At 6am on a bleak October morning in 2006, I was driving down the North Circular in London to a job I hated. I usually kept the radio low, a background murmur to keep me focused on the road. But that morning I turned up the volume allowing the buoyant bassline from Amy Winehouse\u2019s Rehab to reverberate through my Ford Ka. As Amy\u2019s rich voice conveyed the depths of her despair, I stared blearily at the empty road ahead and wondered how I\u2019d taken such a wrong turn.<\/p>\n
It was a disorienting time for me. Two years out of uni, I\u2019d accepted a job in the back end of London\u2019s Docklands area, in a freezing cold, windowless office, staring at four giant screens to check whether any of the world\u2019s stock exchanges had technical faults. My shift pattern meant I would wake at 5am, then endure a male colleague relentlessly monitoring me \u2013 the way I had to monitor those blinking screens. From two desks behind, he would send me Myspace messages with inappropriate observations about how tight my outfits looked.<\/p>\n
But it was better money than my previous job, an admin role that had been sold to me as a graduate media position. And perhaps it would look good on my CV if I just surrendered to the grownup notion of a sensible job in finance. (Who did I think I was, expecting to be paid to pursue my passion as a writer anyway?) Maybe one day I\u2019d be able to clear some of my debt and move out of my parents\u2019 house. But I hadn\u2019t seen my friends, who were partying every night in east London, for more than six months. In my bleakest moments, I\u2019d will a minor car accident on my drive in, in the hope I wouldn\u2019t make it to my desk. The moment in Rehab when a man tells Amy he thinks she\u2019s depressed had never felt so close to home.<\/p>\n
double quotation markIf Amy could wade through all of this pain then I could surely stop writing myself off<\/p>\n
The weekend after I first heard the song, Amy\u2019s album Back to Black was released, and I rushed to HMV to buy the album on CD. Delving into her storytelling, I was astonished at her unflinching brilliance, but I should have known. Amy and I grew up on parallel tracks. As a teenager, she\u2019d play pool with my brother at our local pub in Whetstone, north London. We were both suburban girls who wanted something different, and found it in little retro dresses, tattooed men and raucous nights in Camden. I may not have been suffering a searing breakup, as she was when she wrote Back to Black, but I was lonely and despondent.<\/p>\n
Amy\u2019s visceral take on life, told through frank lyrics, arresting melodies and powerful vocals, shook me out of my stupor. If she could wade through all of this pain, all of this addiction, then I could surely stop writing myself off and get back out there.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
So I signed myself up to night school to study journalism, letting the money from a bad job pay for what I hoped would be a better future in magazines. I rang my friends and told them how low and cut off I had been feeling, and they gathered me up and placed me right back in the mix for those nights in Camden that fuelled me on. And I finally worked up the courage to tell my manager, a woman, about the office creep. It warned him off and, while it was many years before #MeToo would roll around, he thankfully didn\u2019t so much as look my way again.<\/p>\n
Before long I was still doing the 6am drives to Docklands, but when I finished there I\u2019d drive straight on to night shifts at newspapers, where I\u2019d write headlines and upload copy on to websites as the printing press whirred in the building\u2019s underbelly. I began to feel a burning in me again to do something I loved, and a new confidence that I might actually have a chance. Eventually, I was able to drop out of my dead-end role and get paid for doing the job of my dreams.<\/p>\n
Nearly 20 years into my journalism career, I\u2019ve written a book about how Amy and so many other immense female singer-songwriters have pulled us through our most heartbreaking moments. It\u2019s a testament to women\u2019s ability to restore each other in tough times. Love might be a losing game but, against the odds, loving myself was something I needed to bet on.<\/p>\n
I Hate You So Much Right Now<\/a> by Emily Phillips is published by Blink (\u00a316.99).<\/p>\n Share your cultural awakenings<\/p>\n You can tell us how a cultural moment has prompted you to make a major life change by filling in the form below or emailing us on\u00a0cultural.awakening@theguardian.com.<\/p>\n Your responses, which can be anonymous, are secure as the form is encrypted and only the Guardian has access to your contributions. We will only use the data you provide us for the purpose of the feature and we will delete any personal data when we no longer require it for this purpose. For alternative ways to get in touch securely please see our tips guide<\/a>.Show more<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At 6am on a bleak October morning in 2006, I was driving down the North Circular in London…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":956089,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-956088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=956088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/956089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=956088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=956088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=956088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}