How Do We Know We're Doing It Right?: Essays on Modern Life

by Pandora Sykes

Friendship works best in tandem, when one is a little more up (to pep) and the other is a little more down (to be pepped).6 So what happens when everybody is frazzled, everybody is weary, and everybody is frightened? Who the heck props up whom? Loneliness can bond people together, but it can pull us apart. When everyone needed each other the most, a lot of people felt neglected.

I was humbled by the words of writer and artist Josie George, confined to her home due to illness long before the rest of us became locked down – and without the respite of park walks and supermarket trips. ‘I have learned not to treat life as a waiting room,’ she writes.9 ‘Instead, I look at this new day in front of me.’

The paradox of choice is a theory coined by the psychologist Barry Schwartz to describe how choice has become just as much a straitjacket as a liberation.

The difference is now we no longer compare ourselves with our peers past whom we stroll, but the perfect strangers past whom we scroll.

At the heart of wellness is deficiency. The idea that we are broken, suffering from a sort of neurasthenia – a nervous exhaustion caused by the stress of modern, urban life, where symptoms include tiredness, aches and irritability.

my mother once said that the only thing more exhausting than raising me must be being me

Wellness presents itself as forward-thinking – with its wearable gizmos and performance apps – and yet it is based on one of the oldest principles of patriarchy: that women are dirty and that a woman’s virtue depends on being perfect inside as well as outside.

It strikes me that what we should be seeking is not self-care, but self-respect. Dignity and faith in ourselves which is more than skin-deep. Something that does not offer a dream catcher – a false protection against ambivalence or trouble – but that seeks a sense of peace and private reconciliation.

The irony of pregnancy is that at a time when many women would really rather be rendered invisible, you become extraordinarily conspicuous.

this concept is known as arrival fallacy: the idea that success is a finish line,57 and that once we’ve ‘arrived’ at the end of this yellow brick road, a rainbow will lead into a pot of golden happiness.

Reading is a crucial part of my mental health. I don’t want to say that it’s ‘self-care’, as that almost trivialises it and makes it sound temporary. Rather, it is and has always been, an essential part of me. It is probably my defining characteristic. Me without reading is like me without food. I would wilt and become silent. I don’t read because it is ‘better’ than watching television. I read because I don’t know what else to do.

‘The woman who does not require validation from anyone is the most feared individual on the planet,’