I’m her daughter. I live in California, but I’m always aware of my other home, in England, where my mum lives and I grew up. I try to get there as often as I can, and when I can’t I try to grasp how bad the situation can be, piecing together phone calls. Dad’s: “we’re doing better, she’s still having some trouble in the morning”; my brother: “have you spoken to the parents; they aren’t coping very well”. Trying to work out who to believe and what is real.
But I also get her condition: I’ve been through therapy, had one particularly bad period of anxiety over Grad School, and I know what it is to have a panic attack. And through these experiences, I’ve become interested in psychology and therapy, wellness and self-help, all subjects that I’ve found to be somewhat, for want of a better word, unsexy, and unspoken about. Let’s just say mental health is not a subject that comes up easily when you are having a drink with someone.
Joe’s Daughter is about two parallel worlds. It’s about my mum and talking about mental illness. And it’s about me and discussing ways to preserve our mental health. I’m curious whether the two can exist in the same space and conversation.
Joe’s Daughter will cover two somewhat arbitrary locations: the UK, my home and that of my family; and California, where I now live. It will be a sampling of everything and anything, in both places, that are about supporting ourselves: therapy, positive psychology, taking a walk, watching a movie, seeing a friend, getting out of the house.
In David Smith’s humorous anxiety memoir Monkey Mind, he wrote of one moment where watching the film Singing in the Rain helped him through a bad episode. Marian Keyes in her cookbook Saved by Cake talked about how baking cakes got her through days of depression. My mum has been building her confidence through sewing, which is the inspiration for our logo and graphic identity.
Joe’s Daughter is as much my love letter to her, as it is a place to work out different approaches to ourselves, our world and each other.