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder, binge eating, alcohol and drug consumption and burnout.

Eight years ago, she founded Mental Health Mates, a nationwide, volunteer-led network of peer support groups which encourage people to walk and talk to improve their mental health.

Now, she says, she’s learning to embrace her imperfections and to take life with husband Harry and 10-year-old daughter Edie as it comes. “Ours is very much a ‘girl power’ house,” says Bryony. “Harry is having to deal with me with my hormones declining and Edie with her hormones on the up. He’s sort of in the middle of it — in the middle of these two magnificent women that he’s so lucky to live with!

“The book is about that stage that happens to a lot of women in their forties and fifties. To a certain extent the process is happening from your teens and twenties through to your thirties. It’s about going, ‘Actually, I’ve tried to have it all, I’ve tried to do all of this stuff that I’m supposed to be doing, juggling it all, and actually it has not made me happy, it has just made me really quite exhausted’.

“I talk about redefining what happiness is for me and also accepting that I don’t have to be ‘happy’.
I am not failing if I’m not happy — life is a kind of rich cornucopia of things and emotions and feelings and they’re all absolutely valid.

“Mad Woman is about confidence but it’s also about realising that all of my ‘problems’ were appropriate because I was trying to fit myself into the very narrow definition of what it is to be a human.

“I think we’re seeing this a lot more with the rise in discussion about neurodivergence and everything like that but actually realising ‘I’m not mad, I’m just me’ and what might have once been called ‘mad’ is a perfectly appropriate response to living in a world that’s not set up for us.”

Bryony has struggled with obsessive compulsive disorder since she was 12.

“OCD has sort of really run quite a lot of my life and it continues to shapeshift and surprise me in different ways,” she says. “I’m always very hesitant to say, ‘Oh, I’ve beaten that and I’ve moved on’ because it’s just not realistic.

“OCD something I’ve had since a very young age and my brain is wired differently because of it. I’m constantly learning new things about it.

“Mad Woman is also about that surprise, where I thought I’d sort of got OCD beaten by getting sober and not blacking out, but during the pandemic it was quite a shock to realise it had sort of morphed into something different.

“The type of OCD I was experiencing wasn’t that, it was like intrusive thoughts but of a different nature, you know? I always have to be really vigilant to it but that’s okay, I would rather be vigilant so it doesn’t hit me over the head, cripple me and take me out.

“Right now, I’m reading a psychotherapy book about OCD and I have a therapist who I see once a month, so I’m constantly doing work to keep myself as well as possible, you know?

“What I’ve come to realise is that all mental illness, I think, is your brain’s very clever coping mechanism, for whatever reason.

“I think we’re learning to redefine what trauma is and stuff like that. It’s a very evolved way of the brain trying to protect you from something in your life that isn’t perhaps quite right.

“There are lots of different theories and lots of people believe that depression is suppression.

“When I wrote Mad Girl I definitely was like, ‘It’s a chemical imbalance and you just treat it with antidepressants’ but I’m definitely not of that opinion anymore.

“I think that we would be better off listening to what these things are trying to tell us as opposed to just quietening or silencing them.”

• Bryony Gordon is in conversation with Steph Douglas about her new book, Mad Woman, at a Henley Literary Festival pop-up event at Christ Church in Reading Road, Henley, on Thursday from 8pm to 9pm. Tickets cost £15, or £22.50 to include a copy of the book. For more information or to buy tickets, visit www.henley
literaryfestival.co.uk