I thought there would be cake too!

After reading Katharine Welby-Roberts new book, I Thought There Would Be Cake, I was left with one deep-seated thought: Me too!

I also thought there would be cake. With all the promised freedom, money, and available time, I thought this whole ‘adult thing’ would be a blast. Where’s my party? Where’s my cake?

There is occasionally cake, but it seems to invariably come with health warnings, high sugar content, and painful comments like ‘oh, I’ll just have the one, small piece.’ Instead of cake there are debilitating gas bills, addictive box sets, variable speed limits, disturbed sleep, and hair-growing-where-it-shouldn’t-and-not-where-it-should. Isn’t there someone in management that we could talk to about this? Where’s the ‘growing-up complaints department’ around here?

Living with people

What gets me the most, however, are people. It’s this ‘other people thing’ that causes me the most anxiety and connects to me most personally from Katharine’s book. I sometimes think life would be so much easier if it were not lived with others.

People are wild cards in the cake-deprived game of adult life. As Katharine points out, ‘Other people don’t just make failure scary, they make any acknowledgement of wrongdoing scary.’ She goes on to say that at any time we’re not able to present ‘perfection’ to the world, we get sucked into a scared, reactionary and defensive posture.

This idea that ‘if I’m not perfect then I must be failing people’ is something that I’ve struggled with throughout my adult life. I either need to be perfect, or else defensively and adamantly convince people that I am. Katharine poignantly describes the permanent feeling of guilt that comes with this idea. It is a feeling I recognise all too well.

It’s encouraging finding solidarity with Katherine, but also to be reminded by her that I don’t have to be perfect (realistically I just can’t be), and that when people are not pleased with me it doesn’t actually mean the sky is falling down.

Living with depression

Throughout my time as a youth worker I have dipped in and out of both depression and anxiety. Sometimes these have come as a result of great stress, and other times there seems to have been no obvious reason other than my mental health deciding that I was due another season of turmoil. Thanks, psyche!

I was asked to write this post from a ‘male perspective’ and when I talked to some friends about it, they commented that it does seem a little easier to admit you have mental health difficulties as a woman. I’m not sure that I’ve always found this to be true, however – or at least it might not be as true as it used to be. In my work with young people I’ve found that both boys and girls have opened up about their mental health. Even among my older peers there seems to have been a shift. I have been in several situations over the last year with men that I’ve only just met where the conversation had quickly moved on to our emotional battles.

As a guy then, I found lots to take away from I Thought There Would Be Cake. In her chapter about ‘comparisons’ for instance, I empathised deeply with assuming that I needed to be exactly like the public, confident, and totally-together surface projection of people that I admired. Despite knowing that their public face is, in reality, unlikely to be the whole picture of that person. This false comparison has tripped me up more times than I can remember.

Living without cake

The heartbeat of Katharine’s book is a warm reminder of God’s love in the middle of mental and emotional turmoil. She reminds us that knowing we are infinitely loved by a perfect God gives us a foundation of self-value that can be found nowhere else. The solidity that God’s love provides for our identity and emotional character is essential and absolutely irreplaceable.

So, while there might not always be cake, there is always a chef who knows how to cook us healthy food that helps us grow. There is a composer, who knows how to weave even dissident melodies into beautiful music. There is a lover, who will always draw us to Himself. Even when we are unsure of our own souls.

There’s not always cake, but there is always God – and He always loves.

Thanks Katharine for the reminder!