Something that a lot of people don’t know about me is that I have a degree in information technology. Admittedly I don’t strike people as someone who is good with computers, precisely because I am not. After a brief jaunt in the industry, I quickly went on to become a trade union organiser, something I was most definitely better at.
Anyway, about my degree, in Australia, you can choose to do a certain amount of subjects from other faculties and I chose to do graphic design, gamer theory (why?), screenprinting and psychoanalysis. I was alright at screenprinting and my tutors in that subject were among the first to tell me that comics were my true art form and encouraged me to continue. However, it was psychoanalysis that was the only subject in my degree for which I got a high distinction. That kind of surprised me because I really thought I was in the running for a high distinction for “Technology & Society” (which really should have been called Marxism 101 for The IT Crowd). But it also didn’t surprise me that much due to the fact that I started watching videos about C.G. Jung and reading self-help books from the age of 12.
Now, this is obviously not normal childhood behaviour and I’ll admit this is because I didn’t have a particularly normal or happy childhood. There, I said it! A big part of healing is always letting go of certain fantasies that we created as children and accepting certain truths. I always feel lucky that I am naturally introspective enough to do this kind of inner work. Many people go through their lives unconsciously repeating patterns and wondering why the same things keep happening. Fortunately for me, I get to go through life consciously aware of how I am playing out my self-defeating patterns and wondering why I keep doing it!
However, I really believe that each time I fail as a person or get dumped (whether by a friend or a lover) there’s a lesson to be learned and an opportunity for growth. Hence the current exploration of my childhood and the origin story of my anxiety problems. This isn’t my first attempt at doing this. Each time you go on the Fool’s Journey you learn something different, a new aspect of yourself. Sometimes memories come up and you are not ready to deal with them yet and other times you are, which is why each time it’s different. It’s an ongoing process.
Anyway, as part of this current inner work, I finished reading “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents” by Lindsay C. Gibson and wow is it a great book! It goes into how children who didn’t have their emotional needs met by their parents during childhood (which is actually most people) learned to play certain roles in their birth family to get attention or the love that they need. In my case, my original role-self in my family was to be a self-sustaining plant that mostly didn’t cause any trouble or burden people with my emotional needs. This particular fantasy role-self quickly fell apart at the age of 20 when I experienced my first major episode of depression.
Around the same time, I met the man who was to become my husband and then later, my ex-husband. Luckily for me, his needs as a delusional narcissist were so great and so urgent that they proved a suitable distraction from dealing with myself. Until I got to the point where even my physical body was starting to break down and I realised that I needed to get out. At this point, I was in my late twenties and trying to reconstruct my life and myself in the midst of what could only be described as a traumatic divorce. Ok, so that’s a lot of information there.
Well, there’s more, obviously, I’m nearly forty and I have a lot to talk about!
I was extremely fortunate that I had a close friend, really the best of friends, at that time. A wise woman in her sixties who I had met during the course of my first career while I was still in my mid-twenties. This friend was able to reveal to me how unhappy I was with my life, she helped me leave my marriage and emotionally carried me through my divorce. Unfortunately, all the years of repressing my emotional self meant that even a year after my divorce I was still in such a state of distress that she had to end the friendship because my need for emotional support was simply too overwhelming. Well, recently I’ve been crying myself to sleep at night thinking about this friend and everything she did for me. My eyes are welling up even now as I write this.
She was the only person that I confided in about having fallen in love with a tutor at the university during my degree. My response to falling in love was, of course, to run screaming from the general vicinity, which is still kind of my response to falling in love (if I don’t send them running and or screaming, from the general vicinity first) but hey I am working on it and I am slowly getting better… Well maybe very slowly. However, she asked me a very important question, which was “What do you feel when you look at your lover?” and my response was “Sadness”. She then pointed out that I was actually projecting my inner reality onto my lover. And from this time onwards I have carried around the self-image or role-self as the “sad clown” a kind of actor-comedian who publicly puts on a happy face but is privately trapped within their own overwhelming sadness. Deflating balloon and all.
For a long time I have put off drawing this picture, but the other day I decided to finally sit down and draw a self-portrait of myself as a clown, complete with my deflating balloon. It’s often true that comedians are really quite sad people, the jokes are a way to not cry all of the time. I don’t mind that I have to put on a happy face and in fact, I am better for it but sometimes it is important to look at the (role-)self in the mirror (or sketchbook) and ask am I still this person? The great thing about role-selves is that they can be changed or discarded over time as needed.
