I’ve always thought a lot about myself; not in the sense that I thought highly of myself, but just, I thought a lot about myself. I called it self-awareness: the ability to sense an awkward silence, anticipate a reaction and patch up the story before anyone noticed the gap. So when friends accused me of talking about myself too much, I was stunned. Wasn’t this my virtue? My almost-saintly commitment to objectifying myself?

It may be that I am impossibly defensive, but I’ve always struggled with the idea that ‘mental health’ means there’s a fixed state of normality, and any deviation from it is some kind of faulty wiring. There is suffering, and there are cures, yes. But the notion that panic, hallucinations, sadness or coping mechanisms all point to some fundamental brain imbalance has always irked me, and I welcome these theories increasing debunking. Sure, in times of crisis, I’ll lean on that model as a way of articulating who I am in language another person might understand. After all, it’s a lot more in the common parlance to say ‘I have a phobia of cliffs’ than to try and explain it in quasi-mythological, psychoanalytic or risk-averse terms.

There are few states as maddening as anxiety. It leaves you nauseous, breathless, and just so goddamn shaky. You spend your days reminding yourself you (probably) will not die, but furious at all the ways your body reveals its doubtsabout this. For years, I would think I could keep my composure – control over what someone thought of me -, only for my trembling to betray just how little control I actually had.

In a letter to Fliss, Freud famously stated that the ‘aim’ of an analysis is to transform a person’s neurotic misery into everyday unhappiness. This rather poignant quote mutated over the years, and is now often cited as the ‘aim’ of an analysis is to help a person ‘love and work’. While I love the optimistic-nihilism of Freud’s words, its later iteration has always grated me. Why work? Why must my symptom – the very piece that refuses to bend to the Other’s will – come to work for me? Is it not quite late-stage capitalist to demand that my useless enjoyment be made useful?

Unless you work in a high-octane industry where The Wolf of Wall Street is treated like a role model, admitting that you’re a competitive person can feel a bit icky. Especially outside of the office (in friendships or family dynamics) being openly competitive is often seen as a character flaw. But as always, when a moral ideal becomes an unquestioned good, it’s worth asking how that ideal was formed.

Whenever I’m really busy, I have this habit of writing out a too-perfectly organised to-do list. I make sure there’s just enough time to fit everything in – except, of course, eating, enjoying and living, and then I get through a day or two of this over-the-top schedule. For a while, I can live on the feeling of control and ‘smashing my goals’ it gives me, but by day five, the need to overthrow the ruler always kicks in. I might go for a drink with a friend, and get just silly enough that the next day is a write-off. Or I’ll stay up far too late watching something completely pointless – and I mean until 4 or 5 am late – so that I’m equally useless the next day. Should both of these plans fall through, I’ll feel sick instead. Basically, without fail, I need to sabotage my schedule at least once a week. I then proceed to lie in bed torturing myself over how much I have to do, how I’m doing none of it, and I’m ultimately a useless and ‘bad’ person who just can’t seem to stick to a routine like everyone else!

I intended to write about self-diagnosis and how, despite embracing subjectivity, we remain surprisingly rigid in our approach to mental health. But as I began, I realised we’re no longer in that era. Our post-pandemic moment feels less like millennial self-reinvention (think tote-bag activism, workplace revolution fantasies) and more like a 1930s newsreel; all looming crisis and fractured trust.

With no claim to political expertise, I turn instead to Lacanian discourse theory, which I also can’t really make any claim on. This is a highly simplified take, naturally prone to gaps, but it might help clarify how certain ideas gain weight. Since every era begins with ‘the word’, ours is surely ‘pandemic’, which I’ll use as an exemplification throughout.

As psychoanalysis fell out of fashion in the mid-1980s, psychoanalysts retreated with it. Their theories remained largely inaccessible to anyone unwilling to dedicate thousands of hours and money to the work. Then, as critical thinking became more and more crucial, psychoanalysis did not do enough to confront its problematic underpinnings (castration, penis envy, Oedipal attachments, you know the ones). Admittedly, once you read enough Freud, you realise how remarkably queer and progressive his work is (he was the first to speak of a sexual spectrum), but again, you need to dedicate hours to this stuff to get there.