In her book, Romanticise Your Life, Beth McColl advises how to appreciate the small things in life …
‘Romanticising your life’ may be a familiar trend. During the pandemic, we saw seemingly infinite videos of flower-buying, breakfast-preparing and journalers inviting you to slow down, find beauty in routine and mundanity, and imagine you already live your dream life. Feeds may have swallowed the trend, but writer Beth McColl insists romanticising became a life-changing practice for her. “When I was in the grips of depression, all I could do for the first of however many months was open my eyes in the morning and drag myself through the day,” she says. When she could leave the house, she would walk. “I would breathe, and I would put one foot in front of the other.”
She walked to local parks, where her sole task was to breathe and observe: the sun, kids, couples. “That was all I had because I had nothing else,” says McColl, “They were beautiful moments and they were real.”
In her book, Romanticise Your Life: How to Find Joy and Romance in the Everyday, she presents a selection of stories and practical advice around themes of being present, valuing friendship, dating and solo travel. She sees it as a companion piece to her first book, How To Come Alive Again: A Guide to Killing Your Monsters, a handbook on handling mental illness.
McColl is known for her frank but kind advice on break-ups, mental health and personal growth. Her brutally funny takes went viral online, so she started writing – an unexpected outcome. “I had no plans to be a writer,” she says.
Romanticise Your Life offers practical advice for anyone who might need it. “Anyone who thinks, I’m okay, but I don’t have that much pleasure, I don’t take that much time for myself. I don’t see the point, I’m perhaps waiting for life to become really beautiful,” says McColl.
HOW TO ROMANTICISE YOUR LIFE
Life is full of “free” pleasures, she says. You can make a bingo card of things you might like to see that year – a unicycler, handmade gifts, being liked by a grumpy cat! – small things that, if we just wait around to notice them, can bring us joy.
Poetry cemented the profundity of this practice for McColl. Poets daring to propose that life’s quiet mundanity outlasts its moments of excitement. “It was extraordinary and reassuring,” she says. Mindfulness, gratitude, appreciating the little things in life are other names for the practice, McColl says, but “the effort is to have more peace, more pleasure, more appreciation for the small stuff.”
McColl’s writing is strongest in her storytelling. Her friends cleaning mud off her face as a teenager, reminding her to celebrate her friendships. A magical one-night encounter with a dishonest man, a disappointing stay in Boston and an anxious solo journey to the Greek coast all taught her to be kind, patient and strong for herself, rather than spiral in shame.
Romanticising your life isn’t glossing over serious problems, McColl says. Grief, chronic or mental illness often blind us from seeing joy because we need professional help. “It was only when I had done counselling and I was finally on an antidepressant that worked that I was able to leave the house,” she says.
Consumerism sometimes seems like an answer, she says. “I have tried to shop my way out of every crisis or personal identity panic in all of my adult life and it has never worked.”
It’s not necessarily useful in a work context either. “You don’t have sway when you’re selling your labour,” she says. “I didn’t want [the book] to be polemic about areas of your life that exist in an unjust space.” It was important for her to be realistic about what her book could do – not redefine the self-help genre, but instead offer guidance to those lost in a tricky period of their life.
She believes personal writing can do that, even when online audiences can sometimes be unforgiving. “I’m quite good at oversharing, at just saying the uncomfortable thing,” although usually with a bit of space between her and the difficult time. “I’ve felt vulnerable, but I’ve never felt uncomfortable with it.”
Romanticise Your Life: How to Find Joy and Romance in the Everyday, Orion Spring, by Beth McColl.
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