On Barbie, Jung, and Creating My Perfect World
A kind of reflection and life update about where and who I am now, where and who I want to be, and whether or not those things [can] coexist.
Bored at work and in a reflective, scatterbrained mood. Sorry if this doesn’t make that much sense.
If I could have done it all over again, I would have majored in something other than Political Science in college. Don’t get me wrong, I love lively and spirited political debates as much as the next neurotic Twitter user slash impassioned liberal arts student, but this one class I took in my senior year (that I won’t name specifically for privacy reasons) about religion, philosophy, and psychology in order to fulfill my religious studies core class requirement definitely changed my perspective. Our class discussions were not controversial, nor did they leave me exhausted or emotionally drained once that hour and 15 minutes were complete. We had enlightening conversations about Jungian principles, the role of religion in the psyche, and one’s mental and spiritual evolution through the archetypal Hero’s Journey. This class was a game-changer for me, and it led me to think on a much deeper, more complex level about my relationship to not only the world, but my own self – after all, the relationship we have with the self, our self, is just as important as the one which we have with our Creator, and some even believe that those two are interchangeable.
I have always been drawn to such discussions about how we as human beings relate to the world around us, and am forever pondering our status or purpose on this earth – whether we are humans having a spiritual experience or if we are spiritual beings having a [temporary] human experience. I tend to agree with the latter perspective the most, but I recognize that ultimately, there is no concrete answer. To loosely quote Greta Gerwig’s instantly iconic Barbie (2023), which has quickly become one of my most cherished pieces of art, “Being a human being can be pretty uncomfortable. We create things like religion, politics, and ‘Barbie’ to make sense of it all. And then we die.” Spoken like the true wise woman that Ruth Handler/Rhea Pearlman is.
During a recent discussion with a friend who is taking a very similar path in terms of our careers – both of us are politically passionate law-track girlies – we touched upon this subject, as well as why people are drawn to certain careers in the first place. She made a very interesting point that while those who are drawn to STEM-focused careers tend to view their positions as little more than an occupation through which they receive compensation, those of us who have humanities-related focuses tend to view their occupation as intrinsically related to their lives and their very beings. We love law, politics, and humanities because they remind us of that beautiful, agonizing discomfort over being alive and what it all means. The work we do needs to be a constant reflection of such a fact, and we can never escape it; not that we would ever want to.
Knowing this about myself has made my path to law, legal theory, creativity, and philosophy that much easier and harder all at once. The path to law school, then the bar exam, then whatever mid-level public policy job I can find is the most straightforward and expected — at least among my family, who have been lovingly bestowing me with the superlative “Future Harvard Law Grad” ever since I could crawl. But what if I wanted to do something different? More importantly – how can I find a career path, or a life in general, that perfectly encapsulates the passions I possess? The simplest way I can frame such a passion is the excitement and bittersweet symphony of life itself, but it’s truly much more complex than that (or at least, I think it is). I am addicted to my own humanity and my own divinity, as well as that of others, and figuring out how all of it — and all of us — relate(s). I am addicted to love and its origins, as well as basically all of human and natural history (though, what I truly know about these fields is somewhat limited to the few times I’ve studied subjects under this umbrella in school). I want to know everything I possibly can about how humans came to be, and how we came to live in this world, and how we came to love — both the noun and the verb — and I haven’t the slightest idea how that can be encapsulated in a simple Juris Doctorate.
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I want, I want, I want. That’s all I can seem to say these days, even in the midst of profound blessings and an intense life transition from vaguely creative stay-at-home daughter to full-time law student. I want – what I do want, what I don’t want, and what I believe I should want. I want to travel and stay in hostels and have flings with handsome locals. I want to hole up in the mountains for six months and do nothing but write and gaze out at the early morning horizon. I want to both read books to young children and to fight for their happiness. I want to fall in love with a man whose soul lights mine on fire yet is also the rainbow at the end of the storm, to bear children that share his last name and his eyes, and to bring them up in the Word of God. I want to be a loving, accepting person with divinity in my heart.
On the way to work today, I was listening to one of the more recent episodes of the This Jungian Life podcast entitled “Identity Crisis: When Our Story Falls Apart”, and Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano, Deb Steward, and Joseph Lee discussed the ways in which people can fervently and desperately cling to false personas to, ironically enough, attempt to maintain some sense of self that they feel is lost to them somehow. They also discussed the inadvertent psychological damage of being asked to change in some way, whether through loving concern or through coercive, restrictive intimidation. My previous article, an open letter to my mother detailing our loving yet tumultuous relationship, examines this idea in great detail as it is present in my personal life. How can you find who you are and how you relate to this world when something or someone is always looming over you? Even more harrowing, what happens when this role is no longer fulfilled by your overbearing yet well-meaning parent and is shifted to your shadowy self? That Robber Bride quote about male fantasies from unofficial feminist icon and author, Margaret Atwood, rings true here – “You are your own voyeur” – yet it is just as relevant in terms of not only the expectations we place upon ourselves, but the phantom remnants of those expectations and hopes once placed or projected onto us by the important people in our lives, desperate to use us one way or another to fulfill the fantasies of the life they could have lived, lost to late-stage capitalism or societal or familial obligations and responsibilities. All that to say, my mother — whose trauma from decades ago still reverberates in the present day to everyone in our family and beyond, and whose immense, bottomless sacrifices have yet to be fully repaid — would not understand that, after years of intensive schooling and education clearly pointing to one straightforward direction, my primary goals consist of pondering the divine and falling in love. My happiness in those areas would be a scourge on her lifelong penance, and she says she would be happy for me but I know deep down it would break her heart.
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I want, I want, I want. What do I want? I want peace, and I want knowledge. I want the dual-sided coin of love and hate, for what is hate but love misdirected and warped, yet still artful and alive, because the worst thing that anyone can be is indifferent? I want the Library of Alexandria to be restored somehow. I want to read every single book in my local library, as well as the other branches in my county. I want enough time to fulfill my duty to both my family and to my own happiness. I want to live long enough to see my perfect world fulfilled, or at least to see its first emergence. I want to share in the flawed world we have now with someone standing by my side, forever.