I’m so sleepy today, I slept like 4-5 hours last night. I think it’s because the last course of weed has finally exited my system and my body is returning to its sober homeostasis. Fine by me. I’ve been working on my writing like crazy for the past few days and it seems to be finally taking root. Jungian psychology was the final puzzle piece in moving the needle forward. I watched loads of Marie-Louis von Franz interviews yesterday and started tying seemingly disparate realities together.
One of the things she brings up is the effect that moving has on women. She said that moving is quite common in North America and as a consequence it splinters the instinctive self, preventing a woman from taking root. My childhood was marked by quite a bit of moving. First in different places around Canada, and then to Ohio. By the time I was 11 I had moved 6 times, lived in 2 different countries, and attended 3 different elementary schools. Every move was followed by me laying in bed, crying for the last place I lived.
Splintering of the instinctive self. This seems so critical. My identity in Canada was far more developed, fleshed out, and distinctive. I wore oversized black t-shirts and baggy jeans with a chain wallet when I was 10 (I was a cool little baby) and played basketball with the boys at recess. I wanted to learn to play the drums and skateboard. I had family friends that deejayed and liked reggae and techno. I wanted to follow behind them. Toronto is not pockmarked by xenophobia the way it is in the US, so there is an openness to different cultural communities. My being in Canada was individuating, following a path that was reflective of its inner reality. When I moved to the United States I was separated from the soil that was nurturing me, essentially halting the process.
I feel like the United States advocates for a deeply homogenous internal and external identity, and pushes people to exclusively focus on establishing themselves within a larger social matrix. The self can exist on multiple planes, one of them being within oneself, and within a social framework, aka the herd, the rat race. Much of my time in New York has been spent resuscitating my identity from the larger social matrix. I don’t show up as a well cultivated system baby, I show up with a fully developed internal self.
This feels like a strange impulse, to recover the emotional being and invest in its survival instead of a system identity. In one of Marie-Louis von Franz’s interviews she talks about how people from underdeveloped countries are more comfortable with feeling, intuition and instinct. My childhood informed my life choices. Having a fully realized internal self was essential to survival and the foundation upon which I would build my life. As I come into myself I realize that the socially approved pursuit of an external identity can psychically castrate a person, leaving an emotionless shell. I don’t want to live a deadened life.
a soft death 