Sweet : my keyboard issues seem to have ALMOST fixed themselves. I can type every letter of the alphabet except S and X.
X is easy to live without, but S is one of the most common letters in the English language, so having to still use the virtual keyboard for that one letter is a pain.
I might get desperate enough to reboot just in case that brings my S back. Then again, it might reverse whatever benevolent magic made the damned thing work again.
Perhaps I should quit while I am ahead.
Oh. Turn out I can’t do Q either.
This is all so stressful! Why are my problems always so weird?
Work, god damn you!
Anyhow, that’s not what I meant to talk to you about today. This is :
What’s in my shadow?
Ooh, how mysterious!
{ am speaking of my Jungian shadow in this case. I watched (listened to) a video yesterday about the shadow and how important it is to explore your shadow and reclaim everything in there and embrace and accept it back into our identity and it made me realize how slippery an issue this is for me.
Because I am someone who has done a fair of intropection in my attempts to fix my fractured mind and I have no problem facing harsh truth about myself and I have a loing history of fearlessly plunging ahead like a pack of wild dogs after the truth and so it is easy to imagine there is nothing in my shadow because I am far too honest with myself and open to myself to even HAVE a shadow.
Which mean mine is doing its job very, very well.
It job is to hide the thing we can’t accept about ourselves from us, after all. Like Freud’s subconscious mind, it lets us generate a sense of self we can accept.
Gah. I’m intellectualizing again. Stop explaining and dig deep!
So what’s in mine? I don’t know. I can’t immediately think of anything I have trouble accepting about myself.
Which again just means my shadow is very good.
But perhaps I am looking at this all wrong because I am looking for deep dark secrets filled with shame when the real things I can’t accept about myself are virtues.
Like just how powerful and special and unique I am. Sure, I technically accept the bare truth of these aspects of myself, but I am far too scared to come within a dozen parsecs of really accepting these astounding truths about myself into my core identity.
It’s just too much. It feels like if I did that, I would instantly lose my mind to delusions of grandeur because there is no way to fit all that power into a merely human identity.
Plus there is the enormous responsibility implied by so much power. That scares me too. If I truly took ownership of my abilities, I would feel obligated to do great things with them, and then what?
What would happen to my life as I know it if I let that happen? It would be destroyed.
And asking an overgrown caterpillar like me to give up everything he knows in order to enter a completely foreign and alien new life is asking one hell of a lot.
But that’s what comes next if I want to move forward.
So do I?
More after the break.
Taking the reins
So yeah. That whole “owning my power” thing.
The very idea of it make me feel dizzy and nauseous. Like I almost stepped over the edge of a steep cliff and just barely pulled back in time to not fall.
It’s a lot like vertigo, come to think of it. But the heights involved are metaphorical.
But to me, very very real.
The thing is, I don’t know how to live with the constant present knowledge of jut how much you tower over other people intellectually. I have always dodged the question by concentrating on my flaws instead.
Like my current fave, adding “fat lot of good it does me!” or the like to any statement, internal or external, about my extraordinary gift.
This is more than just depression cutting me down. It’s an active strategy to avoid having to deal with the reality of my position over others.
As such, it treats the knowledge of my giftedness like a threat that must immediately neutralized lest it upset the whole system.
There is also the fear of “falling into the sky” as the knowledge of my advantages makes my ego inflate and take me into the stratosphere far, far away from the rest of humanity and into some kind of esoteric realm of abstraction from which there is no return.
Again, such a fear might seem bizarre and improbable and easily dismissed to other but I assure you, it is extremely real to me.
And I know this all might be pure humbug generated by my depression to keep me under its thumb. But that, sadly, does not give me the power to wave my magic wand and make it all go away.
These things are part of my mind and I have to deal with them whether or not they are “real” in any other sense.
It all comes back to the fact that I don’t know how to BE a person with amazing gifts, even though I have been one for my entire life.
I mean, I learned to read when I was only three years old, for Christ’s sake.
But I suppose, looking back, that my default strategy for dealing with that fact has been to very badly pretend to be like everyone else.
While also, of course, violently refusing to change in order to fit in.
Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?
Well then here it is: I am a once in a generation intellectual giant, and I am just going to have to get used to the idea.
…
Great, now what do I do?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.