I'm at a loss to know where to post this, so it will go here. It's not much, it's just a quickish statement regarding a small personal victory I had this evening.
Upthread I mentioned that I used to work with a person at a bank, upon whom I projected a ton of my personal shit. She hopefully never realised it and she's not responsible for any of it. I'm responsible for the whole lot, beginning to end.
Something I didn't mention upthread is the amount that changed in me as a result of performing that NLP work. Using my conception of my work colleague as a resource to fix myself was intuitive, it wasn't really planned. There are a few Barbelith people who I met up with on the day I did this work, and they will probably remember how it was looking after me in the pub after I was knocked sideways by the experience. Maybe I'm mixing up my account and it was actually the evening that Flyboy came to visit me at Laura's student digs and he played me the new Jay-Z and Outkast albums. I think maybe it was the latter. They happened on consecutive days and my journals of those times have been lost in a hard disc failure.
Anyway, a huge amount changed in me as a result of the Change Personal History exercise and reintegrating my separated self back into myself. For a while I was very different, and the closest analogue I can find is from VALIS. You know how the apostle who existed in Horselover Fat's head figured out what was going on before Horselover Fat did? Well it was very much like that. I found that I couldn't smoke my usual brand of cigarettes, they made me feel ill. So I didn’t smoke for a while. Then on impulse I was at the newsagent counter one day, and I asked for the same brand as my colleague used to smoke. I found it was fine, and I could smoke them without a problem. The same with alcohol. I switched drinks to her usuals and I was fine, but I had no taste my usual stouts and real ales. These are the most obvious manifestations, but there are others that involved habitual ways of thinking changing that also took place, subtle things that are harder to pin down as they don't really fit into written language well. This is the truth of my experience at the same time as being a cop-out. It's possibly too personal to write about here.
This lasted about a month or three in total before things became integrated and my usual tastes came back. And I never had a recurrence of those previously frequent dreams or physical reactions around women afterwards.
But the proof of the change, as ever, was in the eating of the metaphorical pudding. After all, there was this particular colleague who, for whatever reason, was flagged up by my infinitely wise unconscious mind as an exemplar of my anima, the parts of me who I could not deal with. My conceptions of her were the ones I deliberately integrated during the exercise, after all. And it had worked, in all but the meeting up with her again and seeing if the weird physiological shaking and being tongue tied persisted.
Well, this evening I did. For the first time in around three years. And there was not a flicker. Not even an attraction. I've stayed in touch with a colleague who had recently bumped into her, and we all met up in the pub for a catch up session. And it was that, nothing more, nothing less. Easy, painless, chatty and pretty aimless. I found her to be pretty cool, still very funny and personable, and pretty clever to boot. A good person and one who I'd like to stay friends with, but wouldn't be too sad if not. But nothing else. All good. It was lovely to have that one last confirmation in order to set the whole thing to rest as something that is done and over with.
Only now I've started to wonder. It's been a long time since I've been attracted to anyone beyond the feeling that maybe I ought to be attracted to someone, enough to maybe make me think that a part of being deeply smitten by someone is a manifestation of this sense of anima, of encountering what you are not yet prepared or equipped to perceive as a dislocated part of yourself. I wonder if whether having integrated these things I am at a disadvantage in the usual relationships I encounter, because many of the relationships I see friends having exist in a kind of compensatory framework in which characteristics of their partner fill in the gaps that one might make an educated guess are missing in themselves.
Not that I don't have any personality flaws or blind spots, because I blatantly do. It's just that I don't have any kind of *type* any more, at least in the sense that many people say of someone of the opposite sex, "They're my type," or "They're not my type." I have no idea now of who may or may not be a compatible person with Seth. That's not a bad thing necessarily because I'm rarely lonely. I'm just kinda curious. I have no idea what this person I've become may think or feel next. I'm without framework. And I've not met anyone since who I've been smitten by sufficiently to give me a clue as to how I might respond to being smitten by someone within the context of the person I've become.
If anyone else has been through this and retained a copy of the non-existent rulebook I'd be really interested in obtaining one of those impossible photocopies/pdfs. |
