Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
|
“It’s Fine If I Suck Sometimes”
Sara Hussain for Vogue India: In 2026, I’m No Longer Interested in ‘Working on Myself’, aka the exhausting “hyper-policing [of] our thoughts and language until having a personality feels like a risk assessment exercise”.
Everything began to feel like a diagnostic exercise. If I’m tired, it’s burnout. If I’m irritated, it’s dysregulation. If I don’t reply to a message immediately, I’m either protecting my boundaries or avoiding intimacy. I am never simply annoyed. I am always processing.
To be fair, some of this shift was necessary. Therapy helps. Naming patterns helps. Talking about things publicly has helped people survive things they otherwise might not have. Awareness is progress. My awareness, however, has tipped into surveillance.
Being in therapy these last few years has been great, essential even. But I feel what Hussain is talking about here. One of the helpful things I’ve learned is that while you do need to change and grow, you still need to be yourself. I forget who, but someone once said that the job of an editor is to make a writer sound more like themselves. That’s probably true of the therapeutic process as well, including the part we’re responsible for.
