NON-FICTION — AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Chapter 37 — A Return To Changzhou, China

Kintsugi: Making, Breaking, and Putting Pieces Back Together Again

We flew to Toronto in August 2010, planning on several days of visiting our son and his young family. He had relocated to the city for his career. It was the time and place to say goodbye to them before disappearing for ten months. Then, after several days together, we flew off to the Far East. I had created a new blog site for the return to China.

In a blog entry for September 1, 2010 in the new blog site, I wrote:

“I lack the courage and the temperament to stick out, to risk being in full view of others. I prefer to keep low and stick to the shadows and not be noticed all that much, at least most of the time. Personally, I prefer to take risks and go out on a limb within my inner landscapes. There I know I have my privacy, safety, and there I have the courage to do what I would never consider doing in the outer world. So, what does that say about me?”

The evidence left behind over the years in the wake of dealing with psychological issues, tell a different story. I had made my pain public in local newspapers, in books, in private conversations, in the world of cyberspace conversations, and in numerous blog posts, including three written earlier in 2010, which contained nude images of myself.

I was creating fraudulent images about myself. I was hiding, running away from some very vital truths which needed to be freed from the prisons I had built in decades long past, built before I knew the woman he would meet and marry.

Now, at the age of sixty-one, I was once again standing out like some famous V.I.P. in a foreign country, a different race and culture. Here in China I was the Master Teacher and I reveled in that role, a very public role in a city of four and a half million people where I was featured on the front page of newspapers on more than one occasion.

The city of Changzhou had changed as much as I had changed, in the two years since we were last there. Despite those changes, I charged into the world of teaching at the university with confidence. My writing outside of the university focused on being a teacher of depth psychology concepts.

In the role as lead teacher for the expats, I was given the role of mentoring, which resonated as I had often mentored teachers in the schools where I served as a principal. My ego swelled and again hubris blinded me to the small cracks showing up in the privacy of our apartment home.

What was going on behind the scenes? The answer was buried in one of my posts, “with a complex activated, the drama unfolds, and life becomes a confused mess.”

The initial energy in being back in China, saw my ego validated in so many ways. The first months of teaching race by. However, like a person suffering from bipolar disease, that initial “high” wore thin and the “lows” were waiting patiently in the wings for their turn.

Following a visit to Shanghai and the World Expo, the signs of another period of depression began to appear. They showed up in small conflicts. My growing awareness of these moments of dis-ease seeped out into my blog posts:

“When a relationship hits a rocky patch, it pretty much looks like everything is going downhill, down into a dark hole. One’s field of vision is reduced to a narrow band of possibility, and the possibility is in darkness, a damp darkness that reminds one of a swampland at night where sinkholes are just waiting to suck one down. In an instinctive reaction we lash out hoping to back off the demons and find a bit of breathing space. The enemy is out there, and the enemy is wearing the body of one’s partner in relationship.” [October 24, 2010]

Projections were again at work. Triggers were continuing to be activated. I had thought I had deactivated the triggers to avoid having the dangerous inner demons escape and trash my life. M had become the victim of the shadows from my inner world. Though I knew she wasn’t the enemy, the activated complexes didn’t care what I knew.

The shadows were determined to escape the prisons I had built and get their day to speak. The had to teach me the lessons I needed to learn — who and what he was. With the intention of protecting M, I began to build a wall between me and her, trying to keep her safe from my demons.

The life of teaching continued with only a few minor bumps, before the end of the first term. Life in China continued to work its wonders during most of the hours of the day. It was only on rare nights when I became irrational. We had chosen a four-week tour of Indochina for our term break, with most of that time to be spent in Vietnam.

We flew into Ho Chi Minh City in January 2011. There we began to experience yet another shift in culture. I had assumed from research and preparations, I would see Vietnam through a masculine filter, a land with a long history of war, a country that was filled with temples and other structures that celebrated the masculine. Yet my journal told a different story.

“Water — the unconscious — anima — my soul. Somehow, the feminine has stepped forward to claim my attention. I have taken almost two thousand photos in five days and I would have to say that images of women and water account for most of these images. I do find men in this collection of photos and the temples that men have built, but not all that many. I am often disconcerted as women look into my eyes and smile with invitation while I walk down the streets of the towns and cities while holding Marynia’s hand.” [January 19, 2011]

The Buddhist temples and the symbols found in so many places, through which we travelled, awoke a desire within me to return to the practice of meditation. In the past I had used meditation as a means to find my centre, a practice which helped quieten the shadows and ghosts hidden within. But again, I pushed the idea for meditation into the background, telling myself it wasn’t yet time. I rationalised that I had too few hours in Indochina for meditation.

Previously

I want to thank the following people for reading this story:

Brian Lageose, Robert, Dennis Koluris • M.Sc., Bill Harris, Mariana Busarova, Alberto Ocando, Chase Dalton, Mr. Plan ₿, Harshil Mevasa, Author, D. Denise Dianaty, Loicrees, and Buddhi Ruparathna, Lady De Ville, Pete JJ, Tina Here, Patricia O’Neill, Domino Cat, Lisa Duffy-Korpics, Sai Ezra, and Trinity Ellis, Author