I was wrong about everything

I had a life-shattering experience recently. I'm in Greece, seated at a rooftop restaurant on a warm October's day, delving into my ceviche and a book. 'The School of Life'; what a book, I thought. What kind of name is that for a book. Little did I know that this opulent blue-coloured little paperback would fundamentally change how I saw myself and shatter years of inaccurate and misguided self-knowledge, accumulated in good spirit, but off the mark, so off the mark.

Throughout my entire life, I've been silently yet boastfully proud of being an emotionally avoidant person. Emotionally avoidant in the sense that I regulate my emotions as though they are a project that I am managing, concealing them when needs be and being carefully cautious in how I expose, share and distribute them. Emotions, I've long viewed, are ancillary. They add to life, but they are definitely not central to my life.

In fact, I've spent many years completely distancing myself from daily emotions. Frustration, hurt, envy — these are for the weak-minded, I've told myself. Before you label me as some emotionally void robot, know that nearly all my favourite philosophers are Stoics who preached the necessity of overcoming one's emotions through good reasoning in order to not be consumed by them. Marcus Aurelius famously writes:

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment".

How liberating, I used to think — to recognise that we are not our emotions and to build an imaginary dam between ourselves and our feelings, not to keep them out, but to protect from flooding and debris. In truth, it is emotion that bonds us to one another, but it is also emotion that chains us to a more primal version of ourselves where we become slaves to neurochemical transmitters or fight-or-flight instincts — so much of what we feel is linked to built-in survival mechanisms in the brain.

For this reason, I've self-studied neuroscience extensively and learnt that the number one inhibitor to any real possibility of joy or self-actualised happiness is the amygdala — a complex structure of cells nestled in the middle of the brain, adjacent to the hippocampus. It is primarily involved in the processing of emotions and memories associated with fear.

The amygdala is the reason why when your colleague insults you with a passive aggressive remark in the office, it hurts more than a sting. You can get riled up, adrenaline pumping through your veins, fight-or-flight is activated because as advanced as the human brain is, we are still guided by old neural circuits that our early ancestors relied upon while foraging through a jungle, fighting off a predatory sabre-toothed tiger and living each day only concerned about where one's next meal would come from.

Although we think the amygdala is only activated in serious, life-threatening cases, our body can experience a sudden release of hormones even in response to mild stress. Something as simple as a heated discussion with your partner or attending a nerve-wracking job interview can lead to a cascade of cortisol-induced emotions. Indeed, we've been dealt a rough hand when it comes to the brain's tendency to get triggered and transform us from enlightened, wise beings into emotional thermometers with little to no control over our programmed responses.

Now to the book.

"We bury our personal stories beneath an avalanche of expertise. The possibility of a deeply consequential intimate enquiry is deliberately left to seem feeble and superfluous next to grander tasks. We lean on the glamour of being learned to limit all that we might really need to learn about. We side-line avenues of personal investigation as unduly fancy or weird. We use the practical mood of Monday morning 9am to ward off the complex 3am insights of the previous night when the entire fabric of existence came into question. Deploying an attitude of radical disquiet seems like aberrations, rather than the central occasions of insight they might actually be".

Wow. Wow. Wow.

"A defence of emotional honesty has nothing to do with high-minded morality. It is ultimately cautionary and egoistic. We need to tell ourselves a little more of the truth because we pay too high a price for our concealments. We cut ourselves from possibilities of growth. We shut off large portions of our minds and end up uncreative, tetchy and defensive, while others around us have to suffer our irritability, gloom, manufactured cheerfulness or defensive rationalisations".

My goodness. Everything I have ever thought about myself is wrong. Getting lost in the deadlines, the practical mood of Monday morning 9am, becoming dissociated from my own personal life because of the degrading way I have viewed emotions, when as Alan de Botton writes "It is only when we're properly in touch with our feelings that we can correct them with the help of more mature faculties and thereby address the real troubles of our adult lives".

My life has only really come into question during the end of my twenties. Before this, I was sure (albeit naively) of who I was. Doubt did not flicker in my mind as it does now. I could tell you with the utmost certainty who I was, wasn't and would eventually be. I knew what type of partner I wanted in the same way that I could recite my restaurant menu order — procedural, sterile and most of all, unrealistic. I was supremely certain that I did not want children and becoming a successful, internationally published writer was all I ever wanted.

But then, you achieve some of the things that you had set out to, you start to foresee yourself as an elderly person without children and grandchildren and you realise, importantly, you realise that emotions matter too and that working on your birthday, writing and editing until 10pm every night, working when you know you should be spending time with the man you adore, but with whom things didn't materialise with, precisely because you were writing and editing until 10pm every night.

Truth be told, during my workoholic ways I didn't have an existential second to spare to think about who I fundamentally was as a person or the emotions that form and influence my being. I was doing exactly as de Botton describes — burying inevitable emotions and personal stories in "an avalanche of expertise". The psychological portrait of the self, which is like an ancient vase slowly being pieced together from fragments scattered across miles of sand, was vague and opaque for me (all in the name of hard work).

Being driven matters. Having a go-getter mindset is critical, but as Botton emphasises: "We lie by pretending that we are simpler than we actually are and that too much psychology might be nonsense".

For how long could I have proceeded in the aforementioned way, grinding myself to the bone, not taking a moment's pause — navigating through life as a stranger to myself. When I finally brought my inner-workings and buried personal feelings to the surface and permitted their reveal — it all erupted like some overwhelming repressed volcano. Maybe I do want kids. Maybe work isn't the only thing that matters in the world. Perhaps I was wrong to think that writing and editing from 7am until 10pm each night was somehow more stimulating that being cradled by fierce, gushing waves in the Mediterranean sea or laying in the Greek sun as it bronzes every cell on your body.

I've been doing it all backwards, living to work instead of working to live. And there are those who discovered this long before me and have been wearing the clothing of their life the right way round. It's time to turn the label the other way, I've been walking around in backwards garments for far too long.