Have I done this premise before? Eh, whatever.
Watched a video about Jungian psychology that talked about how it is by exploring your shadow – that place where you hide everything you can’t or won’t accept about yourself – that you can find not only true mental health but maybe even your purpose in life.
Now I dunno about that second part. I don’t disagree with Jung per so, just like I don’t disagree with Freud, but both men fell into the pathfinder’s trap of thinking that that marvelous new thing you’ve discovered explains EVERYTHING.
Hold your horses, gentlemen. Let’s not get carried away.
But the idea that you can increase your mental healthy by making the subconscious conscious seems sound to me if not overapplied, so what the hell, let’s try to figure out what all I have shoved out of the light about myself.
There’s a lot.
In fact, from a certain POV. it feels like there is a whole universe of it. For lo these many years, I confined my consciousness to a very narrow corridor of possibilities and everything else got chucked into the fuck-it bucket of my subconscious.
Well I’ve told the bucket where it can stucket (sic) and now it’s like I’ve just landed in Oz and I am seeing life in color for the first time.
Anyhow, enough wittering away. What’s in there?
We’ll tick of the simple, easy ones first : all my basic lizard brain level emotions have been redirected there. Rage, lust, ambition, resentment, bitterness, and so on.
There’s oceans of all that stuff hidden in my shadow because I have never had the guts or the wherewithal to deal with that stuff at all.
It takes a certain amount of boldness and grit to follow your urges in order to slake them, and I have not had that in me.
Instead, I just stick my head in the sand until they go away.
But of course, there’s far, far more than that in there.
Take the entire realm of romantic love. I’ve barely ever been there, and when I did have it, it was online and via text based furry environments and thus rendered “safe”.
Actual normal adult romance has never happened to me, and I honestly don’t know if it ever will. As things stand right now, I can’t see how that could ever happen to a furry urban hermit like myself.
I mean, how would I even meet somebody, let alone become romantically connected to them? My life is so sealed off.
I presumably have all these needs myself but I cut myself off from ever following my instincts and/or doing things purely for my own emotional satisfaction a long time ago, and forced myself into a cage made of logic and cowardice, then managed to forget all about what life outside that cage might mean in regards to myself.
There’s no family or intimacy or sense of connection for me right now. I feel very remotely removed from the human race, and I long for greater connection, and yet I also doubt my ability to maintain such a connection.
I can only imagine myself fleeing from connection because it’s all just too intense and “real” for me and I need to escape into my flickering shadows once more.
And for the stuff in the green zone, I have two kinds of confidence, total, and absent. There are intellectual arenas in which I am completely confident, to the point of seeming arrogant, and I am not sure I could say that I am not.
Maybe being so sure of yourself really IS a form of arrogance. I don’t know.
But outside those areas I am the sad little critter you know and love. Clumsy, shy, and easily confused, I stumble through the scrubby underbrush of the world afraid of everything and doing nothing.
Well, nothing of note, anyhow.
Video games don’t count.
And I long for some confident, competent, noble soul to come scoop me into his arms and give me the comfort and reassurance I need in order to go out and play with the big kids and finally learn how to get along.
More after the break.
More pyramid stuff
I honestly believe that as simple and obvious as it seems, Maslow’s hierarchy as illustrated above actually contains great wisdom.
Taking another look at the green zone, I guess I started off as a very unique individual and I have never been anything else.
I never felt pressure to conform. Whatever frequency that shit is broadcast on, I don’t receive it. The most I ever had was very vague, diffuse thoughts about what it would take to get along with the other kids.
But it never felt like something I could actually do.
They were as alien to me as I was to them.
Ironically, I actually do better with the stuff at the top of the pyramid, in the purple zone. Creativity I have in spades. Morality has been a deep part of me ever since my early teens, when I first understood that people have a moral stance and it’s something they need to fight and stand up for.
And I have been stockpiling inner potential for so long that it’s like I am stockpiling canned food for the Apocalypse.
So I suppose I am kind of built upside down. I have the top zone and the bottom zone covered, more or less, but everything in the middle is missing.
I have a long way to go before I am truly human. My higher self cannot sustain me without my lower self’s energy and love and warmth. I have been trying to live up where the air is rare for far too long.
Time to climb down and see what’s going on in the real world.
I have insights to share! Anyone want some?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.