Book Freak 164: A Life of One's Own
A Groundbreaking Journey of Self-Discovery from 1934
In 1934, Marion Milner (1900-1998), writing under the pseudonym Joanna Field, published A Life of One's Own, an exploration of self-discovery and the pursuit of happiness. Milner, a British psychoanalyst and writer, was born in London and studied psychology at University College London. Her book grew out of seven years of introspective diary-keeping that began in 1926 when she was 26 years old.
Unlike typical self-help books, Milner's work doesn't offer quick fixes or universal formulas. Instead, it's a deeply personal journey rooted in rigorous self-observation and analysis. Milner's approach combines introspection, observing fleeting thoughts (which she called "butterfly thoughts"), and cultivating an openness to sensory experience that she termed "wide awareness."
A Life of One's Own was a sensation when it came out, attracting praise from literary figures like W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. Its insights into consciousness, perception, and the unconscious mind continue to resonate with readers seeking a more authentic and fulfilling life nearly a century later.
Three pieces of advice from the book:
Observing your daily experience helps you discover true happiness
Through daily reflection on her experiences, Milner discovered that true happiness often came from unexpected moments of "wide focus" awareness, rather than conventional ideas of enjoyment, leading her to uncover deeper, more authentic desires.
"When I first began, at the end of each day, to go through what had happened and pick out what seemed best to me, I had had quite unexpected results. Before I began this experiment, when I had drifted through life unquestioningly, I had measured my life in terms of circumstances. I had thought I was happy when I was having what was generally considered ‘a good time’. But when I began to try and balance up each day's happiness I had found that there were certain moments which had a special quality of their own, a quality which seemed to be almost independent of what was going on around me, since they occurred sometimes on the most trivial occasions. They stood out because of a feeling of happiness which was far beyond what I had ordinarily meant by ‘enjoying myself’, and because of this they tended to oust all other concerns in my daily record. Gradually I had come to the conclusion that these were moments when I had by some chance stood aside and looked at my experience, looked with a wide focus, wanting nothing and prepared for anything. The rest of my enterprise had then become an attempt to find out what this ability to look depended upon.
Not only had I found that I enjoyed different things, but I also wanted different things. When I was living blindly I was pulled this way and that by all manner of different wants, but when I stopped to look at them their clamour died down and I became aware of others which seemed to emerge from far deeper down in myself."
Relief comes from asking "What are the facts?" instead of "What shall I do?"
By observing her own anger and impulses to control others, Milner discovered the power of detachment and shifting focus from "How can I make them do what I want?" to "Why are they behaving this way?" leading to a sense of relief and freedom.
"My first observations were concerned with anger and bad temper. For instance, I would sometimes find myself raging against someone whose behaviour had interfered with my wishes, feel a longing to impose my will upon them, and then, the more they failed to do as I wanted, the more was I impelled to act as I would in the world of things, by physical force. My thought would even be reduced to such a primitive level that throwing things at the offender appeared to be the only way of making him do what I wanted; as, in a modern play that I had seen, the wife broke a gramophone record over her husband's head in order to make him agree with her. I realized then that a kind of thinking which could not recognize thought for what it is could certainly not be aware of the complexity of motives which might prompt another per-son's act. Even though I had learned long ago that it was ‘not done’ to try to control others by throwing things at them, my blind thought still wanted to rush into action. Sometimes, however, when my mind became obsessed with such an impulse, sheer exhaustion from the ideas going round and round in my head would drive me to remember my act of detachment. I would be forced to stand back from my thought, and to refrain from constant planning, so I was able to ask, not ‘How can I make them do what I want?’ but ‘Why are they behaving like this?’ The sense of relief and freedom which always followed when I managed to bring myself to ask, ‘What are the facts?’ instead of, ‘What shall I do?’ was like waking up from one of those tiresome dreams in which one is continually involved in futile efforts, such as trying to pack and catch a train and everything goes wrong."
See both the dignity and absurdity in human nature
Trust the value of your personal experiences, even when others might trivialize them, recognizing that all human experiences contain both dignity and absurdity, and no single expression can fully capture their complexity.
“Also, it had often puzzled me how, when other people's intimate affairs were the subject of general conversation, they could so easily be made to sound laughable, obscene and cheap. I felt that my own experiences, which sometimes I had thought grand, sublime, would sound just as bad if mentioned. I could imagine just how they would tell about them. So, when anything important happened to me I told nobody. But perhaps my experiences were really cheap too, and my sense of their importance might be only another ramification of egoism? For the people who talked like this, reducing everything to absurdity, were people I liked, people full of generosity in their acts, not purposely malicious. Not until I understood a little of the nature of thought and the need to be always aware of the obverse of my pattern did I learn to escape this conflict. I saw that to see only the ridiculousness of humanity was just as misleading as to see only its dignity, that what one said or thought about a thing must always be a distortion, that the mistake was to believe that any one expression could be the last word, for experience was always bigger than the formula. It was not that other people's experience was sordid and obscene, mine sacred and marvellous, for theirs to them might be the same as mine to me, and mine to an observer as much a source of merriment. If only I could remember to distinguish the formulation from the fact, and not assume that because it was said it must be true, then I would be able to know that their laughter did not always prove me futile.”
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