Editor’s note: Jan is a longtime Planet Waves reader and psychologist who is offering this feature to answer one reader letter per week. If you have a question you would like answered and explored in this forum, please email her at Drjanseward [at] gmail.com. Please note, depending on volume of emails, not all letters may be featured. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We’re really excited to see what our readers come up with! — amanda
Dear Dr. Seward,
Something came to me soon enough after your kind first post, now I’ll attempt to take my notes and turn them into a coherent question.
Where Am I? Who am I? What Am I? While these questions have longitude and latitude of human consciousness, they mean something different to me today that “just” The Hero’s Journey.
What are the new questions we need to ask of ourselves? How do we begin to understand who we are, where we are, what we are? What tools are available? Where is the language to speak of what we are becoming?
How do I define myself in a world where I have shed the old skin but the new one isn’t the same? Is it even there? How do I recognize it? I am not my mother’s daughter. I am not “one” with my family of origin. What I did for a living does not define Who I Am. A position with which I could earn my economic place in society no longer holds water as a way to define (a farmer, an IT tech).
Handling other issues/subjects such as “shame” is difficult when there is no framework beneath, defining “self.” Although I often latch on to these discussions (they are often all I have around me that feels “real”) doing so feels much like making the icing/decorations before the cake is baked.
In therapy for awhile contemplating “abuse” and recovering from it, I often spoke about my tool box – how I knew I had one, and it probably even contained “tools” but that I couldn’t see them (and certainly not feel them) and until I could identify them, they could be of no use. (Sadly therapy did not help me discover my “tools.”)
A few minutes ago, contemplating this letter, I happened upon a crow’s feather in the grass of a park as I walked through. Long enough for a quill pen, beautiful yet imperfect – I understood that I will place this quill in my “toolbox.” Perhaps its meaning, the meaning of its discovery, will come with contemplation.