About How to Live
From the ages of 11 to 19, I spent countless hours being tested, analyzed, and probed for a seemingly undiagnosable, secret, and incurable condition. I took numerous IQ tests, underwent yearly psychometric batteries, was weighed, measured, and plotted on height-and-growth charts that I was too small and underweight to land on. Doctors asked me things I didn't know, never asking what I did—and no one ever asked what I felt. Had they, they might have discovered that what felt intolerable were my feelings themselves.
When I was 25 years old, I was finally diagnosed with the condition of my childhood: I had a panic disorder. I've spent the last two decades reading about and working hard to understand what it means for our truest selves to be overlooked.
“How to Live” explores how and why we neglect ourselves, and others. It asks questions not just about psychology itself but the people who helped shape the field. We are all flawed individuals, and those whose contributions to the field of psychological thought are no different. Many of their own personal traumas informed their work, and the conditions they sought to measure and treat. I’ll introduce you to Christiana Morgan, patient and muse to Jung, whose personal demons made their way into the Thematic Apperception Test, a personality measure we use to this day, and whose legacy was erased by the very men whose work she made famous.
Often, I will use myself as a test subject and take old diagnostic measures (ex: defunct IQ tests, out-of-date personality tests) and try out a variety of present-day-therapies (ex: EMDR, Micro-dosing, Ketamine, and Somatic Experiencing Therapy) taking the reader through the process, and the end result.
Throughout it all, my aim is to interrogate the human experience, examine why we are the way we are, and how we can become who we were meant to be, all to better understand ourselves and live deeper, more intentional lives.