The Anthropolgy of Your Own Life

There are no soft landings tonight. It’s a vicious, dull February night, and I am here, still in my odd, nylon, emerald green robe, (a Mildred without her George), my journal beside me, raw pages blank and accusing, ink waiting to draw blood. And there shall be blood. (For if we will not draw it, let it or spill it for ourselves, who will?).

I’m eating seafood sticks and drinking black tea, no milk because it went off overnight, no sugar because it fell behind the cabinet and we cannot reach it, no mercy, because self-anthropology isn’t therapy, it’s vivisection and I’m discombobulated by it, turning the blade on my own life because what I’ve seen isn’t pretty. It’s feral. And true. And the only way out. You in?

Once in the dim glow of this bedroom at dawn, armed with nothing but a chipped mug of tea gone cold and a notebook yanked from the back of a drawer, I decided to become my own anthropologist. Not the dusty academic sort, but a sly observer of the self, peering into the rituals of everyday existence as if I were Jane Goodall among the chimpanzees: except the chimpanzee was me, fumbling with a biscuit I was calling breakfast, abundant with worry and awash with regret.

The night before Ben had spilled chilli sauce on his bedside table and it had dried blood red on the marble. I saw it but didn’t wipe it. But that spill stopped something inside me dead. Why wasn’t there a bit of me rushing to wipe away the congealed evidence of a rubbish kebab? Why wasn’t I upset that he (let alone me) hadn’t wiped it either, when the once-upon-a-time me may have stood with a cloth under his chin, a walking bib ready to save surfaces from stains and grown-men from dribbled chaos? The answer stung like a slap: our lives are garbage heaps of artefacts, habits, and the sweetest lies we whisper to stay small. This isn’t gentle archaeology. It’s digging with bare hands in soil that smells of rot and resurrection. And it’s only when we NOTICE it, the loose, drifting material of life as Virginia Woolf might have called it that we can begin to examine it.

Of course, we women have been gutting themselves like this for centuries, in attics that smelled of mildew and fear, under the glare of husbands, fathers, bosses, churches. Woolf carved out psychic territory in “A Room of One’s Own” and treated the self like a flawed, raging protagonist. While Anais Nin’s journals were battlefield dispatches from the trenches of desire, masks ripped off, blood and lipstick everywhere. “We write to taste life twice.”

(Scratch it deep; the second taste is always sharper, saltier, truer).

There’s a photograph Margaret Mead kept on her desk at the American Museum of Natural History: herself at seven years old, sitting cross-legged in a Pennsylvania meadow, notebook open, pencil poised, studying a colony of ants with the fierce concentration of someone who already understood that paying attention was a form of love. When asked about it years later, she said something that should be embroidered on a cushion: “I was learning to look at what was actually there, not what I expected to be there.”

She was talking about ants. But she might as well have been talking about us. Because we are terrible anthropologists of our own lives. Or at least I am, and should probably learn to speak only for myself and not as the collective “we”, that Finley is always telling me off for. But do bear with won’t you?

So we arrive at fifty-something having spent decades as unreliable narrators of our own experience, editing the field notes in real-time, adjusting the data to match the hypothesis we’ve already committed to. We’ve conducted our research with contaminated instruments: the male gaze, the mama gaze, the magazine gaze, the mirrored gaze. All of it confabulated and befuddled into myths about ourselves we buy and swallow whole, because we decided a long time ago, that we cannot trust ourselves, and must therefore rely on the dubious opinion of every dog and its Mother.

But what if we started over? What if we approached ourselves the way Mead approached the Samoan islanders, with ferocious curiosity and without the burden of who we’re supposed to be?

“I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.” —Madonna

The Field Site

Your life is not a self-help project. It’s a field site. You are both the anthropologist and the tribe. This distinction matters enormously. A field site is observed, but project is fixed. A field site reveals patterns. A project imposes them.

Sarah Ban Breathnach understood this when she created “Simple Abundance” in 1995. Though she called it gratitude, what she was really teaching was anthropological observation. Write down five things. But not five things you should be grateful for. Five things that actually happened. Five pieces of data from the field.

And she is beautiful and so important and she changed my life, but I need sharper language right now.

You see the anthropologist arrives with questions, not answers. She notices what people actually do, not what they say they do. But even digging through life for that which to be grateful for isn’t enough, because we are still bringing whimsy and romance to life in order to frame it as something to be grateful for. So the committed anthropologist tracks patterns across time and takes nothing at face value. She digs and squints and takes a magnifying glass to all, the way Mary Oliver turned attention into a blade: “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work” she said as she stood in the wild until astonishment sliced through numbness. Because noticing is combat. A way to go to war with that numbness so our whole selves are not lost to mere acceptance.

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” - Joan Didion

Keeping House, Keeping Self

Here’s where it gets domestic, where the anthropology meets the dishwater. Because how you keep house- or don’t - is field data of the most revealing kind.

As you probably know, I am writing this from a falling-down house mid-renovation, selling out from under me while I try to make sense of domestic sovereignty from a place of profound unsettlement. Twenty-one years I’ve written about home, and now I’m learning that home was never about the house at all. It was about attention. It was about the rituals we perform in domestic space that either keep us caged or set us free.

Watch how you move through your rooms. Do you straighten cushions for invisible judges? Do you close cupboard doors because “that’s what you do” or because it genuinely pleases you? I caught myself once trying to teach myself how to make the bed with hospital corners perfect, tight, miserable and realised I was performing “good woman” for absolutely no one. The bed doesn’t care. There’s no hospital matron or army sergeant watching. The only person suffering that performance was me.

The dishes in the sink aren’t moral failures. They’re anthropological evidence. Mine piled up most when I was writing well, when I was so deep in the work that domestic performance fell away entirely. For years I called this “letting myself go.” Now I call it “letting myself be.”

M.F.K. Fisher understood this. Her kitchens were sites of sensual observation, places where she studied herself through what she cooked, when she cooked, who she fed. She wrote about a perfect omelet the way an anthropologist might describe a marriage ritual, with attention to every gesture, every choice, every meaning beneath the surface. “First we eat, then we do everything else,” she said, and she meant it. Food wasn’t separate from life. Kitchen wasn’t separate from self. It was all ONE field site.

What does your kitchen tell you? Mine used to say I’m someone who hoards interesting ingredients I never use, sumac, za’atar, and preserved lemons going murky in their brine. These were aspirational artefacts, evidence of a self I thought I should be. Though the actual self all too often made toast and called it dinner. Both are true. Both evidence.

Then along comes Clarissa Pinkola Estés, the mestiza cantadora who hands you the real weapon. In Women Who Run with the Wolves she drags the Wild Woman archetype out of the cave where patriarchy buried her. La Loba, the bone woman, circles the desert collecting scattered bones of the self. When she has them all, she sings: low, guttural, ancient, until flesh, fur, and fire return.

And that is your task now: to collect your own scattered bones. The diet you abandoned, the voice you swallowed, the desire you called “too much.” To sing them back to life.

Estés warns too, of Bluebeard, the inner predator who sweet-talks you into smaller rooms, prettier cages. He’s the voice that says a good woman keeps a perfect house. He’s the voice that says your worth is measured in gleaming counters and folded laundry.

Stalk him. Name him. Cut him.

Mid-life is the time Estés says we finally hear the howling. No more pretending. No more domestication. Not domesticity, domestication. There’s a difference. Domesticity is the art of making a life within walls. Domestication is the breaking of your wild nature to fit someone else’s idea of proper. I don’t want that any more. I turned out to be rubbish at “proper”. I want authentic, meaningful creative ritual steeped in the hours that spell domesticity and make it holy. I want to merge with the domestic, not be controlled by it.

So let’s claw your wildness back from the places it was beaten out of you. The scars are doors. Every deep wound a threshold back to the instinctual self.

Ready to Start the Dig?

Don’t flinch now: I did warn you this work gets ugly. Start then with the artefacts of your habitat. That pile of unread books by the bed reeks of guilt. Mine: Zadie Smith’s essays jammed against du Maurier’s Rebecca, hoarding stories of women who unravel because my own seams are splitting. Bits of me spilling out left, right and centre.

Curate your evidence like a crime scene: the tarnished locket hiding a younger, braver face; the postcard from a trip you never took; the chipped teacup that survived your mother’s rage, (even if she threw all the others at your father’s head). These objects testify.

And those teacups, let’s talk about them. I collect them, chipped and pretty, rosy things with hairline fractures. A friend once called it clutter. I call it the museum of survival. Every chip, a story: this one fell when I slammed the cupboard after a fight; this one belonged to a woman who drank her grief in careful sips; this one I bought the day I decided to leave a job that was killing me slowly and went junk-shopping instead. Everything I own has a story, data to be added to my field notes so that slowly. but surely i can banish all that screeching its story too loudly.

Colette’s Paris apartment was chaos and genius; make yours the same, lived-in, honest, gloriously feral. Stop trying to scrub glorious mess into rigid conformity. Observe where the tidying feels like work. Colette understood that a too-tidy house is a too-tidy life, and neither bears close examination. Don’t waste your time but do as Woolf did: Her diaries are thirty volumes of field notes on the daily life of one Virginia Stephen Woolf- not just the grand intellectual moments, but the texture of ordinary days. She tracked her moods like weather patterns, treated the self like a flawed, raging protagonist. “What is a woman?” she asked, not politely, but with teeth. She noticed everything: what she ate, the colour of the day, whether she made pudding or bought it. The domestic was never separate from the intellectual for Woolf. It was all one field of study. The quality of the light in her room mattered as much as the quality of her prose. The state of her house reflected the state of her mind, and she tracked both with equal ferocity.

Here then is what you do: for one week, you document yourself the way you might document a fascinating stranger. Not to judge. Not to improve. Simply to see.

What time do you actually want to wake up, versus when you force yourself awake? What do you reach for when you’re anxious? I once spent a month documenting my relationship with biscuits and discovered I only wanted them after phone calls with a particular person. The biscuits were never the issue.

When do you perform? Every time you sense performance, make a field note. You’ll be astonished how much of your day is theatre. Only when we peek behind the stage-set do we understand how the play is being directed.

The Rituals and Belief Systems

Every culture has rituals that look insane from the outside and inevitable from the inside. Your intrinsic culture, the rules and values and rituals intrinsic to who you are is no different.

What are your cargo cults? In anthropology, cargo cults are rituals people perform in imitation of something they once saw work, even after the original context has vanished: like islanders building fake airplane runways hoping planes will return with goods, long after the war has ended. We do this too. We perform rituals we inherited without questioning whether they still serve any purpose. I have a friend who irons tea towels because her mum does, even though she actively resents ironing and doesn't care if tea towels are wrinkled. When pressed, she said, "But what kind of person doesn't iron tea towels?" But an anthropologist would note this as a ritual maintaining a social order that no longer exists - or building a runway for a plane that will never land.

My own cargo cult? Candles. I buy them obsessively, beeswax pillars, French tapers, votives in mismatched holders, burning only the cheapest and stashing the others away for better days, because I decide most are just too lovely to burn. Too special for an ordinary Tuesday. And this, right here, is the sickness. The belief that I’m not special enough for my own beautiful things. That I’m saving them for some future version of myself who’s finally good enough.

NOTE TO SELF: Burn the candles. (This is not a metaphor. It’s an order. Actually burn them). See also posh lingerie, good glasses, and fabulous coats.

Delve deeper into the rituals that define your tribe of one. Breakfast: is it a hurried gulp or a ceremonial pause? Mine has long been pure evasion, coffee gulped, toast burned, sink glaring like a witness. Why the evasion? Because dishes represent the unglamorous underbelly, the evidence that I’m not the pristine, organised woman I sometimes pretend to be. Dishes = mess, not of the glorious kind, but with good coffee and artisan bread I can kid myself I am living the dream. Field/noted.

Glennon Doyle names this in Untamed: "The truest, most beautiful life never promises to be an easy one." Write that down on the scar days: those days when old wounds throb, when you're confronted with evidence of every time you tried and failed, when the past won't stay buried. The diets that crashed, the hobbies you ghosted, the loves that left chemical burns. The unmade bed, the pile of laundry that lives on the chair, the bathroom you avoid cleaning because it would require admitting how long you've been avoiding it. These are data points, not defeats. Scars are just proof you survived something. They're doors, remember? Every deep wound is a threshold.

Life’s detours have teeth. You can’t avoid them, but you can examine them.

Spot the places you strain until your jaw aches: midnight Instagram, curating a life that never existed; schedules so tight they choke circulation; the performance of having it all together when the truth is you’re held together with coffee and spite.

Spot the trying-too-hard: rictus smiles at family dinners, staged bookshelves. Release them like shedding dead skin. Gilbert: “Do whatever brings you to life.” Then do it harder.

Often, you’re performing rituals for gods who left years ago. You’re keeping house for a mother-in-law who died in 1987. You’re proving something to a teacher who never even noticed you. You’re maintaining standards nobody asked for and nobody cares about. Tasks no-one is ever going to feel grateful for, no matter how hard you jab your pen on the pages of your gratitude journal.

The Pattern Recognition

After you’ve collected data, you will start to see patterns. Not the patterns you expected. The ones that are actually there.

• You notice that every time your ex-partner calls, you eat carbohydrates for three hours afterward. You notice that you write better at 10 PM than 6 AM, despite forty years of believing you’re a morning person. You notice that the days you don’t shower until noon are often your most creative days.

• You notice that your house is cleanest when you’re most miserable. That you deep-clean when you’re avoiding something. That the impulse to organise the spice drawer alphabetically only strikes when you’re terrified of the bigger work.

• You notice that you’ve spent thirty years saying you’re an introvert, but the actual field notes show that you’re only drained by certain kinds of people. Specifically, people who want you to be smaller than you are. You’re fine with intensity. You’re exhausted by dimming.

• You notice that you say “sorry” seventeen times a day, “I don’t know” when you do know, “does that make sense?” after every third sentence. You notice that what you call “anxiety” arrives most reliably on Friday mornings, which is when your mum used to pick you up to go shopping with that particular face. You’re fifty-three and your body is still responding to a ritual that died with her and will never have to be experienced again.

This is the lightbulb moment: the official story you’ve been telling about yourself is not borne out by the data.

The woman you’ve been insisting you are doesn’t match the actual evidence. What the field notes show is someone who’s been trying to fit into a culture that was never designed for her. What the field notes show is someone who’s been performing being overwhelmed when actually she’s just been bored by smallness.

Pema Chödrön says: “The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.” And we are ready for the new aren’t we? The gloriously, messy NEW.

Feral Rest as Research

Feral rest is non-negotiable. Not cute, lavender scented naps. Real hibernation. Phone in another room, curtains sealed, burrow under every blanket you own until the bed becomes a den. Lie there like an animal that has finally stopped running: panting, relieved.

This is where housekeeping becomes self-keeping. The unmade bed isn’t lazy, it’s a nest. The bedroom door closed at 2 PM on a Tuesday isn’t depression, it’s den-making. And its safe to let the dishes wait, to let the laundry sit and to let the dust gather like snow while you dig a little deeper in search of pattern and trope.

So feel the shoulder knots from decades of invisible carrying. Hear the thoughts you usually drown out with productivity. Let patterns surface like bruises: the way you apologise for taking up space, the hunger you call “emotional,” the way you flinch at silence. All of it.

Journal the raw data, the sweat, the breath, and the exact ache, because this is reclamation. Estés would say you are La Loba in the dark, singing your own bones back together. I would say you are letting your own glorious mess wrap round you like a blanket and its ok to curl up under it, foetal position, until you are ready to be born again.

I’m doing this now, in this falling-down house. Learning that you can keep yourself even when you can’t keep the house. Learning that domestic sovereignty was never about control: it was about attention. About noticing what actually nourishes you versus what you’ve been told should nourish you.

Making Yourself Strange

The culture you’re studying is the only culture you’ve ever known from the inside. You can’t see it clearly because you’re too embedded in it. So you need to make yourself strange to yourself.

Simone de Beauvoir did this. She wrote about herself in the third person, creating distance between the observer and the observed. It’s both disconcerting and brilliant.

Try this: Write about yourself in the third person for one day. “At 2 PM, she felt the familiar tightness in her chest when she opened Instagram. The subject exhibited classic avoidance behaviour, making tea instead of finishing the email she’d been dreading. She rearranged the tea towels, still un-ironed, with aggressive precision, as if domestic order could substitute for emotional honesty.”

The comedy of distance. The clarity of observation. The liberation of seeing yourself as a person doing things rather than as a collection of failures and virtues.

The Emic Versus Etic Perspective

Anthropology distinguishes between the “emic” perspective (how the culture understands itself) and the “etic” perspective (the outsider’s analytical view).

The emic view: I’m a failure because I haven’t published the book, lost the weight, organised the closets, kept the house the way my mother kept hers, the way the magazines say I should.

The etic view: This is a fifty-three-year-old woman who’s been performing someone else’s idea of success while ignoring her own actual life. The data suggests this is a cultural problem, not a personal failure. The data suggests that “keeping house” was always code for “keeping women small.”

See the difference? It’s the difference between “I’m broken” and “I’ve been living in a system that breaks people.”

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” —Alice Walker

The Counter-Evidence

A good anthropologist actively looks for counter-evidence. What doesn’t fit the story you’ve been telling?

You say you’re bad with money. But the field notes show you kept your family afloat for fifteen years through precarious times. You say you’re not creative. But the field notes show you’ve been solving problems inventively every day, you’ve just been doing it in forms that don’t count as art. You say you’re a bad housekeeper. But the field notes show you keep the things that matter: the people fed, the animals loved, the work done, the door open to whoever needs shelter.

Anaïs Nin, that diarist par excellence, spent her life writing battlefield dispatches from the trenches of desire, masks ripped off, blood and lipstick everywhere. Her journals were less confessionals than field notes. “We write to taste life twice,” she declared. Even she knew: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

This is the terrifying, exhilarating work. Building a case against your own official story. It’s like being a detective investigating your own life and discovering you’ve been framed. And its kind of appalling. And there’s room for grief in it too you know? No-one is asking you to LIKE the realisation that you have been playing a part for the best part of your life…

Think of Frida Kahlo, that vibrant vortex of pain and paint, who turned her broken body into art. She wasn’t trying to be perfect; she was excavating truth, bedecked in flowers and folklore. Her house, Casa Azul, was a riot of colour and life, cluttered with folk art and ex-votos and the beautiful debris of an examined life. Wreckage into thorns that bloomed. Let her be your beautiful, berserk and broken muse. Learn from how she channelled all that she observed in herself.

The Cultural Context

You cannot understand yourself outside your context. You’re a woman in mid-life in a culture that systematically erases women in mid-life. You’re someone trying to rest in a culture that treats rest as moral failure. You’re trying to keep house in a culture that says a woman’s worth is measured in her ability to make everything look effortless.

When you’re exhausted, is it because you’re weak, or because you’ve been running uphill in concrete shoes your entire life?

Gloria Steinem said: “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” The anthropological truth is that a lot of what you think is wrong with you is actually a sane response to an insane culture.

This doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for your life. It means you can stop blaming yourself for struggling against currents you didn’t create.

The Thick Description

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz coined the term “thick description,” the kind of observation that captures all the layers of meaning embedded in a moment. Not “she closed the door” but “she closed the door the way her mother used to, with that particular firm-but-not-slamming gesture that meant I’m not angry but you should know I’m disappointed, a door-closing that carried three generations of Methodist disapproval.”

And this is how you need to observe yourself. Thickly.

Not: “I felt anxious today.”

But: “At 3 PM, when I should have been writing, I felt the familiar flutter in my chest and instead of investigating it, I cleaned the kitchen with aggressive efficiency while mentally composing the email I should have sent two weeks ago, each wipe of the counter a small act of self-flagellation, each gleaming surface a performance of competence for the ghosts of every woman who ever judged me.”

M.F.K. Fisher did this with food, which was really her way of doing it with life. She never just ate a peach. She ate a peach in August 1935 in a garden in Dijon while thinking about death and desire. Her books are anthropological studies of appetite written by someone who understood that you can’t separate what you eat from who you are from what you want from what you’ve been told you should want.

“First we eat, then we do everything else.” - M.F.K. Fisher

What are you hungry for? (This is the field note that matters. This is so very much the biggest part of our work together, you know?) 

Don’t Romanticise, But Don’t Run (or Ruin) Either

Don’t romanticise the dark, but don’t run from it either. Oliver’s command: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Carve it into your page. Let it direct your mind?

Celebrate the feral quirks: the teacup museum of ghosts who will not hush; dancing alone to Ella Fitzgerald until the rug burns your feet; the way you howl in the car at red lights; the dinner plates that don’t match because you’ve broken enough sets to know that matching is overrated.

Mae West sneered: “I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.”

But know that there will be pitfalls. Envy that tastes like metal. Regret that wakes you at 3 a.m. The shame of the messy house when someone drops by unexpectedly. Improvise like de Beauvoir over bitter coffee, Wollstonecraft with her revolutionary snarl.

Release the trying-too-hard like shedding dead skin. Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic urges: “Do whatever brings you to life, then. Follow your own fascinations, obsessions, and compulsions.”

Acknowledge an Encyclopedia of Dangerous Feelings of your own devising.

Map brutally, Estés-style—each feeling a bone to collect:

Envy: Venom spike. (What caged part of you is it howling for?)

Regret: Spectral chains. (Wallow until you taste the lesson, then burn the note).

Wildness: Primal surge under the ribs. (Release it weekly: scream, run, create, let the house go to hell for a day).

Shame: The Bluebeard voice whispering “too much,” “not enough,” “what will people think.” (Stalk it back to its lair. Often you’ll find it sounds exactly like your Dad, or a magazine, or a man who left twenty years ago).

Track patterns - betrayals, flashes, howls - as your unmaking map. Note it all down. Cosset and nurture it until the truth of who you are merges with ambition for she you want to be.

The Field Notes Are the Point

In the end, the field notes are not preparation for some future analysis. The field notes are the life. The paying attention is the thing itself.

When you treat yourself as a field site, everything becomes interesting. The way you make coffee becomes a ritual worth noting. The way you avoid making the bed becomes data about what you’re really avoiding. The things you reach for when you’re lonely, the lies you tell yourself in the morning, the truths your body speaks in the afternoon.

You’re writing the ethnography of your own life, and it’s the only one that will ever be written. No one else is embedded this deeply into the minutes of your day.

From Woolf’s psychic rooms to Oliver’s wild vigil to Estés’ bone songs, from Colette’s smoky, unapologetic flesh to Coco Chanel barking “I don’t do fashion, I am fashion,” women have been here, sifting the silt. I've said it before - we are part of a lineage: stylish rebels who understood that keeping house and keeping self were never separate projects, and that sometimes you have to let the house fall down to discover what you’re really keeping.

As Nin put it, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” In studying yourself, you expand infinitely.

So grab your notebook, your metaphorical trowel, your claws if necessary, and dig. Who knows what rituals you’ll rewrite, what myths you’ll debunk? What bone will you sing back to life first?

“Write what should not be forgotten.” —Isabel Allende

Your life is what should not be forgotten. Not the performed version, not the one where the house is always clean and you’re always together. The actual, embodied, daily, messy, true thing.

That’s the field site. You’re standing in it right now, dishes in the sink and all.

Take notes. Dig until it bleeds truth. Because here's what I've learned from one dried puddle of chilli sauce on marble: I spent decades as a human bib, standing ready with a cloth to catch every spill, save every surface, perform "good woman" for ghosts who weren't even watching. Now I see the spill and think: evidence. Data. Proof of a life actually lived rather than endlessly tidied. I watch and I learn. Ben's rubbish kebab left its mark. So can I. That's the field site. I'm standing in it right now, stains and all.

Taste it twice won’t you?