Sometimes you just need to start (In memory of Carol)

There are many reasons for not doing this project, for not starting If Lost Start Here. Want to hear a selection of them?

• We are not ‘Experts’.

• It makes us want to vomit.

• Do projects like this pay?

• Husband is doubtful.

• Time to get a ‘proper’ job.

• Don’t only perfectly-formed people start projects like this?

• Someone, maybe many people, will laugh at us.

• We are terrified of putting our ideas out there.

• When? Like seriously when? And how? Maybe these are the same thing.

But there are many reasons why to work on If Lost Start Here: 

• We believe in it.

• It wakes us up at 2am and gets us to the coffee shop to work on it by 5am.

• More about mental wellbeing = matters hugely

• It feels so good and right and necessary.

• Good things might come of it, for us and others.

• It might make people look differently at something, value their own thoughts, to notice who and what’s around them. 

• So many things in our lives led us to exactly this place.

• We’d be moving forwards on one of our major life ambitions: mental health advocacy

• Vomit can be cleaned and we’ll be ok even if we blush a little. 

• We get to decide what we do and where we put our attention, even if we have limited resources.

• Not to, would be one of life’s big regrets

• We love doing this together.

AND

• This is the big one: because of my mum (this is a photo of her from sometime in the 70s—I love how she looks here). For many of us, it always comes back to our mums, doesn’t it?

There was a very clear ‘Before’ for me: I used to be a curator, in a former art world life, creating exhibitions in museums and galleries that I could have only dreamt of, like Tate Modern, the Serpentine and the ICA in London. It was an incredibly exciting career for a northern girl: I wore a lot of black.

Then something happened that forced me to reassess everything. My mum, who had been my best friend and constant in my life, started to lose her mind. Slowly, then completely. Now she struggles to function in the world. No, I don’t know her diagnosis. No-one does. We’re still trying to figure that out, after years and years of appointments, and ER visits, and specialists, and reading. Lots and lots of reading.

But the loss of my mum, even as she’s very much in this world, did this to me: it forced that question of the After, of what comes next. After I dropped my mum off at a psychiatric ward for the first time, as I drove to my childhood home, I made a promise to whatever entity we want to call it, that this would not all be for nothing, that I would work in any capacity I could to change whatever this situation was in which we were finding ourselves now lost. There is only After when you’ve been through something like this.

I’d quit the art world to train as a therapist. My experience with my mum’s mental health, and let’s add here my own, put the question of how we function as people front and center in my life, and it made me feel that this reified environment of conceptually-oriented art exhibitions didn’t connect with my life anymore. I would become the person in the room. I’d seek out a very clear role for myself.

My year at CCPE completing a Foundational Counseling & Psychotherapy course taught me that I was sincerely drawn to this world of therapeutic thinking. But I also wanted to bring that learning together with my curator brain—that roaming, search for thematics on which that profession is built. There’s always that tension in my mind between ideas and how they take their form in the world, in other words, the human piece. That’s the point of interaction that fascinates me the most. Could I make that into that something?

If Lost Start Here began to percolate when I realized that people were starting to do some fascinating things with that tension point. They were starting to build brick-and-mortar places around things like community and emotional intelligence, anxiety and depression, and even the end of relationships and end of life. They were starting to make places that hold our mental well-being in ways that the museums that I’d worked in held contemporary art.

I also realized that was nowhere to go to find all those different things. There were, and are, incredible platforms for great interior design, or travel off the beaten path, or well-being trends, but there’s nowhere to think about all the different places in the world that are now being kind to our minds and making for better lives. I realized that we needed a guide to this new sector, one that combines well-being with curiosity, travel and lifestyle, place-making and socially engaged art, independent cafes, and mom-and-pop stores—all approaches directed at making our lives better, and easier, and more fulfilling.

We’re hoping that If Lost Start Here will become the platform that curates the best places that support us as actual people in our worlds. It’s about that practical search for something else, for whatever it is that represents the gap in your life, for the thing that you need. My hope is that you’ll find what you are looking for and what you need. As I’m trying to do for my mum and me. Maybe we can do this together?

There are various ways for you to engage. By reading our online guide of those places that help with our sanity and our everyday lives, and supporting them as and when you need them in your life. By participating in our guide, contributing the places that you know prioritize our mental wellbeing in new and interesting ways. And of course, by sharing—help us get the word out that this platform exists, that there is help out there. Sometimes, we, you, and I just have to find it.

x Claire

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My mum passed away unexpectedly last month. We’re reposting this piece now in her memory. This month, we’re supporting a place dear to mum’s heart, Sandbach Art Room. It helped my mum immensely over the last few years. You can also contribute to our Just Giving Page.

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The Criteria

So what does it take to be listed here beyond those categories? What are we looking for?

Sometimes its a feeling. A thank-god-this-exists-in-the-world lifting of our spirits. We know it when we see it. We get that instant hit of wanting to know more, to experience it ourselves, to get there if we can. The best thing is to take a look at some of our entries and see if you can catch that vibe.

But that sounds kinds of woolly and you probably want a little more direction, so we’ll go with this. What we’re looking for needs to touch on some of the following things (though we may break our own rules sometimes if we think a place has something particularly relevant to say to how we experience modern life):

• Physical Location: We’re interested in places that you can actually go to or something you can do in a space with other people. We’re all about getting people together, about creating places to contain the different aspects of ourselves and our lives, and about making the world more people-y. So that’s a storefront, or a garden, or a museum, an actual physical space. There are great things happening on the internet (like this), but we don’t search for those things here. Maybe that can be a companion piece later.

• Mental Wellbeing: There’s a mental wellbeing component built in there somewhere, even if its adjacent to what you think a place does. Like a coffee shop that also supports its local community and social justice projects. Or a stationary store, that prizes human communication alongside their cute designs. Maybe an arts space that thinks that supporting who we are as people is as important as what we produce. There’s something woven into a space’s mission, maybe sometimes covertly, that helps us be people in our worlds.

• Design Matters: There’s some nod to great design principles. Because we trip into wellbeing territory doesn’t mean it has to use bad imagery (butterflies and blue, head in the hands portraits). We look for initiatives that think about their audience in ways that are engaging, immediate, even playful.

• New Thinking: We’re always searching for the innovative, which is something bounced around a lot but not so much in the therapeutic space. Are there approaches that speak in new ways to our current needs? If there are, we’re interested in what these places say about what we’re looking for as people today - more untethering, less tech, more nature, less busyness. Something in direction.

• Accessible and Inclusive: Our picks have to be democratic and open to all. There’s so much in the wellness space that can be unattainable, maybe even elitist. Expensive retreats, exclusive seminars, consumerist off-sites. We’re not about experiences as trophies but about finding the things that we all can do, because we all in some way need it. We’re in this together, still, aren’t we?

• Public: With that in mind, we’ve tried to avoid the corporate/wellness world. Yes, your employer might have found a great program for you but if its a benefit that only you and your coworkers have experienced, with no reach beyond that, then it needs to stay there. We’re happy though that you had a great experience; we’re not trying to knock that.

• Independent: We’re all about supporting Independent initiatives, things started by individuals to make our world a better place. We privilege the mom-and-pop over the chain, so though you may love WeWork for Co-working or a BlueBottle for Coffee, we probably won’t get to that here.

• Realistic: We work to identify places that have the potential for transformative change or acceptance for what is. What does that actually mean? We’re searching for places that have a realistic platform for engagement. No crazy promises, no suggestion of needs that can’t be met, no banner headings that are about scale and sales only.

• Global: We’re starting with where we know, the UK and the US, because this is where we find ourselves quite literally, but we’d love to hear about places globally. With If Lost Start Here we want to create a map of the world as we are shaping it for ourselves, in real space and time.

Read all the above and still have a place to pitch, head to our contributors page and let us know what you are thinking. If we like it, we’ll list it!

The Categories

We are learning that we know very little about how our minds function. And we’re also learning at the same time a huge amount about how our minds function. That doesn’t quite make sense does it? But really what’s starting to happen is that we’re beginning to see the gaps in our understanding as we’re incrementally filling the spaces around those gaps.

We’re nowhere near where we need or want to be with our treatments and diagnoses of our mental wellbeing, but there’s an increasing amount of information that indicates that who we are and how we can best function is situated within a complicated, and highly individualist, web of situational, environmental, social, and physical aspects, plus let’s throw epigenetics in here now.

With that in mind, If Lost Starts Here takes an expansive view about how to approach our mental wellbeing. Each place or initiative can be fitted into one of the following categories which we’ll indicate on each post:

Anxiety and depression are rapidly rising in the UK, and our ability to talk about and treat these conditions is shifting. There’s DIY art therapy, frazzle cafes, people to walk with and grow food with; all ideas that are non-stigmatising, that bring people out of their heads and let them connect with others who share their experience.

British author Ruth Whippman argues in her book America the Anxious that the most important idea for combating modern ills is connection. She claims that ‘the most significant and most reliable source of happiness for human beings is our relationships with other people: friends, family and the wider community. Our happiness, or lack of it, is almost entirely dependent on the quantity and quality of our social connections.’ That’s a huge shift in emphasis for how we live or aim to live our lives.

The focus here is simple, how to be in contact with other people. It seems so blindingly obvious but we’ve lost contact with this idea. We now spend an absurdly small amount of time with actual real people and we’re suffering because of that. These initiatives are all about ways we can connect with each other, whether that’s dropping into a pop-up dinner and spending an evening with others, or a weekend in a Cornish Estate meeting like-minded individuals and boogying under mirror balls in the trees.

There’s connection – getting to spend time with other people – and there’s community – getting to spend time with the same people. We know we’re loosing this too. That our communities are fragmenting, that there are now distances between us caused by moving for work, or long hours at our computer screens, or just having our energy sapped by day-to-day living. We’re not getting the opportunities, or giving ourselves them, to show up in our communities anymore. But have you wondered why you love coffee shops – it’s often not the coffee. It’s being around other people, just brushing against them. And those Third Spaces, those bits between home and work, are popping up and getting our attention. Whether that’s an actual place near home that we go to again and again, or a pub that grabs our attention and time beyond the microbrews on offer. 

There’s an explosion of interest around creativity and all the quite brilliant things creativity can do for your everyday life and personal wellbeing. And it’s now easier than ever to participate in creative communities and environments, as well as to get yourself making and doing. This could be in the form of a monthly talk where you get insight into what inspiring creatives are doing (and meet other creatives over free croissants and beer – though not at the same event / time); or a new place that reimagines what galleries can offer the public and how you can participate in the art world; or a network of people making something that gets them thinking about how their brains work; or a poet who uses her own craft to cure. Creativity isn’t just for the arts professionals, its for everyone.

Curiosity is a profoundly wonderful thing, but sustaining an engagement with the world of ideas and keeping a life-long interest around learning can be tricky. Places now exist to spark our imaginations, to inspire and teach, and to above all encourage our curiosity. We need to keep ideas alive and meaningful in our own life, at whatever stage we might be in.

There’s a twin approach to being a person in the world – one side looks out, to how you can connect, be part of a community, find purpose beyond yourself; the other goes inward to who you are and how you function. Here’s that emotional resilience bit, the part we’re now getting in school, but if you’re a grown-up you might have missed that piece. Places like the Empathy Museum, The School of Life and Street Wisdom have us on catch-up about those social and emotional intelligence skills.

Happiness is a term that is much derided, but it’s a serious business to get to a place of being, well, umm, you know, happy. With the burst of interest in positive psychology, and an abundance of support now for self-care and self-actualisation and all those other self-thingy’s, this category is all about those shiny in an innovative way places that can get us to our happy place. Table your natural cynicism and surrender yourself to the joy bit. 

This category is all about the search for meaning. We’re finding that identifying with something beyond yourself can bring perspective and meaning into your life. We’re not talking about traditional church though- this is all about the non-secular ways we can connect to something greater. We’re finding the places, maybe a Sunday Assembly of a different kind or a forest bath in a local park or some place to get outside yourself and feel – in a good way – small. This is all about bringing back that sense of awe and scale. 

As if life isn’t complicated enough—relationships, family, work, meaning—the whole upheaval of technology, social media, rapid social change also now get thrown in. If you are, like us, feeling lost amongst all those shifts, there are ways to reorientate yourself, whether that’s by getting back to basics, slowing down, or untethering yourself from tech and residing in the analogue life for a while.

This could also be labelled “distraction sickness”, writer Andrew Solomon’s wonderful term for this.

We now know that just looking at pictures of nature can help us feel good. Getting into nature as often as possible is key to our wellbeing, but somehow we’re not yet doing that. We’re lost in our minds, or our urban/suburban spaces. We no longer integrate green and blue places into our everyday lives. This section is about raising our relationship to nature up the agenda; making it something vital to us again.

When things go wrong in our heads or in our lives, we tend to prioritise an individual, private, and removed from the world way of dealing with it. But what can actually help us the most is getting outside of ourselves and helping others. When we give back, it does wonderful things to our minds and emotional health. When we raise other people on our personal agendas, we start to feel better. Doing good, does us good.

We spend an enormous amount of time at work, and yet many of us have very complicated relationships with the way we earn our keep. That’s not helped by shifts in what we can expect from a job: we move around tons in our professional lives and no longer have the stability of jobs for life, our expectations around work have skyrocketed, there’s a pressure on us to find ‘the one’ career in the same way we need to find ‘the one’ person, and the work-economy is shifting at a fast and furious pace, rendering some jobs obsolete and bringing in whole new sectors. How to deal with the shifting carpet tiles of the work-place? New co-working spaces and teaching institutions are helping us rethink our messy relationship with our working lives.

Experiences of awe and wonder can provide a corrective to the everyday challenges that we all face. According to Dacher Keltner at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center who led a multi-year research project on the universality of awe, its effects are wide-ranging. Our experience of awe has many pro-social impacts, like community integration and improvements in physical health (it’s the only emotion that has been found to reduce inflammation), impacting our curiosity and sense of purpose, and awakening our mind, taking us from self-interest to a collective one. In this category, we’re looking for those places that help us build awe in our everyday lives.

Exercise your body, exercise your mind. Moving releases stress, improves sleep, helps your overall mood, decreases tension, improves self-esteem and combats anxiety and depression. We’ve traditionally separated the mind/body, but now we’re realizing the importance of rebalancing the connection and hierarchy between the two.

Our cultural institutions already offer the possibilities for creating spaces for personal as much as social change. This category teases out how the two – our mental wellbeing and our cultural spaces - might work differently together. It asks how as visitors we might also shift our role, our way of engaging, even our why for showing up at museums, galleries and other types of arts venues in the first place.  If you feel lost, lonely, depressed, even anxious, would this be the first place you would come? Maybe not, but maybe it could be?

With all the above to think about, what else could you possibly need? Well, sometimes we need to find those places that don’t just help us get through the generic blah but help us get through the specific blah. You know those situations that some of us find ourselves in - like divorce, aging, addiction, bereavement, you know the stark adults bits. The events rather than just the conditions of someone’s life. The universals that we all have to deal with on a a personal basis, the life confusions and challenges that we often pathogise rather than acknowledge and work through.

Wow, that’s a lot (isn’t it?) but maybe we’re still missing some categories. If there’s an area that’s pressing that you think we should cover, let us know in the comments or by email, and we’ll find a way to bring it in. Remember we’re just getting started to and will add to this list as we get going.

Navigate from here.

Have you ever been lost? Totally stuck? Grasping for something? So much so that you’ve sat in front of your computer, not knowing what to type into Google, not knowing where to look, so you’ve simply typed ‘help’. You had no idea how to square that work situation that was escalating, you didn’t know how to get beyond the heartbreak of losing someone you love, you didn’t have a clue how to get your aging parents to listen to any of your well-thought out advice, your boss was driving you crazy, your kids equally so, and you were knackered beyond compare. So, you just typed ‘help’. And really what you were doing was looking for the answer to a really simple question: ‘What can I do?’ But the answer still didn’t come.

If Lost Start Here attempts to answer that question by exploring each week exactly what you can do. We’ll cover a café that deals with anxiety, a museum that can teach us about empathy, a group of blokes hanging out in their sheds. We’ll get to an organization that offers mental health walks, another that focuses on getting out of our heads and into nature. We’ll feature a festival that encourages creativity, a community allotment project that takes on aging, and a collaborative art project that invites participants to make connections, material and otherwise.

This platform will focus on what we believe is an emerging new sector that’s all about how to be a person in the world. This includes initiatives that range from inspired classes and smart idea sessions, to hands-on practice studios and maker sessions. Initiatives that have arisen across different sectors, away from just wellness to the domains of culture, science, and the humanities. Initiatives that are people-centered, have a deep appreciation of experience and design, are open and accessible to all, and are often playful. Initiatives that represent something that people can return back to, again and again, and offer a longer-term relationship to making something work better (so not the quick-fixes).

Other people, or maybe you, are building the frameworks and creating the structures to help people negotiate their lives, from multiple perspectives and in very different ways than what went before. There’s a sector developing that’s aims at helping our emotional and psychological well-being, but it hasn’t yet been pulled together as an effective and necessary response to all our life’s problems.  

If Lost Starts Here attempts to do just that, to respond to the conundrum of tons of advice, shifting evidence and approaches, and the very real question of where and how you can actually do this. As you read through, your bit is to find the thing that appeals to you, to show up to something and see how it goes. To engage.

So, let’s get started…