Junior High Ghost
Disclaimer & Context: I have made it a goal in March to write in my blog 5 days a week. My plan is to use my morning contemplative time to isolate a thought or idea I would like to flesh out a bit more and then write a blog about it. I’m not giving myself a lot of time to write the blog because this challenge isn’t about the quality of my writing. The goal of this challenge is to work on my conversion process of idea to blog. I have noticed I have dozens and dozens of insights and ideas every day but rarely do I flesh them out and share them. This is a challenge to help me strengthen that muscle. So it’s important you and I both know I’m not specifically trying to make these posts 100% true, educational, or helpful to you at all. If it’s any of that: frosting.
Selfie on 3/3/2022, facing west
So if you’ve been following my personal journey through my podcast this last year, you’ll recall when I started to talk about slugs (episode 8). I didn’t know what they were and what to do with them exactly, but it was a placeholder name I gave to some subconscious awareness I was starting to have. At the time, what I was noticing were very subconscious impulses/messages about how to contort my body to be less “disgusting" for others to view or other Self-berating language revolving around whether I’m good enough in a million different ways. I thought this was incredibly interesting and felt the excitement of an upcoming psychological adventure. I mean, I wasn’t wrong. I certainly am on an adventure. Something that has me riveted into every day lately. Aware. Curious. Growing. Anyways, point being, turns out these slugs were more than just body dysphoria. Turns out, I am filled with slugs… about all kinds of things. But let’s stop calling them slugs. I very much believe in the practice of creating placeholders for things you realize about your brain, but don’t stop there. Keep expanding out to find the widest context possible. And I think the widest context is that (beware, it’s another placeholder) I, a 39 year old human person, am being psychologically and secretly haunted by a very hurt junior high Marie.
Now I suppose this may not be a revelation for some of us. But it is for me, given my neurological background. So this is what I write about with the enthusiasm of discovering a new reality… which… is honestly how it feels. Detoxing from the residues of duality. Embracing the peace of a self-aware brain. Updating my self-referential language to include the framework of knowing I am not what I think I am: I “am” a black void with chaotic fragments and flashes of images, feelings, thoughts, and more.
And I’m realizing, by first-hand knowledge, that my mind needs maintenance like any other part of this machine I inhabit / creates me. My placeholding understanding of the mind is that if you 1) don’t know what you are [brain/mind] and 2) don’t do ongoing maintenance and tuning up of the mind organ, then you will experience a lot of suffering from drowning from your original experiences (childhood), not get support for things you were born with that society doesn’t recognize/validate, and won’t have a process for ongoing mental hygiene as you continue to have experiences and thoughts throughout life. This is my hypothesis for why I have been generally dissociated my entire life until recently.
cool reflections from a pillow i bought while thrifting; unrelated to this post, but candy for your eyeballs
Because I’ve continued to watch my mind. It’s like pandora’s box. I can’t forget that I’ve seen behind the curtain of “Self”. There’s no man behind the curtain. Just a lot of electricity, water, and minerals. It’s not immediately felt to be as romantic as the idea that there is “something” out there that we can project our faith and hope into. However, after sitting with it a little bit, it may start to make sense and be profoundly satisfying in a completely different way. There are a lot of ways to feel a baseline balance in our Self. One way is to project out your sense of love, belonging, and meaning onto something external. Your organize externally. But there is also the option to realize that is all just projection and all that we truly have is the subjective nature of our minds, which I am beginning to believe can be very intimately KNOWN, if not scientifically, relationally. But I don’t get the sense communities are talking about the mind in this way. We are filtering it through other narratives, not realizing that what we’re sensing is… us. For me, projecting that love outwards has caused me no end to suffering. Now that I have found my true Self (brain gas), I can interact with it in a truthful way instead of a romanticized/American way.
So this junior high ghost… as I’ve been thinking about my past, I’ve realized that around age 13 was incredibly painful for me. I think I’ve always been in psychological pain but I think 13 is where it started to compound and I began to really internalize shit. As I’ve been practicing more daily mindfulness, I’ve been keeping an eye on subconscious messaging. A lot of what’s popping up is centered around concerns a 13 year old would have. A kid who just realized they’re into boys, who doesn’t really feel like they fit in, doesn’t know how to relate to peers or crushes, has lots of questions that their community doesn’t seem to be prepared to answer or even understand. I think my body kept growing and my neocortex helped me outwardly achieve and perform what was expected of me. However, it’s clear as day to me now that it isn’t just a pop psychological notion to say that trauma is stored in the body. I’m not sure I would phrase it that way, but I think I get what they mean now. 13 year old Marie never found the resources or community at the time to help process their big existential questions nor the mental and chemical support to learn how to navigate with an ADHD ship.
That poor thing. That poor young Marie. Every time I hear that ghost speak to me through my subconscious, my heart breaks. Because I can remember the situation(s) where that Marie stored that lesson which kept playing over and over again in a weird inverted way for the rest of my life. This is why my latest conclusion is that the mind is an organ like any other body part. Takes in stuff, expels stuff. However, it needs consciousness to facilitate its maintenance if you want to live more intentionally, less reactionary, more thoughtful, more considerate, more present. So meditation, to me, isn’t about achieving some kind of state of peace nor as a generic self-care activity one does like taking a hot bath.
My meditative practice is approached from the framework of seeing my “self” as an organ that needs to shit and only I, the conscious thing, can help it shit by being present and non-judgmental to my subjective nature so I can collaboratively process and consciously choose my life. We wonder why life moves along so fast as we age? Perhaps because we’ve numbed our minds into auto-pilot mode from not cognitively shitting. Shrug. Thoughts.
