A Life of Your Own

A(nother) little old book on life, purpose, and other simple things

Know what you want(?)

Marion Milner (1900 - 1998) was a British writer and psychoanalyst. She is widely considered a pioneer of introspective journaling, not in the least due to a little book called A Life of One’s Own, published in 1934 under the pen name Joanna Field. In the book, Milner recounts her seven-year-long introspective journey beginning in 1926. As a young woman, she had everything going for her — a good relationship, a higher degree (not a given for women of that age), and a socioeconomic status that gave her freedom most of her contemporaries didn’t have. And yet, she felt empty; dissatisfied with her life.

She decided to start journaling. Why journaling? Why not consult a professional or read books on psychoanalysis (all the rage at that moment thanks to Freud)? Milner writes:

The need for such a method in these days is obvious, a method for discovering one’s true likes and dislikes, for finding and setting up a standard of values that is truly one’s own and not a borrowed mass-produced ideal.

Tell me that doesn’t hit the bull’s eye in 2024.

Early in her journey, Milner decides to investigate her ‘wants’ hoping to find what she misses, but she quickly finds that her wants are not her own. Her wants, the desires that occupy her mind, are what society tells her to want.

Well-paying job? White picket fence? 2.1 kids and 1.8 pets? Do you genuinely want those things or does the world tell you to want them? (All answers are valid, of course.)

To figure out what she truly wants, Milner begins to note “a small catch of each day’s happiness”, or the moments in a day when she feels genuinely happy. That, however, turns out to be quite a challenge. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to the moments she lists.

Let no one think it is an easy way because it is concerned with moments of happiness rather than with stern duty or high moral endeavour. For what is really easy, as I found, is to blind one’s eyes to what one really likes, to drift into accepting one’s wants ready-made from other people…

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(Read The Essence of Life for insights from another century-old little book on happiness and purpose.)

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Pay attention (but not like that)

What Milner does learn, however, from her small daily catch of happiness is that it concerns mostly moments when her attention - as she calls it - widens.

Whether it’s playing tennis or repairing socks, when she stops worrying about hitting the perfect serve or not pricking her fingers, when she allows her body to do what it knows to do, Milner finds a hint of inner peace. Sounds a lot like flow to me. Building on this thought, she distinguishes two types of attention: narrow and wide. Narrow attention is all about self-interest, about doing what is expected of you (be productive! Make money! Hustle!). Wide attention is letting go. In her words:

… all the things which I had found to be sources of happiness seemed to depend upon the capacity to relax all straining, to widen my attention beyond the circle of personal interest, and to look detachedly at my own experience.

You open yourself up so that the world flows through you.

If this sounds a bit like Eastern philosophy to you, you’re right. Milner is the first to admit that she is drawn to (and draws from) Eastern philosophies like Taoism.

She brings everything together with the final addition of something that we now call psychological androgyny — we all possess ‘female’ and ‘male’ traits and when the world pushes us too far into a direction we cannot be ourselves in (alpha male, anyone?), we find ourselves adrift.

In her concluding words:

I had undoubtedly been quite at sea about how to live my life until I had learnt to make that active gesture of separation and detachment by which one stands aside and looks at one’s experience. And it seemed that my reluctance to do this was due partly to the fear of what I might find there, but also to difficulty in allowing the internal male and female to interact.

In 1940, four years after A Life of One’s Own was published, Milner started training as a psychoanalyst. She graduated and began practicing in 1943. She continued to pioneer methods of introspection - journaling, doodling, and so on - until she died in 1998.

Let me finish with a paragraph from one of the obituaries that appeared after her passing:

Her last years were, physically, a struggle against increasing deafness, blindness and wobbliness; but her mind was wonderfully alive till the very end, her warmth, curiosity, humour and interest in other people intact. At the age of 93, she asked me to help her on to the swing in our garden, saying she hadn't been on a swing for 60 years. She remained beautiful, and was always elegant, in her idiosyncratic, many-layered, textured and harmonious way.

A life of her own, indeed.

Q: Do you journal? Good/bad? Would you recommend it?