Whose pain am I carrying?
Am I aligned with my symbolic meaning?
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Whose pain am I carrying?
I’m carrying my own pains, the things I suffered and lived through, that helped me become resilient. The yelling and emotional abuse at home. Diana’s death. Crushing my finger. Feeling so alone, and feeling all that pain, and wanting to scream the truth but keeping it quiet. Seeing Steve die. Seeing more people die. The regrets I have about how I’ve treated people over the years. I carry my own pains.
I’m carrying Mom’s hurts. She would call me a stupid, stubborn mule sometimes. Which makes me wonder if someone called her that. Or if someone called me that in her presence. She called me this when I didn’t do exactly what she wanted when she wanted it. When I resisted her control. She called me a monster. She started calling me that after I killed myself. Or like the time I spilled grapejuice on the carpet and she got so angry. She got even more angry when I told other people. She started to train me to tell people I had a good home life and a happy childhood then, projecting out the happiness she didn’t have, the easier life she wanted, telling me I was destined to do big things and save the world. Too much. And if I suffered, or cried, or hurt, it was like I punctured her fantasy. I carried all the pains of her wounded life, her Mom’s kidnpapping and torture, the suicide of her brother, her own suicide, abandoning Jade at the airport, being abused by her first husband, being hit and abused and belittled and yelled at by her second husband, my father. I carry all of this hurt with me from her. And it lives on in her voice, sometimes still driving the car. Pushing all these pains into the shadow.
The dream I had. Mom is driving the car, but it’s out of control. She’s inert, dead in the driver’s seat. The car plunges into a dark lake, the same one that I found my nine year old self in trapped in ice. The car goes into the darkness and I escape. But mom’s pain is still down there. It’s not mine, though. It needs to be released. That’s what the dream means. I’ve put mom’s pain into my own shadow, but it’s not my pain. There’s nothing for me to integrate. But it’s down there, and she’s screaming and yelling down there. Mom, Yang energy, feminine, the dark part of the Taiji with the drop of Yin energy. Passive. The anima.
The dream I had about Dad makes sense from this perspective. It’s the same dream, except that it’s daytime. Yin energy, with a drop of Yang, masculine. Dad doens’t drive me into the shadow. He vanishes, and the truck crashes. So where did his pains go? Where did he go? And what was I projecting onto him?
What are Dad’s hurts? A stepfather who hit him. A father named Fred, who he and Mom decided to name me after, who was a philanderer that abandoned him and left him waiting on porches as a child. A desire to play music that he left behind. A desire to live an adventurous life that he left behind. He passed on the hurt of hitting his children. He felt small, I think, and so he needed to be right, and feel powerful. He was drawn to men like trump, who convinced him that his culture was right, that suppression, and putting his own hurts onto others as the crucible of them, that’s where it lived. That tears and dealing with pain were not the path. And then here I come, and I cry openly and feel pain and transmute it and sometimes I draw it out of him. He drinks and becomes alcoholic. A pain I shared, but that I let go over a decade ago now. Himself a philanderer. I was a sex addict but I’ve set that aside, to the point that I’ve become the monk that I said I’d become if I didn’t sell a screenplay in five years. Dad lost his daughter, the beautiful wise and mystical Diana, and it gutted him. It gutted us all. But he lost a daughter, his science smart baby girl, his favorite. He never got over that pain. He punched his own Mark so bad that any goodness left in him was knocked away, and he watched his son take revenge on him by taking away the money that he went to Long Beach to get from his father. Failed business. Sons who abandoned him. Living alone in a home. His beloved wife, the beautiful woman, slowly erasing herself as Parkinson’s disease takes him away. The covert narcissist who’s only left with his ego wounds. Who can’t even hurt anyone else anymore to give himself a crucible. His ritual was once to beat his children but he couldn’t beat me.
I don’t carry Dad’s pains. The one I worry about carrying is the narcissistic wound. But the rest, the ones I did carry, they’re already gone. That’s why the truck crashed. There was nothing to carry into the shadows. There was nothing there.I got out of the wrecked truck in the dream. I wasn’t hurt. It was scary to crash, but I walked away from it. In a white field, an empty road. My own whole self. And I’d already let go of those pains years ago.
The parallel dreams finally make sense. I share Dad’s pain of Diana, and understand his other pains, and I carry them with me in the sense that I have thoughts and feelings about them. But the only one I worry about is narcissism, to the point that I sabotaged myself recently out of fear of it. And I’m letting that go, because narcissism isn’t me. It’s his. Not mine.
So it’s Mom’s pain that’s in my shadow. That I need to let go of. These pains aren’t for me to integrate. Understand, yes. Empathize with, yes. Remember, yes. But these aren’t to be integrated. They aren’t parts of me or my personality. They’re part of the inheritance.
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Am I aligned with my symbolic meaning?
The meaning of my life as I see it in this moment is of the invincible joy rebel, the boy who learned to smile and build the fire of his own happiness, who smiled so bright that other people tried to snuff it out. Who thought that God and the universe had it out for him, until he realized that both were his friend, just like they’re everyone’s friend. The ordinary kid with the gift of writing, who could tell stories and do things like I’m doing right now. The child (the innocent), the rogue (the rebel), the wizard (the mage), all integrated together into me, The Shaman (the seer). The wise man who sees symbolic meaning, transumtes it through soul alchemy, who sometimes lives in synchronicity with things like a random apple playlist. As I typed, “The Shaman” the music hit a crescendo, as if I’m in a movie that someone’s watching, and I’m laughing and smiling as I type this.
Yeah, I’m aligned with my symbolic meaning. The synchronicity lets me know it’s so. And I”m grateful for it. I’m grateful for all of it. I’m grateful for the pains I feel. Because it’s like I always say, the pain is just a reminder that I can fell, and what a glorious gift that is. To know I have a heart. Thank you.
And now, I get outro music for this. A peppy song. Bopping along. It’s The Shins, “Australia.”
“Time to put the ear covers on!”
“No!”
La-la-la-la!
La-la-la-la!
La-la-la-la!
(Born to) Born to multiply
Born to gaze into night skies
All you want’s one more Saturday
(Born to) Born to multiply
Born to gaze into night skies
All you want’s one more Saturday
Well, look here until then
They gonna buy your life’s time
So keep your wick in the air and your feet in the fetters
Till the day
We come in doing cartwheels
We all crawl out by ourselves
And your shape on a dance floor
Will have me thinking such filth to gouge my eyes
You’ll be damned to be one of us girl
Faced with the dodo’s conundrum
I felt like I could just fly
But nothing happened every time I try, ooh-ooh!
I mean, I’ve gone to Australia and started to find myself there. I PLAYED FOOTBALL IN AUSTRALIA FOR GOD’S SAKES. I got on TV for climbing out of a hotel window along a ledge because I lost my shoes and people thought I was a daredevil or a jumper. And then right as I type that, the Shins sing …
But nothing happens every time I take one on the chin
You Himmler in your coat, you don’t know how long I’ve been
Watching the lantern dim
Starved of oxygen
So give me your hand and let’s jump out the window
I’ll never jump out the window. Diana died crumpled in pain jumping off a cliff. And I’ve already died once. The next time I die will be the last, and I’ll be an old man when I do it.
Thank you universe for the gifts of meaningful coincidence. Got your back, my friend.