L5: Shadow Work

Dear Diary,

Last night I did a kind of Jungian therapy called “shadow work” with a woman named Amy from New Zealand.

Tomorrow I’ll be leaving PAF.

Mikkeline will drive me to Laon at 6 a.m. to get a 6:30 a.m. train to Paris.

Today I decided to not work on any fiction, and it feels extremely good.

I have been reading Normal People, and it has been fucking me up. It’s such an accurate and honest account of the actual reasons human life proceeds as it does (with the exception of a bowdlerized version of male sexuality that enables the story to get from Point A to Point B) that it feels hard to live life in half measures, which is the only way a real person can actually live.

Last night at dinner Normal People came up and Amy said she didn’t like it when she read it in February, but she was “looking at it through a different lens, through a lens of recovery.” Being mid-getting-fucked-up-by-it, I was extremely curious to talk to this person who had not been affected by it, and so I did the Jungian thing.

It’s been almost a month since my last update. I haven’t been doing a lot, mostly writing fiction, so a weekly update seemed excessive.

Here is the link I promised in my last letter, to my story about a boy who does murder.

I’ve been at PAF for two months and one day. I will be in Paris tomorrow and in London the next day and in Toronto the next day and in Kingston six days later. Beyond that I don’t know. It can be anxiety-inducing to live like this, but I want to remember that it’s been very nice to be in Europe this fall.

I find I don’t actually have a lot to say right now. I’ve had a pretty emotional last few days, but my brain seems to be floating in a stew of my fictional worlds and the world of PAF and the world of Toronto and the world of my friend in LA and my friends in New York and the classroom in George Brown College where I used to teach middle-aged Canadians to write about themselves and the opening pages of The Vegetarian by Han Kang which I read this morning and the French labor strike. I was very receptive to the therapy thing last night and I feel somewhat deconstructed and rearranged by it (my homework, to grossly simplify, is to be more assertive/communicative, positive, calm, and kind). I’m going to go make pasta with arrabbiata sauce, from a brand called Sacla, which, according to the label, has been in Italy since 1939.

Yours,

Steve