photosynthesis

My overriding feeling during this time is hubris. How dare I be so close to having achieved amazing things? How dare I be married and have a successful business and be in fucking Disney World? This isn’t right and the universe must redress the balance of me being so close to happiness. Obviously on some logical brain level I know that I cannot cause a global pandemic, I am not psychotic – not yet, anyway. And yet there is still this deep ancient pre-logic primordial ball of shame inside me: this is your fault. Everything is always your fault. Somehow this is to do with the fact that you are fundamentally not good enough for things in your life to go right. It isn’t psychosis – I’m not acting on these beliefs as if they’re real.

But so much of what I’m struggling with is that this belief is incompatible with life. I teeter on the edge of falling into this chasm of total self-centredness – I am wrong and I am bad and therefore everything I touch goes wrong and bad – which is literally fatal. Because the logic of my brain tells me that if this is all my fault, I should be out of the game. I’m the one skewing the experience for everyone else. That belief – that ball of shame and guilt and stink that seems to have existed before me – can only be redressed with my death. That’s the endgame: no holidays, no marriage, no pension. Just nothing. The end of it. Me removing myself. And isn’t that gorgeous? That I’ve managed to use my fucking manipulation skills to make what is essentially and importantly a selfish act into an act of martyrdom and sacrifice. That I will give up my life but it will, ultimately, make the world somehow fundamentally better.

But there’s a small tiny problem with this, a small, tiny but possibly insurmountable problem. I don’t really want to die all the time. I seem to – through some series of miracles and dumb luck – have managed to create a bit of a life for myself, and I see it. I live with someone who wants to marry me. I am a pretty alright hairdresser who has done pretty alright with being self-employed. And I really don’t want to die, because that instinct that we all have – ice creams on sunny days, petting a dog, learning to do insane and impossible things – that instinct to live, is just as strong as the instinct to die. My life is a balancing act. I have to outrun the shame and guilt, I have to never let it catch up. And before you quote some inane fucking “Native American wisdom” about the only wolf that lives is the one we feed – well, basically, fuck off. It has never been that simple and it never will be.  

Because one thing to me is brutally obvious: I can’t exist without both these instincts inside me. That is who I am. I am caught between wanting to live and wanting to die, and so many of the choices that forces upon me are shitty ones, and so many of the behaviours that this causes are shitty ones. But just as many of my choices and behaviours and feelings and needs are absolutely glorious, you hear me? I am capable of joy and love and light that some people will never ever feel, I can feel so happy and be so loving, I can feel on fire with the pure wonder of the fact that I am alive and I have a body and a mind and a soul. And maybe the sort of karmic cosmic opposite of this is the sludgy shitty parts. And I can almost live with that – if I am fast enough, if I manage to chase it away. I can create enough hope to keep the hubris at bay, I can create a here and now that whilst I don’t fully think I deserve, I am still able to enjoy. I can craft my existence down to every detail, I can grow the branches of my life towards the sun. I can, but more to the point, I do. I manage to climb high towards the sun whilst staying grounded in dark and dank soil.       

I don’t think the clue is get down under my skin and cut away the badness. I don’t think you could find it and pluck it out like a weed. I think it is twined in and around every fibre of my being and has shaped the way I’ve grown most of my life. I think it is so fundamentally me that I would be blank without it. What am I without my shadow self? I become two dimensional, flat, less than animated, less than human. I have to treasure and cultivate my shadow. She has been through some shit. She is scared and she thinks everything is her fault. I’m not one of these who thinks that I can become one whole person by FORGIVING HER and EMBRACING HER. I already am one whole person, jackass. But like everyone else on this planet, I contain multitudes. And maybe some of my multitudes are a little darker than other people’s. But I am not fucking hiding them anymore, I am so done keeping all this in a jar and pretending that there isn’t something more interesting than who I pretend to be. Let’s stop that, now. Let’s just be who I am, root and branch.