twenty

“To make a future, shared storytelling was needed. I read what she had to say about the healing power of writing. That we needed to tell the tales of the past to better shape the future. Jane had opened up a vital literary space. I sat up straight, my mind clear. There was nothing wrong with my head, I knew; it was my circumstances I had got so spectacularly back to front. Pills were not going to heal me. What I needed was work. Real work.

twenty-six

“Determined to do everything myself, I turned independence into a weapon. I thought of it as a strength, but it was a faultline along which I fractured. I resisted taking other things too – love, advice, knowledge – even if it was good for me, even if I wanted it. Like my troubled relationship with food, which always felt like too little or too much, this refusal – a fear that merging with another would result in the loss of my hard-won self – was old and it ran deep.

Life is a continuous cycle of births. Imagine yourself as made up of three parts. One part arrives at birth and never changes, the eternal self. At that level, you are eternal, and throughout your life you recognize that unchanging self in the midst of developments, a quintessential star ever shining in the deep interior of the soul. A second level is so completely defined by events and environment that it changes all the time. This is the self that tries to survive and thrive in the everyday world, the practical self. Yet a third level is the caterpillar-and-butterfly part, the unfolding self. This self is always becoming, always evolving, unless it is blocked, and goes through deep transformations. It is the go-between that links the eternal with the everyday.

A person suffering a dark night might say, “Help me. I’m depressed. Get me out of it.” But how can you get out of a natural process of change? How can you medicate self-transformation? The problem, of course, is that we no longer think in terms of passages and transitions. We have exchanged a spiritual awareness of life’s meaningful moments for a psychological view based on medicine. We would like to cure ourselves of the darkness. The resulting confusion of categories only makes things worse.

In his powerful book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker addresses the many complications and ambiguities, as he calls them, in this process, stressing the need of any person to enter life newly cleansed and liberated. ‘The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his ‘cultural lendings’ and stand naked in the storm of life.