Winter Reflections
Emotions, Narcissism, and life after The Journey Home
It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
James Baldwin
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
Rumi
Well, well, well…
Here we are again at the end of another year. And what a year it’s been. For all of us, I’m sure!
Before we begin what I fully anticipate to be an electric year, I wanted to share some reflections on this one and a collection of thoughts I’ve been dancing with that I believe are framing the work I do and create next. Beginning first with the days post-The Journey Home.
But before I continue, let me stop here and say I REALLY missed you and our little meetings here. I don’t ever take your reading and engagement for granted. I hope you have had a special holiday season and are doing exceptionally well.
Let’s get underway.
The Journey Home
The Journey Home is one of my proudest and most comprehensive works to date. It started with an idea I had that kept growing and growing and what began only as a possibility turned into a collection of writing, imagery, and music that conveys so much of my life experience, essence, vision, and hopes for the future.
As you might imagine, after I “turned in” the last post I felt proud, on top of the world, and impressed at my consistency and courage to share so much. I loved the conversations I had with y’all about the concepts I was exploring and was glad I had taken this creative step publicly.
However, interestingly, those expansive feelings waned relatively quickly. I didn’t expect to “fly high” for months afterward, but I strangely felt sad and almost bereft shortly after, which was sooo perplexing.
Here I had written this anthology on journeying home and coming back to myself after years of feeling sort of out of place in my own life and yet I still felt this internal dissonance or maybe it was that this thing (TJH) that was a part of me was now apart from me. I wasn’t clear.
I did remember someone talking about the relationship or dance between creation and despair that comes with creativity, though. I can’t for the life of me remember who said it, but the speaker described the feeling of loss that often visits and takes residence for a while after you’ve created something that has so much of you in it.
I wasn’t sure if this was what I was feeling and it helped me zoom out to see what may have been occurring internally, but it didn’t make it any less unpleasant.
Concurrently, and almost unconsciously (read divinely orchestrated), I stumbled across a book on the human shadow that set me on my next course of study. (Reading list at the end of the post)
The Shadow, Emotions, and Narcissism
The Shadow
I speak a TON about purpose, being uniquely designed for things, and the importance of our earliest years. I do so because I believe that our lives are so difficult (aside from being in the labor-rich, highly exploited 97%) due to our living out pre-existing life templates instead of our unique configurations inside of a vibrant, generative society.
So much “guidance” says to just accept life as it is, don’t be a “victim,” and do your best with what you’ve got. Essentially, don’t look at or get too caught up in the past. Focus chiefly on forging a path ahead. Not unwise advice, but certainly not comprehensive.
As may be apparent in my writing, a great deal of energy has been (wisely!) spent looking back, examining, and investigating my past and early foundations. In steps the shadow.
The shadow is the unconscious aspect of the personality that doesn’t align well with how we wish to see ourselves resulting in our projecting those characteristics on others.
It’s our impatience that is unconscious to us but obvious to everyone else. It’s the self-centeredness that is intolerable in others that we unknowingly exude. More importantly for our purposes: It’s the talents, kindness, and specialness we project onto others and REFUSE to see abundantly present in ourselves.
The shadow contains the dark parts of ourselves we’d rather not acknowledge, the keys to behavioral patterns we’ve never even noticed, as well as talents and brilliance we are convinced are far beyond our capacity to embody.
My studies on the shadow, how it’s formed*, and how we access and ultimately integrate it helped me make sense of the rabid search of my personal history. It also gave me hope that things I felt I had forgotten or banished to my unconscious weren’t lost to history. Thank God.
*We form the shadow in large part by meeting or observing rejection or disapproval in our environments and then we reject that “undesirable” characteristic in ourselves perpetually whether it’s truly despicable or simply misunderstood.
These studies also introduced me to the key to accessing and integrating the shadow: our emotions.
Emotions
I think I would consider myself a sensitive and emotionally tempestuous aware person. However, in all my years of reading, exploring, and feeling I’ve never sought to understand what emotions are, how they function, and what an ideal relationship with them could be like. I mostly hear emotions discussed kind of dismissively as a distraction to waking up at 5 am.
In studying the shadow, I kept coming across the importance of emotions and how they indicate and inform us of so much. As a result, I began a short study on emotions and walked away with a new awareness of my internal landscape.
What I learned is that at their best emotions are messengers who bring us guidance and information at the specific magnitude necessary for the message (big sadness = big emotional release; big anger = big boundary violation). I learned that emotions, as agents or witnesses in our psyche, have “observed” every experience we’ve ever had and the things we couldn’t feel (and integrate) at 6 or 12 or 19 are still available and swirling around to be felt and cleared today.
This is, in part, why we sometimes experience such a big response to something relatively small. We are often feeling and being triggered into an old, unfelt, and uncleared emotion coming forward to be freed.
Thus, when The Journey Home ended, I was understandably feeling deep sadness and grief because I was unconsciously mourning the life and identity that anthology described. I was mourning the pain the versions of me I wrote about had experienced and the realizations this version of me was coming to terms with. I now see it represented a farewell to life as I’ve known it.
So what did I do?
I allowed myself to feel old resentment, anger, sadness, vulnerability, and shame. I allowed myself to weep not knowing if I would stop, to blast rap music while getting at my opps, to turn the mirror back on myself to see how I had inflicted the same hurts I was grieving, and I have experienced successive levels of emotional freedom since.
One of the things I’ve learned and come to agree with is that until we vulnerably confront the emotions we avoid feeling, we can’t truly clear them and live unencumbered.
Don’t get me wrong you can live a good life and be fine without all this deep emotional work I be talking about, but the key to so many patterns and habitual ways of being has to be felt, not intellectualized or escaped as our society is so quick to recommend.
I am also reasonably convinced that the reason there is so much war, violence, and strife in the world is because of the size of our collective unhealed and unintegrated shadow.
It is our unwillingness to individually (and subsequently collectively) see how we contain the qualities we so despise in others (especially those). It is our demonizing of the “other” whose true home is within our hearts. It is our futile attempts to kill what we despise in ourselves a world away.
Exploring the shadow and emotions also gave me the awareness to face a particularly sensitive area and aspect of my upbringing: narcissism.
Narcissism
For so many years it’s felt like I have been ceaselessly searching my childhood and personal history for something. I could never put my finger on it and so I persisted searching and exploring. After everything (and I mean yearsss), I feel that “thing” may have been the role that narcissism played in my upbringing.
I won’t speak clinically, however, I’ll say the experience I had growing up mirrors that of someone who grew up with a narcissistic parent. The reality distortion, the smear campaigns, the emotional manipulation, and the silent treatments all contributed to a warped family experience that has evidently led to this prolonged recovery I have felt I’ve been in for so long.
Children struggle and resist seeing their parents as anything other than loving, strong, capable, and safe. The problem with this is that when this is not the case for them (more often than not or on a conditional basis) self-flagellation and self-blame nearly always result.
Additionally, a critical component of child-rearing is mirroring qualities, behaviors, and emotions back to children while their burgeoning self materializes. When this mirroring is absent it becomes difficult for a developing child to establish an identity or feel real.
Add to that being a little… Sweet (if you know what I mean) and you’ve got a recipe for persistently feeling (and wanting to be) invisible. All this and decades of religious piety meant nearly ALL of my Queer self was lodged in my shadow.
Despite the magnitude of these realizations (and trust me I’m summarizing and retelling), being able to critically look at the foundation I had built my life on and the absences therein gave me freedom and hope. I could see the things I was deprived of and, consequently, what’s necessary for me to continue developing (and reclaiming).
I’m also not mad and hold no grudges (any longer). I truly realize that I am a being playing human. We all are. And the wounds I’ve collected represent all the ways the light of God, of consciousness, can be refracted through me. It’s ALL good.
And at long last I’ve made some sense of the journey I’ve been on and what’s ahead.
The Journey Ahead
Now, emotions are dynamic and I’m certain there are some old things not yet felt, but now I have more tools to navigate my internal and external terrain. I’m not aiming at “finished” or perfect, but rather internal harmony. I no longer have to run from myself or avoid hard feeling things.
My need to explore and unearth the past has also changed. I don’t feel this compulsion to search the annals of history for answers anymore. (I guess you could say “Something has changed… Within me…”)
As a result of all this, now it is before me to rebuild my identity, my personhood consciously and intentionally. To take all I’ve experienced and sampled and decide what’s true to me and what’s not. Or more subtly deciding what is a pure desire of mine rooted in who I am and who I want to be versus an unconscious knee-jerk reaction to a negative or painful experience parading as a desire.
(e.g., “I’ll prove them wrong!” or “I won’t start things since I was told I was a quitter” versus just doing experiments that 9,999 times out of 10,000 won’t create the lightbulb.)
Now I feel the call and the urge to build. And I can narrate the process in real-time. I get to be something and someone I’ve never been before. In public.
Learning My Creative Mechanism
Creatively, all of this has been so fascinating, too! I remember saying toward the end of The Journey Home, “I can’t wait to get back into digestion mode and read after so much output.” However, I didn’t expect… all this.
In the time since my last post, I’ve kind of wanted to write, but I didn’t have anything to say yet and didn’t feel it. But a couple of weeks ago I told a friend of mine, “Huh. I feel a tickle to write again… We’ll see what comes of it.” I opened a draft page on Substack to jot a couple of ideas down and noticed it felt like the tap was back on. A truly moving experience (on a walk no less!).
So in this whole thing and process, I am learning my own creative mechanism and giving what I get to you as it comes. Who knows where we’ll end up, but as long as we do it together, we’ll be alright.
Thank you so so much for reading this post and all the others. I hope this year has been fruitful and insightful (but hopefully less jaw-dropping than mine).
May 2025 surprise us with goodness we didn’t expect and the realization that we are all powerful creators; even, and especially, of ourselves.
Happy New Year!
I will talk to you all soon.
Melvyn ❄️
P.S. In the next post, I’ll come up out the weeds of my own life and offer some observations and perspective about the times. And wheeeewwww the times.
Post Journey Home Reading List
The Shadow
Emotions
Narcissism