On Lulls

I had imagined it might pass, more or less, unnoticed, my halitus from writing. Though lately, more people ask if I plan to return to these yellow pages.

It is not a voluntary retreat, I tell them, but a necessary pause while I learn, in earnest, how to be a psychologist.

A seasoned psychoanalyst recently warned me about the danger of thinking this way. The endpoint, he said, will only keep receding; some days my imposter syndrome is no different to the kind overwhelming you now.

I think about how writing was never incidental to psychology, but constitutive of it. An answer, in part, to a writing teacher’s insistence that one’s income and one’s writing function most optimally when independent of one another.

Lately, I return to this teacher’s advice wondering whether I am kidding myself. Whether I ought, instead, to simply give it up.

When people ask what it’s like learning to be a psychologist, I think of Dave, our plumber, who has been attending to our old pipes lately.

I am responsible for letting Dave in because the others sleep past eight; he is always unphased by my breast-y singlet and bed hair.

Observing him move around our messy house with indifference, I realise he is probably accustomed to these situations, a regular witness to people’s more private worlds.

While Dave dismantled various aspects of our bathroom this week, all in the service of making our lives easier to move through, it occurred to me that we are not in entirely different lines of business. The difference is my trade is concerned with the mechanics of suffering.

I feel new and clunky when it comes to this.

My clinical supervisor cautions me against becoming too preoccupied with competence. The best thing you can do, she advised, is remain open and stay on top of your own suffering so you are in the best possible place to attend to somebody else’s.

At this thought, I stood up, pulled on a jumper, and made Dave a coffee.

I made myself one too and returned to my laptop. By the time Dave had been and gone, I was still sitting there. I remained there all night, missing a literary event for a different writing teacher, one who now permanently lives in Athens and from her writing.

I pictured her at the wine bar, talking about her new book, while I sat at my desk with a bowl of pasta, formulating, one sentence at a time, a client who made no sense to me.

I imagined the conversation I might have had with her if I had attended – her talking about Athens and literary success before asking if I was still practicing. I consider if this was part of the reason I had chosen to remain home.

I am still writing, I would have said, only my practice has been relegated to the margins, refracted, often uneasily, through the formalities of science. And, despite all my effort, I am still told it is too colourful, too subjective, for the discipline.

Lately my writing has concerned itself with modern dating via a qualitative thesis. There is something deeply peculiar in studying what one is also living, while being asked, at least in part, to remain objective.

Qualitative research offers something of a loophole to this demand for objectivity though. It permits, even requires, positionality and reflexivity – a sustained practice of turning the gaze back onto oneself.

I take this practice up in a small black journal handed to me by G, my thesis supervisor. After each encounter with a dating application, or with dating itself, G advised I sit down and consider what my most recent experience brings into the work, and how it might impress upon the data.

That is, I am to figure out the ways in which I personally illuminate, or perhaps obscure, the ‘truth’.

I am interested in one mismatch in particular: human mating, and the way these evolutionary adaptations fire, or misfire, within the novel context of online dating.

Some weekends I feel this viscerally, ghosted online or sitting across from a bad date. Others, I feel lightheaded and free and wonder whether the thesis holds at all.

Over the past sixteen months, I have become adept at pitching my thesis at pubs and house parties, and even, with the open-minded person, on dates too.

One night, at a house party in the city’s west, I find myself alone in the courtyard with a doctor in training who is very interested in my research. I am less articulate than usual because I swallowed chocolate laced with magic mushrooms, though the doctor in training appears to follow me.

She tells me she sees online dating as part of a broader culture of risk aversion, that it offers the illusion of certainty in a space fundamentally shaped by uncertainty. I agree with her and feel unsettled that I had not arrived there myself.

In the car service home, I transcribe our exchange into an iPhone note for the black journal. I hover my thumb over the screen and bolden the words risk averse.

Each Monday, at 10.30am, G and I sit down over Teams to review my progress, which is slow. I often spend too long detailing reflections from the journal’s pages, which continues to grow faster than the thesis itself.

He is generous, always listening carefully, before reminding me that while I am doing a good job accounting for my implication in the material I am attempting to examine, this practice is ultimately a private matter – something that will not appear in the final thesis.

Remember, G says before we finish for the day, if positionality concerns what we know and believe, reflexivity asks what we do with that knowledge.

After the meeting, I sit alone in a café feeling vaguely reprimanded. The black journal is there beside my laptop. So is my phone, lighting up with a new email, assignment grade, client referral, case note, or match.

I switch desktops on my laptop and feel my shoulders soften. The severely minimal café suddenly feels less noisy, less oppressive. I open a folder of miscellaneous vignettes I have been failing to turn into an essay. Though reading them over, I feel embarrassed by their self-indulgent register and shut the device.

I open the black journal, and consider whether the constraints of science are as unwelcome as I say. Science, for all its formalities and restraints, offers something protective: structure, distance, sanctioned language. A way of speaking without the vulnerable exhibition.

Earlier this year, at a 30th birthday party, I watched an acquaintance pull out an enormous iPhone, which revealed screenshots of my writing circulating through a group chat. Only, she didn’t know it was my writing.

I remember the peculiar sensation of watching my own sentences illuminated in somebody else’s hand, detached from the room in which they were written. For a long time, I felt almost external to myself.

Writing, particularly the kind on these yellow pages, acquires unbelievable scale once it leaves the room. The idea that an iPhone note written in the back of a car can suddenly appear in somebody else’s hand on a bus in Canada or Prague has always thrilled me. Though lately, it has become a point of tension, even a source of inhibition.

A writer friend in Germany reassures me over the phone that she has not been writing for herself either. The detail brings not comfort so much as sadness. Still, she has been collecting experiences and paying close attention, which we decide is a form of writing in and of itself.

Her voice carries traces of Germany and morning time, as well as something much calmer than myself. I tell her about my clients, and my thesis, my body and its tensions, the weather turning colder, the bizarre speed of time, and the strange sensation that all of it is misfiring.

She reminds me that because my income and my writing are not intertwined, the writing itself does not need to be perfect. In an increasingly curated world, imperfect work is very necessary, she says before hanging up to make her new boyfriend pancakes.

After our call, I return to the black notebook, the pages of which reveal someone in a state of curiosity, confusion, and frequent disarray.

Someone shifting, often drastically, between method and disorder. Some days my position feels clear; on others, I cannot quite find my footing.

Yesterday, G noted that our work is growing, but that it requires more voices. It seems the anonymous flyers I pasted around Melbourne are not gaining much traction. You may need to advertise more deliberately, he said, staring into his camera.

So, if you have been dating online and can spare 30 minutes to speak to me about your experience, I would be grateful to hear from you. If you’re interested, you can register here. Whatever you share will remain anonymous.

In the meantime, thank you for reading, and for your patience with this lull.