About Being Human
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
William Blake
I wanted to say 'why the long face?'
Sparrow perch and play songs of long face
Burro buck and bray songs of long face
Sings 'I will swallow your sadness and eat your cold clay
Just to lift your long face
And though it may be madness, I will take to the grave
Your precious long face
And though our bones they may break and our souls separate
Why the long face?
And though our bodies recoil from the grip of the soil
Why the long face?'
Joanna Newsom, from Saw Dust and Diamonds
"Another is penetrating him, furrowing him with suffering, and this other, who has been transformed into a torture machine, is the handsome lad whose venomous splendour he has been admiring. Beauty is painful, beauty is frightful. Behind its appearance is revealed the unbearable horror of the Universe."
Jean-Paul Sartre on Jean Genet from Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr
“Everything that can suffer, does suffer. Everything that can die, will die. You have suffered, you will suffer much more, and a lifetime of your suffering will culminate in your death. When you can muster genuine gratitude for all of that, then you will have made the kind of progress that is not easily reversed. To develop sincere appreciation for this opportunity to be born in a brutal world, not of your making, to struggle and fail time and time again, to feel repeatedly lost, bewildered, frustrated, and hopeless, to swim in this ocean of misery, and, ultimately, to drown in it—this is the beginning of wisdom. You must embody overwhelming gratitude for the opportunity to fail repeatedly, with no guarantee of eventual success, and to wade cheerfully into a doomed struggle against time and your own limitations. You clamber toward your own death across a landscape of thorns, broken glass, and the corpses of those who have gone before you. Would you have it any other way?”
William Ferraiolo in Meditation on Self-Discipline and Failure
There will come a time in your lifeWhen you will ask yourself a series of questionsAm I happy with who I am? (Am I happy with who I am?)
Am I happy with the people around me?(Am I happy with the people around me?)
Am I happy with what I'm doing? (Am I happy with what I am doing?)
Am I happy with the way my life is going?(Am I happy with the way my life is going?)
Do I have a life? (Do I have a life?)Or am I just living? (Or am I just living?)
Do not let these questions restrain or trouble youJust point yourself in the direction of your dreams
Find your strength in the sound
And make your transition (Make your transition)
Do I spend too much time thinking and not enough doing?
Did I try my hardest at any of my dreams?
Did I purposely let others discourage me when I knew I could?
Will I die, never knowing what I could have been or could have done?
Do not let these doubts restrain or trouble you
Just point yourself in the direction of your dreams
Find your strength in the sound
And make your transition
Make your transition
Make your transition
There will be people who will say you can't, but you will (you will)
There will be people who will say you don't mix this with thatAnd you will say: "watch me" (watch me)
There will be people who will say "play it safe, that's too risky"
And you will take that chance, and have no fear (no fear)
You won't let these questions restrain or trouble you
You will point yourself in the direction of your dreams
You will find the strength in the sound and make your transition
Transition Galaxy 2 Galaxy
i thank You [...] for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
doubt unimaginable You?
of all nothing—human merely being
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
e e cummings (excerpt)
What is anxiety?
A state of mind, that co-emerges as a bodily state of sensations and emotions. Anxiety is what we name a feeling of ‘negative’ excitation that brings discomfort, from mild to acute. Anxiety is the shaking of the heart, twisting of the throat, clinching of the stomach that we feel when, or in parallel to when we are scared, worried, uncertain about something we wish was clear; when we want something and we can't be sure if we’ll have it. When we don't want something, and we’re not sure if we can avoid it. Anxiety is always one step ahead of us, both in time, as we notice that we are already anxious, but also as a state of preparation for something that is or might be coming.
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.
William Blake from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“I forever stand at the pillars of your existence where fear will not seep through and torture you, on my clock which is 24/7 fear does not exist so remember that it’s a temporary illusion and kindly ask her to leave and that her name is doubt.”
Lily wasp akk Chadd Curry
"Behind the world we live in, in the distant background, lies another world standing in roughly the same relation to the former as the stage one sometimes sees in the theatre behind the real stage stands to the latter. Through a thin gauze one sees what looks like a world of gossamer, lighter, more ethereal, of a different quality from the real world. Many people who appear bodily in the real world do not belong there but to this other world. Yet the fact that someone fades away in this manner, indeed almost disappears from reality, can be due to either health or sickness".
Soren Kierkegaard - from 'The Seducer's Diary'
'The word in Tibetan for hope is rewa; the word for fear is dokpa. More commonly, the word re-dok is used, which combines the two. Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long there's one, there's always the other. This re-dok is the root of our pain. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.
In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put "Abandon hope" on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like "Every day in every way I'm getting better and better".
Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can't simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us from the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what's going on, but that there's something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.
Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. that's the compassinate thing to do. That's the brave thing to do. We could smell that piece of shit. We could feel it; what is its texture, colour and shape?
We can explore the nature of that piece of shit. We can know the nature of dislike, shame and embarrassment, and not believe there's anything wrong with that. We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better "me" who one day will emerge. We can't just jump over ourselves as if we were not there. It's better to take a straight look at all of our hopes and fears. Then some kind of confidence in our basic sanity arises'.
Pema Chödrön - from 'When Things Fall Apart'
"The cosmic humor is that if you desire to move mountains and continue to purify yourself, you will ultimately arrive at the place where you can move mountains. But to arrive at this position of power, you will have to give up being he-who-wanted-to-move-mountains so that you can be he-who-put-the-mountain-there-in-the-first-plce. The humor is that when you finally have the power to move the mountain, you are the person who placed it there - so there the mountain stays."
Ram Dass
The therapy session is a meeting of an expert and a novice; the expert explains to the novice what for them life is all about. As the novice doesn’t know what life is actually about and where to start, he asks questions, and tries to follow the expert. As the expert talks and the novice listens, the expert starts questioning their own assumptions and expertise. Eventually the expert becomes a novice, a beginner who’s ready to learn again..
ADHD, the Sense of Isolation and the Potential Benefit of Psychotherapy
ADHD is a psychiatric term and diagnosis; its use has increased drastically in the past 20 years (McKechnie et al, 2023). We are not sure if we are seeing a growing change in the human condition, a growing tendency to frame and diagnose a particular mind/brain diversity, or both. With this increase of ADHD diagnosis and prescription medication, the personal experiences of people who are diagnosed or identify with the condition has largely been affected. One of the most common experiences of people with ADHD is the sense of isolation. Their constant attempts, failure and unique frustration in trying to fit into a world that seems to run in a different pace, different wave-length and glorifies traits that they simply cannot master, creates a sense of never being good enough to be fully ‘a part of’ their others. The growth of diagnosis and ADHD identifying people has changed this unique experience of isolation, being more common and known and hence potentially, less isolating? Perhaps, yet being labeled and a part of a community doesn’t necessarily makes one feel less isolated.
ADHD can also be seen as an umbrella term for a personal/relational phenomena rather than a diagnosis of a condition. A way of being and experiencing the world somewhat faster and multidirectional - which makes focus and close emotional connection confusing. The only way to develop a helpful ‘diagnosis’ or approach to this term, is by seeing not just its context and variation, but also the strength people can have in learning how to fully be the way they are, and accommodate their contexts, rather than try and fit into the mould of others who are fundamentally different. The interesting fact is that due to this experience being no longer a rarity, it is starting to be understood in western culture as a common variety of human experience, hence the growing use of the term neurodiverse.
Society’s demand for attentive communication skills and focus creates a sense of existential ‘mismatch’ that drives many people into extreme isolation, depression and despair. Often in relationships, the emotional needs (wish of feeling ‘held’ and emotionally understood) of partners, friends and family members to people with ADHD, creates a sense of constant failure, or a need to compensate and become somewhat better than others, in order to become enough. This tendency of ‘better to become enough’, is also a symptom and in-line with our capitalist system that always drives for growth in order to sustain itself, and by that is paradoxically Unsustainable. A similar tendency develops in the experience of ADHD, where more or ‘better to become enough’ is never enough ,consumes resources and leaves some individuals in a state of perpetual emptiness.
It is often the same thing that makes us feel strange, estranged and separated from others, that can also help us connect to others and feel understood. Although psychotherapy, counselling or any form of talking therapy cannot improve the experiential reality of this phenomena, it sometimes helps the individual grow a better understanding of their common deficit and how to live with it better. Working on emotional communication in a close therapeutic relationship in long term psychotherapy, can improve the individual’s ways of bearing confusion and difference in personal relationships, but can also help in finding out what the person actually wants and what is the context that would suit them better, instead of only ‘trying too fit in’.
In therapy, clients experiencing such tendencies can create a pattern of commitment to listening to how their mind works and how in some ways it can feel different from others and isolating; but in other ways, can become a way in by learning to express better and bear the confusion. This can happen in close encounters when we feel enough or sufficiently understood, first in therapy and eventually in other relationships. In therapy with ADHD we can learn to become more present with our ways of being with ourselves and others, learn how to identify it and then first-and-foremost to let it be. In some sense we can learn that ‘there is no way to become better’ yet there is a way to become better connected to the way we already are.
For the past 12 years I have been offering psychotherapy in Hackney. Though I found and made a home in Hackney, 6 years ago my partner moved to Vietnam. I started visiting and each visit turned longer than the one before, until I started splitting my life and my work, spending half a year as a psychotherapist in Hackney and half a year as a psychotherapist in Saigon. Working as a psychotherapist in hackney, and also in Vietnam had resulted in doing half of my work online. I was presented me with the challenge of connecting and being present through a video call. I think that the quality of presence is easier to land in person, and harder online, as there are more potential distractions and absence of the bodily presence of the other. To get closer to my patients and become more present on the calls I realised that coincidently I am required to feel closer to my computer, and become one with it. I noticed that this ability to feel close in psychotherapy online is something that had developed over time, by doing it over and over again, struggling with it, and finding tricks to come back to presence and be able to touch the client’s heart through the screen. I think a part of what developed over time is the ability to imagine my clients presence beyond their image on the screen. I get ideas and senses and emotions coming upon in the interaction, similarly to how this happens during in-person psychotherapy sessions. I am still learning how to settle, listen better, and get closer in person and online.