If you’ve ever wondered if you possess the creativity to claim yourself an artist, I can suggest some simple questions to find out:

Do you ever imagine that people are talking about you?
Does your mind conjure a vision of your failure at attempting something that is really important to you?
Have you ever caught yourself daydreaming about a complete escape from your responsibilities?
Have you ever felt so miserable that you’ve considered taking your own life?

You might not be mentally ill.

You might be having difficulty adjusting to an ill world; one where your soul and self-intimacy are not welcome, therefore they knock on the door louder and louder, insisting on being let in. Late stage capitalism demands that we stay busy earning income to survive at the expense of time to develop intimate relationships with others and with ourselves. But your soul isn’t just going to go away so you can be a good employee or a good student. What the soul will do is get creative! Pathologizing sick models of mental health care often identify this creativity break through as a psychotic break or a nervous breakdown.

My reframe is that this is a mystical experience of your soul creatively becoming so loud it cannot be silenced any more.

This is a piece I wrote in my journal when I was about to turn 49 ~ I am now 50 ~ I made it through the dark night of the soul

~

I’m 24 hours away from my 49th birthday and I’m wrestling the tail of an ancestry dragon who both enchants me and wants me dead. My own children brought the promise of a new generation. In that way, they protected me from the tragedy of being born into a damaged lineage; they pulled me forward into hope and action. Their shining spirits and my conviction to teach them to love well was a purpose that kept constant wind in my sails. Now I am alone and wondering was it good enough? Did I bring up the next generation of hope well enough?

While I simultaneously sleep with, wrestle with, get burned by and learn from this awful, beautiful dragon. She is a death-mother of sorts. She wakes me up in the wee morning hours pummeling me with reasons not to hope- another relationship loss, feeling estranged from my kids, aging, fucking capitalism and poverty, my country funding a holocaust, cancel culture, friends who steal my ideas and don’t give me credit, and the fear that life will always be this way, or that I might die lonely.

She is lashing me in the darkness before sunrise, so that I will get up and do something about it. So that I will fight back.

Today she also flogs me with embedded timelines in my family. For example, on my dad’s side of the family, none of the men, except him, lived to 50. That was the story he told all through my childhood. He lost his uncle and his father before they were old enough to be a grandparent and a great uncle. My own sister, after many years of struggling with the internalized pain from our childhood, overdosed on pain pills four days before her 50th birthday. And my brother, just 3 months before his 50th birthday, after many years of struggling with the pain of our childhood, hung himself in the family barn.

So I wake on the eve of 49 under her spell, the spell of my own death dragon. She lifts her iridescent green scales while she taunts me into a quarrel with the darkness of this number, 49. Underneath are the ebony black, light sucking, universe destroying, obsidian surfaces. When my dragon lifts her scales, a thousand tiny razors tenderize my skin, until I stand and fight for my life, crying hot tears, but writhing against death.

She undresses me and whips my bare skin with her obsidian lash. The tip of her lashing tail is hard to grasp at first, but once I get hold, I feel more in control. I grasp the cruel muscle and wrestle it against the length of my body. Her tail tenses and flexes trying to pull away to lash me more but I’ve got all the muscles, the scales and the will to move tucked between my legs and wrapped tightly in my arms close to my heart. It hurts, but the broken skin and taste of salty tears and mineral rich blood are an intimacy with myself I crave.

All this in the wee hours of the dark morning before light can reflect on the consuming black. I fight and cry until the sun begins to rise. As the sun rises, my own light forced from me by the struggle rises too. It completely disarms my dragon, my death-mother, my teacher, my ego. The razor scales lower and smooth to an iridescent mirrored surface. Slowly her scales begin to reflect.

She lays down beside me, her warm body against the full length of my salty, bloody, tired flesh. After having wrestled her tail to rest, I begin to press the scales smooth with shaking hands. I press them with the whole of my palm as if to beg them to remain soft, to not lift the obsidian razors again. With respect and surrender, I tenderly shine my death dragon’s skin until it's a mirror surface in which I can clearly see myself.

My dragon death-mother asks me to look. Really look. But I don’t want to see. I turn my face away from her mirror, shyly. I resist what she insists I must know. I’ve resisted everything about being born into this particular human incarnation. I resisted for almost 36 hours while my mother’s body labored to bring me into the world. I was finally cut from her womb and forced to breathe the air of 1975 America- a naked soul with no skin for it, refusing to be incarnated as a human. My poor mother. How hard it must have been to comfort a baby who didn’t really want to be here at all.

And yet, I am. I am alive today on the eve of 49 and when I bravely look in the mirror that facing death holds up, I see a heroine who walked through the rubble of a toxic family of origin, built a nourishing interdependent matriarchy of her family of creation, made love to a dragon that tried to kill her, and went on to write a whole new story of her ancestry to be myelinated into the neural pathways of her children and her grandchildren and her grandchildren’s grandchildren. That’s who I see.

~

This is what resilience looks like: looking suicidal ideation squarely in the face, wrestling with it, until you foster an inalienable intimacy with yourself, such that you can never feel alone.

Let’s break it down.

What is Ego?

Ego is an accumulation of thoughts and emotions, continuously identified with, which creates the idea and feeling of being a separate entity from one's essential self. In other words, ego is the part of us that we present to the outer world. It is a crafted identity that we carefully guard against ridicule and adapt to meet the needs of what is expected of us in our family, culture, cosmology and economic imperatives. It is the ego that tells us we are somehow not yet good enough and compels us to constantly work on bettering ourselves. The ego will perform reality-testing, use sense perception, memory and reason to create a fantasy of self-representation that serves the requirements of emotional, practical and economic survival.

In contrast, one’s consciousness or soul, is the pure, indestructible, and most of all, creative, essential core of our beingness that represents the truth of who we really are. In Buddhist traditions it is believed that only by disidentifying one's consciousness from ego can one truly be free from suffering. In deep psychology and mystical traditions, it is believed that in order to become whole and authentic, the ego, shadow and soul must be integrated or in deep relationship with each other.

What is the shadow?

When there are conflicts of the personality that do not correspond with the ego ideal, the ego resists. The aspects of our personality that the ego resists become buried in the unconscious, becoming the shadow. Maria Connolly, LPC, describes how the shadow develops in childhood as an intelligent coping mechanism to protect us from vulnerability and how this adaptation separates us from the brilliance inherent in our vulnerability:

“As a child, we have a coping mechanism; we develop adaptive skills to keep the disowned ones hidden. For example when you disown vulnerability you might:

Develop an inner perfectionist to avoid feeling “less than” when making mistakes.
Develop a tough exterior, becoming overly self-reliant and independent so you’re not disappointed and hurt by others.
Develop a need to take care of everyone else because no one is taking care of you.

Yet the truth about vulnerability is that it can be empowering if we develop what David Whyte, my favorite poet, calls “robust vulnerability.” This seemingly counter-intuitive concept is to allow vulnerability into your life so that it strengthens you from the inside.”

Do you see how these shadow adaptations can keep you from realizing your wholeness and true self? Your shadow self keeps you from letting your light, your true brilliance, shine.

The relationship between your shadow and your ego can lead you to waste your creative energy imagining how to get out of your own suffering. By generating stories and limiting beliefs that align with fear instead of “robust vulnerability” and courage.

I believe everyone possesses the capacity to be an artist and everyone is essentially creative. Anxiety and depression are one way that the misuse of creativity manifests and it can be quite dangerous.

The desire to die can be the urgent voice of the part of us that wants to live!

The soul will take us on some harrowing journeys, but it is a force that works toward our greatest potential. It can lead us to ego death, shadow dancing and integration. Jung referred to this as descent, ascent and assimilation. St. John of the Cross called it the “dark night of the soul.”

Will we trust our souls or will we fight the disintegration?

I believe that we are essentially perfect adaptive organisms that organically and effortlessly self-heal in the right conditions. The right conditions require a guide such as an indigenous healer, resiliency coach, therapist, or a form of art therapy.

Our soul can be trusted. Our creativity when aligned with our authenticity can be trusted. But this isn’t a journey to take alone.

Confrontation with the shadow produces at first an immobilizing melancholy. The stillness of a deep depression can conjure images of death. Sometimes when a person is going through an ego death, they may dream of dead animals, perhaps a more tangible way to meet the part of you, the ego, that wants to die. This period during a transformation can inhibit the pre-frontal cortex- the part of our brain that is responsible for executive function, social cognition, attention, reasoning and personality, therefore making complex decisions and following through on former convictions feels impossible.

A monarch does not pathologize the jelly phase inside the chrysalis. Must we?

In this time of descent genuine courage and strength are required. There is no certainty of emergence and there is no guaranteed timeline for resolution. It is a death, but only the death of a part of you. It is a very dangerous time. While a person experiencing an ego death may feel like being alone, like an animal that wanders into the forest to expire, it is vitally important that they are not. A trustworthy guide is needed to aid the ego death, to facilitate the shadow dance and ensure a path to integration.

When a person finds themselves in a dark night of the soul or an ego death without a guide, it can lead to getting stuck in the dancing with the shadow stage. This can manifest in alcoholism, drug addiction, and/or what appear to be mental health disorders such as bipolar disorder and personality disorders, including suicidal ideation. My somewhat controversial opinion is that these are all conditions of being stuck in a stage of transformation, not a biologically based dysfunction of neurotransmitters in the brain. If someone is stuck for too long, it may require biological interventions such as medication, but only as a temporary measure to get you back on the road to transformation. Biology follows ecology. Change the environment and the organisms adapt.

You don’t want to die, you want to transform. You don’t want to die, your ego wants to die. You don’t want to die, you want to live in a world where all life matters.

It is worth repeating, I believe that we are essentially perfect adaptive organisms that organically and effortlessly self-heal in the right conditions. The right conditions require a guide. Our soul can be trusted. Our creativity when aligned with our authenticity can be trusted. But this isn’t a journey to take alone.

Desiring to die is desiring for the authentic self-intimacy that is the prize for enduring an ego-death.

Self-intimacy is hot, patriarchal capitalism is not.

The reason my opinion is controversial is because in colonized America under capitalism, care has become an industry removed from reciprocal relationship with earth and spirit. People are required to prioritize earning money, competing for resources, and climbing hierarchies for status while simultaneously destroying relationships with earth and with each other. When inevitable distress and loneliness occurs, we turn to a ‘health industry’ where we have to pay for a cure with the money we earned creating the ailment. Relationships become another commodity under capitalism.

No matter how many cures we pay for, an individual alone cannot undo the broken and cyclical system that renders us abandoned from belonging to and responsibility for all life. Individual therapy in the health system primarily focuses on cognitive adaptations that enable us to better assimilate into the systems.

If we are all experiencing massive transformations, dissolving our egos and merging into one giant integrated emerging beneficial organism generating instead of destroying life on earth, we would be a threat to capitalism, the status quo, the accumulation of massive wealth and power.

So you can see why the dominant ideology is a binary: you are either depressed and you want to die, or you are assimilated into capitalism with the help of the pharmaceutical and “health industry.”

The secret third thing is your creativity will always find a way.

I’m grateful to Jung for the language of the soul’s journey and the depth of understanding dissolution and ascent. My criticism is that it is the masculine perspective that this constitutes a form of suffering. I don’t think that healing from our past psychic injuries and surviving through our current day to day challenges needs to be painful. I think it can just simply BE. I put forward that ego dissolution can actually be downright ecstatic.

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s book “Big Magic” she suggests you court your creativity the way you would a new lover. You can always make time for a new lover. You’ll steal away a few minutes from work to make out in a stairwell. You’ll sacrifice your 8 hrs of sleep to make love in the dark before dawn.

Processing descent and ascent can certainly feel like suffering when we put it into the context of patriarchal capitalism and we try to process it sitting still in talk therapy within a pathologizing sick model of care. However, if we insert creativity, and get out of the mind and into the body it could also be a dragon who is trying to destroy us that we have the pleasure of wrestling into submission in the intimate hours before dawn.

It can be dissolution, but sexy. It can be shadow work, but hot. It can be riding that dragon.

*If you are feeling suicidal, reach out to a friend. If no friend is emotionally available don’t hesitate to call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If your friend or family member is feeling suicidal, please take it seriously. Do not leave them alone, even if this is a frequent occurrence. The jelly phase needs a cocoon. Be a cocoon.

Enjoy a song by The Bengsons called “Hope Comes” that moves me from despair to my imaginative soul: https://youtu.be/K8AegG5en2g?si=R5xc3qkpTX5ccgDd

Creativity and Ego - An Intimate Relationship