Reclusland

Going off and attaining superpowers doesn’t mean you won’t have to face your problems when you come back. Which is hard if you left because you’d failed at facing them the first time.  Especially if you mistakenly understood that failure as being a permanent part of your what-you-are.  Chances are, this is exactly what you did, since the problems were clearly serious enough for you to feel the need to run off and develop a higher, more perfected being  in order to deal with the great-terrible-whatevertheyares.

Unfortunately, you now not only have to face those problems again, but you also have to dredge them up from the past (within yourself), in order to do so.  You have to take them out of the space that holds forgotten (or willfully ignored) things and make them real again.  The brain has a way of blinding itself to things that you do not allow yourself to see change, regardless of whether you do so because of their perceived goodness or their perceived badness, and this is something that must be overcome before you can even begin to tackle the “forgotten” problems themselves.

This isn’t Final Fantasy.  That you boss you couldn’t beat in that one castle isn’t just going to sit there waiting for you to level up and come back to kick his ass.  He’s going to move somewhere else, turn into something else, level up himself.  You may not even recognize him when you run across him again, but when the battle begins, you will feel a sense of deja vu…  Pay attention to that.

So yes, it’s quite the mess you’ve gotten yourself into, but on the one hand, this is good.  If you hadn’t failed the first time, you wouldn’t have left to attain those powers, and you are stronger for having made the journey.  Often, such journeys prove to be a bounty of helpful experiences, above and beyond whatever may have been attained at their culmination.  They are adventures in-and-of themselves, and no one ever said this was a purely linear storyline, especially not for us post-modern adventurers.

But on the other hand, if you only developed those powers to cover up your sense failure, then really, you have nothing.  If they were only a mask to cover your wound, rather than a bandage to help in its healing, you’re going to have to remove that mask and face the purification that has developed underneath (before you die).  In such a case, the foundations of your power are as quicksand, and your hard won treasure is nothing but faerie’s gold, fading into dew as soon as it hits the light of true day.  For power built upon ignorance must be given up before that ignorance can be pierced through and dissolved.  And who can give up both power and accept their ignorance?  It’s quite the pressure drop.  Be careful, you don’t want to get the bends…

Nevertheless, if you do wish to do such a thing, or if you find yourself in the midst of doing such a thing, or if you have come back from doing such a thing to find a smiling mask covering an ache in your chest that is getting worse by the day, remember one thing: all that you need is yourself, and you have that already.

That sidetrack you took, that break in the narrative structure, did nothing but give that self back more fully into your own hands.   And now you can turn that enhanced self awareness towards the pain, towards the problems that chased you away to begin with, and you can finally begin to heal that one true wound which we all carry within us, and which only a few of us seem to be able to ever bring to a successful conclusion.

May we all become one of those few…

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