Last Tuesday, I was in a pub with a colleague from another university, and was eventually joined by a circle of friends from my own university (most of whom have blogs, by the way). We had fun, I was rather giddy (saying some tacky things, but I have friends all over the world who are accustomed to my tendency to do that); I enjoyed myself, especially in contrast to my feelings of the previous three or four days (which had given rise to a few fairly depressing posts); but the difference between those emotional states bothered me a bit.
Last night, Barry and his partner Paul, and my dear friend P–, came over for dinner, and to discuss the workshop Barry and I are going to run in October about AIDS and writing. Great fun again; I cooked, rather chaotically (chicken, tomatoes, leeks, all with rather lot of chili oil, in pasta with lots of pepper), and we all got along famously. Then P– stayed over, and that is always satisfyingly and rather domestically comforting; it actually makes this feel like a home, which is wonderful of course. I felt odd about it again, though, and told P– so; he said it was just Catholic guilt, but I don't think I agree – aside from the fact that I'm not Catholic, it doesn't seem that I don't think I deserve to enjoy myself.
Instead, it just feels as though my life is oddly out of balance – oddly because I don't think I'm entirely dysfunctional: always, through the years, I have had many close friends, now scattered on several continents (even in the worst times, I knew there were always wonderful people I could call who cared what happened to me). And, in a social setting, I may be rather silly, but I get along well with lots of people; and I can enjoy things, respond to things, relate to people and places.
So: why is there such a painful gap, such a disturbing lacuna, around the area of editing, research, writing? These are things I enjoy, at least theoretically, and in fact they're the only things I do that really matter to me; and at more reactive tasks (answering the phone, responding to an emergency e-mail) I don't do badly. But generating my own universe on the page: even knowing that all writers and many academics have serious difficulties with that, my own problems seem rather bizarre and nonsensical. I just can't figure out why it's so hard.
And now the school year is going to start, and I can't regard it with anything but dismay (though blahfeme seems actually stoked about it – an apparently admirable emotion I can't even understand at this point, let alone identify with). It all seems so oppressive: needing to engage with a variety of people, to make the usual mistakes, to make real decisions and respond to real problems and personalities – I'm not excited about it, especially as this prefatory week has already included collisions, and as I keep feeling I've taken on more responsibility than I'm really interested in engaging with.
Back when I was doing Jungian analysis in the late 1980s, with my remarkable and rather bizarre mountain climber of an analyst (perfect for me, as I wanted to go far and deep to understand myself – so many therapists refuse to go further than what is necessary to make one content), we discussed my diagnosis. That was kind of a concession on his part, since he knew I would talk and read about it anyway. He said that my experience of myself as diffuse and unclear represented the fragmentation of my personality (in ways distantly related to narcissistic and borderline personality disorders – very distantly in the latter case, I might add, I've never been that screwed up – borderlines are of course pretty scary). He said that the way I managed to get by was through depending on my persona, that is, the external image of myself as presented to others.
This is, of course, backwards: a 'normal' person should have an integrated personality, and base their persona loosely on it. I was sort of doing it the other way around, since my persona was fairly solid and well-defined, while my 'self' wasn't quite so well put together. Which doesn't mean I was concealing myself – on the contrary – but perhaps what I was concealing (and not very well, as I've always complained about this to friends) was my own fragmentation, my own endless uncertainty about what I want.
I'm a long way from that time and from the person I was then; almost twenty years from when I started analysis, and fifteen from when I finished. But the problem, if it is one, is such a basic part of me – I just wish I knew how to move further past it....
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