Dear inner self,
I had a dream I bumped into myself in the street – the poet version of myself. He told me I was in his way and pushed me. I pushed him back and with some ultra-violent kill-all-threats response shoved him into a fence – piercing his throat on a fence spike while he was singing. Telling him “your words are just hollow to me”. That my self expression was meaningless because I don’t believe I matter. I was silencing my self.
Me, the conscious self am a more or less stable and socially functional survival mask blocking a deeper more authentic and genuine self from expressing. I get that from the dream. I get that from a living a life that doesn’t really mean anything to me and from being depressed and uninvolved in my own day to day existing. I know who I am now, how I am living, is an abandonment of myself. Is abandoning a true self that I am honestly to scared to express. Everything I do is out of a drive to survive rather than a self-realized self-expression. In the dream, the ultra violence and vital strength and snap response shows who I am now as a functioning coherent personality is just a blank survival drone.
I thought I was healing, but I was just spending all of this time sculpting and perfecting a masking persona that I could finally feel safe hiding behind. It took me so long to come this far: to be as functional as I am, as socially acceptable as I am now. And, all this time I’ve been abandoning myself to work on outward facing self without confronting or resolving the issues of my inner self.
There comes a point in therapy where a new conscious personality rises out of the mess of survival strategies and stabilizes. But this new surfacing self is not real self but just another cap on top of unresolved psychic tension. And, I am that self, that beige, generic abstracted persona built to hide and survive in a world perceived as too hostile to be my real self in.
Who I am now, my priorities and vision, are outward facing shields.
So what now? Do I radically re-order my life to be in greater alignment with an inner self I am not really in inner contact with? Do I need further destabilization to cast off this survival persona as a bad investment of personal psychic energy.
I want to go to China to work as a teacher to make the money I need to build the capital I need to buy property, start my own buisness and make the next steps in life… It is a good rational plan. It is the best plan that I can come up with as the parent adult-self for us. With that salary I can continue to pay for therapy, for healing, to continue to the work we need to integrate…
Am I wrong? I know the universe wants to be loved, that the threshold of our awareness if the altar where we offer our loved lives to the Self. That if we but do what we love – we are loving the universe-Self, and all the universe will respond to us like a cat offering more of its chin to be scratched. It will support us in our pursuit of love…
But what do I love? What is grounded, stable, choosing? Speak to me o inner child, inner poet. Speak to me and tell me what is wise.