Jenga

Jenga

 

 

A therapist of mine used the word metanoia to describe recovery.  I had never heard the word before and went home and looked it up.  It is a Greek word that means changing one’s mind.  In psychology Carl Jung used it to “indicate a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict be melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form.”  That was taken from Wikipedia.  Think in terms of recovery, breakdown and mid-life crisis.

I know for me, I did have to completely unravel in order to get better.  All pre-conceived notions about myself, the world around me, institutions like motherhood and marriage had to be scrapped and I had to start over again with a fresh set of eyes.  I keep thinking of the stacking game “Jenga”.  I feel as though my life had gotten too elevated, too big and was resting on an unsteady foundation.  Drinking was the block I removed that caused the whole tower to crumble.

I love that I can be so less judgmental now.  I feel as though that fresh set of eyes has me seeing the world with all the colors turned up high.  I am not saying I am never judgmental, but certainly I am so much less so than ever before.  I see people more for who they are and not their religion, their color, their class. 

Dustin Hoffman did an interview about his role in “Tootsie”.  He talks about how he saw himself on screen during the make-up tests before the start of the movie and said to the make-up artists, can you make me beautiful.  They essentially told him that they had gotten him to look as good as possible.  He talks about going home and weeping and telling his wife he knew now that he had to make the movie and when she asked him why he explained that he knew he was interesting as a woman.  But he realized that he would never have talked to her because she did not fulfill a societal norm of beauty.  He at that point realized that there were too many interesting women that he had ignored because he had been brainwashed to believe women should look a certain way.

I am so glad that my “Jenga” tower crumbled.  In the process of re-building I have lost my arrogance.  I have lost my old perspective of what people should and should not be.  I sometimes sit in twelve-step meetings and feel like weeping myself because the room is filled with so many good people I would never have deigned to speak to before.  Now I love them all and I wouldn’t have it any other way.