“When does trying become a waste of time? When does hope become delusional?” – Louise Penny, The Black Wolf
When, last March, I finally wrote “The End” on the manuscript I’d written and rewritten more times than I can count, I sat back into a huge sigh of relief and satisfaction. How quickly those feelings evaporated, shifting into baffled frustration and disappointment as rejections from agents rolled in. The deal was: Six months to try for an agent or indie publisher. If nothing arose by the end of six months, I’d turn to self-publishing. After extending the deadline to seven months, I have finally reached ‘enough!’
I’ll never not be disappointed at not ‘being published.’ I doubt I’ll ever fully let go of the desire to be validated by the industry’s gatekeepers. My work is cut out for me: Heal a deflated ego that has suffered months of rejections. Embrace the ‘obstacles into opportunities’ philosophy I’ve written about again and again in the memoir. Find validation within.
I didn’t expect everyone to love my book; I did expect someone to. I still expect someone — you — to find meaning, inspiration, humor, and love in the tale of transformation that took place during three years of living and teaching in the Middle East.
Agents, when they reply, use the vague boilerplate term, “this is not a fit for my list.” Online writing classes and podcasts bemoan the exclusivity of the publishing industry. Many say non-celebrity memoirs are hard, if not impossible, to sell. Others speak about the unlikelihood of acceptance of authors who don’t have enormous, already existing audiences (thousands of followers on an email list, Facebook, X, or Instagram). Whatever the reason, it’s time to move forward.
Once I soothe my battered feelings. Once I realize that battered feelings cannot destroy me. Once I dust myself off and lift my gaze, there is liberation staring me in the face. I can take this project into my own hands. Over the next six to seven months, I’ll work with a publishing consultant and editor to transform the manuscript into a book I can share with you.
And what an opportunity! (I keep telling myself and hoping to finally absorb and assimilate. Come on, ego. I’m waving the white flag. Get over yourself!)
Sometimes, I wonder if I was given Philip as a way to gain access to my shadow. Living with his larger-than-life personality, the parts of me that my upbringing had taught me to repress were activated. In response to his stubbornness, I dug in my heels. His need to be in control prompted latent rebelliousness. My shadow included intense feelings, not-nice-girl urges, and unacceptable (to my upbringing) emotions like anger, willfulness, desire, and self-centeredness. Before Philip, I’d learned to lean into the even-keeled and compliant sides of my nature, the parts that my parents and teachers approved. Discouraged from expressing strong emotions by parents who preferred living in calm, unruffled composure, (cool as a cucumber was one of my dad’s favored expressions), avoiding my shadow had been relatively easy. That is, until I was inexplicably drawn to live next to someone who turned toward every feeling and walked into every response –positive and negative– without hesitation.
Life with Philip was like living with a highly-strung wild horse; he was skittish and oversensitive, ears pricked, primed to react intensely to whatever came his way. Alternately, he was inclined to fall into heavy funks of despondency. To live beside this nervy, hypersensitive creature, my lesson was one that went against all I’d been taught about appeasement and avoidance of the shadow. Instead, I needed to willingly dive with him, to sink, muck about, settle in. In other words, anything but trying to cheer or bring him around.
Giving the shadow time and space rather than resisting and refusing it turns out to be more effective than running scared. It’s also more compassionate to ourselves and others. When I learned to sit with discomfort or pain, I also learned of my multifaceted wholeness; I am light and dark, up and down. Learning that we can and do survive the dark teaches us to trust … in ourselves, in others, in Life. In their book Romancing the Shadow, Connie Zweig and Steve Wolf suggest this kinder, more accepting engagement with the shadow. They say we learn most from all the hidden, ignored, and wounded parts of us. And in the process, we find greater emotional richness, resilience, and vitality..Vitality because energy exerted (and wasted) in avoidance or repression is freed. In accepting our wholeness, we become more alive and more ourselves.
In Abu Dhabi, when Philip began to have more intense anxiety, when full-blown panic took over his body and mind, I wondered if he was playing out the shadow for both of us. Was my Abu Dhabi survival mentality, my desperation to maintain a light and constructive perspective, creating an imbalance that landed on his shoulders (in his psyche)? We are much more complicated than we tend to acknowledge or admit. Energy is shared in a marriage, whether we know or intend it to be. There are stories of one family member carrying the psychic burden for the whole family: the black sheep, the highly sensitive person, the worldly failure. Philip was that person in his birth family. In my Abu Dhabi effort to survive, was I overloading my struggles and darkness onto him? Was my need to stay afloat dragging him down under the weight of my unacknowledged and unaccepted shadow?
In myths, fairy tales, and folk tales, the heroine (or hero) struggles against dark forces to overcome the obstacles standing in their way. These forces are metaphors for the psychological shadow. In many of these stories, it is only when the wolf is vanquished, the dragon slayed, and the wicked witch defeated — that the heroine moves forward in her life. Jung calls this the journey of individuation. In this journey, by braving the dark, we are given the opportunity to liberate ourselves from familial and cultural conditioning and move into the essence of authentic, spiritual being. As a child, my favorite of all the fairy tales was “Beauty and the Beast.” In this story, the heroine’s path to individuation is to uncover the inner beauty of the Beast, to reveal and release the totality of his essence by loving him. Beauty is also The Beast. The Beast is also Beauty. I am both beauty and beast. Loving the shadow transmutes the darkness into the light of a beautiful prince. The beautiful prince is beautiful because he contains both light and dark. This was the journey Philip invited me to take with him, to dare to struggle with him. It was the struggle and the life to which I belonged.
Together and independently, we struggled, dared, and changed. We moved closer to each other and our souls. The struggle with our dark forces is not the pretty part of the fairy tale, but it makes the entire tale … the entire life … infinitely more authentic and whole. Today, on the tenth anniversary of Philip’s death, I thank him for holding out his hand, his heart, his darkness and light to meet and embrace the whole of me.
I am … every day …becoming the woman who is learning to love him … without him.
This is an unnerving place to land. Does it mean I am caring less? Loving less? Or does grief shift, morph, grow into something else? Of course, it does. And yet … What has become of that other crazy woman who spent years imagining the sound of a key in the lock, the hum of a tune, and his footstep returning from that long, unannounced journey he took without my permission. He’d gone off yet again in search of that infamous, long-sought-after place on the planet. Unlike every other journey, however, this time, and much to my chagrin, he left me behind. But now, or any minute now, he’d be back. He’d have found a place on the circle he’d drawn following the equator on the globe in my office. Looking for a temperate climate where fruit and flowers grow year-round.
I stop. Pause. Listen. But no, he is not returning. Not in his body.
So, I have become the woman who loves him … without his being here.
This is a challenge for an agnostic with little faith in spirits and better places. And yet, a different kind of faith grows in part thanks to neuroscience. Science says my brain is building (at this late age of 72) new rooms in its house. Synapses and neurons are reconnecting to form new pathways. I am no longer (except in dreams, which is an interesting topic I hope the scientists will get to soon) chasing him down familiar pathways only to find spaces of absence. Instead, I am remapping inner terrain. Learning … I might even venture to say … have learned that he exists in a newly encoded place in my inner landscape. Cognitive science has explained this, but it is my heart that has found spaciousness and a wonderous felt sense of connection. “… love makes the space inside me even more vast, even more beautiful.” * He lives in my forever. And much to my amazement, I am the woman who has (almost) become okay with this.
You would have been 77 this year. So, Happy Birthday, my honey. Happy Forever.
