I wrote the poem below upon starting James Hollis’s book A Life of Meaning, which is about becoming conscious of the stories that govern our lives through their logic, character roles, and societal rules. This can be productive, but it can also be destructive, and at mid-life especially, people start to notice that certain stories we serve, the most powerful stemming from childhood, are no longer serving us, or maybe they never were.
Listening to the initial chapter—which explains how insidiously powerful the stories are that we take in from culture and early life experiences—brought up in me feelings of despair as lately, I’ve been stuck between outdated stories that dominate my life. One of these is a cross between “God is a man” and the “magical other”: this idea that there’s a person who can make everything right in your life. It’s not only women who believe in a male magical other. Men believe in a female magical other. The cross-section of the stories just means that men and women are often ascribed distinct roles, abilities, and limitations, based on whether you were born with a penis or a vagina, which really doesn’t have all that much to do with being human beyond a couple of very limited, albeit very important, roles on both sides.
Belief in the magical other prompts us to project all kinds of responsibilities onto our partners that are not theirs. We want and expect them to take care of us in ways that are not their responsibility. I am guessing that the “magical other” is the star in our co-dependent relationship patterns, not the real person we’re with. Enter stage left disappointment and resentment.
For various complex reasons, I’ve never really bought this story, though I’ve been somewhat aware of variations of it for much of my life. The simplest reason is that I was always suspicious of it because real life didn’t seem to work that way.
Religion said there was a magical guy in the sky (and in our hearts) who could do this. I didn’t really find that to be true in my life. Hollywood said that a True Love could do this. I never really believed in that either. Most real relationships I witnessed were fraught with tension, and the way most love stories ended at the beginning of the relationship (marriage) just didn’t make sense to me. I always thought, what then? Married life did not look “happily ever after” to me. Raising a family is no cake walk. (Remember those??)
A more complex reason has to do with the dynamics within my family of origin, in which I was often misunderstood and had a younger sibling who figured out at an early age that he could “tell on me” in order to get what he wanted, even when I hadn’t done anything wrong, especially when I hadn’t. Kids will be kids. I don’t hold any grudges about this as an adult, though I did as a teenager. Who wouldn’t?
The other important part was that for whatever reason, probably overwhelm in dealing with daily life, my parents weren’t particularly interested in discovering the truth and sometimes punished me for things I hadn’t even done. This had an interesting effect on my beliefs about our stories: how people created stories not only to make sense of life but also to get what they wanted, and how uncritically people often accepted and used them to decide what was true and what to do about it.
The simple fact that seemed evident to me was that people were full of shit, and so were our stories. The truth seemed to lie underneath our words. I think that’s what I believed.
Looking at my life through this lens, it’s not surprising that I chose a career in examining how stories worked in our individual lives and in the world at large.
If there was a part of the Magical Other story that went along with this, it would likely be a belief I have noticed in myself that a “true” lover should be able to understand the truth beneath my words, and anyone who doesn’t even try is no lover of mine.
The things my younger sibling wanted were innocuous things like getting to choose the next show on TV even though it was my turn. He’d try to keep the “channel changer” (what we called the remote), and when I’d eventually pry it out of his hands by force, my brother would embellish or outright lie and say something like, “MOM, Julie hit me and stole the channel changer!” And my mom would yell upstairs from the kitchen, “Julie, apologize to your brother and give him the channel changer!”
I would try to argue, but that would be the end of that, probably ratified by the threat, “Don’t make me get your father!” Nobody wanted that. I’d surrender the remote and fume in silence or stalk off to do something else.
The worst scenario I can think of nearly resulted in me not being allowed to go to my grad party because of something my brother had done. This was the only time I can recall really going after him for it. I usually just peaced out and did my own thing, but this time, the stakes were too high. I was GOING to grad, so I pressed him hard to confess, so hard that he broke down and cried, still proclaiming his innocence, and I felt guilty about it for decades, until he finally admitted that he’d actually been guilty. Little fucker!
This is a funny anecdote between us now.
The troubling part for me growing up was that because of stories like these within my family, I became the notorious “black sheep.” I was always causing trouble, hurting my little brother, doing “bad” things, and my parents became sort of perpetually suspicious of me and my motives. They thought I was a bad kid who actually wanted to hurt my brother, which was not the case. I was no angel, but their view of my character was considerably darker than the reality.
The human mind is always looking for someone to blame, someone to project our angst upon. I became that person in our family to some extent for our father in particular. He had all kinds of dark imaginings of how I treated my brother that were complete fantasies. This often manifested in a vague and pervasive dislike of my general presence, but sometimes I got severely punished for nothing or next to it, whether my brother had complained or not.
Besides the usual irritation an older sibling displays when commanded to include their younger brother or sister when playing with friends, I was actually very protective of my brother. I don’t think I ever told on him for anything, and about the few hazing things I did as a kid, I immediately felt so guilty that I not only never did anything like that again; I was extra nice and careful with him.
Likely at least in part because I knew so viscerally how false our stories about life and people could be, I was suspicious not only of the alleged “bad guy” but also the alleged “good guy.” In our family, the “good guy” among us three siblings was my brother, as far as I understood things, and he was—this childish manipulation aside—a good person. I mean, I didn’t disagree in most ways. I could see how awesome he was, and I loved him dearly, but he was certainly no saint, and this “good guy” was certainly not responsible for fixing my problems in life, nor would I expect it.
Interestingly, for having grown up a liar, liar with his pants on fire in his early years, he turned into one of the most honest people I’ve ever known, and he is probably a better wordsmith than I ever was. He can absolutely slay a wedding speech and the sporadic birthday or Christmas card. He thinks he’s bad with words, but he’s absolutely not. I wish he’d written a wedding speech for our sister. I wrote one, and it was lukewarm good. If my brother had written one, it would have destroyed the place. Me: the alleged writer, and he: the alleged tradesman. (I’m invoking stereotypes about white and blue collar here but not mentioning them, so as to destroy them with exploding roses in your brains.)
Back in the earlier days, though, the simple fact that seemed evident to me was that fixing my life was up to me. My parents (who we often see as akin to Gods when we’re children) weren’t going to do it either, in certain regards that I had in mind. In the barest logical terms, parents were good for making sure you were clothed, fed, and had a place to sleep. They did more than this, but it wasn’t in our family narrative for me to go to my parents for help solving problems that didn’t have to do with the basics of the basics. Kids talk to their parents nowadays a lot more than in the past. This was at least in part a cultural thing when I grew up, and I’m drastically simplifying here to get to my point.
For various reasons, I didn’t believe in the alleged “magical other.”
However, when I was in the thick of my quarter-life crisis 20 years ago, I met someone with whom I had a powerful numinous experience that helped me break free from some destructive patterns I was stuck in, and this suspicious story of the Magical Other rose up in me like a flood and created tremendous confusion.
The simple truth is that I didn’t know of any story that could make sense of what I experienced except for the “magical other”; i.e. my transformative experience must have been because of this specific person, but I also firmly believed that the magical other was a myth. Regardless, it struggled for dominance in my heart and mind. It tried to code all of my expectations about what was going to happen next, even as I resisted it, which can often wind you up no better than blind acceptance does. As Hollis explains in his book, the stories we take in in our formative years are powerful influences when triggered, and this one was.
The problem was that I didn’t have an alternative story to tap into that was still life and love affirming without funneling me towards co-dependence and projecting massive expectations onto the person I was with when I had the numinous experience.
It wasn’t until relatively recently that I discovered Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s discussion on women aligning with trees. If I’d had her story then, perhaps it would have grounded me better than the one I had.
In short, rather than embracing the love and excitement I was feeling, I started fighting the story. This did not bode well for what might have been an otherwise very loving experience. It also did not bode well for my emotional well-being period.
As he spoke of love, I spoke of being careful with our expectations of what was going to happen next. I spoke of not getting lost in our imaginations and keeping our feet on the ground. This likely came across as coolness towards him, as rejection, or cynicism, even though it most certainly was not. I was going to win my battle with this story, only it was for too early on, and it just created confusion and separation.
And when my pushback got the ultimate shove, I responded unconsciously by pushing a lot of what might have otherwise been able to emerge into my life with love into shadow.
That was twenty years ago. It was the first time I’ve had to face down the workings of this story in my own psyche. It has come up time and again in other relationships, but not so strongly within me, more so within my partners. I was perpetually being hacked off of pedestals. I believe I did pretty well at not putting them up there, too, but who knows. Maybe that’s just folly talking. Either way, it very clearly came up for me again nearly two years ago when I finally went digging for that numinous experience, if not the man, to connect with what my deep psyche had been trying to give me: a sense of direction with a loving life force behind it. I was going through an equally hard time in life again, and I needed something powerful to draw from not only for a sense of direction but also not to give in to despair.
I tried to keep the man out of the process and focus more on the massive redwood tree that came to me so long ago, but that proved harder in practice than in theory, and no surprise, along came the story with its star: the Magical Other. It was clear as day.
Even so, this time, unlike the previous, I decided to embrace it in order to understand how it worked in my life and, ultimately, retrieve any parts of me lost and abandoned from my disavowal of it. What I discovered was that I was a completely hopeless closet romantic.
FUCK, I thought. I grew up listening not to Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and N-Sync, though they did filter in from the outer environment, but to Metallica, Bad Religion, and Pink Floyd. I was far more punk than powder puff, but there was this part of me that I discovered when I opened myself to the “love stories” of the world, who wanted nothing less than to be loved with great, shameless romance and have the same happy endings.
FUCK, I thought again. There’s no such thing as a happy ending. This is so embarrassing. But, I was determined to stop alienating whatever parts of me had clearly been very lonely all these years because I’d paid little to no attention to them, or when I did, sort of rolled my eyes at them.
I compiled lists of love songs and listened to them continually, reading their lyrics closely and when I wasn’t hearing my own story in them, I was hearing my own desires. I heard what my heart wanted. I felt it, deeply. For the first time in my life, I sat unconditionally open and accepting to my own desire, come what may.
The journey was fraught with clashes with “real life,” which I struggled to make sense of against the story emerging from a confusing combination of memory and desire, and I imagined what could happen if I did a better job of listening more to my desire than my doubt, like I did all those years ago, not to foster regret but to hear what my lonely heart needed me to hear.
I am an introvert. I spend a lot of time alone because that’s where I’m happiest, but at mid-life, I had to reckon with having lost a lot of people in my life due to my illness and other circumstances beyond my control.
There was a loneliness that needed to be heard with love rather than rolling eyes.
So headlong into the abyss of the enemy I went: into the storyland of the alleged “magical other” to retrieve myself and bring her into the present. I allowed myself to imagine being loved by someone unconditionally, which I thought was purely myth on a conscious level, where lovers were concerned, because throughout my life, I’ve found that people seem to mainly just want a partner to do things for them in life or represent something they feel makes their life complete, someone to agree with all their ideas rather than have true, two-way conversations. I’ve known many men who I can have proper two-way conversations with, but this is rare in partnership for me. Love has by no means been absent, but never again has there been that powerful connection and flow of life force that I felt for a short time many years ago, from which the great redwood emerged and set me straight in some important ways.
I’m working on connecting with that tree now, with the great narratives of nature not only told in our school books, to shirk the narrative of the magical other, but I’m still in the weeds here, to be perfectly honest.
Parts of this journey of facing the “magical other” mythology and phenomenology head on—of which I am on the tail end as long as no one gets me started on that philosophical branch I just named—were tremendously, joyously full of love and inspiration. Others not so much, especially where I tried to reconcile reality with these dreamlike explorations of love. Here I sit, stuck between fantasy and reality, neither of which is free of the power of stories, without a compass or a map, for literally all stories are suspect at this point.
But in this apparently barren place, I cannot deny that the gifts have been considerable. For one, I know what my heart desires, whereas this was only a vague idea for the longest time. For another, my folly, by and by stripped of toxic shame, begins to emerge, and from there, by contrast, a path may appear, suggests Hollis. It’s still pretty murky and liable to much confusion and stumbling, but the potential is there.
In shadow work, rather than running from our folly, we must look it in its face (our own foolish face) in order to understand what it has to give us, so in I went, contrary to my “better” judgment of previous years, which said, Fuck this. Forget it, and move on.
As I traversed this “lovers land,” I discovered that the grand expectations I have so assiduously guarded against manifested anyway, just beyond my conscious awareness. They went into shadow, from which come our most powerful influencers, not least because we don’t know what they’re doing or why, but because we don’t even know they’re there.
So the trouble with the belief in the magical other is our projections of all kinds of outlandish expectations upon our very real, humanly limited object of desire. While I had not ascribed to my love interest what I thought to be the usual grandiose expectations of responsibility for my well-being, like ridding the world of all evil, I discovered ones that were equally grandiose and unrealistic. I had expected him to understand my heart without telling him what was in it.
I had expected, in essence, that he could feel what I was feeling, that he could read between the lines.
I was never someone who had the wherewithal to try to manipulate people by saying one thing but meaning something else, but there were aspects of my motives and desires and hopes that simply never made it into words. Because I could feel their undercurrents as powerfully as mighty rivers, I assumed other people could, too, especially my magical other.
The loving parts of me, I’ve discovered in this process, are often the non-verbal undercurrents of what I do and say, or don’t do and don’t say. This likely has various causes, including the fact that we didn’t talk that way when I was growing up, except in church with church language that didn’t really apply to regular life. In my family, we knew we loved each other, even if we didn’t say it. That was part of our distinct, though not uncommon, story anyway.
The other thing that became glaringly obvious to me upon looking back through time was the way no one, myself included, understood how disorganized my illness made my mind, including the way I spoke and understood the world and myself. Now that we have Long Covid, awareness is growing, but this was before that.
There was a time when I tried to explain to this love interest of mine, in hindsight, how much he meant to me, but because of how confused my mind was, I went on and on but never really got there. It was a confused mass of words, anecdotes, philosophies, emotions, and other flotsam and jetsam, whatever was nearby.
In another important part of my life, this inability to stay focused in both speech and understanding unfortunately was taken up by cynical minds to discredit my motives, which were in reality supportive in nature, but were interpreted as ultimately selfish and power hungry.
Unfortunately, on the world stage, when someone with a powerful voice comes along and paints you with a brush that suits their own selfish aims best, often projecting onto you their own dark motives, there’s little a person can do about it besides “walk it down” with the best integrity you can muster. This is one of my aunties’ way of saying, keep doing what you know is right, and eventually, people will come around.
There is wisdom in this, though it’s not easy. The worst part is that people I deeply respected began to doubt my respect for them because of this new story about what I was all about and what I was trying to do. I’m not saying I never made mistakes. The problem was the slander around my motives and the disintegration of the community, which no longer provided organic opportunities to identify and repair the damage.
Ultimately, I lost people I genuinely cared about to a fearful fantasy.
That was painful. It still is.
What I learned? Trust is precious. Don’t squander it on fearful imaginings. If you have doubts, talk about them with the people they concern, not just everybody else. Give a person the respect of hearing your concerns and responding themselves. Don’t forget about Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. There are many Iago figures in our world today, inner and outer.
I don’t know how many times I’ve encountered this problem: countless, in love and friendship alike.
Jung’s definition of evil is actually relevant here. He says something like, “The spirit of evil is negation of the life force by fear. Only boldness can deliver us from fear, and if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is violated” (Hollis).
If there’s one thing my life urges me to share with others, it’s encouragement to be bold in the face of our fears about people we love, and people we don’t even know. My life tells me that we need to be bold enough to let people show us who they really are, not just listen to the fearful tellings of others about them.
Yeah, I know despair over the power of stories in our lives. I know the disappointment of being set up to fail by small-minded story-tellers with personal agendas. Be awake to the evil of the world, but also be wary of fear mongers. Go deeper. Dive below. Look for the bigger picture. That’s what my life tells me, not just Shakespeare.
There’s also a much shorter, more modern piece on this that we taught in first-year English on the Regular. It’s by NYT writer Brent Staples. It demonstrates to us the danger our fear creates for certain categories of people in particular, inviting us to consider and reconsider how our stories can, in fact, cause real-world harm to real-world people, not just fictional characters like Desdemona. (As far as I can tell, story-tellers in California and beyond have been heeding this call, which is worth noting, but we do need to keep at it.)
When my own most monumental character assassination happened to me, after I volunteered (yes, volunteered) my blood, sweat, and tears on a project I was hand-picked to do, my soul withdrew energy from my life in that place, despite me being a picture of good health habits otherwise. I collapsed in every possible way. The very energy system (the mitochondria) in my body stopped working almost entirely.
I ended up in the hospital for a week. They told me I could return to life as normal, so I tried. Within three months, I couldn’t even go to the grocery store for myself. The information was getting in, but it made no sense to my conscious mind, which had gone almost entirely underground.
What examination of the dominant stories in my life—about male dominance and the magical other—reflects to me now is the way in which I have played the role of the self-abrogating, self-sacrificing woman when things got heated.
I found myself doing the same thing with this love interest of mine, not because he was dominating in any noticeable way, but because the story was alive and well inside me, both in the distant and more recent past. In some important ways, I had not allowed myself my own desire back then, and even 20 years later, more recently, I struggled to do so.
As soon as the mere whiff of an accusation of selfishness comes up, I withdraw. No one even needs to say it, though it certainly happens. That’s how powerfully our stories work within me, to this day.
In our great love stories, traditionally at least, a woman is validated by a man. Her desires move only through him. They are given life through marriage, for example, and henceforth through the yay or nay of the husband and/or her children. Sure, fine, this is the 21st century, but we haven’t consciously rejected this self-denying narrative for that long, and not at all in many parts of the world, including many of our own neighbourhoods.
For my own part, let me be quite clear. On a conscious level, I have for a long time completely rejected this premise, but in practice, I have honoured it in ways that have been very harmful to me.
In particular, I didn’t allow myself to feel feelings that were not validated by (what?) my “magical other?” when things didn’t work out between us. And as I deliberately tried to openly consider these feelings more recently, I still met with GREAT internal resistance. Me: an unabashed feminist. The love would come up, and I would scold it and stuff it back down. In one sense, I battled our great cultural narratives that rarely have a place for unrequited love. At best, they replace the unrequited love with a new love, which in reality, often just winds a person up in the same place again, as Hollis explains in his book.
Whatever the cause, I faced deep shame over not having my feelings validated by the one person who was never going to validate them (that ship had long since sailed, but even if it hadn’t, it would still not be his responsibility to make me feel okay about my feelings; that’s my job, I find I have to remind myself, and I try to be kind about it, having learned that this is a vulnerable part of me that responds better to kindness than being pushed aside). I find I have to work hard consciously, on various levels, to embrace it unconditionally myself. I wonder that I could ever think it would be easier for other people than it is for me. So consciously, I knew it was up to me, not him, to validate my feelings, but the stories of the world have me believing that I need to get it from him, parts of me anyway.
And because this is a pattern, I have to keep an eye out for it when it goes shopping for bread at the hardware store and coach/coax it off in a different direction without the scolding. The shame-feeling part of me feels bound and reduced by not being able to complete the story. It goes all the way down to bare logic, i.e. that a person, especially a woman, as incomplete without a partner, and this part in particular has given me a serious run for my money because I LOVE logic. It is so reliable in some domains, but when it comes to relationships, it gets confused because we all have slightly different versions of the same programs running in our heads because when we take them in, we fit them into what’s already in there. Through that process, they become transformed, and so does the logic, via, I’m gonna wager my Psych background, the process of reducing cognitive dissonance.
There’s a nice thread to follow down the music path for anyone who’s interested.
All this is to say that there’s lots of obstacles to my success here, but I’m nothing if not stubborn when I’m on the scent. So, not to be deterred in going after stories themselves, not specific people, I decided to counter the reductive dominant narrative by writing my own as well as seeking other stories that were large enough for what is right on the horizon of my vision. While I have embarked on this effort with great enthusiasm, it’s like I’m missing my North Star and have to remember to re-orient regularly. When we’re in seed mode, it’s all a big jumble, but when we orient, we can have greater choice as to the direction our energy goes in as spring returns the energy to the land around us. Parts of me want to take off like a shot, but I HAVE to do this slowly. I don’t have a choice. I’ll burn out if I don’t.
So part of me brings in some story to slow me down. That’s okay, the slowing part, but I’m also now able to be more selective about what I choose to LET me slow down, and I’m trying to draw on stories that emphasize less about gender and more about the larger natural world and how they deal with that biological bifurcation. Some things have top priority: the basics for animal health, like lizard first, or is it mouse, but what about monkey? Then all these fights break out in this other story. ;)
As I’m experiencing this, I kind of just zone out and experience them as these sort of invisible barriers, in one perspective. From another perspective, it feels like a lack of… voter turnout, perhaps. The energy from the priority committee is disorganized. No one can agree well enough to get a majority. Consensus is preferred, like from our local Indigenous cultures that I’m familiar with.
So there’s just a lack of a clear message getting through, but as the world shifts this year, the message is getting clearer. It’s making more sense to me this time around. I’m also learning how to do trial and error better myself. I’m often on autopilot by necessity, kind of like the way autism works, but it’s not always like that. If I get enough time to myself, I can be very present with people, and I absolutely love it.
The problem with a kind of sudden return of life force to the body is that the body is out of condition, and so is the mind, for collective work, and I really love seeing that people are interested in becoming bolder about opening themselves up to people they would normally close themselves off to, which often happens because of a pain or fear from the past and may or may not be relevant to the present.
Because so much of what we do when we come back up from being, more or less, buried alive is non-verbal. It’s impossible to do some of this work remotely unless on the spirit realm, which I believe is the main hold off. Okay, to this, despite my outward rejection of Christianity, I actually have deep respect for certain aspects of it. I’m just still waiting to see more Christians interacting with more of our heathen stories (I’m not sure if that’s the right word) and reading them like we read the Bible, with awe and reverence as well as a healthy dose of skepticism. I’m also just waiting to notice it more because I think it’s already there. I’d love to see a spirited and reverent debate between like Joseph Campbell and, say, your local reverend.
Anyway, I received an amazing gift from the Christian legacy in my process the last few years: protection on the spirit plane from God, and all of the belief of … innumerable people around the world in its power. You don’t have to go this route. There’s others with equally powerful archetype power you can accept help from. This was offered to me by my Christian relatives, and I gratefully accepted, and it was offered and given without any strings attached. I don’t share all of the Christian faith, but I am humbly grateful in my heart for what this legacy has given me though living, loving people. This doesn’t mean I’m never going to kick and scream at “our Heavenly Father” from time to time because He isn’t perfect, but I am grateful.
No, this doesn’t make me a Zionist, in the same way that my love for Palestinians does not make me anti-Semitic. Can we dial back the name calling and pointing and shooting at each other online, unfollowing via knee-jerk assumptions? It closes down so much meaningful conversation. I’m not saying I haven’t unfollowed and even blocked a few people, but I try to do so with the same open consideration I would hope they’d give me if I said something that offended them. Knee jerks all around leave everyone kicked in the shin, or worse: the crotch. (It’s not as eloquent as “An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind” by Martin Luther King Jr, but it’s going in the right direction, no?)
So I’m stuck here at the intersection of all these stories, trying to, in essence, blaze my own path forward with a weave that I get to have a hand in making. That’s staring freedom in the face, yo. It’s blinding for a while, so you do some exercises and work on your body and your house, you see some friends, you go for a walk in the woods, finally! I’ve been waiting for the mud to clear up, and it’s still a bit mucky, but it’s finally totally walkable. (AMEN for spring!)
Here’s the really interesting thing. When I’m fighting with some “False king” or “false prophets” on here, I’m also fighting with those parts inside of me: these figures as I understand them, as they fit into my own brain.
And THIS is where the true power lies: we go after the ones inside of us, and this changes the way we see and interact with the world outside of us. Problems just disappear. Sometimes this happens gradually. Sometimes more quickly, but when you aim high, a word to the wise: get ready for the long haul. It’s time to channel the spirit of the long distance runner into your whole life… by remembering that it is NOT NORMAL to put your body through that degree of stress on a regular basis. If you’re going to do it, do it in nice, long cycles that always include fallow periods, or sabbaticals, whatever you want to call it.
The stories argue about who gets to choose the words. This is what happens.
Who gets to drive the ship? Where is my North Star?
I go in circles. I forget to eat. I walk too far. I write for 8 hours straight without a break. That kind of thing. Then in my befuddled fatigue the next day because I did those things, I go through it all again. And when I’m burnt out, if I arrive at my purpose by nightfall, I’m lucky. I’m happy.
Here’s the thing with my love story. I know it’s against the rules, but I kind of need someone who will mom me a bit. I don’t normally take orders from a partner, but if I’m perfectly honest with myself, I need someone I can trust to tell me to stop working and eat something when I haven’t gotten off the couch for 6 hours, someone to notice.
If I had that, I could get there faster. But here’s the rub. Your partner doesn’t always know what you need. Part of what I’ve learned about burnout recovery is that I need to get better at sensing these things myself: i.e. what my body needs. I’m rebuilding pathways between instinct and societal-level minds that have been severed via both religion and academics. I LOVE both of these in some important ways, but, GUYS, give us back the primal importance of our bodies, PLEASE.
Come on! Tell us how it’s done, pretty, pretty please! Not through work webinars about how to fit better life-balance into your work…, but by changing our fucking laws. The basics of health should be a basic human right, over and above economy, regardless of race, gender, and anything else you can think of. If you are a human being on this planet, you qualify. No IFS ANDS OR BUTS. We’re always going to get push-back from economy, but who’s the boss here? Humans or some machine we created?
We are!
Yeah!
I hear that! I’m not the only one thinking this. Can we just go from there? Restore the body to its rightful place in the WHOLE WORLD. I think therein lies our connection to spirit, paradoxically. That’s the hard part to explain.
So there’s all these stories running around in my head, colliding, and if you read my poem below, it might make sense. I decided I had to do the logical opposite of accepting all the genuine love from men in the world: accepting all the hate. I felt completely lifeless, listless again, but something important broke, so it was worth the sad sojourn.
Here’s yet another story to add to the mix. My head is exploding with stories. Yep, I’m the one who’s stuck as I try to unstick others. That’s what I like to do: unstick people from places they really don’t want to be, only this time, I decided to unstick myself.
Four words: easier said than done. Respect to anyone I’ve ever “made” feel oversimplified by some off the cuff recommendation I’ve made. I do know it’s almost all easier said than done, and we all have to find our own way of doing things, even when we’re part of a collective system through a workplace, though that’s much harder than trying to manage your life purely from the inside of your house.
The stuck place after the hate place or the shame place is never fun, but you know what? I’ve never been more proud of how determined people seem to be to get things, if not right, then at least better on this neck of the road. Parts of me are so exhausted, but other parts of me are so, pardon my French, fucking proud.
So this story has a happy ending (for today haha), but that’s not where I’ve been recently, if I’m perfectly honest. This is not because my North Stars were letting me down, though I’m not saying I didn’t see things out in the world that disturbed me greatly, but because I couldn’t see where I was going, and felt like I was stumbling around in the dark in broad daylight—that’s what burnout feels like—and I began to doubt again whether my particular gift is meant for this particular world. There are times and places for things in the grand scheme, no? I’m still not afraid of dying prematurely—nothing I’ve seen since I literally almost died has convinced me I need to be. I’d just prefer to get it right this time, so I don’t have to come back and do this all over again, again, not that it was a terrible life. It was considerably better than the last one, if I understand it correctly.
Circles and Circles. No single North Star. Darkness in broad daylight. Prescription: music. Just keep following the rhythm. Apparently visiting the Emily Carr exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery is something your doctor can prescribe. I just saw this today on Instagram.
I see my dreams coming true in life, essentially, but in this stuck place, emptied by hate, is where I found myself upon listening to the first chapter of A Meaningful Life. Hollis usually energizes me. It was a weird departure, not a bad one, if uncomfortable. I asked myself, Am I bound to write yet another sequel to the same old story franchise of the false magical other? Am I just imagining my way back into a place of pure fantasy, creating a Lover character who no human person could ever live up to, a place for me to hide in and avoid real living?
If I want a partner, I have to be willing to come out of my head and live more in the human world. This is a fact. I have to question my direction because I can get lost in stories and music. It’s great fun and can be wonderfully productive if channeled by people with skill, I bet, but I don’t think the professionals exist yet. In some ways, getting back to work would help to get my feet back on the ground, but I can’t do it by conventional schedules for extended periods of time like nine-to-fivers. I just can’t. I can’t even do an appointment more than a couple times a week, and do I even want my feet on the ground all the time? NO! I can’t ONLY live with my feet on the ground if I want to finish this novel and art exhibit. Feet on the ground don’t paint pictures for the walls. They can’t even reach.
Here we go. More questioning. More arguing. It’s the ringing of answers I’m looking for, the artist in me watching alongside the academic.
Perhaps this just an eddy in a river flowing out to a larger sea, where the “magical other” dies a magnificent death, opening up room for not only ONE real person to emerge but TWO, i.e. including myself?
This remains to be seen, but the writing process is certainly revealing a lot more than just the unrealistic expectations I have of myself and a “true” lover. Perhaps herein lies the way through the story of “magical other” to one more truly magical, for being real, as Hollis suggests.
And here is a genuine question (which I see now Henry has begun to answer above): can people who are connected through the heart actually feel what the other is feeling? I had more numinous experiences while I was overseas 20 years ago, in which I could sense things I did not yet know about. I want to know more about that.
You see, here’s my theory. People in their natural forms are much more magical than we can ever imagine them to be with our stories. The challenge, a beautiful one in my opinion, is in letting them be who they are, letting them show us who they are, and then seeing the magic in that.
A lot of problems in the world could be solved by getting everyone to attend the same weddings or something, so they’d have to eat and drink together and rub shoulders, dance, tell stories, laugh, etc., maybe over at least 3 days, set in some form of paradise on earth, where everyone is treated equally; then after a couple days rest, set to work together on defining the problem and figuring out how to solve it, including switching rolls when it’s the servants’ turn to do their wedding/work thing. I feel like there’s precedents for this in a few different places, no?
Here we go again.
The problem as the writer is that this is literally ALL coming from imagination, albeit inspired by real people.
So that’s the Magical Other in my life as I understand it today. The other major outdated story—related to the “God is a man” story—is that “nothing I do matters; no matter what I do, I’m wrong.” The problems with this one, I’m hoping, are more or less self-evident (aka learned helplessness and rock bottom self-esteem).
Political side note: I’m sorry to say it, but the US president’s self-esteem is, by necessity, a real factor we have to consider. Sometimes we’re real assholes about him, failing to give him the same respect we demand for ourselves. I’m not saying that people should coddle him. Fuck no! I’m saying it is a real, as in factual, factor in his behaviour. What do we do with that? I don’t know. I am NOT an expert in making nice with Narcissists. They FUCKING HATE ME. Because it takes one to know one, to some degree, but also because I know their game and tend not to fall for it. Parts of me are immune. I don’t know what else to tell you. That’s just the way it is.
Certain facts in reports about our current Prime Minister, Carney, suggest that he, too, may be at least partially immune to narcissistic tomfoolery. My hope in the Liberals has thereby been rekindled, but we ALSO need to see GREEN AF agendas that mean business. Now. And take the working public into account, not just businesses, but businesses, too, but starting with our immediate, life-supporting environment, next our bodies, then our social bodies. I think we extend outward from the center. That’s the vision I see in my own dreams, and the vision that’s making sense to me in the voices and other art of the public on “both sides” of the conservative versus liberal argument (or red versus blue in the States, white versus blue collar on the status plane).
Here’s a titty twister for ya, friends. We can’t demand fair treatment by the other but then not offer it in return. I am country AND city. I am proud salt-of-the-earth redneck AND liberal academic (the Canadian version of liberal). I am a woman who grew up thinking that all I needed to do to be a boy (and eventually a man) was decide to be one. I’m not sure why. but it never occurred to me that it wasn’t my choice. Not even the biological difference, which I did vaguely understand when I decided to be a boy, was a deterrent to my understanding of male/female in life. I understood certain boundaries, but in terms of rights, I believed what people told me: men and women were equal. I took it at face value and decided it was best if I be a boy, in some regards anyway. I actually did like being a girl in some other ways, but not the expected ones, like wearing dresses. I hated that. And as far as I could tell, body and facial hair were optional, so everything else must have to do with behaviour, and that was all that I needed to decide: abracadabra, I have the same rights as men and can enjoy life just as thoroughly, no matter what “stories” people tell me or show me. The real world persistently pushed back hard enough on this one to make me reconsider, but I believe that qualifies me as not only substantially feminist, but also substantially queer. (This is not the only thing, and it sounds reductively logical, but that’s how my psyche made the decision, like it or not.)
So yeah, in addition to the other boundaries I refuse to honour in our world, there’s a man inside me, and not just on fun days. WHAAAAT? That’s just the way it is. I don’t know what else to tell you.
Ok, friends, I’ll leave it there. It’s been a slice.
Thanks for keeping it real, everyone. I don’t know what I would do without you.
I wish I could wrap this up in a prettier, more easily consumable package for you because you’ve been working hard, and I see what you’re doing. It’s beautiful. Keep it up, and don’t forget body breaks, right Hal Johnson and Joanne McLeod (sp?)?
Now without further ado, the angsty poem, which this unexpectedly joyous introduction does a poor job of setting up, but I hope you get the mood, and I hope you find a friend in it for the angst over stories in you:
Black Days
I just spent the last week
Accepting all of the
(theoretical)
Hate I've received
From men
Over the years,
And this after several months
Of accepting the
(theoretical)
Love.
I think I prefer
The love.
The hate is no less
Than living death,
My body a hateful sack
of neediness
and disappointment,
My mind lonely,
Empty,
Dull.
But to hide in mere stories
Of love
Is pallid day-dreaming,
My body, yes, it dances,
but alone.
To want more
Is to bleed myself dry
For trying,
Massaging stones
For bread.
To want less,
I would have to stop
My very breath.
Between two false choices,
Frustration wills
Me to call the lightning
And burn it all
To the ground,
Leave nothing
But trees
And beasts:
No less than an end to ALL
The prison cells of human story.
There is no escaping the human
Worlds of ideas that tell us
Who we can and cannot be.
Even if I can liberate my own mind,
Dive far beneath to the golden oceans of
Wholeness we all come from,
Your will traps and strips my branches
Bare, better sized and shaped for
Your eyes and mind to admire,
Or revile,
As you please,
Better pages for your books
And pieces for your furniture,
Better fuel for your fire,
Better trophies for your mantle,
Better grist for your mill,
A better maid for your chores,
A better nurse for your ailments,
More compassionate,
More compliant,
More admiring,
Less
Me.
You don't love Me.
You love your Ideas about me.
You don't hate Me.
You hate your Ideas about me.
But still, I sit in our prisons
Of stories.
Oh, sometimes I escape,
Only to enter new prisons
The same as the old,
With different coloured paint.
You wanna know why
She's a
Man Eater?
It's because every man she's ever loved,
With almost no exception,
Has tried to twist her into
Something she's not,
With superior regard
For his own Ideas about her
Than any true
Discovery
Of oceans
Of gold
Beneath oceans
Between the waves,
Not to mention the use of her body
With no regard for her soul.
She needs the words
And worlds
Going both ways.
This requires your openness, too,
Not hers alone.
Until then, her hope for a True life slowly withers again in silence,
Her Real world asleep
In the arms of
The gold and black oceans of stars,
Still,
Unborn.
To be known
And loved,
What a beautiful dream,
For children's books,
And evenings
After work.
The logic:
Let's not kill their hope
Too young.
The motive:
We must wait until they're
Too trapped in the nets
To step out of line
When they try.
Every move,
This way or that,
Only fits us more snuggly
Into the Grand Story
Of someone else's
Greatness,
Of our own smallness,
All
As it “should” be.
The advice:
The only way to get ahead is by stepping on someone else.
Take your pick: woman, black, gay, "strange" in some "other" way.
Point your finger.
Pull the trigger.
Rise above the "others,"
Says the Great Story of Man,
Whose arches break your back and mine,
Not me,
Whose will we all serve
Again
And again
And again
And again
And again
And again
And again
And again.
Why do I keep coming back
For this?
Forever cast as Scapegoat.
Even when I'm not, I play the part,
The story so deeply ingrained in my storied brain.
Woman = original sin.
I don't buy this for a dollar
But couldn't escape it for trillions.
I feel hate rise within me
For everything I've known and done,
For my very dreams.
I speak this.
You hear that.
I show you this.
You see that.
I do this.
You punish me for that.
Your blindness for beauty
Fills me with
Nothing.
And that nothing
Fills me
With shame
For beauty itself.
I use words to chase myself
Out of this maze,
Only to find myself
Back at the heart
Of human hate,
Circling chambers
Barred
And
Cut
from all limbs
Of life.
Round and round I go,
With all the care
But not a hope
In the world.
Gods, help me,
I plead.
And wait.
And sleep.
And a passage between
The rock
And the hard place
Opens up.
At first,
Just a glimmer
and an ellipsis
…
This is just to say
That I ate the delicious
Plums in the ice box,
and
That the story
is
To Be
Continued…
And here’s the tree (I think it’s a fir) that I painted today while thinking of our inescapable stories. May you find your ellipsis between the rocks and hard places of our world’s behemoth stories. May you find your Great Redwood Tree from whom to accept some Holy Mother vibes and direction. In some ways, I see the Divine Masculine in the tree, but in others, it’s Holy Mother all the way, and she’s the one we’re trying to train our ears and noses to, the culturally absent/silent/quiet/louder voice we’re learning to hear on the wind.
P.s. ten points to whoever it was that identified Wolves (and Estes on stories) as informing my own reconnection of instinct. Nice!
The brain as a whole is a tree, no? In terms of fractals and metaphors? We have a lizard part, a mouse part, and a monkey part, each one growing out of the previous. Human stories are the leaves on the tree, not the roots. This part literally doesn’t work without the lizard roots and mouse trunk, not even without the monkey branches.
