Living Life in the First Person

Perhaps one of the deepest experiences of human fulfilment is this: feeling that the life we are living is truly our own.

It is not enough simply to be alive. It is not enough to follow schedules, fulfil responsibilities, meet other people’s expectations, work, produce, care for others, pay bills, or simply move through our days. We can do all of these things and still experience a strange sense of absence. The body is present, but the self seems to be somewhere else.

Living in the first person is different.

It means being able to say, inwardly: “I am here. This is my life. I am the one living it.”

There is an enormous difference between living and watching our own life happen.

We can spend years functioning perfectly well on the outside and yet feel that something essential is escaping us. It can feel as though we are permanently playing a role, following a script written by other people, by our family, by society, by our idealisations, or even by the demands of our own superego.

This is where some of Winnicott’s ideas become particularly meaningful. For him, psychological health is not simply the absence of symptoms. There is something more fundamental: the capacity to experience life as real. To feel that what we do, desire, create and experience somehow comes from within ourselves.

Fulfilment is not necessarily the same thing as success.

It is the feeling of being present in one’s own existence.

A person can be extraordinarily successful and profoundly absent from their own life. Another may live an apparently simple life and yet experience an extraordinary sense of reality because they are genuinely present within it.

When the Past Takes the Place of the Present

Neurosis can make this experience difficult.

When we become too entangled in our internal conflicts, a considerable amount of psychic energy remains attached to stories that have already happened but are still emotionally alive.

The past has passed chronologically, but it has not necessarily passed psychologically.

We continue to have imaginary conversations with people who are no longer in front of us. We continue responding to criticisms made twenty years ago. We continue trying to receive from someone what that person was never able to give us. We continue defending ourselves against dangers that no longer exist. We continue searching for reparation for old wounds.

It is as though one part of us knows that we are living in the present, while another part is still living in 1986, 1995 or 2010.

And there is a price to pay for this: we lose our capacity to fully experience the present.

We are sitting in a wonderful restaurant, but thinking about yesterday’s argument.

We are standing in front of the sea, but worrying about what might go wrong tomorrow.

We are with someone we love, but inwardly we are still talking to someone who hurt us.

We are travelling somewhere beautiful, but psychologically we have not arrived.

The body has arrived. We, perhaps, have not.

It is possible to be somewhere without truly being here.

It is possible to live through a moment without truly being now.

Neurosis as Repetition

Freud showed us how human beings can repeat what they have not been able to work through. Often, we do not simply remember the past: we reproduce it.

The people change. The cities change. The relationships change. Yet something from the old scene remains.

The person who never felt sufficiently recognised may spend an entire life searching for recognition. Someone who experienced abandonment may interpret even small distances as threats of abandonment. A person who grew up surrounded by criticism may carry an internal critic who continues speaking long after the original critics have disappeared.

The past takes up residence within us.

This is why being trapped in the past does not necessarily mean consciously thinking about it every day. We may be trapped in the past precisely through our present ways of feeling, choosing, fearing, desiring and relating to others.

In this sense, psychoanalysis does not attempt simply to erase the past. That would be impossible and probably undesirable.

It attempts something else: to return the past to the past.

Not to forget it, but to take away its power to permanently occupy the present.

The Future Can Also Steal the Present

But it is not only the past that can remove us from life.

We can also live excessively in the future.

“When I finish my degree, I will finally relax.”

“When I have enough money, I will start living.”

“When I meet someone, I will be happy.”

“When I lose weight…”

“When I retire…”

“When my children grow up…”

“When everything is finally sorted out…”

And life gradually becomes a waiting room.

We are always preparing ourselves to live.

But there is a fundamental problem: life never actually happens in the future.

When the future arrives, it arrives as the present.

So, if we do not know how to inhabit the present, we can spend decades pursuing a tomorrow that, when it finally comes, we are still unable to experience.

Being Here and Now

Being present does not mean forgetting our history, denying suffering, or abandoning our plans for the future.

Nor does it mean living in a permanent state of happiness.

Being present means being able to recognise:

“This is happening now.”

I am drinking this coffee.

I am listening to this music.

I am talking to this person.

I am walking down this street.

I am sad.

I am happy.

I am tired.

I am in love.

I am alive.

It may sound like very little.

Perhaps it is enormous.

Because a life is built precisely from these small fragments of presence.

Sometimes we search for extraordinary experiences of fulfilment when what we are missing is something far more elementary: the ability to be where we actually are.

Recovering Authorship

Perhaps good psychotherapy or psychoanalysis does not teach us exactly how we should live.

Perhaps it does something more interesting: it helps us recover the authorship of our own existence.

To distinguish what we genuinely desire from what we have been taught to desire.

To recognise which voices belong to us and which voices continue to speak inside us from the past.

To recognise what we repeat.

To understand what we avoid.

To make peace with parts of our history without allowing them to govern every chapter that follows.

We cannot change what happened.

But we can profoundly change our present relationship with what happened.

And perhaps this is where a certain freedom begins.

The past ceases to be a prison and becomes a history.

Pain stops occupying the entire house and is given a room of its own.

The memory remains, but it no longer needs to direct every movement.

Then psychological space begins to emerge for what is actually in front of us.

For encounter.

For desire.

For play.

For creativity.

For love.

For the unexpected.

For life.

A Life That Can Be Lived

Ultimately, perhaps fulfilment is not about reaching a particular destination, but about gradually developing the feeling that our life can actually be lived.

Not a perfect life.

Not a life without loss, conflict, anxiety or contradiction.

But a life that feels sufficiently our own.

A life in which we can be present.

A life that is not merely remembered, anticipated or endured, but also experienced.

Because there is an enormous difference between saying:

“Life is happening to me.”

and being able to say:

“I am living.”

Perhaps one of the most beautiful tasks of psychoanalytic work is precisely this: helping someone return to the first person of their own existence.

Not erasing yesterday.

Not ceasing to think about tomorrow.

But allowing there to be, between what has already happened and what has not yet happened, enough space for one small but decisive word:

now.

Because throughout our lives, we may find ourselves in many different places.

But there is only one place where we can truly live:

here.

And only one time in which we can do so:

now.