Bad Blood

"...Confusion never stops
Closing walls and ticking clocks
Going to come back and take you home
I could not stop what you now know
Singing: come out upon my seas
Curse missed opportunities
Am I a part of the cure
Or am I part of the disease?..."
Coldplay/A Rush Of Blood To The Head/Clocks

I think I've told you before that I have Hepatitis C and how I've tried the Ribavirin/Inteferon cocktail. After finding out it was unsuccessful, I asked the doctor to tell me honestly how much time she thought I had left. She told me I had 3-5 years of relatively good health followed by 3-5 years of declining health...You have no idea of the range of emotions I have experienced since she told me that unless you're facing your own mortality. The past two years or so since I got the news that I was going to die have been almost unreal.

At first I think I was almost numb. I thought I accepted it and was okay with it. I was actually in the first stage of grieving for myself. I haven't done much reading on the subject of coming to terms with one's own death. I have however read about the Kubler-Ross stages of grief and about Dr. Roberta Temes' theory that there are three types of behavior that people who are facing grief and loss go through. I believe both theories to be correct, but it is Dr. Temes' theory that I think fits me most.

The three stages of grief and loss that Dr. Temes wrote about in her book, "Living With An Empty Chair - a guide through grief," are:

Numbness - the person functions by rote and tends to isolate or form a social insulation.
Disorganization - the person has intensly painful feelings of loss.
Reorganization - the person enters into a more normal social life.

A month ago I tried to kill myself (again). It was only through the help of a friend that EMT's were able to find me and save me. One of the things I promised myself when I was trying to recover from the suicide atempt was that I would start blogging on a more regular basis. I am hoping that I can get into the reorganization stage that Dr. Temes wrote about. The painful feelings I've had are still raw and hard to write about. Someone suggested that I write about it by using the pronoun he, so don't think I've completely gone off my rocker when you read any posts in the coming months. I might just start writing like I was Spooky writing about Jeff! God, sometimes I think I really am off my rocker...

Enjoy Life!

Shackled Alice Encounters Carl Jung

“What youth found and must find outside, the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself” Carl Jung

We spend the early part of our lives involved in education and learning skills. However nobody prepares us for the times when we start examining ourselves, for the times we look deep within ourselves and ask, "Who am I really?" Of particular interest to me are the many contradictory, sometimes conflicting, aspects of my personality.

I'd like to introduce you to several fictional characters and one not so fictional: Audacious Deviant, Jeff, the one and only Shackled Alice, and Spooky.

According to Jung's theories on Archetypes; Audacious Deviant would be my animus (the female), Jeff would be my anima (the male), and Shackled Alice would be my shadow. Spooky seems to have modeled himself after Casper the Friendly Ghost and I suppose would be my self.

Audacious Deviant is a bit prissy. She loves to take long walks in the garden smelling the flowers along the way. She loves going to art galleries, rearranging her furniture, long flowing skirts with army boots, paisley scarves, and gossiping. She's really quite fun and a loyal and faithful friend. She loves animals and has two finches that she named Tank and Lula. She desperately wants a cat or dog but can't afford the upkeep.

Jeff loves to read, write, learn new things, computers, collecting movies, and he loves to laugh though he tends to be a bit depressed sometimes. He searches his soul and deeply examines hisself. He listens to alternative rock, especially the old grunge bands like Sound Garden, Pearl Jam, and Audioslave. On Friday nights you can usually find him dancing at a drum circle. He is the one always trying to figure out which character out of the lot is non-fictional, and is the one who is usually in charge of this blog.

Shackled Alice lives in the shadows of my unconscious and due to her tendency to get the others into trouble, has to stayed chained up there. She is the shadow side of my personality. She has a superior attitude, wears leather and lace, dark eye-liner, has killer tattoos. She loves to wear chains, body piercings, getting high, and can get herself into some seriously fucked-up situations. She also tries to kill herself and all the others when she gets pissed off or depressed. Any man without confidence, upon meeting her walking down the street, would be intimidated and step to the side. It's really a shame she has to stay tethered, and it is Audacious Deviant that lets her loose when Jeff and Spooky aren't aware.

Spooky is hard for me to write about because of his/her androgeny. Spooky really has no gender. He/She follows the moon cycles, checks his/her horoscope when he/she is in doubt, and reads tarot cards. He/She loves to study the different religions and loves it when he/she finds a similarity between them. Spooky is terribly shy but desperately wants to make friends. He/She wants to be able to go out and have fun but finds it difficult. He/She shares Jeff's love of reading and writing and sometimes Jeff lets him help with blogging. You might find Spooky burning Sage and casting a circle on one day and revering Shiva or Christ the next. Spooky was the first archetype Jeff found and that was because of a friend of his.

This post was originally started over a year ago as a draft and I have come back to it several times to add different aspects as I discovered them. The road of self-discovery is a hard but rewarding one and I urge each of you that reads this to take some time and think about the many facets of yourself. You might find the whole idea of archetypes of particular interest.

Enjoy Life!

Lo, Sentient!

Erlend Mork

The Search For Meaning

It was Viktor E. Frankl who wrote, "What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence." I decided to search for some other thoughts on self-transcendence. Here are a few of the things I found.

“He who loses himself will find himself”. Christ

“This process of transcendence is beyond the thinking of the mental man. It finds its existence in the self-giving of the psychic man. The psychic man becomes part and parcel of reality by identifying with reality itself. The thinking man, the doubting man, finds it extremely difficult or impossible to identify himself with that reality” Sri Chinmoy

"Self-transcendence is growing into your unfulfilled potential. Self-transcendence is moving beyond the orbit of your ego into your soul. Self-transcendence is gaining a new concept of self that is much expanded and includes more of the universe. Your little self disappears and is replaced by a vast self as old lines of separation disappear and former distinctions no longer bind you. You are part of much more than you know or imagine. The universe is interconnected. You are part of All That Is. The universe is non-local. You are everywhere. Only in the third dimension do you occupy such a small place in the scheme of things." Leland R. Kaiser

God, I hate facing death...not knowing when it is going to happen. It's driving me nuts. Do I continue to strive for my own potential or do I say, "Fuck it," and stay wasted?