Soul container
I like to picture myself in the mirror of his mind, constant, perfect, beautiful. He contains my soul in cupped hands, treats me gently, always wants to know how I’m feeling.
Thinking about this prompt this morning, how I dealt with it last week and how I always want to focus back on love, the love that I am not sure I believe in, the slipperiness of sex and the danger of it, too, I thought again to the theme of being a character in someone else’s mind, fully known, maybe even created by them, and totally loved. I want a man-god to contain me, to see me from fault to fault to cracked fault. I want to matter on some fundamental level to this idealized creature, this fiction.
What is this all about? Well, isn’t this part of why I am in various therapies, to expose this man for what he is, to rip off his corny toga and see my history written on his skin? It comes back to the original story, the neglected teenage years, though I know it goes further back than that. I still don’t understand how I was allowed to essentially live on my own from fifteen onward, how I stayed in that little unheated, unplumbed guest house even after the baby was born (dead, as my mother coached me to push), how the focus was on me taking responsibility and not on my withered and suppressed grief. I was invisible, I was a blank slate for meaningless platitudes and no one was able to come in and rescue me from the situation.
I say that the antidepressants have separated me from my stories, from my past, and its true. I don’t have as much of an urge to tell the stories over and over again. I’ve contained them with words and made them public. But this story is so huge and meaningful and layered.
When I went to the psychiatrist, when I finally was ready to admit that I was depressed and needed pills, I told her the story. She was appropriately sympathetic and said something interesting: that a year or two of therapy was not enough to deal with this sort of trauma. Of course, she’s working from a therapeutic perspective. But it made me realize that yes, this event did matter, that I have to deal with it, that maybe I’ll be seeing my therapist for a while on this one, despite my urge to just pretend that with the dissipation of my depression, all is well.
So: the man-god who grasps me with his mind, who sees all? He is a vestige from the long time of invisibility, he is my childish desire for parenting, for the hand hold across the street. He plucks me from my past and saves me from myself. It’s effortless, the dance between me and this man. He massages away the scars and heals my soul.
He doesn’t exist.
From the prompt "The best feeling in the world." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach. Here is last week's take.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image from the Pime Missionaries of North American (who knows where they got it from). It hasn't escaped me that some people get this feeling of being seen and held from religion, from an idea of G/god. But this is not an authentic path for me.