Week 6: Anima/Animas, Jungian Archetypes Part 2

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 this new kid moved in. I wish I could say we accepted him into our classroom with open arms, but we were unequipped with any forms of social grace so instead, there was this awkward unspoken initiation process that included relentless poking, prodding, and teasing. We were a wall of sanctimonious eyeballs.

It all came to a head when a brand new game was initiated into our recess regimen. It's a game based on the classic wall ball, where the player throws the ball against a wall, and tries to catch it, for honor and glory. The harder you throw it, and catch it, the more status you gain. The twist we implemented that day was that when you try to catch the ball and drop it, you become a moving punching bag, until you run and touch the wall. We all embraced the grittiness of the new rule of the game. No one was overly aggressive about it, but it did make us all feel kind of macho. Then the new guy stepped up to the wall. I remember feeling off about him joining the game for some reason, but figured he knew what he was getting himself into, so I let the feeling go.

He eventually dropped a catch, thus transforming him into a socially acceptable target of animal rage. And then the unimaginable happened. I saw the kid pause to think for a moment, then he began running, away from the wall. I don't know if he was trying to prove his toughness to the group, or protest the newly established rules of the game, or what, but the fastest kids quickly caught up to him and pounced. Not knowing the strength of a tiny mob of 11 year old kids, that poor kid landed in the emergency room with a concussion and a bruised kidney.

Everyone involved felt horrible after the fact, realizing what we had been a part of that day. It shook us to the core. I confessed the whole story to my mother and admitted that even though I didn't threw any punches, I couldn't absolve myself. When I saw him step into the game I felt subconsciously that things might turn ugly, but never made a conscious decision to say anything to him or the other kids, I just let it play out.

As the self appointed class clown, I felt a responsibility to keep the tom foolery at bay. I also felt the responsibility, as a human being, to try and integrate the new kid into the group, not help alienate him. I didn't know how to fix the problem on my own, but my mother stepped in and called the kid's mom on the phone. I was ready to give the kid a solemn apology, but my mom didn't hand me the phone. Instead, she hung up and told me to get in the car, that I was going to go play at his house.

I was mortified. I thought for sure an older brother would be there waiting for revenge or something. That never happened. He was actually surprisingly charismatic on his home turf. His classroom persona must have been so far from his natural demeanor. How much of a guard did he put up to survive being the new kid at the end of a school year.

That experience shaped how I formed new friendship groups moving forward. I became more sympathetic of outsiders, and I opened myself up to the challenge of integrating myself into new groups. I also found myself being attracted to the girls who invited me into their groups and who were the most open to integrating the outcasts.

This is why I've fallen so hard for my wife. She leaves the ninety nine to go after the one, and inspires me to follow. She challenges my impulses and pleads for me to constantly to be more mindful.

On the other side of the yin-yang, she has complimented me on my ability to do taxes, and calculus and program computers, all of which make her want to run away and hide. Studying the anima and animas has uncovered a complicated mess of abstraction in my mind, but the simple truth that resonates in me, is that it is crucial for all of us to have people in our lives to keep us from running away, towards oblivion.