How Do We Know We're Doing It Right?

Using her own experience becoming a mother as an example, she says: “The sense of being both deeply within myself and hovering outside of myself, waiting for the real me to return, is further cut loose by birth and most permanently, by motherhood itself”.

Isn’t this how most of us feel when we discuss post-lockdown? When we can go back to the lives we lived before, because it’s who we’re used to being, even if during this period, we’ve admitted we don’t enjoy much of it? That there’s a perpetual feeling of keeping up with the Joneses? Whether that’s in a WhatsApp group, a sports day at your child’s school, the digital admin of our phones or cocktail hour with friends?

But, as How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right? highlights, the self is not a fixed state. It is constantly moulded, broken down, and built up again. It can be made stronger, by relinquishing control (“In refusing to let go of a stagnant concept of who I was, I almost lost myself entirely,” Sykes writes).

These 242 pages are an (exhaustive, though not depressing) middle-finger to the word ‘should’. A word which justifies women feeling the need to constantly scrutinise every decision; in the name of self-improvement, in order to have the Best Life Possible, at a hundred miles an hour. A word that suggest there’s only one right way to live; ignoring the reality that we’re all made up of a roster of identities.

“This is a reminder to resist complacency and impotency by keeping clear-eyed about the choices that we want to make, and those that do not matter”.

'How Do We Know We're Doing It Right: Essays On Modern Life', by Pandora Sykes, is out now, buy it here.