Writing.
Literary-clinical essays at the intersection of psychoanalytic thought and lived experience.
Each series approaches a different territory — love, loss, self-knowledge, grief, the interior life — through a voice that moves between clinical reflection and personal essay. The writing is not self-help. It is an attempt at honest attention.
New essays can arrive by email — the subscription form is at the foot of this page.
Staying With.
On love, loss, and the particular difficulty of remaining present to what is painful. Essays that take their time. They ask something of the reader — not effort, but attention.
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01
Staying With What Hurts
On what it means to remain present with difficulty rather than moving prematurely toward resolution — and why that distinction may be the most demanding one in relational life.
Founding Essay -
02
Staying With What Changes
On the relational architecture that makes it possible to remain present through transition — and why that capacity may be harder, and stranger, than we expect.
Staying With -
03
Letters After the End
What continues, internally, after a therapeutic relationship closes — and what it means that the most honest words sometimes only find their shape when there is no longer anyone left to receive them.
Staying With -
04
When Love Doesn't Sound Like Love
On the people who show love primarily through alertness — and what it costs to receive care that arrives as surveillance.
Staying With -
05
The Untimeliness of Love
Love arrives when it chooses, not when we are ready. On desire that comes too early, too late, or in the wrong direction entirely.
Staying With -
06
The Cost of Care
On the particular exhaustion that comes not from working too hard but from caring too completely — for too long, in a context where the caring is not returned in kind.
Staying With
Practicing
Relational
Integrity.
A manifesto essay — the fullest statement of what Relational Integrity asks of us, written for anyone who thinks carefully about relationships, with others and with themselves.
Read the manifesto essayLove
Dictionary.
A vocabulary of love — not definitions, but investigations. Each entry takes a word from the language of intimacy and stays with it long enough to ask what it actually means.
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01
Absence
On the different kinds of absence — the chosen, the imposed, the structural — and what each one reveals about how we hold people when they are not in the room.
Forthcoming -
02
Need
On the word we use when we mean something other than what we can say — and what it costs to want without being able to name the wanting.
Forthcoming -
03
Holding
What it means to hold another person — not physically, but symbolically — and what happens when that holding is interrupted.
Forthcoming
Knowing
Yourself.
The ancient instruction — gnothi seauton — taken seriously. Not as a self-improvement project, but as a difficult, lifelong, and fundamentally relational undertaking.
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01
What You Keep Repeating
On the patterns that return — in relationships, in behaviour, in the same kind of difficulty differently named — and what they are trying to say.
Forthcoming -
02
The Self You Present
On the difference between the version of yourself you offer to the world and the one that moves beneath — and whether that gap is necessary, or merely habitual.
Forthcoming
Designing
a Self.
On the construction of identity — how we build ourselves, how we inherit ourselves, and what it means to take deliberate responsibility for the shape of a life.
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01
The Inherited Self
How much of who we are was chosen, and how much was simply given — and what it means to begin, carefully, to distinguish between the two.
Forthcoming -
02
Living at a Distance
On the particular form of self-construction that happens when you leave — a country, a language, a version of yourself — and must build something in the gap.
Forthcoming
Left
Absence.
On grief — not only the grief of death, but the grief of what has not happened, what has been left, and what absence means when it is the absence of someone still living.
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01
Grief Without a Body
On the losses that have no ceremony — the relationship that ended without ending, the person who is present but gone — and the particular loneliness of grieving what has no name.
Forthcoming -
02
The One Who Stayed
On what it means to be the one who did not leave — and the invisible grief of that particular position, which is rarely recognised as grief at all.
Forthcoming
New essays,
by email.
New essays are sent by email as they are published — nothing else, no more often than the writing itself appears. If the work is useful to you, this is the way to follow it.
Essays from all five series, as well as occasional shorter pieces — notes, reflections, and fragments that don't quite fit the essay form but deserve a space.