IIt’s not often that we see portraits of our childhood problems. When families released cameras in the late 1960s, it was usually to capture smiling faces on special occasions, such as Christmas and birthdays. But here I was, 18 months old, standing on two pages of a yellowing national newspaper, dated January 1969.
The first, under the heading “Suffer Little Children,” showed me in tears as I looked away from the camera into the distance as if looking for someone. In the second, I was inconsolable again, looking up and still waiting for an adult to pick me up and comfort me. It came with the words: ‘Be grateful that the little girl is not yours. She could so easily be!”
The images were part of a national campaign for the Mental Health Trust, to highlight the impact of mental illness on children. I was too young to remember these photos being taken. My father, Kim, was a flamboyant creative director in London at the time and started his own advertising agency. So maybe I was just the most convenient choice as a model for his new campaign.
Although I was vaguely aware of the photos growing up, I hadn’t seen them in years. Now, in 2011, they were returned to me by a relative as part of a pile of childhood memories that my grandmother had kept of me.
When I looked at the photos at home, I felt shocked and then uncomfortable. I now had two young children, aged six and nine, and the photos took on a completely different meaning.
Of course I knew that toddlers cry. But now I wondered how long I had sat under the studio lights to take enough photos where I looked sufficiently sad. Moreover, I was angry about the loss of confidence that I saw – and still recognized – in my toddler self’s eyes.
My father died in 1997 after a long illness, polymyositis. So while I assume he was in the studio with the photographer, he’s not there to give me any more answers. And the photos date from a painful time in my mother’s life, so I found it difficult to press her on the details.
But these photos felt like more than brief snapshots of my early life. The loss of hope in my eyes still felt familiar. For starters, my parents’ volatile marriage was marked by arguments and divorces from birth. Throughout my childhood, I witnessed explosive arguments that left me feeling scared and powerless. Often the adults were so caught up in their own chaos that they didn’t notice.
When my parents finally separated and divorced when I was ten, I lost the only stability I had known: my home and school friends. My father moved to Australia and my mother to the US. I lived with her and her new partner for two years, commuting to Melbourne and Sydney during school holidays. Then I agreed with my mother that boarding school was the best option for me.
So one of the lessons I learned early on was that it wasn’t safe to feel happy and secure because something out of my control would come along and ruin it. I grew up into an adult who was constantly scanning my surroundings and expecting bad things to happen.
Even on my wedding day in 1999, instead of feeling joy, I felt distant, dissociated and numb in what should have been one of the happiest moments of my life. At parties, parties or Christmas I felt like I was standing outside, as if I was looking in from the other side of frosted glass. My husband, Anthony, and I had two lovely daughters. But even when life was going well for me, happy family moments felt “cringy.”
As I delved deeper, I realized that I could also hear the voice of an invisible evil fairy whispering on my shoulder, “If you feel happy now, there will be a price to pay later.”
That changed when I wrote a book called Are you feeling ‘Bla’?which analyzes why joy is harder to find in the modern world. I’ve been trying somatic therapy, which looks at the way our nervous systems are wired when we’re young children and how this can cause physical feelings of anxiety in our bodies that last even into adulthood.
When I saw the somatic therapist, he said to me: “Rationally, you know that you have a partner and children who care about you, and you should be able to enjoy that. It’s just that your body didn’t get the message.”
As I continued to research the book, I discovered that there was even a name for this fear of happiness: cherophobia – from the Greek words for fear and celebration. Now that I have been able to name cherophobia, I have been able to notice it when that nervous feeling starts to come back.
Instead of resisting or running away from good experiences and happy feelings, I let them in. That doesn’t mean I don’t still feel physically uncomfortable—and often still cry—when I look at those photos of myself as a toddler. But I’m no longer angry at the adults who didn’t pick me up to comfort me. Now I imagine myself as the adult who is going to hug that little child – and tell her everything is okay.