If “waking up” conjures up some spontaneous, immediate eye-opener, sorry. It’s not. You know how long planting a seed takes to sprout, right? Long time. Someone named that, too: gestation period. Fruit and fruition come only with lots of watering (asking) and sunshine (searching) and fertilizer (learning). Gestating your Self may take longer; you will live the message of the fable of the Hare and Tortoise, “Slow and steady wins the race.”
If you try hard to play all the roles assigned to you by life (both men and women), you think you have a handle on ‘who you are.’ You’re the—daughter/son, student, mom/dad, mate, wife/husband, aunt/uncle, helpful neighbor/volunteer, faithful friend, star employee, church-going-do-right-by-my-neighbor human—and all of those keep you pretty busy for sure. But take away the roles, the labels, the titles, the letters after your name—do you know who you really are? That’s where I was in life. My wake-up call came as the Animus-masculine (that’s the opposite of the Anima-feminine for men) as Jung describes in his psychology. The Animus/Anima are just part of the ‘parts and pieces’ that become a whole Self, my whole Self, your whole Self.
I would have to tear apart my life as I’d been living the perfect-princess role and all the other roles I’d taken on, to find who I really was. To claim for the first time ever, a life just for me. I grieved as I saw the heartache and heartbreak that was wrought upon those I loved the most. My grandmother cried to me, “I sacrificed my life for my family, why can’t you?” I had to be sure that stepping into the dark unknown, I was doing it for the right reason. Somehow I had to grok that it was for me, not for him. If I did the heart-wrenching work to become my own individual, would I spare my daughters from having to go through that heartache? Would they inherit their independence from me?
Choosing a life of your own to find out who you are does not come without turmoil. Going forward on feelings, letting synchronicity lead and underscore, being honest with myself. Mustering up my courage to press on as fearful and painful as it might loom. All of it being assuaged when Jung told me my own story. I had been ‘awakened.” I had accepted the challenge and answered “the Call.” I had followed some innate inner urging that made me bound and determined to look inside. To see what I would find inside my own true Self. It is one of the stories so true and so necessary for the human psyche, even the evolution of the human species, that they’ve written myths about it so we don’t ignore it or forget it.
The real meaning behind this chance encounter with The Catalyst, the spontaneous and all-consuming need to be with this person, would take years to see clearly. Would send me on a search for the truth, asking questions and bearing the weight of honest answers. Would take me being led to Carl Jung to explain what I had stepped into, when I met this person I’d never known before and yet I knew immediately.
He was me.
Psychologically speaking, a woman usually doesn’t recognize that she needs to integrate a balancing masculine principle (Animus) into her psyche. She doesn’t realize it, but something inside her psyche does. So what does she do? She projects those wonderful traits lying dormant inside her onto a man. The perfect man. The reason he is perfect is because she is really seeing the shine of her own perfect masculine aspects reflecting back at her. How could he not be the perfect man for her? She feels being with this man is all that she was ever supposed to do.
And it is. Well, at least the masculine ideal she has projected on him. On her way to becoming whole, she must incorporate all those wonderful masculine traits alongside her caring, nurturing feminine aspects. She thinks it is the human man she falls in love with, but it is not. It is the masculine ideal…her masculine ideal…that she needs to incorporate into her psyche/wed/become one with.
Some Part of Us knows we need these things. (Hence, why some person touched it and wrote a myth about it.)
I had been living a life with a mere one dimension of my wholeness, playing all my roles full tilt, just as hard as I could. Unbeknownst to me, I now was being initiated into the first step of adding more parts of my becoming whole. I had projected my very own ideal masculine attributes on this one person. (And everything inside us is ideal.)
Fell in love with that masculine ideal and spent years trying to distinguish which was the real man and which was my own perfect projection. Or maybe I spent years trying to overlay the real man with my own perfect projection. Yeah, I think that’s what it was, because in honest reality, I could not make the two match up. It was a struggle to keep my eye on the prize, which required discerning that the prize may not be the man, but the masculine aspects of myself.
In those many years I began to learn and use all those wonderful masculine attributes for myself. Learning how to take care of myself. Speak up for myself. Become independent. Upright, on my own. Have my own thoughts. Let known my own opinions.
Time would bear witness that the little voice that kept nagging me, “You have to get to know this person” was not so that I could be with him forever. Instead, it was to hear and heed ‘the Call’ to enter the forest, step into that dark room of the unknown, jump the crevasse-home-of-the-pumas, and look inside to see who I really was aside from the roles I played. I was living my own myth to find the holy grail, my true Self, and I felt the need to stay true to the path, no matter the angst.
I appropriated many of the masculine traits I saw in this man for he was accomplished. Many were just my own I was coming to recognize. I learned several great adages for living an independent life from him: “In times of feeling out-of-control with fear, determine the worst that can happen, accept you will survive it regardless, and you will become rational to keep it from happening.” (It works.)
He seemed anxious and fearful at times leaving me in silence, but would always reach back out like I was his touchstone. He had to check to make sure I was still “over there.” I came to wonder, “Did he have a little voice telling him the same thing? You’ve got to get to know this person or you’re going to be mad at yourself?” Was I the projection of his Anima, his inner feminine aspects of caring and nurturing? I loved the line at the end of “Pretty Woman” where Richard Gere’s character asks Julia Roberts’ character, “And what happens when the prince rescues the princess?” And Roberts answers with the smile of the Mona Lisa, “She rescues him right back.” What if he felt the Call but had not the courage to accept the challenge and look inside? That would make me fearful to be around. I had to accept that perhaps he had done all that was required of the prince.
Time would bring me to believe that he and I made a plan to do this before this life. And let it be known here and hereafter, I will be eternally (I do believe eternally) grateful.
This was what he agreed to do.
Come wake me up.
If you are new to Mesmarriah Miracle, it is best to start at Post 1 and continue in numbered sequence, like connecting Dots.