I Thought I’d Designed Myself
How a 1990s A-Level Lesson Shaped the Way I See the World – and Myself
As an A Level Communication Studies student, circa 1992, I remember learning about a model of communication that depicted the myriad ways we are formed, psychologically, as people. There was a central point - the person - and then around them were multiple factors of influence that had moulded them: culture, social norms, life experience, language, environment, attitude and beliefs, peer groups, and family background. It was called the Transactional Model of Communication, and it blew my mind.
Much of that course blew my mind, in fact. There were all these concepts and research studies into things that I’d previously never given a single thought to. Things like “phatic communication” (chit-chat for social connection but with no greater purpose), “groupthink” (how human beings can be drawn into behaving in ways incongruent with who they truly are, simply through social and emotional contagion - for example, Vietnam and the human rights atrocities carried out by many U.S. soldiers there - people with no history of such behaviour outside of the war environment), and “agenda setting” (how news and the media select certain items deemed more newsworthy than others, and the process by which they prioritise world events. For instance, is a British royal family state visit higher up the agenda than an earthquake taking place elsewhere on the same day?).
That A Level Communication Studies course shaped me in ways I didn’t appreciate as a teenager, caught up, as I was at the time, in the woes and desires of a 1990s girl in the UK. My big loves were dance music, the rave/club scene, boys, being thin, my dog George, and clothes. College was, to a large extent, an inconvenience - but I loved the Communication Studies course (and I got an A, which proves, yet again, that we do well in the things we are passionate about).
So, back to that Transactional Model of Communication…
What was it about this that affected me so deeply that I can still recall it now, 32 years later? Well, that model showed me that we are more animalistic than we perhaps like to think. We have less agency than we might choose to believe. We are driven and designed by what is happening to us from the moment we are born. There are genes that come into play, of course, but where, and with whom, and in what circumstances we mature into adults becomes the blueprint for what we are - each one of us, a unique construct designed by the life that has happened around us.
I didn’t see this prior to college. I thought I was choosing everything. I believed I had designed myself.
I suppose, looking back, the Transactional Model of Communication was the first time I’d had my ego challenged – the first time I stepped away from myself and saw a construct, as opposed to a person making independent choices from a place of complete neutrality. I had been shaped. I had been designed.
Now, what I did with this knowledge was park it, and occasionally consider it in relation to other people. I sort of forgot that I was in a state of constant and ever-changing design. And as a result, I went on to become deeply affected by the way the alcohol industry at large began targeting the female audience at that time; the way I thought women should behave and look. The way I embarked on adult life became a mishmash of other people’s beliefs and values – my authentic voice got crushed and trampled by the weight of this loud, noisy, frantic, and relentless world around me.
The lessons of Communication Studies were ultimately - for a couple of decades at least - obscured by the hyper-stimulating, productivity-obsessed world around me, a capitalist machine that never sleeps, always demands more, and drowns us in noise.
For someone with ADHD, it’s like trying to meditate in the middle of a motorway: the speed, the pressure, the constant input - it all blurs into a kind of mental chaos that you can’t just switch off or walk away from. I found it almost impossible to stay clear-headed during all those years I didn’t know I was neurodivergent - it was like struggling to swim against the flow of a raging river. I was always getting dragged back in the direction I didn’t really want to go.
Stopping drinking in 2011 was the first thing I did to help myself climb out of that turbulent torrent. That single act tuned out the noise and the chaos. It gave me clarity and a greater ability to choose, with agency, the habits and lifestyle that served me. In the years that have followed, I’ve consistently worked towards a non-processed diet, daily exercise, regular meditation, self-honouring (recognising and immersing myself in the environments, people, and cultures that help me thrive, and letting go of or distancing myself from the ones that drain me), and self-compassion. I tune into my needs, take regular recces of what is happening around me, utilise the agency that I do have, and try to choose what helps, rather than being pulled into that which hinders.
When I look at that Transactional Model of Communication, the answers are all there. The person in the middle, shaped by all those little bubbles around them – the people, the environment, the peer groups, the language, the life experience. What I have learnt, above all else, during the last 32 years, is that we need to practice active design of those bubbles. We cannot leave them to chance. That is our power, our agency – to place ourselves amidst the right influences to bring out the best version of our authentic selves.
Think of it as a soul garden. Then pull on your gardening gloves on and get busy.
