how did you realise you were a bad person?

The social standard this culture offers is one of controlled, placated solitude. Its narrative often insists that you’re surrounded by toxic people who are trying to hurt you, and the only way to ever become the person you’re meant to be is to cut them all off, retreat into a high-gloss cocoon of talk therapy and Notion templates, and emerge a non-... See more

That ‘individual responsibility’ idea is present in so many messages from awareness campaigns: the idea that it is our duty to reach out to loved ones and services for help; the suggestion that mental health support should come in the form of a ‘service’ at all; the emphasis on individual tools like therapy, meds, self-help, mindfulness and apps to

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Locked in the terrifying prison of one’s neuroses, where the increasingly narrowing paths to liberation always seem to invoke the language of individual healing, flourishing or self-improvement (therapy is wonderful, but it’s strange that a private, commodified exchange seems to have become synonymous with practising a public ethics of care), the m

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Therapy is not bad. It is often good. But, I think, it is easy to find tools in this world to force our focus inward. It is encouraged that we constantly check ourselves and check in with ourselves and self-care ourselves. To live externally is to live more dangerously; it is to live a life that takes up public space, a life that is messy and confu... See more

I’m curious about the way it’s impacting our inner monologues. The constant self-analysis, the picking-apart, the internal work . In collusion with capitalism and social media and the digital panopticon, seeing ourselves through a therapized lens means regarding the self as the ultimate project. It’s easy to forget there are other ways to live.