Inventor of the Essay - a word that means to try, to attempt, to explore - Montaigne had a remarkable talent for putting his own thinking on trial. The beauty of his work is in his full exposition of the thought itself and then taking it one step further: he puts his thoughts on trail, questioning the very foundations of assumptions he laid bare.

Montaigne did something exceptional for the 16th century: he turned his focus onto himself as a subject of study. And captured that process in writing.

The question for today.

I’ve been pulled towards Montaigne again this year because my life has been going through big changes. I was made redundant 18 months ago. I’m taking medication to prevent breast cancer returning. I threw the towel in on London, and moved to the sunny England coastline.

In various forms - from fiction, to essay, to LinkedIn posts - I’ve tried to capture some of the changes I see in myself.

Yet each time I sit down to write, I give up.

The simple act of sitting and thinking about myself as a subject evades me. I pile tasks on top of myself to distract myself. Everything comes before my most important task: writing.

What’s making this task of writing for and about myself so incredibly difficult?

To even ask that question assumes that the answer lies somewhere outside of me. That is precisely the thing that needs to be interrogated.

The real question should be this: what in my thinking makes attending to myself as a subject so difficult?

Years ago.

Long before social media - attending to myself in writing was easy, simple and everyday. I’ve never kept a journal, but I have always written poetry, snippets of thoughts, stories and blueprints of my thinking.

When I was choosing to do a PhD, my main interest was to read philosophy. Because philosophy - unlike any other discipline - gives me a clear picture of another human’s mind. Read a work that took someone years to write, and you will find the structure of a mind. For me, that structure emerges like a diagram.

Read a work of philosophy, and you will also find the structure of your own thinking as it butts up against someone else’s.

It’s a delightful past time. One that takes absolute quiet and uninterrupted time. Resources that since 2012, I’ve not had.

To return to the question at hand: what in my thinking makes attending to myself as a subject so difficult?

The only thing I can think now is that I am out of practice. Attention to my own subjectivity is a skill. Critical reflection and the process of questioning the authority of my assumptions is something I have done in the past. Like riding a bike, playing piano or picking up crochet again, it needs practice and play to develop strength.

This seems like exactly the type of activity Substack was built for. A place where someone simply tries to stop outsourcing their brain to content creation and dwell instead in their own thinking as a subject of study.

Where to begin?

Let’s begin with this question: Why do we hand over our brains to others?

When I close my eyes now in this moment, I picture the sea. The wide mouth of a bay and it’s gentle breathing against the long stretch of sand at low tide. The water grey at the shoreline blends into depths of blue as it meets the horizon.

Reading through my work journals from years ago, I know that when I closed my eyes, I pictured the problem of toxic leadership I could not solve. I even drew this problem as a monster in my notebook. I spent months trying to crack the puzzle of work relationships that I didn’t understand. I was plagued by anxiety and soothed myself with Tik Tok videos and ‘5 steps to influence’ posts.

If I’m honest, I soothed myself with hate as well.

Back in the right now, my mind immediately resists this admission of hate. But it’s true. Hate soothed me. It turned anxiety to blame. Impotence into action and control.

My mind jumps to wanting to take on the role of a psychiatrist diagnosing social media click bate as the ultimate vehicle to achieve soothing spectre of hate.

Perhaps that’s true.

But what’s more important now is to stay the course on the subject at hand: myself as the thinking thing. Hate, diagnosing others, turning to social media all take away from internal reflection.

Perhaps what confounds me the most is the pull to focus outwards vs the desire to focus inwards.

It is so much easier to focus outwards - on blame, on love, on critique. So much harder to stay the course inward.

Yet, inward we must go.

That’s today’s reflection

And I gained two insights: I’ve used hate to self sooth in the past, and I am absolutely intrigued by the pull of the mind outward and how it prevents the mind from focusing inward.