ASSIGNMENTS:
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Wholeness Inc.
San Francisco, California USA
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REPORTS:
PREVIOUS NEXT
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Me: Hello?
Anima: Hey, it's Anima.
Me: Oh, hi Anima. What's going on?
Anima: Oh, nothing much. What's up with you?
Me: Yeah, you know...I'm feeling really mixed up right now. I'm upset and confused, and I feel really hurt. I don't know why you keep asking me to call you to hang out, and then you never return my phone calls. I have to say I've rehearsed saying this to you a couple of times, and I can't remember any of my well planned, cunning remarks. I just feel scared and confused.
Anima: What are you talking about?
Me: What am I talking about? You never return my phone calls! If you don't want to remain in contact with me, that's fine. Well, I mean, it's not totally fine, it really hurts, but if you want to disconnect, I can at least respect that and try to get on with things. It's this in between shit that I really have a problem with. I just don't get it. Why do you tell me that you're so adamant about us hanging out and getting together when I see you once a year for you birthday, and then when I actually do try to get a hold of you, you don't call me back! It makes me feel like I'm fucking crazy. "She said she wanted to hang out with me right? Why is she not calling me back? Okay, I can't call her back twice, because then she'll think I'm psycho and I have no life. But isn't that the truth? Only psychos would freak out so much about such a small social exchange."
Anima: Look...I was just, I was really busy, okay? I just didn't get around to it. I'm sorry you're so freaked out about this.
Me: You were really busy? You've done this, like, like three or four times! Do you do this to your friends? I told myself I wouldn't put up with this again, I wouldn't get lured in with your hook, but I always do. I feel like a fool. I feel like a fool who cares so much about having just a tiny bit of connection with you. I wish I didn't care about connecting with you, but I do. I try to pretend that I don't care, just so it doesn't hurt so damn much. I get really good at pretending. And you? You couldn't seem to care less. I seem like an afterthought to you. Maybe you might have distant fleeting concern that I might actually still exist, meanwhile I compulsively anticipate any future interaction with you.
Anima: Look, you're really making something out of nothing.
Me: Yeah, I wish I could understand that. Part of me knows that, part of me knows that I'm blowing you way out of proportion. I'm not really obsessed with you, but I've mistaken you for a part of myself. You represent a lot to me, more than you and your ego could possibly carry. You can't know this. It's really not about you, it's about a sense of completion and security that I want and feel I ultimately can't have. It's like the endless hamster wheel: I place my sense of well-being in your hands specifically because I know that you'll never give it to me. What I'm really afraid of is to stop running.
Anima: Look, I'm gonna go now, okay...
Me: Go, fine, but please take yourself with you and leave my consciousness FOREVER! Oh, god, do you know how hard I've tried to get rid of you?
Anima: Get rid of me? That's the last thing you want to do. Trust me, if you really wanted to get rid of me, you could at any moment. All you need to do is stop. Not stop thinking about me, but stop running after thoughts about me. Just leave me alone and I'll leave you alone, okay? It's really that simple. It's like that old blues song, "Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die." You just need to let me die. There's no cathartic resolution here. No reconciliation and no understanding. Nothing is here, and nothing will ever be here, or anywhere else, but you entertain all these fantasies of showing yourself off to me. "This time," you think, "I'll really impress her now. Before I was confused and I looked foolish and irresponsible, but look at all these positive characteristics I've developed. I've done all this meditation, I've been through therapy, I know myself, and hey, look at all this weight I've lost. I'm going to be a successful musician. We'll have such a happy life together, you doing all your environmental stuff while I do music all day, and then at night, we'll have sex that transcends physical reality. And, even though both of us claim we'll never have children, we'll probably eek out a couple anyway, just out of sheer biological compulsion."
Me: That's not what I think...I just want to connect...
Anima: Bullshit! You can fool yourself, but you can't fool me. Remember, I AM YOU!! Don't you get it? There's no separation. That's why I haven't called you back.
Me: That doesn't make sense. Why would what I think influence your actions? If I believe I'm going to get into a car crash tomorrow...
Anima: Look, I'll tell you what you need to do, okay?
Me: What I need to do...for what?
Anima: You said you want to "rid me from your consciousness," right?
Me: Yeah, that's all I really want I guess. I mean, I don't want you to die or anything. I just want to live a happy life without you, which is the life where you never fall in love with me, which seems to be the unalterable reality.
Anima: Okay, just remember, that if you let me die, I'll just become someone else, okay? If it's not me, it'll just be Bjork, or Miranda July, or that girl in your from your music history class, or that one chick on Myspace. You'll just pass the buck to some other unwitting chick whom you now place ultimate security in. Okay, I've been pretty bitchy up until now, but it's only to disenchant you. I tell you, what you really need is self acceptance, and I know you think you know this, but you only partially know this. You have inherited money from your parents, but you also have inherited genetic encoding for self hatred, and your upbringing and your parent's attitude towards themselves didn't help much. I was perfect when you were just entering high school; I was the perfect expression of everything you were never given: acceptance that your mother never gave you, mutual interest that your sister never gave you, respect for you ideas that your father never gave you...
Me: Stop it!! I don't want to pathalogize your existence! I'm so sick of this Freudian crap! Why does everything have to be about childhood pain? Why does everything always have to come back to how I was mistreated or disrespected? Can't I just have become obsessed with you because I needed SOMEONE to be obsessed with? Can it just be because I thought you were hot, and that you had good taste in music, and that you had integrity, and that you seemed so independent, so comfortable with yourself, so secure with your own ideas and state of being? I just wanted that to feel that independence in you by being with you, as backwards as that sounds. I can't bear to mourn the loss of "us" never having happened, and here I am, getting older, having lost it. But that's all just fantasy now. It's perfect, only because it's in my imagination. I have genetic encoding for self torture too. I just like to torture myself with visions of what could have been, because I can't accept that this is all there is.
Anima: Just stop acting like I'm some kind of logic game that you have to figure out, because you never will. You'll just end up running around in circles forever, dizzy, and you'll still continue to rehearse for me.
Me: Maybe I just need to forgive you, maybe then I can have freedom.
Anima: Sometimes the biggest pain is also the source of the most contentment, the beauty you'll discover when you find me gone, and your own heart in my place. Remember the world we live in . Don't expect that it should be any other way.
Me: Hello? Hello? Anima, are you there?
END CALL 11:37
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