19 Things I know.

1.

You don’t have to follow most rules: there is no consequence for breaking them. You will be told the rules to make a good photo, or the rules about your career, or how the world works. They are figments of your own anxiety, to squeeze you into some unnatural shape. There’s no need to be gainly or artful; laugh in the face of standards. Almost any way you behave can be construed as following any rule, so you can never be sure you’re following it or not. Learn to collaborate with the world, find the real boundaries to your agency. Sometimes rules will come with consequences, which you will just need to face.

2.

Repetition legitimises. Do something once and people will think you’re insane. A second time and you establish a pattern. On the third try people are used to it, the shock of the new has faded.

3.

There’s a view going around that language is simply a vehicle for taking meaning, which exists, say, in my mind, and transporting it to your mind. Words are a window to some realm of pure thought, which the reader can gaze through to determine the truth about the propositions we expound. Language is an instrument: you can point at something and say a word. The word is the thing, it’s meaning. Language is something in excess of the world; something which makes our experience legible, but which is not required.

In this view, the highest virtue of writing is clarity; everything pertinent to your point goes in the text; anything that gets in the way of the reader climbing into the new reality you build has to be cut. Communication is just exchanging information, even if that information is just how something felt to you. Good communication means that your intercolour has gotten what you intended to impart. In fact, everything is just how things are to you. We go around saying: do you love me, do you love, do you love me?

If there is some inside of you just waiting to get out, how did you know what was on the inside in the first place? How do you know that there even is an inside? One of the problems with the ‘window’ theory of language, is that it can’t explain how you know what’s going on inside. There is a constellation of sensation and emotion and then you say that you are ‘excited.’ But you could be fearful or aroused or happy. You just say that because that’s what you have been taught. You haven’t really looked at what’s going on, what’s really happening. And if you did, and if you invented a language all of your own, then nobody would understand you. There is no beautiful, cool, sepulchre to retreat to, where you can be all yourself. Everybody knows what’s going on.

4.

The best tomato sauce is made by braising an onion, two cloves of garlic, and two tablespoons of olive oil in two tins of san romano tomatoes. You continue until the onion is translucent and the olive oil has emulsified into the tomato juice. Once this happens, blend. The result is an undeservedly creamy sauce. My mother overturned 40 years of habit after a single spoonful. Now, there is always a tub of this in her freezer.

5.

Every podcast is a podcast about ideas that matter. It’s just that podcasts, as a genre, don’t matter.

6.

A therapist is not a coach, and maybe you just need a coach. Coaches are people you go to with a specific problem, for a definite outcome. They move you through a sequence of psychological and practical steps to actually get where you want to go. You can get coaches at everything now: writing, business, studying, productivity, social media, copywriting, dating, fatherhood, psychedelics, fashion, whatever. There’s a whole world of ways in which you can improve.

The thing is with coaches—and this is a fantastic business proposition, if I were therapeutically inclined, I would absolutely become a coach—is that they attract the coachable. These are people who know what they want and are willing to persevere until they get it. It’s a self selecting group: the unmotivated and unwilling are weeded out.

Being coached is a limited form of change. You can go from making poor fashion choices to constructing an entire gestalt that suits your body. There will be some internal movement—dressing well requires that you want people to notice you. Only once you are comfortable with attention will you exist with confidence—More load bearing beliefs, will go untouched. There’s nothing wrong with that. Someone being frank about your limited shortcoming can do you a lot of good.

For some people, coaching isn’t enough. They have arranged their life around ignoring changes they need to make. They may be a woman telling themselves ‘maybe next year he’ll tell me he finally wants children,’ or a father telling themselves that they ‘really need to work, my children need the raise!’ whilst their toddlers grow into teenagers. The siren sounds in their life. No amount of coaching will help these unfortunates: they haven’t gotten to the stage of even accepting change. A coach is what they need next; first they need their ontological gestalt reconstructed. That’s what therapy is for.

7.

Self-pity gets a bad rap. I was sexually assaulted when I was 19, and there’s no good way to say that when you’re sitting down with someone for coffee. It can feel like you are being stalked by some feral creature, just outside your peripheral vision. One made up of the reanimated organs of sea creatures and stitched together from your discarded skin; attached to you through a long rotted umbilical cord.

You have to let yourself feel sad for the cosmic injustice of whatever birthed the beast in the first place. You have to give yourself the pat on the back that nobody else will. It’s a good deal better than ignoring the familiar, as they have a habit of sticking around and forcing their way into your life no matter what. Paradoxically, making friends with it robs them of their power. Even if that power is the feeling that you were wronged by your terrible ex.

8.

You are standing all wrong. Whether you know it, or not, you are leaning back, knees locked and hips thrust forward. This is the reason your back hurts. Relax your knees. Take a moment to push your hips back, way back, to the point that you feel like you are almost tipping forward. Check your alignment in a mirror. You are, finally, standing up straight.

This is the natural relation your body has with gravity, and it will feel all wrong. Your senses are lying: you have become accustomed to error. Eventually, you will catch yourself in the wrong posture and correct yourself, then soon you will stand straight. This effect will extend to your entire life—you can stop yourself doing whatever it is you feel like doing, whatever is habitual and what feels like ‘you’ and find the freedom to do something different, explore your options, even if they don’t feel like the best thing in the moment.

9.

Don’t feel proud of your pain. An inner darkness doesn’t set you apart, nor give you some insight lost to others. You can see yourself set apart, alone; or you can face the truth: your pain is boring.

10.

It’s old hat to say eat your vegetables, but you should eat your vegetables. There are few easy victories in life, including a vegetable in every meal is one of them. This can be as simple as some spinach in a smoothie, or a side salad with lunch. You cannot eat too many vegetables; they aren’t fattening, there’s something for everyone, and they make you feel clean from the inside. Even cabbage. Braising a cabbage steak in an unreasonable amount of butter makes it finally palatable.

11.

Once a meeting at work ran late and I was late for therapy, or I was going to be late for therapy at any rate, and this got me really anxious so I emailed my therapist every five minutes on the train journey from the office to the clinic. She was bird-like with long calipered legs like spindles and a stooped aged back. It was early days when I didn’t know what I was doing. In the session she didn’t acknowledge the emails, but just talked me through the minute details of what had just happened. And then the next week, when I was on time, we talked through my waiting at the door and how I felt as I sat and how I wondered about whether my shoes should stay on or come off and my hopes and dreams and what I saw and felt all broken down and without preconception. I saw with someone else’s eyes some great pattern, some current, of my life that was all the big things but all the little things as well; every gesture and word and choice and I was I ‘did’ myself wherever I went.

12.

The best response to stupidity is laughter. Somebody once told me that we shouldn’t stop companies from polluting: they not only made jobs, but also made housing cheaper in the polluted area. At the time this felt like somebody had reached into my head with a stick blender and my brain was now dribbling out of my ears like soup. The argument had a certain internal logic to it, and, as it turned out, was microeconomically sound. I guess there are upsides to pollution. But really engaging with the meat of the argument would have been too much, so all I did was laugh and say that’s dumb. You don’t have to engage on the same level that life is presented to you.

13.

Acid is the missing key to good cooking. People can sear and salt and add the right amount of fat to almost anything; some people can chiffon and brunoise and emulsify and braise and marinade, but they don’t get the acid right. Don’t believe me? Next time you’re making soup, taste a spoonful. Then with another spoonful add a single drop of lemon juice. The second spoon will be fragrant with a depth of flavour that is unwarranted. The chemistry is that some flavours are soluble in fat, and some in acid. I keep a bag of lemons in the fridge, and about five types of vinegar in the cupboard since I’ve learnt this. You’ve got to get the acid right.

14.

It’s better to think of your Self as a party, or an Event, a geological process or breeze, something shattered or warped or otherwise beyond repair, a cadaver arrested in decay; so that you don’t hope for cure, or the disease to be purged, or that you can stand outside of your own history. An academic can’t be an academic without a university, and the university wouldn’t be that institution without the professors. To hope for a different past is to rearrange the whole world.

15.

I know that it’s possible to lose something as basic to you as breathing, and that once you’ve lost it it’s never coming back. I used to play the violin, and I was really really good at it. The kind of good that meant people forked over money to hear me play. Now I haven’t picked up my fiddle for almost a decade. I was mistaken about what my talent was: talents aren’t things you feel amazing at, talents are what you are good at that everybody else struggles with. I didn’t feel talented at music, so I threw it away; spent my time improving myself, working on my weaknesses. Now, one finger injury later, I can’t play at all.

16.

If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.

17.

When you wake to the soundless dark and it seems as if an ocean was pressing down on your chest and your capillaries scream at the pressure it is the same darkness that humans saw in caves and under the first naked stars and this gives me some comfort that in the grand scheme of things there is something we have all seen that is unchanged since primordial time.

18.

Psychiatrists keep the good stuff, the pills that actually work, behind lock and key. These aren’t your run of the mill SSRIs. They’re more potent than that. They’re your opiates and your barbiturates, and your lithiums and your benzos. They’re the drugs which really sort out your head. You’re given them and it’s like clouds have broken in a curdled sky. The thing they show you is that it’s all in your head, everything you think about yourself, other people, even the world. It’s all made up. And whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it to yourself.

19.

The work is over when you can interrupt yourself and then continue in silence.