I Want To Experiment On Psychologists
After the Art of Assembly last week, I meet Adam. We have a debrief. Neither of us can think properly — MY MUM IS WHITE has been so intense. I know he has changed. I have changed. ‘You look different.’ ‘You look different too.’ Chasing half-caste, mixed-race, is irrelevant now. We both know that. In our hours and hours of listening; questioning; digesting; mind-mapping, I have personally discovered that the caste system's projected colour of our skin and our parental heritage has been masking our real grief. Linked, as is normal, to loss, abandonment, death, and the need to survive which inevitably involves money. Our process has really worked. Our colour, race, ethnicity, caste — I don't even know what to call it — is redundant. We have tunneled beneath it. We don’t understand what our process has worked on. We don’t know what to do next. Let’s write a book. Adam walks me to the train station. I will pull the chapters outline together. So, I do.
MY MUM IS WHITE: The Book
Me and Adam will both write a version of the following 8 chapters. Opening with an intro. Closing with a summary. Adam as a psychologist. Me as an artist. Both of us influencing each other. Both of us as participants too.
Introduction.
How we meet. What we intend. Why. How.
1. Mine and Adam’s 8 weeks together.
Devising the process we truthfully explore what being half-caste is like growing up.
2. 23.07.25. Prep Day.
Participants first meet. Each must declare a non-negotiable. Each give us a little peak of their heart. We go down into HOME gallery to see how to curate MMIW.
3. Playlist.
A soundtrack of our life. How do you make the decisions? Who are you presenting to the world? For example, scared that mine is predominantly white musicians I go through the decades making sure to add at least one black artist in each.
4. Montage.
We each curate a photo montage. Who’s in — who’s out? Why? How we feel when we enter the gallery on our day, and our life is projected huge on a screen underscored by our playlist?
5. August. Individual psychology session plus mind-map.
In the ghost of Adam’s consultation room — which he must also exorcise — listening; questioning; digesting; mind-mapping.
6. September. Group psychology plus mind-map.
In our moody comfy corner — lamp, sofas, biscuits, brews — listening; questioning; digesting; mind-mapping.
7. Public Workshops.
29.08.25. Investigating Isabel Wilkinson’s 8 Pillars of Caste.
05.09.25. Investigating Fraiberg’s Ghost in the Nursery.
12.09.25. My 12-words writing technique; and 8-station mind-mapping technique.
15.09.25. Panel hosted by the University of Manchester’s Creative Manchester.
8. Exorcism
Staying in the semi-posh hotel next door. Having dinner together just as human beings. Midnight — lighting candles, laying flowers in our mind-map forest. Sitting, supported, our back to the wall of Adam’s deconstructed consultation room feeling nothing but peace.
Summary
19.09.25 unpacking what MY MUM IS WHITE meant to participants and public.
21.09.24. Sunday. The last day.
14.11.25. The participants' evaluation — yet to come.
What we discover.
Psychologist
As I’m writing the chapter outlines, I’m thinking of course we won’t just be telling our readers what we did; but also unpacking the relevance of each chapter; what it unlocks; guiding them through exercises to help them implement the process themselves.
Then Sonia replies to the Apothecary of Art. ‘I love you and your aunts tottering up the hill to Miss Ada and I love what is valuable about her time. I think I spend too much time convening with the ailments, I understand them well enough now, I need to get on experimenting and offering relief.’
I think more deeply.
What are the ailments I am convening with?
What should I be experimenting with?
What relief should I be offering.
I realise. No, me and Adam can’t chase race all our life. It flies in the face of what I say I want to be unchained from. This process can exorcise anything and anybody. The next cohort must be psychologist. We have to test our process on psychologists. And the ghost we have to exorcise — don’t freak out — is Freud. Born 1856. Dies 1939. So much has changed since then. No one wears Fedoras. We don't live by the societal morals in novels written between theses dates. The line between professional and private is blurred now. We are invested in our own mental health.
We Forget to Lay the Railway Line
Then I realise. MY MUM IS WHITE did not travel on the seminal 8 Pillars of Caste, or Ghosts in the Nursery — the texts we used to uncover and control our goal. Did we make things harder for ourselves by seemingly making it easier for our participants? Do the participants need to study Caste and Ghosts? Should they learn how to mind-map? Or is it the psychologists, only, who learn Caste, Ghosts, mind-mapping? There is a caste system embedded in formal psychology walls. And ghosts haunt each psychologist’s nursery. Should their patients be aware of these to help their own recovery? When Adam makes our participants aware of the system he battles, the ghosts he is born with, their hearts are moved to empathy. Empathy means they are feeling. Feeling the event is the bottom-line elixir of Ghosts in the Nursery. The participants don’t strike him off as a nobody. They do that modern internet thing of responding to his story and then feeling they can confess more.
Relief
If a process can make me not give a fuck about race conversations and just feel totally comfortable in who I am — in only 16 months — it is definitely a relief I should be offering for many things. I should experiment on the best way to deliver it. And nobody, but nobody, is a better guinea pig than psychologists. On every level.