Gaining insight or autonomy of any kind involves breaking away from someone’s box of rules and protective embrace, and sometimes incurring their wrath. Each “breaking away” is another piece of us that transforms from child to adult – a painful but liberating process.
© 2021 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
Following a decade of failed relationships and hostile confrontations, you begin wondering if something is wrong with you, or whether everyone you choose to associate with has a collective mental health issue. So, you go to a shrink – referred to you on Reddit – who blankets you with his, her, or their personal countertransference issues, while trying to determine whether your portrayal of the real you, or what you thought was the real you, is authentic or a subterfuge serving to hide some rather unsavory aspects of an “unconscious” real you, otherwise known as the shadow.
The first confrontation with my mortality was at age 27, after the sudden death of my uncle. For the first time, I felt the universe to be a very cold and impersonal place. My faith was badly shaken, and I felt very alone and vulnerable. I experienced a breakdown as a result, one that lasted for several weeks, until the pain finally exhausted itself.
Eventually, I recovered a sense of spirituality in my life, as the idea of an impersonal universe was both incomprehensible and intolerable to me.
© 2021 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
Social media is not the real world. Rarely does anyone express the full embodiment of their real self over the Internet. At most, you get to know slivers of people here, like the flat characters in a novel. We don’t become rounded, fully inflated human beings until stepping back into the real world.
© 2021 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
In the movie Castaway, Chuck Noland, played by actor Tom Hanks, creates an imaginary companion from a Wilson soccer ball, by painting his own bloody handprint into the shape of a face, and then naming him Wilson.
Chuck’s traumatized psyche exploits the resources immediately available to him, to restore some semblance of normalcy and emotional balance, giving him the wherewithal to survive his predicament. The soccer ball and Chuck’s own blood were the most accessible mediums for creating his temporary, anthropomorphic companion – a split off portion of his own psyche, projected onto a red faced soccer ball. If something more human appearing had been available, such as a puppet or doll, he most likely would have chosen that over the bloody soccer ball.
Notes from David 