Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 7

I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.

By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost. It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.

In part 1, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.

In part 2, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.

In part 3, I blamed everything on boiled potatoes (and allowing my everyday life to become too bland).

In part 4, I surveyed the rise of analytic philosophy and attempted to show how it rejects the spiritual and the emotional.

In part 5, I evaluated analytic philosophy and the limits of its conception of meaning.

In part 6, I identified the limit that the analytic method places on discourses of morality and responsibility. 

Part 7: What Pieces Are You So Scared Of?

I wasn't expecting to write this part in quite the mode I'm in at the moment. I've been feeling generally pretty positive and upbeat so far this spring, and was looking forward to rounding this series out with a similarly cheerful summation on the theme of healing and embracing a life that values emotional sensation.

But I had a bad weekend in a handful of little ways that left me feeling a bit on the low side. As ever when I get on a downer, I started to pull back from things, and especially from people. Anxiety sets in, loading every potential encounter with a hundred disaster scenarios.

There's a numbing process that's part of this, too. It's a defensive reflex, I think, shutting down the mechanisms of self-regard and self-care that identify the problem to avoid having to think about it. We're supposed to solve problems by disinvesting, stepping outside ourselves to look at them 'objectively'. This is supposed to make solutions clearer and less clouded by emotion. But sometimes the problem is the emotion, more than anything else.

In my head, at least, this sits side-by-side with the analytic method. They present themselves to me as the same process. For years I have embraced them as one, and identified all sorts of objective solutions to my problems - limited budget, for example, or shared living environments that aren't well cared for, or (when I was still living at home) the fact that my parents insist on listening to the radio news four times a day, making it completely inescapable.

The real problem, though, is and has always been the denial of inner sensation, the failure to attend to so many important dimensions of well-being, the determination to rise above 'meat'. I am starting to learn, though. Slowly, I'm thawing out.

It starts, perhaps predictably in my case, with music. Music has always offered the most purely emotional experiences of my life - I don't have the theoretical knowledge to analyse it the way I can tackle novels, films and now to a certain extent also video games. It's in music that I'm normally closest to engaging bodily - while I'm a terrible dancer, I'm also basically incapable of standing still when there's music playing.

And I have some incredibly talented musician friends. Look, I know no-one ever takes my music recommendations, but click that last link and listen to Sam's most recent album. Seriously, it's not long, and the last track is the first piece of music in a decade to bring tears to my eyes. It's five minutes that I can get completely lost in. Sometimes it's good to be lost.

Sometimes getting lost is exactly what I need. Some problems don't need the analytic distance of the cartographer - the map is clear, the map is the problem, the map shows you all too clearly what stands between you and the shining horizon. The map tells you what the walk is like, but sometimes you need to stop thinking about that and walk anyway. That's the point at which the map can't tell you anything useful.

Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 6

I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.

By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost. It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.

In part 1, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.

In part 2, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.

In part 3, I blamed everything on boiled potatoes (and allowing my everyday life to become too bland).

In part 4, I surveyed the rise of analytic philosophy and attempted to show how it rejects the spiritual and the emotional.

In part 5, I evaluated analytic philosophy and the limits of its conception of meaning.

Part 6: On Taking Responsibility

The concept of moral responsibility has been at the heart of my journey through analytic philosophy. The first philosophical system I encountered which inspired and moved me was existentialism, a position that has moral responsibility as its foundation and centrepiece. This stands in direct opposition to the determinism which characterised much of 20th-century analysis.

Science has long been thought to promise a perfect system for predicting human behaviour (I choose my words carefully here, since few practicing scientists have embraced this belief - it belongs more to the realm of 'popular' or at least establishment commentary). It's a classic modernist tenet, and for a while scientific discoveries did seem to be progressing in that direction. Neuroscience and psychology made great strides through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

Still, as early as 1942, Isaac Asimov could acknowledge, with his invention of 'psychohistory' in the Foundation short stories, that a truly determinist understanding of human behaviour was out of reach, prohibited by the fundamentally probabilistic character of quantum physics. This is not to claim that prediction of human behaviour is impossible, only that it can never be done with complete certainty.

Philosophers, who have been arguing with Laplace's demon for two centuries now, were slower to catch on. Even ten years ago, when I was in my first year at university, hard determinism was still discussed as a plausible theory, rather than merely a far-fetched possibility. So great was my determination (hah) to hold onto moral responsibility that I once refused to read an assigned article because of its determinist slant, which is about as defiant as I've ever been towards a teacher ever.

Determinism and scientism suit the analytic approach. They are theories of absolute knowledge and certainty, of everything in its place, clear and predictable. In denying the possibility of free will, they deny the meaningfulness of the aesthetic, reducing emotions, beliefs and principles to the purely causal.

This outlook has persisted despite the eventual demise of hard determinism. The philosophers who would have been determinists in a previous generation now begrudgingly begin their papers with 'we know that hard determinism is false, but...' and go on to argue that quantum randomness leaves the defender of free will no better off.

The point is not entirely without merit. Fundamental randomness does not guarantee a meaningful freedom of will. Free will theorists have long held that free will is a necessary condition of moral responsibility. The best they can claim from quantum theory is the existence of a narrow sliver of space in which freedom of the will might hide.

More insidiously, the post-determinists have targeted moral responsibility itself, even as free will theorists began to abandon the connection between will and responsibility (the resulting positions are myriad, and better covered in detail elsewhere). The essence of the new determinist argument concerns motivation, understood as whatever mental state in an agent results in their action.

An agent is morally responsible for an action, the argument goes, if their action is a product of a motivation in an appropriate way (that is, not subject to hypnosis or other control). Motivations, though, are products of the agent's character, and said character is a product of the agent's birth and upbringing. If we are to hold agents responsible for their actions, then, it seems that we must hold them responsible for their upbringing and their ancestry. This, the post-determinists argue, is absurd.

And, on the face of it, it does sound absurd. A person cannot literally be responsible for their own birth - this would distort time itself. This argument, the causal argument, seems to present a profound challenge to the existence of moral responsibility.

And yet... Let us come at this from another angle. Critical theories, such as Marxism, feminism and queer theory, recognise differences among birth circumstances as important social phenomena. The concept of privilege is vital to understanding these models, and their well-grounded demands for social justice.

These days, it is common to hear reactionaries crying that it is not their fault they were born male, or white, or middle class, or straight, or cisgendered, or able-bodied, or neurotypical. Strictly, they are not wrong - but then, you will find no serious feminist arguing that they are. What the reactionaries are doing, though, is relying on the same simplistic, causal understanding of moral responsibility as the post-determinist analysts.

Responsibility for the circumstances of our birth, for the privileges and attitudes therefrom, is something we take. It is not something we are born to, nor something we are morally entitled to ignore. The essence of maturity, of adulthood, is making this transition; this is the sense in which children are innocent.

Practically speaking, the act of taking responsibility consists in critical self-reflection, the willingness to examine our own behaviour and the attitudes which condition it, and the seeking of ways to change them where appropriate. It is the act of taking seriously our relations, both structural and specific, to others, rather than viewing ourselves as isolated particles predestined to bang into one another with whatever arbitrary results a crude social physics dictates.

Theoretically, taking responsibility requires detaching responsibility from the purely causal, embracing the messy illogicality of a putatively free choice to escape the fist of determinism. The result is not a neat theory; it has little of the clarity that analysis craves. But it is honest and liberating, and above all else it allows a hope for general, meaningful change that the determinist mindset can never offer.

(part 7)

Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 5

I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.

By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost. It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.

In part 1, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.

In part 2, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.

In part 3, I blamed everything on boiled potatoes (and allowing my everyday life to become too bland).

In part 4, I surveyed the rise of analytic philosophy and attempted to show how it rejects the spiritual and the emotional.

Part 5: Aesthetics and Anaesthetics

I only recently made the etymological connection between 'aesthetics' and 'anaesthetics', but it's hardly an earthshaking revelation. Aesthetics is (roughly) the study of art, a fundamentally sensory thing; anaesthetics make us numb, insensate. The common Greek root originally means perception.

It would not be too far wide of the mark to describe analytic philosophy as anaesthetic. Above all else, what analytic philosophy denies is the subjective. It is the search for objective answers to the grand philosophical questions. The whole analytic construction of 'rationality' opposes the value of personal perspectives, appealing to a transcendent reason which may or may not bear any real connection to the divine intellect of the early modern or classical rationalists.

But analytic philosophy undoubtedly has its advantages. The detachment it advocates can be absolutely crucial for some debates. It's particularly important when responding to criticism; one cannot, after all, take up the point of view of another while clinging to one's own. There are other ways to develop the ability to detach, but practice in the analytic method is a particularly effective and pure one.

(Note: it's far from perfect, as anyone who's ever pricked the ego or threatened the funding of an academic can attest).

And the analytic tradition in philosophy has real triumphs to its name, too; the systems of formal logic developed in the first half of the twentieth century are not just a huge step forward over their arcane predecessors. They are legitimately powerful tools of reasoning, at least within the limit of Gödel's theorem, and underpin much of modern computing.

Another important product of the analytic tradition, one that is rather more complicated to endorse, is its discourse on meaning. This is usually what definitions of analytic philosophy centre on, but the analytic discourse on meaning is almost exclusively linguistic - it concerns words and sentences, spoken and written. In aesthetics, on the other hand, languages are only a small subset of things that mean (the first part of this video has a pretty robust introduction to some of these ideas, referencing the omega of analytic philosophy, Wittgenstein).

And in aesthetics, meaning is a very different beast to the meaning of the analysts. It is lived, experienced, bodily, not a clinical study of how words point to things in the world. Analysts have devoted a great deal of work to establishing what it means to say something exists; in aesthetics, the question is simply 'is it felt?'

The modern technophile's - my - obsession with transcending 'meat' (as William Gibson perfectly put it in Neuromancer) is born of this analytic understanding of meaning, thought and reason. We disdain bodily hedonism for the 'higher pleasures' of the mind, and in doing so fail to realise that our 'higher pleasures' are really just contempt for other ways of seeing the world, other tools that are in their own way as valuable and in many ways richer than those we have learned.

Aesthetic comprehension, in a way, is a much more basic part of the human condition than analytic. This, perhaps, explains some of our disdain; a baby can feel, but only a sophisticated adult can 'really think'. That we can believe this while yearning for our lost, or innocent, or joyful childhoods is a testament to the spectacular power of the (archetypally white, male etc.) privileged ego.

(part 6)

Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 4

I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.

By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost. It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.

In part 1, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.

In part 2, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.

In part 3, I blamed everything on boiled potatoes (and allowing my everyday life to become too bland).

Part 4: A History of Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy

Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy is a landmark text. Russell's position as its author - author of one of the most influential histories of philosophy - is a testament to his stature and import in the first half of the twentieth century. If anyone is the father of 'analytic' philosophy, it is Russell; at very least, he was the first patriarch of its fractious family.

History is written by the victors.

Russell's career was built, founded, on the strength (or at least the success) of his attacks on the philosophies that preceded him; the British idealism of his teachers, and the late phenomenology of Brentano and Meinong that paralleled it. By the end of the 1920s, analytic philosophy was well-established, with Russell at its head.

His opponents were not just defeated, they were dead; Meinong died in 1920, at 67. Bradley, greatest of the British idealists, hung on until 1924. Analytic philosophy delivered triumph after triumph in logic and language, most notably in modernising formal systems for logic which had languished in an Aristotelian mode long into the Enlightenment. Since those formal systems underpin the computation sustaining this blog post, we can hardly reject the analytic approach outright.

But it bears asking what was lost to its triumph. Analytic philosophy is a cold, clinical thing, characterised by abstraction, a devotion to clarity pursued by stripping an object of any context that might introduce ambiguity. This is the mindset that numbed my body to serve my mind. This is the approach that relegates emotion to a backwater, nothing more than a hazard to reason.

The archetypal rationalists of the early modern period - Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz - would have had no truck with this division. For them, there was no great conflict between mind and spirit (mind and body might be a different matter, but body-as-pertaining-to-felt-emotion would have been spiritual to them, not 'merely animal' if there was such a thing). Their tradition, and the work of those who inherited it, from Kant all the way down to Bradley and Meinong, is one of unified, harmonious worlds in which things can only be understood as they are in relation to one another.

It is very hard, when tackling the metaphysics of the post-Leibnizians, not to chuckle, not to view their spirituality as naive, archaic, a product of a 'less enlightened era' in which people still believed in wooly notions and lacked clarity of thought. It is easy to see these men as clinging to religion in the face of marching progress. To do so is, at the very least, to overlook how many of them flirted with outright heresy in challenging the established religions of their times; Spinoza was outright excluded from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, and their sanction against him stands to this day.

While it would be presumptuous of me to present this as an account of the origins of modern critical thought, there are definite links; Marx and Freud, for example, both draw on ideas from Hegel which are fundamentally legacies of Leibniz - ideas that are political, economic and psychological cognates of the metaphysics of Bradley and Meinong. Marx in particular went on to influence a broad range of modern critiques not just in matters of economic class but also the discourse around race, gender, sexuality and disability.

Even the fact that, in anglocentric culture, we view 'philosophy' as something esoteric and removed from daily life can be attributed to analytic philosophy, a product of a simplistic and privileging attitude to the academy and 'academics'. What I hope I have shown, or at least plausibly suggested, is that philosophy is lived, is at the foundation of how we live, is stitched through life and culture in a way that is shaped by but also helps shape everyone who participates in it. The shape it has fitted me into has not been kind, and I am in so many ways one of the fortunate ones.

(part 5)

Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 3

I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.

By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost. It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.

In part 1, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.

In part 2, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.

Part 3: The Problem with British Food

Boiled potatoes are non-food. Without either flavour or texture, they are sustenance without experience, matter without properties, as close to the Lockean idea of the bare particular (no, that's not a euphemism, though I've just realised I missed out on a hell of a joke lecturing about them last week) as occurs in real life.

At least, they are when I cook them. I'm aware that various interesting things can be done with boiled potatoes, but I've never had much success when trying. It all seemed more effort than the marginally-improved results were worth.

I ate a lot of boiled potatoes during my PhD years. Money was tight, and I am a coward in the kitchen. Boiled potatoes are a very safe option for student cooking - it's not like they can get any blander from being overcooked, right? Yes, I could have mixed things up sometimes with rice or noodles, but that would have meant keeping rice and/or noodles in stock - more diversity of food means more money spent.

And I didn't really care that they were bland. I viewed eating - everything related to sustenance, basically - as a chore, something to be minimised. That doesn't just mean the simplest cooking possible, it also means the least attention-demanding food. The blandness itself became a kind of virtue, a way of reacting against my limited means; 'I can't afford good food? Well I DON'T CARE, SO THERE!'.

(Sidebar: I wasn't poor - in all sorts of structural ways, from parental support to a fees grant without which I wouldn't even have been able to start the PhD, I was well-off. But I was strapped for cash on a day-to-day basis for most of the four-and-a-half years).

Lots of other elements of my daily routine were similarly, deliberately anemic. I didn't care about them. I cared about the things that I thought 'enriched' my life - my work, my studies, my writing, music and gaming. All those things did, of course, greatly enrich my life. They all mattered to me, and still do.

But the quotidian stuff isn't meaningless, and one of the things I learned in counselling was how much I couldn't 'rise above it'. Quite the opposite, in fact - it dragged me down. Initially, I clung to rigid domestic routines to keep my budget under control, a strategy that worked but at a cost. The routine itself began to the object of my clinging, though, and therein became a problem.

When the disruption of decorating began to stress me out last summer, I initially identified my shattered routine as the cause of my mounting anxiety. I felt that if I could just get things back in order, I would stabilise. Only after the discomfort had almost boiled over into meltdown did I start to think that perhaps the routine itself - a rigid sequence of bland, boiled-potato nonexperiences whose only value to me was their place in the order - might be the problem.

I'm not actually eating much more healthily these days (and indeed, I'm still eating some of the same stuff - no more boiled potatoes, though). But I do try to think about what I'd like to eat before making decisions about buying meals. It wasn't hard to start developing actual preferences again.

(part 4)

Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 2

I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.

By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost. It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.

As for what boiled potatoes have to do with anything? Wait and see... 

In part 1, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.

Part 2: A Body with No Answers

I'm not going to go through everything I discussed in counselling. Not all of it is relevant, a great deal of it is probably extremely tedious, and the conclusions are likely obvious to all except the protagonist. My counsellor, Jules, was brilliant at drawing me out, getting me to reflect on myself without too much criticality. She didn't try to diagnose or explain, but let me draw my own conclusions and thus internalise each successive realisation.

I learned - perhaps it would be better to say 'reinterpreted' - a lot about myself in those five hours of discussions, but the standout experience is one that happened several times. When I was struggling, either for words or in discomfort, Jules would ask 'How are you feeling right now?' I never had an immediate answer.

In fact, I didn't really have an answer at all. Feelings are embodied things - they happen in the 'gut', the 'heart', sometimes the spine or the back of the neck. Jules would ask me, and (the first few times) specifically direct my attention to bodily sensation. I would frown, expecting an immediate answer (who doesn't know how they're feeling at a given moment?). When that didn't happen, I would interrogate my body, a technique I've learned for fiction writing.

And there would be nothing there. There were physical sensations - the chair, sometimes a headache or a dry throat, ordinary itches or aches - but no emotional ones. What I could identify of my emotions - usually a sense of dread about where a question might lead, how I might be pressured to change my behaviour - were 'head' things, and not sensory. It was the racing-thought, future-chasing anxiety seeded by stereotypes of therapeutic exercises ('Feeling lonely, you say? Okay, GO INTO TOWN AND START ASKING RANDOM STRANGERS FOR A HUG'), something that for all its unpleasantness is almost entirely mind, not body.

Trying to describe the silence in place of expected sensation is difficult at the best of times. I managed to be intellectually disturbed by the solid flatness of my chest - not cold or hard, like stone, just... there, like a well-plastered, plain-painted wall - but couldn't even feel afraid of it.

Occasionally, on the cusp of some realisation, there would be a vertiginous moment, a yawning, teetering on the edge of a bigger, more daunting perspective. That, at least, was a sensation, though mainly around the crown of my skull, sometimes spilling into my eyes as a headrush. It was all I ever managed to report to Jules.

I was self-reflecting the way I'd learned to reflect on everything else - Analysis, with a capital, historical A, a clinical process of standing outside an idea, surgically peeling away its context, tracing each vein and neuron one at a time. There's a time and place for that, perhaps, even when the idea is your own self, but it cannot, must not, be your only paradigm for thinking.

(part 3)

Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 1

I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.

By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost. It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.

As for what boiled potatoes have to do with anything? Wait and see...

Part 1: To Paint a Comfort Zone, First You Must Destroy It

First, the journey itself, or at least the closing chapter of it. This, by the way, is not a dramatic or melodramatic story. Probably it's quite underwhelming. It has no histrionics, no blubbering collapses, and the longest redemptive journey involved walking round the corner from my department building to the university's counselling service.

Proportionately to that, it starts with decorating. Having made this rather optimistic post about how my bout of decorating last summer might go, things actually went pretty well for most of the process. The schedule was met, and by the Sunday of the week after that posting, I'd finished all the decorating work. All that remained was the carpet, which was to be delivered and fitted, along with a carpet for the adjacent bedroom, on the Monday.

And then, about lunchtime on Sunday, we spotted that the boiler, which is in the other bedroom, had leaked a few spots of water from what looked like a badly-corroded valve.

Obviously, there was no way we were going to put a new carpet into a room where a boiler might need a valve replacing (where, indeed, the whole boiler might turn out to need replacing - it's a pretty old one, though - *touch wood* - still reliable). And it was a Sunday, so reaching the carpet fitter to discuss arrangements with him was going to take a while.

I can't quite put into words how I felt about this (more on this point in a later part). But to resort to tired metaphors, a stone sank into my gut. My chest felt tight, and I found my jaw clenching a lot. Even thinking about the emotional state I was in then is making me feel a bit hollow now. In retrospect, it should have been a warning, but I was a little too self-absorbed to notice (if that even makes sense - too self-absorbed to notice my own emotional state?)

But it gets worse, because I wasn't the person dealing directly with any of the people who needed to be contacted about the carpet and the boiler. All that was handled by one of my housemates, the one whose bedroom had the boiler in it. I tried not to pester her, I promise I tried, but it still got to the point that I almost drove her to tears by passing my stress onto her.

Perhaps oddly, it was the break in tension that brought matters to a head. When she finally managed to get confirmation from the carpet fitters that they would be happy to come and fit just my carpet on the Monday, and do the other one at a later date, it was my expression of relief that finally pushed her to tell me to back off.

I spent the next fifteen minutes shivering in my temporary bedroom, fighting off a panic attack. A mild one, by the standards of some I've had. It was half an hour or more before I even managed to apologise.

AND EVEN THEN, I was only thinking about maybe seeking counselling, not really sure what I should be seeking counselling for. Being a rationalist is no guarantee of always being rational; being a lover of wisdom is no guarantee of always being wise. These revelations have a significant role to play in what's to come, but for now suffice it to say that I was eventually convinced to make good on the counselling idea.

(part 2)