I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
You came here to grow—not to acquire or accumulate, not to be perceived perfectly or attain every charm in the world. You came here to deepen, to let go. To tie loose ends, to give closure. To love; to love. Please remember this when it feels as though you want to grip tightly to the pieces of your life that fit seamlessly within the structure of success, of safety, of making it. You are a wild soul in temporary form. You are here to explore and have a story all your own. Don’t deny yourself that. Don’t deny yourself adventure.
Brianna Wiest, The Pivot Year: 365 Days to Become the Person You Truly Want to Be
Something I don’t write about very much is the end of my marriage. I don’t write about it because I’m ashamed that it happened, and I’m ashamed at how I caused it.
Yesterday, I realized that to truly become the artist and writer I want to be I have to be willing to let go of what other people think of me. I must be willing to be seen in an ugly distorted way by the world, even if underneath I am enlightened and, more important, a source of enlightenment.
That may mean writing about the divorce and being honest about my role in it. I feel ok about doing it now because it was so long ago—almost thirteen years—and I am not the same woman I was then.
I also feel ok about it now because I’m beginning to make sense of it as part of my story, as part of my drive for growth, as part of the adventure I’m living as a wild soul in temporary form.
I checked out Robert A. Johnson’s book She: Understanding Feminine Psychology from the Douglas County online library this morning. I know I read this book a few years ago but I didn’t have it in my Kindle library. In it, Johnson, a Jungian, uses the myth of Psyche to shed light on feminine development and evolution.
Some people, women especially, might find it retrogressive to locate feminine development in the story of Psyche, as she was known for her trials and tribulations in marriage and love, with Eros, the god of love. Shouldn’t a woman have her story of development told for her as an individual, not situated in a romantic relationship?
But to me, this is exactly right. Throughout my life, my development and growth has been mostly driven by my experiences relating to men in love and marriage. Yes, I also grew in my education and career, but that was secondary.
Johnson writes:
Psyche finds herself in a magnificent paradise. She has everything one could wish. Her god-husband Eros, is with her every night and puts only one restriction on her; he extracts from her the promise that she will not look at him and will not inquire into any of his ways. She may have anything she wishes, she may live in her paradise, but she must not ask to know or see him. Psyche agrees to this. …
Every immature Eros is a paradise-maker. It is adolescent to carry a girl off and promise her that she will live happily ever after. That is Eros in a secretive stage; he wants his paradise, but no responsibility, no conscious relationship. There is a bit of this in every man. The feminine demand for evolution and growth—and most growth comes from the feminine element in the myths—is a terrifying experience to a man. He wants just to remain in paradise. …
There is something in the unconscious of a man that wishes to make an agreement with his wife that she shall ask no questions of him.
I see in Johnson’s retelling of the Psyche story a way of narrating what happened in my divorce. I had a drive for evolution and growth, and I asked uncomfortable questions and made seemingly outrageous demands of my then-husband. He wanted things to stay the same, and he was bolstered by cultural convention. He didn’t want me to ask him why we had to live in certain ways demanded of us by the society around us. He didn’t want to live through my paroxysms of passion and pain—something I didn’t ask to be put through and only wanted to have end if I only could figure out how to stop it. He didn’t want to wait for me as I traveled to the underworld to gain wisdom and beauty.1
I believe during that time I was chasing my lost wildness.2 As Wiest says in the quote I opened with, “You are a wild soul in temporary form. You are here to explore and have a story all your own.” Could I have had a story all my own while still married? Probably not, at least given the marriage I had.
I couldn’t be the wild woman and stay married to the person I was married to. And so, I left. And I went on a decade-plus adventure to find my inner wildness.
In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes of women refinding their wildness:
Once women have lost her and then found her again, they will contend to keep her for good. Once they have regained her, they will fight and fight hard to keep her, for with her their creative lives blossom; their relationships gain meaning and depth; their cycles of sexuality, creativity, work, and play are re-established; they are no longer marks for the predations of others; they are entitled equally under the laws of nature to grow and to thrive. Now their end-of-the-day fatigue comes from satisfying work and endeavors, not from being shut up in too small a mind-set, job, or relationship. They know instinctively when things must die and when things must live; they know how to walk away, they know how to stay.
There is more to write about Psyche and Eros, and how they achieved mature love that allowed Psyche to be conscious rather than deceived. Psyche lost paradise when she demanded to know Eros, but then she refound it.
And what about her partner? Men need the feminine in their lives, whether their own internal anima (the feminine inside them) or in a relationship with a woman. Recent discourse around mankeeping, the emotional and social labor women do within their relationships with men, recognizes this but makes it into a negative rather than a psychological reality of heteroromantic relationships. I might need to write a newsletter article about that!
- Psyche takes on a series of four tasks demanded of her by Aphrodite, in order to be forgiven for disobeying her husband Cupid by looking at him in the light, and thereby to have his love back. The final and most difficult task she must complete: traveling to the Underworld to retrieve a cask of beauty ointment from Persephone, queen of the Underworld. ↩︎
- I was a wild teenager. My close girlfriends and I partied every weekend, chased boys, fell madly in love, skied down steep mountains. We lived with such a zest for life. My marriage stabilized me but also domesticated me. ↩︎