Am I My Shadow Self?

photo by Amy Brandon

I realize this may sound strange, but I’ve waited until I was 50 years old to figure out who I am.  Some of the waiting was my fault; some was not. 

The first issue I should address is the who of who I am discovering myself to be.  This may be offensive to some of you. I prefer cats, dogs, and birds to most of the people I know. (If I’ve lost you here, you should probably stop reading.) Most of the time, I prefer silence, books, animals, trees, flowers, and mushrooms to people. Sometimes I think maybe I am a reasonably intelligent person, and then I find myself staring for hours at the birds on our feeders. I would go into debt to buy land for these birds, if my husband would let me.  This is not a sign of intelligence as we understand it. So you can see why I often doubt myself. For most of my life, I was told these qualities made me not likeable to the people around me.  The worst insult in my culture is “she's just not a people person.” This continues to be a problem. I’m pretty sure it will be until I learn to “fix that shit,” which, let’s be honest, at this point probably is not going to happen. I’ve given it (fixing that shit) a good go for 50 years though, which is why I still don’t quite really know myself.

 I go through periods of feeling like a kick-ass human being and periods of feeling particularly fragile and isolated. During recent months, mostly I’ve felt the latter. Through one of my current books, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd, I discovered May Sarton, specifically, her Journal of a Solitude. From the first entry in this journal, I felt like I was reading my own thoughts. First and foremost, I discovered that I am not the only person who goes “up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour,” and for whom, all too often, “every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation…the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting, and tormented self.” I can’t bring myself to delve into or elaborate on this journal right now.  I need more time with it, time to buy my own copy, mark it up, meditate on it.

Concurrent with my reading of The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and Journal of a Solitude, I also have been working through The Portable Jung edited by Joseph Campbell, Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, and Lila by Marilynne Robinson.  The intersection of thoughts and ideas in these works has felt eerie and has helped me begin to understand the underlying truth of Jung’s collective unconscious, the revelation that some things are true, whether or not we understand and accept them. I wonder if maybe this truth is what some of us call God.

I spent my childhood and adolescence pleasing my parents. I’ve spent my adult life shaping my children, who have turned out to be more than I could have ever wished. Now it’s my turn to find me.  I don’t think I could have better companions for this journey than the people whose works I am currently reading.  I just hope that in finding myself, I don’t lose others. That seems to be the danger, the narrow line women are asked to walk.  Find and acknowledge yourself or continue to prioritize everyone else?  Is this asked of men?  Why is this ever asked of anyone, regardless of gender?