Shadow Sojourner: An Internal Battle for Self-Actualization

When I was a child, I had had a difficult time controlling my thoughts. When I'd close my eyes at night I'd start seeing this wall of sanctimonious eyeballs staring back at me, waiting to pounce the moment I did or thought something disagreeable. My mother spent a lot of time with me training me how to visualize and take control of my mind so I could sleep at night. “Visualize a giant garbage can in the middle of a stage, and take a large broom and sweep the eyes into the trash.” This would get rid of the eyes temporarily, but it wasn't until I imagined myself taking them on aggressively that they finally left me alone. I didn't have the heart to tell her that I imagined throwing knives and bombs at my eyeball wall like a cartoon, but it worked. It made me laugh, and I could finally relax and fall asleep. At age 11 that feeling of unrelenting shame came back, triggered by a game at recess that had gotten out of hand. It was towards the end of the school year when thi...

Continuing down the rabbit hole, the Jungian personality archetype of the trickster really stuck out for me. Although I'd like to say I have a large range of character and I can take on any role, the trickster has always been a favorite of mine. Looking back again to my elementary school years. There was an ever changing hierarchy at recess. I grew up on Leprechaun Lane, and my high school colors were green and gold. The founders of Kearns were pretty obsessed with treasure I guess. Maybe I can tie that into my personality somehow. I was never the fastest kid, or the biggest, or the first in line alphabetically when it was time to line up for lunch. I knew I never would be, but what I really aimed for was to be the kid with the most charm, as in Lucky Charms, my unofficial sponsor for today's memory. See it does tie in! BUT, there's a problem with charm it can quickly becomes annoying, and distracting, and even menacing. I remember the closest I ever came to death was ri...

July, 23, 2021 There was this popular poster floating around when I was six that said, "All I really need to know I learned in Kindergarten." I didn't learn how to read that poster until the following year. My kindergarten life lesson was learning how to make friends out of strangers. Up until then, all my friends were the people I grew up with. My first kindergarten friend was amazing. He had Ghostbusters on Nintendo! It was the first game I'd ever seen say its own name. I may have actually believed it was self aware, and that haunted my dreams. When I asked my new friend if we could play again, he told me coldly, "No." He'd made a new friend, and his mom had told him he was only allowed to have one friend. I cursed myself for not seeing this coming and decided from then on to never be anyone's first friend again. The real takeaway was that I had not been the one with the cool shiny thing. I was a consumer of cool, not a provider of cool. I brought...

July, 16, 2021 Last week I started a new journey of dissecting my personality, specifically my competitive nature. I thought back to my years in little league where the game of baseball went from carefree pick up games with the neighbor kids to a suddenly hyper competitive game about long lasting bragging rights. I was really counting on the street cred of winning the 1993 Kearns Township Pony League Baseball Championship to carry over to Junior High that next fall, but it only made things awkward whenever I'd bring it up. So I fell back on my love of comedy to get into a good friend group. I found the kids with the most Monty Python references and asked them 3 simple questions. What is your quest, what is your favorite color, and what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? When they answered "African or European?" I knew we were good to go. I kept chasing the attention of my peers and found myself in 8th grade joining up for the school play as the lead hot dog v...

July, 8, 2021 Lately I have been trying to engage in some shadow work, a Jungian concept of exposing your ego to the unconscious parts of your personality. One volatile aspect of my personality I want to work on is my wide ranging level of self confidence because it is so painful for me when it swings from high to low. For example, one of my earliest childhood memories is when I lucked into playing on an undefeated little league baseball team for almost two seasons. That experience sent my self confidence through the roof even though my role on the team was to play right field off the bench. In the 2nd season we lost one game, and that one loss shook me. Not only did I lose out on a pizza party for a 20 game win streak, I had attached my personality so strongly to that win streak that I cried the whole ride home. My mom tried to console me by telling me it was just a game but that just made me realize my mom was not a competitive person. Somehow, I got out of bed the next day and went ...

July 24th of last year was the last time I saw my mom. She hosted a pioneer day party at her house and all four of her kids were there, it was a fitting farewell party and theme for a women who loved researching her pioneer heritage. It has been a long year of healing and reflection. I've starting blogging to document that healing process. This entry gets to the meat of why I choose to share. I never thought the story of Anakin Skywalker would open the door for me to learn new tools to assist me in processing my own mother's passing. My infatuation with acting took me deep into the art of the myth. This is how I connected with my mother as we would share our favorite stories to one another throughout our lives, including Star Wars.  I didn't like the fact that I could see myself in Anakin, a boy destined to bring balance to the force, only to fail miserably because of his inability to control his own emotions. I remember watching Anakin loose his mind as he learned of his m...