Alchemizing pain into beauty (shamelessly): In defense of shadow work and sorting through your shit.

But you don't take my word for it. I've recruited backup for this follow-up tribute to the real real.

“What would you write if you weren’t afraid?” Mary Karr asks in her impassioned guidebook to writing personal narrative, The Art of Memoir.

A week ago, I shared my first deeply personal essay, Death of a Maiden. It was a big day and a big deal, finally sharing a painful experience that had weighed heavy on my soul and functioned like a black hole within my psyche, more or less. Did you know that if you somehow managed to scoop out a tiny teaspoon of a black hole, it would weigh in, unthinkably, at thousands of millions of tons?

Forgive my melodrama and paraphrasing, but I’m suddenly reminded of a popular saying: Sometimes you don’t realize the weight of something you’ve been carrying until you feel the weight of its release.

Every minute that day after 11:13am when the post went live, I was manic giddy. World Dance Academy posted the following clip from Dirty Dancing of Jennifer Grey as Baby practicing her scandalous moves on a stroll around Kellerman’s Catskill resort. It was precisely how I felt after hitting ‘publish.’

I was even wearing something strikingly similar - Baby’s got style - but instead of dusty pink, think mustard gold. By penning down and then posting my story, I laid to rest a tangled mass of pain that I had carried for nearly fifteen years. That’s half of thirty years, the period of time often used to delineate a generation. You can also call a thirty-year period ‘a score and half,’ if you want to sound quirky and rousing. The point is, I carried this for almost half of a score and a half, so help me god. And given that I’m creeping dangerously close to 40, it just seems like a lot. It’s nearly the majority of my life as a tricenarian (a person between the ages of 30 and 39). And listen, there is a lot of shit I’m not about to take with me into the next chapter of my life as quadragenarian (a person between the ages of 40 and 49). I’m working toward that popular cultural trope of forty and fabulous, whatever that means. I’d really like the people I meet to be like that lady in the diner in When Harry Met Sally who says “I’ll have what she’s having” when Sally schools Harry in the brilliant cinematic showcase of the fine, feminine art of faking an orgasm. A respectable craft, no doubt - to each her own - but at damn-near forty, one I no longer have the energy or interest to engage in. And hey, when a fragile ego gets fractured, that’s when the real work can begin. The real real, am I right?

I began using that term - the real real - almost flippantly when I started scribbling these segments down on legal pads or whatever scraps of paper I could get my paws on in moments when the memories would make themselves known, and additionally assert in no uncertain terms, that they were meant for eyes, ears and inquiring minds other than my own.

We are only just beginning our journey through psyche together, with yours truly as your sometimes perky, sometimes pensive personal tour guide with bad inside jokes from being so intimate with the terrain. I can’t say that I’m a well-equipped guide for the endless expanse of psyche, but I am a therapist, and at minimum, an expert on the particularly moody quarters and seedy corner booths I frequent and, as stated earlier, often settle into quite comfortably for extended periods of time. When I find myself inside of one of my own complexes, I announce to loved ones who are on a need-to-know basis: “I fell into the sewer again.” But, hey, better that than a black hole. I don’t think you make it out of there alive. Somehow I always find my way back to the luminosity of lived experience. And having orbited the gravity of my material - aka shit - enough times, I’ve cultivated an otherworldly trust that even when I’m not okay, I know I’ll be okay. If that makes me kind of a Pollyanna, then so be it. My name is Joanna after all, so I’ve got at least half the namesake. 50/50 ain’t bad. These days it seems you’re one of the lucky ones if only half your life is shit. Let’s face it, in these post-apocalyptic-esque times, every Pollyanna has a dark side, and we’re all desperately overdue for a rebrand. Sally Albright got there, too. When you’re nearing what Carl Jung called “the second half of life,” you start to see it isn’t all so bright. Sunshine and rainbows start to equalize with dark nights of the soul. I mean, come on, it plays out in every superhero and villain saga in popular culture: night battling day, light versus shadow. It’s the landscape of psyche personified: part-hidden and part-revealed, conscious and unconscious, visible and invisible. And you know every good heroine has a dark side, or at least a tragic backstory, without which they could never have become who they are.

And I think that’s what I’m here doing, telling the innumerable tragic comedies of my own intrapsychic grappling with the darker, heavier aspects of myself, my life, and the world at large. I’m here to tell you, when you start spending time down there, in your own interior gutter, you start to see it’s not really as bad as you thought from the stubborn view from up above. Like when you were a kid and you drove your remote control car into the grates of the street sewer; or when you had to go dumpster diving at the junior high after school because, for the umpteenth time, you accidentally trashed your glittery purple retainer, scraping it right off your lunch tray along with the untouched goulash when the bell rang. Eventually your eyes and olfactory organs adjust, and over time you begin to develop a new way of seeing. A kind of whole-body adjustment you can’t attain when you insist on continuing to run from the murky underground we all ironically depend on for our relatively odorless, modern existence. Or worse, opting in to the popular, perpetual shine of slapping a smile on it, sans retainer. But who are we even kidding? Our lived lives leave a trail, both within ourselves and in our wake. Somewhere scattered beneath decades of collective garbage, there’s a wiry rainbow band of glitter retainers I left behind, baked into whatever remains of last century’s lunchroom leftovers. Some things just aren’t meant to be retained.

This kind of shadow work is what Brené Brown was talking about in her viral Ted Talk, The Power of Vulnerability, when she spoke about her breakdown breakthrough (or what her therapist called a spiritual awakening). With her brilliant use of the strikethrough, she encapsulated the essence of her work on vulnerability and joy, announcing to the world, that one is prerequisite for the other. No exceptions.

“One does not become conscious by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Carl Jung

In her other viral talk for 99U, Why Your Critics Aren’t the Ones Who Count, she’s talking about stepping out of the dungeon of fear and self-loathing and entering valiantly and vulnerably into the arena of creative living. When she described herself as the kind of person who would rather hang up twinkle lights, order takeout and forever stay put in the underworld where potential goes to die, I almost choked on my own knowing laughter. Some days my commitment to being mired down in my own muck matches the sentiment of the kids in this 1970’s Big Wheel commercial.

There’s nothing like a good joy ride around your own darkness with a band of your closest inner demons. On a good day, you can really catch the wind in your hair blowing through the grates from the land of the living above.

There she goes again, Pollyanna with a dark side battle-racing her demons for a chance to take the crown as queen of her own personal purgatory.

I’m reminded of a quote by James Hillman I heard from elder and soul activist, and my teacher from afar, Francis Weller, whose profound body of work taught me how to begin, as he calls it, “digesting” or composting the weighty, stagnant grief of my life:

"The alchemists had an excellent image for the transformation of suffering and symptom into a value of soul. A goal of the alchemical process was the pearl of great price. The pearl starts off as a bit of grit, a neurotic symptom or complaint, a bothersome irritant in one’s secret inside flesh, which no defensive shell can protect oneself from. This is coated over, worked at day in and day out, until the grit one day is a pearl; yet it still must be fished up from the depths and pried loose. Then when the grit is redeemed, it is worn. It must be worn on the warm skin to keep its luster: the redeemed complex which once caused suffering is exposed to public view as a virtue. The esoteric treasure gained through occult work becomes an exoteric splendor. To get rid of the symptom means to get rid of the chance to gain what may one day be of greatest value, even if at first an unbearable irritant, lowly and disguised."

It’s been a week since I put the real real out across the wild interwebs. And let me tell you, there is no feeling so ironically rewarding like being able to stare down the bare bones of your own life story - the good, the bad, and the ugly - settle into the marrow of your unedited lived experience, and stand what you see. Firmly, solidly, squarely, tits up, in your own shit, putting down roots into the bare-naked truth of who you are and what you’ve lived through, and growing large for all the world to see, from the very place you once wished you could remain hidden for all eternity.

Ten out of ten, highly recommend. But you don’t have to take my word for it. As I’ve heard Francis Weller say on many an occasion:

“It is time to become immense.”

Elder’s orders.

What are we all waiting for, really? Our highly conditioned, tightly constructed ego complexes to loosen their chokehold on our vital essence? I’m going to say to you, to all of us, what my dear naturopathic-doctor friend once exclaimed to me at a small gathering inside her shipping container house where she was incubating her new life as a quinquagenarian divorcee, after leaving her husband of forty years. (Note: at the moment it went belly-up, her marriage was older than I was; it died a quadragenarian.) Now, this lady was, and still is, a good listener, known for her gentle delivery as a consultant and confidante. But on this day, she’d had a couple of glasses of her signature cocktail: kombucha and cabernet, on ice. A delightfully effervescent summer-esque spritz but with just enough weightiness to match the late-night telling of our mutual disillusionment amidst our respective marriages’ dissolutions. Misery loves company, come on over.

She’d been sitting, almost horizontally, across a yellow, upholstered armchair, cocktail in hand, with her head leaning far to one side and her legs crossed, pointed slantwise in the opposite direction, all the while listening quietly as I droned on, incessantly conjecturing over my then husband’s potential for confronting his own inner demons - or better, banding together with them to form his own version of a Big Wheel biker gang - so that he could meet me where I was so desperately needing to be met in our present state of matrimonial woe (i.e. the aforementioned sewer).

The gorilla in the room of this gathering was the question I’d been mulling over in my mind for years: Would this man be able to finally will himself to get his waders on and enter with me into the rotting detritus that had become our marriage, and help me sort this shit out, so we could start again, for real? For real real.

Finally, the gentle doctor had had enough. She pulled herself upright, loose limbs and all, stood up from her armchair, steadied her fizzy lifting drink in one hand and leaned over the round marble-top coffee table, pushing aside a huge stainless-steel bowl of sprouted, organic stovetop popcorn topped with grass-fed butter and herb salt, so that she could place her perfectly manicured palm squarely on the cold stone - the same material used for tombstones, mind you - and exclaim, slowly but audibly to my face, and with a New Jersey drawl: “It’s never going to happen, honnneeeyy!”

Now it seems Pollyanna’s just jaded. We need backup. Here’s a video of Jungian Analyst, Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and basically the Santa Claus of depth psychology, speaking of slaying your inner dragons:

“The real dragon is in you.” Damn, Joe.

Notice how in the same breath, where the panicky, constrictive inhale is about confronting our inner demons - the forces within and without that threaten to keep us down, dim our light, and dull the soul - the exhale that follows is a word about the rich reward of wresting the shiny pearl of one’s own vitality from the dragon’s grip.

“The influence of a vital person vitalizes. There’s no doubt about it. The world is a wasteland… any world is a living world if it’s alive and, the thing is, to bring it to life. And the way to bring it to life is to find, in your own case, where your life is and be alive yourself.”

Joseph Campbell

I was born a writer which, for me, has always meant I was born to brood. But for all my lifelong reverie, I’ve managed to uncover this paradoxical truth: the great majority of the treasured richness of my life comes from the places I’ve most wanted to avoid.

“Every memoirist I know seems doomed to explore the past in an often agonized death march down the pages.”

Mary Karr

There are more tales from the crypt to come, dear reader, running the gamut from childhood trauma to past life regression and beyond. Who knows how many past versions of me are fated to be exhumed and paraded through these literary streets like a traveling circus led by a hearse? Only time and the dream-maker will tell. But what I know for certain is that we’re going to have a helluva time doing it.

For now, I’ll leave you with these two poems that feel most fitting for our topic at hand.

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” 

Kahlil Gibran

“Come, come, whoever you are,
wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving,
it doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.  
Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times.
Come, come again, come.”

Rumi 

Cheers to the real real, fellow dragon-slayers. Here’s one more from Mary Karr to close us out:

“Real You is all you have, and all other paths are false. And in the best case, Real You is so happy to finally be recognized, it rewards you with Originality.”

When I grow up, I want to be a centenarian eccentric.

Nobody puts Baby in the corner of overly edited unoriginality.