‘My life was not as I would like it… it might be in my power to make it different’

Is there anyone else eating at this Italian restaurant? A flourish of napkins. 'L'Amore Perdonera' playing. I open my rucksack and pull out the book I brought with me from London. This book is the record of a seven years' study of living. My pasta arrives, and I carry on reading, fork in one hand, book in the other. The book claims to offer a way of finding out what one truly likes or dislikes. Some weeks back, I had been ordering in a coffee shop with a friend, and after what felt likes ages of hesitation I said: 'I'll just have what you're having.' Later I felt ashamed, not because I set much store by which drink I'd chosen, or not chosen; rather, that moment of indecision seemed to capture something of the quality of my weekends and evenings, times when I wasn't working or committed to doing something with another person. I read on. It is possible to handle ideas with apparent competence yet be utterly at sea in trying to live one's knowledge. The moments of recognition were accumulating as I turned the pages of the book. 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, and to evade the continual day to day sifting of values.

At the age of twenty-six, Marion Milner, the author of the book I was reading, began searching for 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. She kept diaries, made lists, doodled, and observed her childhood memories and everyday experiences to become better acquainted with her mind, her wishes and desires, often finding herself surprised by what she found. She called her book A Life of One's Own, and it was published in 1934. I was the same age as Milner when she started her project. It was almost as if the book had been written for me. The coincidence felt like a reward for the following of impulses, for sitting alone in an elaborate but decrepit Italian restaurant in Ramsgate. It was gradually dawning on me that my life was not as I would like it and that it might be in my power to make it different…

Mad thoughts

A Cadbury's eclair is wrapped in gold-silver foil, with purple lettering. Inside the lockjaw caramel of the shell, there is something more yielding, something like chocolate. I'm holding a single Cadbury's eclair in my hand. Where did I get it? In school. Some unexpected reward or treat. My father sits in a chair on the lawn. The lawn is vast. I am very small. I offer the eclair to my father, holding it out in the palm of my hand. He says thank you. I watch him unwrap the eclair and place it in his mouth. A few moments later, I'm crying and inconsolable. He ate it. Now it's gone and I'll never see it again. I'm bereft. Someone leaves the house and returns with a thin blue polythene bag, filled with Cadbury's eclairs. I can have as many as I want. But they're not the same as the one that's gone. It's not the same, I say through my tears, my nose streaming. I am made entirely of regret and loss. What makes anyone think they are equal to the task of being a parent?

The house in Jodhpur had a fireplace and chimney. We never lit a fire there. It was cold in winter, but we could move to rooms warm with winter sunshine, on the other side of the house. I think of that house being built around a longing for England, arranged around the totemic comfort of a fireplace. But it is difficult to ignore the desert. A lumbering two-blade fan in the vast dining room, verandas full of shade. Once a storm blew sand inside the house. Do things appear large in memory because I see with the eyes of a three-year-old? Or are these just the dimensions of colonial audacity? Schools named after John, and Paul, and Mary. Lined up for assembly, being taught to blow my nose, what to do with the handkerchief after. Mine, small and scalloped. My father's: large, white, folded, ironed. When I have a cold I ask for my father's handkerchiefs and complain when they are starched. My mother has placed a pot, red with a pattern of flowers, in the fireplace. It is an endless source of wonder that a pebble dropped through the chimney will fall into the red pot.

Chimneys, roofs, adults. These are mysterious. It is wrong to run naked into the living room when guests are visiting, to ask your mother's help with washing. Shame is coupled with skin. I will lose my plush monkey with his long tail. Everyone recognises that the monkey is important, everyone looks for him. I am loved. My brother learns to ride his bicycle down the stairs. I catch flu. I am loved, day after day. My mother is at work, and I miss the stories she reads to me, so I start to read to myself. The words and their sense arrive all at once. Later, I will use these words to betray my family. Their values, their love, their secrets.

Even now, I think of my plush monkey, and I want to cry. Even now, I wonder if I can find him again.

***

Milner first had a brief psychoanalysis in America, when she was there on a Rockefeller fellowship. Psychoanalysis was popular in her milieu of intellectuals and psychologists. It represented a new and exciting set of ideas during a time when Sigmund Freud was still living and practising in Vienna. A few years later, when she had returned to London, she attended a lecture by the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, one of the best-known British psychoanalysts, who was highly regarded for his writing on play and infant–Mother relationships. Milner decided to start analysis again, this time with Sylvia Payne, a doctor and psychoanalyst who served as the president of the British Psychoanalytical Society during wartime years. Milner's diaries from the late 1930s are witnesses to her psychoanalysis – they record observations by her analyst, the movement of her thoughts, dreams and memories. Psychoanalysis would always remain a part of Milner's life. Later, she had periods of analysis with Donald Winnicott and the Canadian analyst Clifford Scott, as well as practising as an analyst and supervisor herself.

I first saw my psychoanalyst when I was twenty-three; I still go for analysis three times a week. I can see that my analysis will end, but psychoanalysis will stay a part of my life – it has become internal to me now. My ten years of psychoanalysis and my reading of Milner are intertwined. When something Milner had written struck me as an insight, it was sometimes because months of psychoanalysis had quietly prepared the ground for the idea to come into thought. And it was with Milner's help that I could reach for the words and images to represent the subtle and sometimes shattering movements in myself that were initiated by sitting in a chair, or lying on a couch, and talking – week after week, year after year. I have relied on Milner and psychoanalysis as supports and allies in allowing myself the full complexity of my mind. And in writing this book I realised that when I was searching for a way of describing what leisure meant to Milner, and what it has come to mean for me, in trying to capture both its potential for upheaval and disruption, and its gentle and nurturing qualities, I was actually trying to describe what I have also experienced in psychoanalysis.

Reading and rereading Milner's books, I noticed that the same thing seems to happen in each of them. She discovers something about herself, she is surprised by her mind. Sometimes, across the books, she is surprised by the same thing – the discovery of the same fear, or same reason for anger, for example. And in the writing it is clear that she arrived at her discovery after the same painstaking search. It is as though the something intransigent about living and being alive has to be learnt over and over again. To me, this circuitous quality of her oeuvre is akin to psychoanalysis. Is this a failing? In her book about painting, Milner notes that beauty or happiness can be destroyed by a too direct striving towards them. If psychoanalysis has an indirect or accidental relation to happiness, then surely it would be fair to ask who has the time, or money, to speak to a psychoanalyst – one, two, five times a week over ten years, or more – in order to achieve that happiness.

We live in conditions of stark economic and political injustice and such speaking is indeed a luxury. But when I hear people dismiss psychoanalysis as an indulgence for those who lead a life of leisure, or when I hear leisure itself described as something that is only relevant to those who have yachts and trust funds, I feel like we are missing the point. In reading Milner, and in psychoanalysis – which I can only afford and sustain because I am fortunate to have an analyst who asks for a fee that is commensurate with my means – I have found that, alongside all the things that are worth fighting for, surely it is also worth including the leisure to reckon with what is difficult and inadmissible, in our lives and minds. We are accustomed to thinking of leisure as free time, and in that capacity it is crucial – but leisure can also be time to make free.

The first time I saw my analyst, I sat in the chair opposite, not knowing what to say. I'm listening, he said. Those were the first words he said to me, not hello, not welcome, not tell me about yourself or what brings you here today. I'm listening. At least that's how I remember it.

***

When I was twenty-five, I had a brief relationship with a man about sixteen years older than me. He had many preferences, and underneath each preference there was something hard and prickly. Rules, really, presented as preferences. I wasn't to text or call some days of the week, when he wanted to be absorbed in his work. If I did, it meant I didn't respect him, I was too young to understand the importance of what he was doing. I couldn't be late to meet him. He was always about to call things off, so it was imperative I didn't give him further cause. One evening, meeting at the Barbican, I realised I was three minutes late. I texted to say I was already there, in the toilet. Then I sprinted the remaining distance between the Tube stop and the building. He noted I was late. I offered him the box of couscous I'd made for our dinner, because I couldn't afford to eat out, and he was particular about splitting bills.

The relentless contingency of the relationship felt like passion. I was in love. He wanted to talk to me about his ideas, his past. I felt chosen. But I was never the right listener. I asked too many questions, or too few. I was too quiet, or nodded too much; once I suggested he read something and that led to an hours-long argument walking in the far reaches of south London, roundabout after roundabout of summer flowers. I wasn't listening. In those months I was often very late for my psychoanalysis. After some weeks my psychoanalyst asked if I could try to come ten minutes earlier. I was about to reply that I couldn't, because I was always entangled in interminable arguments with my boyfriend, but just before the words came out of my mouth I became conscious of the absurdity of my excuse. The awareness didn't last long. When my boyfriend broke up with me in the middle of a lunch date – because it was so obvious to him that I wasn't listening – I was as involved, as keen and as desperate for things to carry on.

I'd all but forgotten about him when, eight years later, I saw him across a crowded room. In that moment, my twenty-five-year-old self came back to me, and I was appalled. How quick I was then to sacrifice my wishes at the altar of his preferences. Where had I acquired such hunger for self-immolation? Why did I act like my time or my thoughts didn't matter, like I didn't have a life of my own? I was carrying a copy of Sheila Heti's Motherhood in my bag that day, along with a green notebook and a fountain pen I'd bought to celebrate signing the contract for this book. Later, taking the train home, I read: 'The most womanly problem is not giving oneself enough space or time, or not being allowed it. We squeeze ourselves into the moments we allow, or the moments that have been allowed us.'

It is clear to me now that the problem Heti describes – of not giving oneself enough time – is akin to what Milner diagnosed when she was writing An Experiment in Leisure – the problem of the person who responds to questions about what to do with whatever you like, my dear. During that relationship, it was probably clear to my psychoanalyst that I was living in my boyfriend's time. In asking me to come to my sessions earlier, he was gently nudging me towards inhabiting my own time. I couldn't make use of his help then, at least not in this particular matter of claiming my own time and space. I was too determined, to borrow Heti's words again, to occupy 'the smallest spaces in the hopes of being loved'. Motherhood hadn't yet been published when I was twenty-five, and I had not read An Experiment in Leisure. Would I have recognised myself in those lines? Would I have been able to ask myself why women are expected to give something up in exchange for love? If the book existed then, would I have picked it up?

A few days after we ran into each other this former boyfriend emailed me, to break the ice. I wanted to be concise in my reply, hope you're well, let's catch up when we see each other next. His reply was swift. Catching up was presumptuous. A step too far. I was welcome to say hello, and he'd say hello back. It came back to me, the feeling of always putting a foot in the wrong place. How had I not noticed how bizarre his demands were? I felt rage, anger that perhaps belonged eight years in the past. I asked my psychoanalyst if he remembered this boyfriend, the one who broke up with me because I didn't listen. Yes, he said. My session that day was on the phone. Who is he, I said, standing under the arches of St Pancras Station, to tell me what I can and cannot do?

For a long time I thought I couldn't offer the kind of listening that men needed, something like the finely attuned ear of a psychoanalyst. I tried, and I couldn't understand why I failed. Now I wonder if any sign of life from me compromised the listening. Perhaps not listening meant not just not hearing, but also not obeying. Now, sometimes when I am writing by myself, or having a long soak in the bath, doing nothing, dreaming, drifting, dozing, having refused an obligation or demand, I marvel at this, because it would have been so easy to have never allowed myself such time, to have thought it unjustifiable, to have thought myself inadequate or undeserving. And then I think, all this really was born out of not obeying, of not listening to others, of learning to listen to something in myself.