Special others

Selfhood is not complete without special “others” who listen, accept, guide, support, or hurt us. If these relationships do not exist, the mind will imagine their existence, attaching them to whomever seems to fit the illusions – good or bad. We create the relations and dramas that confirm our current self-image.

Back to invisible

We’ve gone from the “many” being seen and heard for the first time, to being even less visible than before, against the huge mass of smart phones and competing voices in cyberspace. The online experience has moved us between both extremes in just twenty years time.

Autonomy

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.

Flat characters

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.

Bloody art

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.

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