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Writer's picturematilde tomat
Jan 75 min read

the Minotaur at the core

I don’t even know where to start with this.

This past week has been intense to say the least and it took me a couple of days between my bed and my sofa to make sense of this, stranded as a greasy whale. My prompt for today’s action is to do something unstructured, so here it comes [I’ll probably restructure it before posting…] ̷a̷n̷y̷w̷a̷y̷…

I ̶n̶o̶t̶i̶c̶e̶d̶… was aware that the control I perceived and experienced from the outside, was actually / also a reflection of what is going on within. Mi spiego : the constraints of communal living, sharing space, academia, religious dogmas, boundaries shifting, presence of existential cosmic events, family conditioning, cultural expectations, boyfriends… they were also, as I said, a reflection of my own internal conditioning : not just structure and reliability, but also judgement, loads of “shoulds” in my head [should read more, should do more, should clean the house, should dress better, should be fixed by now, should be with a guy, should be accomplished, should be… should be], loads of controlling behaviour. Inner control and external control.

should

My escapism is daydreaming of when I will live on an island, lounging under three palm trees, sipping fresh orange juice, eating charcoal-grilled fish and drinking white wine, doing absolutely nothing but reading and writing. I listen to endless YouTube videos of waves lapping golden beaches in the Pacific, I collect images of people laughing and surfing, I listen to indie music, I paint in blues and greens, I imagine myself swimming every morning and writing every afternoon and laughing every evening. My vision boards are constellated with happy images of smiley people who appear free, abundant and fun to be around. All very beautiful, very fit and very tanned. 


Control vs freedom. Control vs freedom. This push and pull is a constant in my life. Well, it has been a recurring frustration since I started observing myself during my first days at my L2 in counselling. One thing that kept me going was that I was sure that in all this there was a missing link, there was still something missing. I did all the A Hicks, D Chopra, WD Dyer and J Dispenza books; I have done Gestalt, TA, Person Centered and Existential shit and nothing worked. I was still a frustrated, angry woman, swinging back and forth between C [control] and F [freedom].


I always fought against the “heal your inner child” miracle cure because that child was hurt back in the day and nothing could have changed that. Plus, I don’t have children nor do I like them very much so how could I heal and protect myself?

There are a lot of ready-made therapeutic self-helping strategies I looked at which just make me laugh! Lots of fancy theoretical and abstract words are offered around, especially by people who have never been trained as therapists and who are so young you would start questioning the validity of their assumptions just by looking at their faces.


Then the other day a concoction of Jung, Hillman, Moore and Abram created havoc and disrupted my swinging. The very first thought I had that morning was that frustration was good! Whaaaaa?! Yes, it is good. Frustration is an indicator that you are learning and that you need time to process new data. Mmmm… That made me smile and plan a chilling out day; and I know that when I chill out I am about to be hit by new unexpected emotional downloads in copious amounts.


So, in the late afternoon, I realised that it is not that I don’t like the controlled me or the free me. I don’t like the fucking swinging back and forth between the two. It’s exhausting! I should be on a beach, I should be looking for a job; I should stay here in the UK, I should move where the sun is always shining; I should go swimming this morning! I should be cleaning the house; I should read that book for my PhD, I should really go out for a walk… and round and round we go.

I looked at this swinging from a helicopter view and noticed that this back and forth, this unstable, flamboyant, uncontrollable, un-reconcilable, excessive, ridiculous, messy me was right at the centre of my unconscious. That seed protected by my Platonic Daimon.

Unconsciously, that MESSY ME is supposed to be gone and replaced by a beautiful, stable, respectable, accepted, sorted, grounded, controlled me.


It was then that it downed on me that the free MESSY ME of my inner core [eternal and creative, the trickster; magical, innovative, adventurous, loud, inspired and inspiring, visionary real me - the one that at my core I didn’t want but I need] was squashed by this controlled being [rigid, conditioned, abused, overstepping, arid, submissive element]. What I need at my core but that I was taught not to like, that it wasn’t good nor right and that I had to change is the exact mirror of what on the conscious level I long for. And what on the outer layer I don’t like and want to change [the controlling, structured, overly responsible me] is exactly what in my unconscious mind I am trying to accomplish. 

Cross-wired.

For all these years my needs have not been aligned with what I want. On the surface I want freedom, at my core I think I need structure and stability. No wonder I have never manifested anything! A total misalignment between my conscious and my subconscious. 

I can now see that while I spent most of my years trying to reconcile the outer layer, [the basic tension] at the core there is a greater dynamic, a meta-level of integration and harmony that needs to be approached. 


This first realisation was that I am MESSY ME, and I use the word “messy” in a cute - full-of-love connotation. There is no such a thing as healing the child within because that child was never a child, first [we all are very old souls] and because it was never broken. She simply wasn’t listened to. She tried with all her dreams and visions, art-making and wishes to tell me something. Moreover, that child is not a third person to observe and discuss objectively : it’s me. I am MESSY MAT. It’s a matter of Being, and nothing else. 


Now the Magnum Opus, the great work, is integration, is listening, observing, trying to find a new harmony while aiming for wholeness and clarity. At my core, now I know, I want to allow Messy Me to be herself. She has chosen this life and all these experiences in order to be able to speak and communicate because she knows that her voice is important. I know that my ideas are important. I know that. I know that I feel authentic and happy when I don’t allow what I perceive to be external conditioning and expectations to rule my life, my work and my artistic endeavours. I need to write this again: NOT what are external conditioning and expectations but what I perceive to be external… bla bla bla. Messy Mat knows already that in order to be creative and inventive and imaginative she needs structure. The controlled / conditioned / abusive rigidity that was placed around me has nothing to do with safety and reliability.


They wanted me to be “respectable” [that’s a word my mother used a lot] and my fight has always been against people who "did not respect me and my boundaries". I think that as long as I respect myself, I will be ok. I just need to remember that the Greek Minotaur, the beast within at the centre of the labyrinth, was known by the name of Ἀστερίων [Asterion], star.

earnestly, yours.

mx



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