In her memoir Self-Portrait, the artist Celia Paul wrote that she considers herself essentially the same person since she was a teenager. Bloody hell, to have that kind of integrity! To be in possession of a character worth preserving! Paul is 30 years older than me, a significant stretch of time to be herself. I recently turned 36. There's been some peace in the knowledge that, from this point on, I've been an adult longer than I've been a child. I spent my juvenile years, an embarrassingly long era, yearning to grow up. Maybe this stemmed from the common or garden human need for independence. Maybe it came from the reassurance I'd be given from other adults whenever I was distressed, that things would get better when I was older. They commended my intelligence, my "old soul". I dug deeper into this foundation, dismissing the pains of the present by trading them for a bright future. The promise of my adult self was a transformation into another person, that all these awkward, pudgy bits of girl were just the raw materials to build a graceful, dynamic woman. My cloying needs would disappear once she appeared to fulfil them. She would be happy and I would be her one day.

The thread between us, her and I, is that I conceptualised each of them as entirely alone, eternally separate. I simply did not consider others in these visions and that's just pure narcissism, right? What happened was I did actually fit in, consistently. I made friends and did okay at keeping them, despite my insistence at points that I was the shitty centre of the universe. What didn't happen was my fantasy of being revealed to be a very special one, a prodigy, a singular genius. I have been entirely unoriginal in my attempts to be exceptional. And I desperately wanted to be exceptional. Which is why I set out to be a free-spirited artist - just like all the other hipsters, ending up in a mishmash of mimicry, spending most of my working life in offices anyway. But I loved the company, for the most part, and nothing is ever truly wasted, so don't believe what you've heard about youth on the young.

Speaking of company. I corralled my husband to come with me to a supper club - I know, I know, it's just a restaurant that serves a set menu at one smaller sitting - that I had been lusting after for some time. Overhearing our table-mates, who were getting into the socialising swing of the operation, I gleaned that they'd studied philosophy, in that high rising intonation that invited amazement, before listing all the same places I like to eat. Hatred surged through me, for them, for myself, for what suddenly felt like a charade unfolding around us. However multi-directional that hatred seemed, the source was just that same old shame. The illusion that I had free will, that my choices were my own and unique to boot, that my value as a person rested on my publicised proclivities, how subject I am to the same forces as everyone else, with no way out... Oh, the food was delicious, by the way.

Last summer, a friend took me to a theatre piece. The premise was to reverse the focus, showing the audience themselves, celebrating how essential they were to the practice of theatre. In execution, this meant lots of lip-syncing to crowd-sourced voice notes and live video links. How great it was to turn my phone off and be in a place with other people for some theatre to find ourselves projected onto a screen, with no idea what would happen to the recordings of our likenesses we hadn't agreed to being made. It was meant to be a celebration of the people who show up to watch shows but, yikes, all I could feel coming from the stage was contempt. Rather than appreciate the audience, every device seemed to affirm that any artistic alchemy belonged solely to the theatre-makers. I couldn't discern if this was a failure of intent, an elaborate ruse, or a whacking great neg.

There was a slight lag between being filmed by the camera and appearing on the screen. The time delay allowed us to anxiously scan for ourselves among the crowd. I wondered whether anyone else was doing the same. The whole thing left me soaked with the same hatred-shame I'd had at the supper club but with an inverse yearning. The piece had uncovered an assumption of mine - see, nothing is wasted! - that it turns out I want to become part of an amorphous blob of audience. I've not come here wanting to see a direct reflection of myself. This isn't about me.

A phrase has been haunting me for a couple of years, since I saw it on countless trucks hauling throughout mainland Europe - If you can't see my mirrors, I can't see you. Vaguely threatening for a road safety announcement. But I read it as - you must affirm my idea of myself or I won't recognise your existence. I mean, where do I even fucking start with Millennial narcissism? Each generation has its own form, I hasten to add, lest you think I'm singling out my own sorry lot. Our particular type was subject to digital mutation, meaning there were avenues for en masse broadcasting of every minutiae at a global scale. Like Florida Man, we appear more narcissistic because there are more opportunities to display and witness narcissistic behaviours. Trapped in between these mirrors, we were told we'd see infinity, and all we saw was the repetition of our selves ad nauseam.

It wasn't like this at the outset. The rush at first seeing people we knew and people we hadn't crossed paths with before in this new medium expanded our worldviews. We were sensitive, empathetic, and suddenly had attention to pay. We became careful with our words as everything we said turned into text on the record. We vowed not to be as emotionally repressed as our parents and grandparents, which was just as well considering there were suddenly so many different platforms available for us to talk about ourselves. And talk about ourselves, and only ourselves, we did. Which goes some way to explaining the Millennial obsession with writing novels about the Millennial experience. It could be seen as an expression of humility, that it's all we know for sure and don't want to speak for anyone else, but also goes some way to highlighting the lack of meaningful inclusion in literary world.

We've had our prodigy in Sally Rooney. The literary sensation that is Normal People begins with its protagonists, who happened to be the same age as their author, as adolescents. I liked it, even if I felt disconnected from the hype. What Rooney did felt to me like being able to take first love seriously, a love that is recognisable in its early awkwardness but striking, almost unbelievable, in its latter emotional maturity. She enshrined that this kind of love is formative, that experiencing the other as a teenager doesn't automatically make that relationship shallow or disposable. She implores clearly outside of her fiction, more softly within it, that there is no you without others. She takes her uneasy, frankly queasy, relationship to her stratospheric fame and riches and literally puts her money where her mouth is. What a selfish, narcissistic Millennial!

That initial flood and bonding of multiple experiences were usurped by the aspiration, commodification, and optimisation of the global context. We set out for social justice and to continue liberation projects, and we've ended up scolding each other from our individual cells. But what else was going to happen in our era of scarcity, where we're forced to be self-sufficient? How couldn't we become obsessed with self-improvement, self-expression, self-care, when any real-world opportunity to be together was either dismantled beyond recognition or came with a prohibitive price tag.

bell hooks secured her role as prophet when she said, “I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.” I truly believe that we are on the brink of freeing ourselves from this hyperindividualism, these billions of cults running concurrently, these folie à moi-s. We can practice love again. We can build these communal contexts. For no other reason than we're running out of options.

Zadie Smith remarked that there's a refreshing lack of triumphalism in Paul's memoir, as its so often a hallmark of the genre. There's no victory of the self, one narrative conquering all. Just the myriad complexities one particular human life encounters in its inextricable connections from, to, and with other human lives through their shared years, places, contexts. Not strictly a self-portrait - more a self-landscape.

A fair while ago, there was a social experiment slash art installation called something like The Mirrorbox. I'm estimating because I can't find evidence of it now but I know I didn't dream it up. If I had those sorts of ideas, you'd know about it. Set up like a sort of phone booth, participants would step in, to be completely shrouded in darkness. Thanks to some cleverly angled mirrors, the participant would be presented with someone else's face at the same eye-line and proportions as they would have done with their own reflection.

Turns out, there were two entrances to the booth. These two people were looking into the other's eyes in real time. Their brains adjusted, absorbing the only visual information it had to come to the conclusion that the face it saw was its own. The participants would giggle at first, then, one after the other, they'd cry. Out of the booth, they shared that they'd experienced a profound sense of peace, getting as close as they could to being in someone else's skin. Well, how about that?

If I don't see myself in my mirror, I can see you.