Relax with a book
Stressed? Why not relax with a book? And get paid?
Now, I make no claims to be a psychologist, therapist or psychiatrist. If you are worried about your mental health you must get professional help. I can only speak from experience. After a spell working in a stressful environment I quit and moved to publishing. A wise decision.
Nothing beats settling down to proofread or copy-edit a manuscript to wash away large doses of paranoia and stress.
Why is editorial work de-stressing? Because the proofreader or copy-editor has to focus. You focus on every page, paragraph, sentence, phrase, word, piece of punctuation, and space. Sometimes you will become completely engrossed in a book, sometimes not. But you will always concentrate fully on the words on the page. It is hard to think of anything else while editing or proofreading. Your mind is absorbed with minutiae. There is little or no room for the noise which usually fills our brains, the scramble of disorganised thoughts conspiring to unsettle us, making us anxious.
Bermondsey idyll
I joined a lovely group of people working in a big, dingy office in a derelict corner of Bermondsey. This was the seventies. Bermondsey has changed! The office was next to a tannery. Hides and salt were strewn in the yard and on the pavement. The summer was hot. Flies settled on manuscripts and proofs. The pong was hideous. But the work and company were bliss.
I shared the editorial department with four colleagues. One left school at fourteen, another at eighteen, the third after a spell at “Slough Comp” and a redbrick, and the fourth after Harrow and Oxford. Very different backgrounds, very different educations. All were excellent proofreaders and copy-editors. All loved language and words. We made a balanced editorial team, powering our way through manuscripts and proofs. And who taught me the job? The guy who left school at fourteen, of course. A brilliant editor and teacher.
Alongside this, I wrote for legal journals and newspapers, contributed to textbooks and reviewed law books. Nirvana! Generally, I had a whale of a time. Stress and anxiety were in retreat.
Feeling stressed?
If the pandemic has left you a little frustrated, frayed, frazzled and generally upset you could try proofreading and copy-editing as a career. I can’t promise that it will cure you. But it certainly helped me!
Learning proofreading and editing skills is a first step. Settling down with our editorial skills course is no guarantee of sparkling mental health. But give it a go. You may be surprised. And you get paid to sit down and relax with a book.