‘I Can’t Manage to Exercise or Take Care of Myself!’

Because you were taught to hate your own desires, every time you vulnerably surrender to your feelings, you align your body with habits that will help you thrive.

The Absent Lady (1942), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

The final paragraph of your answer to ‘How Do I Learn to Love Work Again?’ reduced me to tears — reading it felt like willingly surrendering to the earnest specificity and weirdness of someone else’s mind, like the experience of immersing yourself in Woolf or Joyce streams of consciousness, letting yourself …