Loosening the death grip of identity: I am CODA (Child of Deaf Adults), moon, man, mother, lover, daughter, dreamer, griever, weaver.
On pain, projection and peeling back the storied layers of life.
“There is no self. There are only aggregates.” Mark Epstein, M.D.
Are you ready to wrap up this precipitous parade of poets, dear reader? As if we ever could. Let’s give it a whirl. Last week I left you with the notion that these gentleman callers were mirroring my “inner man.” In Jungian speak, they were animus figures for me. The lingo tends to be gendered in this domain and I haven’t quite found a way around it, except to say that each of us, regardless of gender carries both feminine and masculine archetypal qualities. Basically, if the individuation process is about edging toward wholeness, then the task here calls for us to make contact with our contrasexual opposites. For a woman this is called the animus, or inner man; for a man, the anima, or inner woman. These inner opposites are the overseers of our unconscious, the parts of our psyche that remain hidden to us. In a teleological sense, they are the gatekeepers of our untapped potential and our inner guides for what we do not yet know about ourselves or what we have yet to become in our wild, wondrous multiplicity.
For those who are feminine-identified, the inner masculine is the actualizing force that carries her pure, instinctual creativity dwelling within her depths out into the world. To make contact with this part of her-self is to activate focus, clarity and aligned action on behalf of her inner truth. The animus translates a woman’s deeply felt values into outward action.
For the masculine among us, the anima is the soul force that allows him to descend into his own interiority and capacity for depth. Attention is directed inward toward the cultivation of the inner life and there is a stilling outwardly. The anima and animus are the way-showers of the unconscious dimensions of psyche, those parts of us that remain uncultivated. Their intentions for our lives tend to run counter to cultural gender norms - about which they care diddly squat, by the way, because again the end goal is wholeness, not fitting in or conforming to arbitrary ideals.
My animus is decidedly a wordsmith, something the Unconscious felt the need to remind me of in no uncertain terms during that winter man-storm. Had I entertained these encounters only at face value, I’d have sorely missed the mark.
It was a moment when the masculine activity surrounding me was perfectly mirroring a simultaneous summoning from my own depths that was also being reflected in my dream life. One of our most powerful tools for tracking libido, the movement of creative life force energy within the personal unconscious, is dream work. In striking contrast to the dead-body dream series that signaled the end of my marriage, after we separated (and around the same time as the tsunami of suitors) I dreamt I gave birth to a baby boy who looked exactly like my youngest daughter when she was born, but bigger. Much bigger. And she was nine pounds, three ounces (I love to brag about the big baby that raw milk and bone broth built).
A Jungian approach to dreamwork states that each figure in the dream depicts a facet of the dreamer and has something to say about this aspect of one’s life at present. A birth in the dreamtime signals a new beginning in the life of the dreamer. Further, Jung said that to dream of one’s contrasexual opposite was to catch a glimpse of one’s own anima or animus. I had done enough dreamwork - years spent building my personal dream vocabulary - to know that this bouncing baby boy was the poet and writer within me, signaling he was ready to emerge from the shadowy womb of my creative life and make his mark on the world.
Unfortunately, I can’t exactly tell you who the father is, but this is psyche we’re talking about, not biology. So on that note, I’d say he carries a little something of every writer whose words have moved me from across the endless expanse of space and time. The great progenitors, too many to name, that make up my “soul lineage” (to borrow a beautiful phrase from Francis Weller), many of whom are still living today and feel like kin.
The man-tide of that tantalizing time eventually receded - this is what’s called “taking back the projection.” It looks a lot less like fun and regrettably more like work. But I knew what I had to do. I had to get back to following the thread.
In Jung’s book Memories, Dreams, Reflections (the autobiographical one he didn’t want to write), he shared that when an idea came to him for something to be written, he would be overcome with physical symptoms so severe he had no choice but to sequester himself to his study, working for days on end. It was his only relief.
Since the summer of 2012 I’ve endured chronic pain and inflammation in every joint of both my hands. Did you know that there are 27 joints in the human hand? That’s fifty-four inflamed junctions, some worse than others, in the parts of the body made for carrying out every task of life. I’ve got knobby knuckles that sometimes catch stares from strangers if I take to talking with my hands too much. Most mornings, picking up a full cup of jasmine tea pulls a wince over my face. Carrying a full plate of food is always a two-handed endeavor. The lack of mobility in the wrist of my dominant hand has made it a struggle to angle a fork or spoon directly to my mouth and when I’m alone, I play around with feeding myself with my left hand (which is harder and more frustrating than I could ever have imagined). It’s just the way it is now.
Six weeks after my youngest daughter was born the pain set up shop in every joint of my body and was so excruciating during the night, I could not lift her from her bassinet at my bedside. Every two hours when she would wake hungry, I struggled for minutes to sit upright as her dad stood rocking her, ready to position pillows around me so that I could nurse her. Since she was a toddler she has known that being held by mom requires her active participation. I lower myself down, she wraps her arms around my neck and we rise up together until she’s high enough for the crook of my arm to slide beneath her as she throws her legs around my hips. It’s a hands-free operation, because it has to be. It’s just the way it is now.
There have been a handful of days in her life when my two hands have felt good enough to wrap around her tiny ribcage and pick her up from where she stands to pull her close. Pools of tears form in my eyes recalling those moments because my body remembers - my body remembers - just how good it felt to get to hold the full weight of my baby girl in my own two hands. And the heaviness of grief for each and every time I took it for granted with her big sister. Now this little one loves to play with my fingers because they all slant sideways from years of built-up bone tissue in the knuckles. I outstretch my hand on command and watch her eyes smile as her tiny, perfect fingers (always with dirt under her nails) move each of mine so measuredly to the place she supposes they ought to be. She lets go and squeals in delight as they instantly return in unison to their stubborn, slantwise station.
Once as I was tucking her into bed at night, she began crying, saying “Mommy, I made a wish on my birthday and it didn’t come true.” By the time she choked out the words, “What if it doesn’t come true?” she was inconsolable. I felt the shockwaves of devastation in her six-year-old heart reverberate in mine. I feared asking what her wish was, but the hope that I could possibly contribute to its fulfillment pushed me to say, “Baby, do you want to tell me what you wished for?” Her wails grew louder. She was scared to tell me because, “What if it doesn’t come truuue?” I sat with her full, open-mouthed sobs. As her tears began to subside, she asked to draw a picture and write her wish down for me to read. This is a strategy we co-created for when something feels too big or scary to say. Here is what she drew:
I worked to decipher her six-year-old spelling. When I guessed a word correctly she nodded, lifting her patchwork quilt each time to partly cover her face as her troubled eyes met mine. When I finally deciphered the message in full, my heart sank at the realization of the heaviness my baby had been carrying alone in hers. It said: “I wished that your hands healed.” My mind’s eye jolted backward in time bringing into focus her bright, hopeful face blowing out six candles on a tiny white cake covered in rainbow sprinkles. There on the white, wrought-iron bed that was her great grandmother’s, we cried together and clung to each other even tighter, just like it’s always been for us, since the beginning.
At just six years old, my little girl knows that some wishes don’t come true. It’s just the way it is now.
I’m a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults), so for all my life, I’ve spoken my native language from my hands, passing more words over in silence than sound. But I’d be lying if I said I knew for certain which one is my true native tongue: signing, speaking or writing. I suppose it matters little given that all language is symbol and symbol is a stand-in for the unutterable mystery that is reality. Since I began writing to you each week, now fourteen weeks ago, I have experienced an alleviation of pain and inflammation in my hands as noticeable and dramatic as any other intervention I’ve tried on my decade-long holistic path to healing in body, psyche and spirit.
It seems these hands were made for talking. But it took me a long time to get here. And one more cautionary dream that shook me.
I take my analytic work seriously. In so many ways, it has saved me. After the mansoon, I took a nod from the Dream Maker and set to work. The flood continued, but this time it was within the seclusion of my spinster hovel: poem after poem (I didn’t even know I could write poetry), old stories, tens of thousands of words for a novel from nowhere poured out… I was possessed. It was electric. I felt fully alive and deeply nourished by the influx of inspiration.
There was one critical component missing. Stories are made for telling. Their spirit is meant to be shared. And I was keeping mine sequestered. Eventually, they lost energy and so did I. I stopped writing. Some time later I had the following dream:
There is an older, disheveled man walking along my street. He appears disoriented. I think he is homeless. Next the man is in my backyard and I can see that he has no hands. I know that he is hungry but I hesitate to offer something to eat for fear that he will not leave. I go to secure the doors, but he finds a way in. I find him standing in the kitchen. The refrigerator door is ajar and he is quietly preparing a bowl of strawberry yogurt for himself.
Fast forward to Thursdays with Tess Tell-It-Straight: I relay the dream and she nearly falls backward from throwing her hands in the hair. “Joanna, I know what this is about and so do you.” I did, but I really like it when Tess gives me the business. It’s a special moment when both you and your therapist get tired of your bullshit. You know, all the idiosyncratic, stylized methods you’ve curated in the art of standing in the way of your own life? “I’ve seen it a thousand times” she said. “He’s the writer in you. He has no hands, no home and he’s starving.”
It’s a special moment when both you and your therapist get tired of your bullshit. You know, all the idiosyncratic, stylized methods you’ve curated in the art of standing in the way of your own life?
This struck me in my aching, crooked bones. All fifty-four of them. Somewhere along the timeline of this swirling soup of psyche and outward reality, during the time when I wasn’t writing, my hands were in such a bad state I could hardly pull on a pair of jeans by myself, much less button them (don’t even think about button-fly). Not to mention the endless carrying out of tasks required for the full catastrophe of single parenthood. I finally silenced my stubbornness and gave in to my friends’ demands for me to get some practical support for my hands that had to hold so much on their own. I ordered a pair of copper compression gloves. It was one of those “what the hell?” moments when you’ll try anything just to get some relief. Want to know what came in the mail in their place? Delivered straight to my front door, posing as a package of arthritis compression gloves was a single, white newborn baby boy’s christening cap.
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
Gospel of Thomas