Jane says...
the acorn is ready to grow into a tree
My 7th grade English teacher, Mr. Huck, used to read all of my stories out loud to the class. He would also stand on tables teaching us about Beowulf and throw chairs talking about The Canterbury Tales. He was bigger than life and I adored him. He made me feel seen at a time in my life when I felt invisible. The last thing he said to me was, “You are a writer.”
That was the last time I wrote fiction. I did not write anything again until I was in my early thirties drowning in alcoholism suffering through an abusive marriage with a once successful acting career disintegrating before my eyes.
While working the door for a small theater company in Venice Beach, a man who stole my VCR after a drunken one-night stand ten years earlier showed up. He did not remember taking my VCR but he remembered me. My name is kind of hard to forget, which can be a blessing and a curse. He awkwardly handed me a business card and told me I needed to get my hands read. I looked at the card, Meredyth Hunt hand analyst. What did I have to lose? Clearly not my dignity.
I called her the next day and made an appointment. Sitting at her kitchen table with my palms splayed upwards while she looked, made notes, and looked again, I had an eerie sense that something important was happening.
She told me that I needed to come back for a second reading. And a third. Then she told me I should get certified in hand analyses. Probably quit drinking. Leave my alcoholic husband. And write.
Write?
There it was again.
Write.
Jane Says - I am done with Sergio. he treat me like a rag doll. he hides. the television. says I don’t owe him nothing. but if he comes back again. tell him to wait right here for me. or. to try again tomorrow. I’m gonna kick tomorrow. I’m gonna kick tomorrow. she gets mad. and she starts to cry. she takes a swing. man. she can’t hit. she don’t mean no harm. she just don’t know. what else to do about it. Jane goes. to the store at eight. she walks up on St. Andrews. she waits. and gets her dinner there. she pulls her dinner from her pocket. Jane says she ain’t ever been in love. she don’t know what it is. she only knows if someone wants her. I want them if they want me. I only know they want me. - Perry Ferrel
It is 3 am on a school night. I am fourteen. I’m riding shotgun in his car.
He is a 21-year old friend of my older brothers. He is in college. He is tall dark and handsome. He speaks french.
He also likes snorting heroin.
He shows me how to do it after I suck his dick. With braces.
On the way home as we wound through the streets of Laguna Beach he plays a bootleg tape from a show he saw in Los Angeles the night before. When Perry Farrel’s voice began swirling around me I found myself haunted by the lyrics hijacked with aesthetic arrest and suspended in time. Rising above the mundane and heartbreaking facts of my life at that moment - I had never before heard anyone describe me so clearly.
She only knows if someone wants her. She wants them if they want her. She only knows they want her.
Who is this? I asked.
Jane’s Addiction. The song is Jane Says.
I look out the window while tears stream silently down my face.
Jane says….
Before Meredyth read my hands in 2005, I was a working actress for quite some time. As that was shifting without my consent, she told me although acting would bring me applause and feel good, it did, my true purpose, was as an author with a message to deliver. I scoffed and asked if she knew I was Jane on One World (a tween sitcom from the late 90’s). She did not care. She said the hands don’t lie. I remembered Mr. Huck.
At her behest, I took a writing workshop that culminated in a live reading before an audience. I read the first piece I wrote in class titled, Penelope’s Pussy, an unflinching exploration of my complicated relationship with my mother. When women came up to me afterward and thanked me with tears in their eyes, something shifted. Meredyth was right. Acting felt good but this felt different - soulful and meaningful in such a profound way that it altered the trajectory of my life. It became my North Star, even when I forgot. I got sober, started improv classes, and left the alcoholic husband shortly thereafter.
Continuing the writing, I quickly vomited out a collection of short stories from my life titled, Deprivation Junky and performed pieces from it in the underground Los Angeles storytelling circuit. I felt seen, heard, and understood in a way I never had before.
I was dancing, playing, and writing…lots and lots of writing… it was the salt, sulfur, mercury - tria prima of alchemy - working its magic in my life. I felt unstoppable. I was single. And I was thriving.
Then he showed up.
He wanted to date me after loving me from afar for eight years, he said.
I want them if they want me. I only know they want me.
It wasn’t long before I was living with him in Sherman Oaks. Dance classes in Culver City with Cati-Jean were too far. Gone. My successful blog I had been building made him uncomfortable. I shut it down. My male improv friends intimidated him. I quit. He discarded me two years later.
This pattern that is more like a prison repeats itself over and over and over again.
What is wrong with me?
Twenty years later I am on the phone with my daughter’s father. He is concerned. Deeply concerned. He says Your last three boyfriends have been a drug dealer and two murderers.
Obviously, he has every right to feel concerned. When you put it like that. How could you not?
This was a trifecta of horrible men, one right after the other. 2025. Two punches then a KO. None of them, not a single one, brought anything positive or substantial to the table. They didn’t have jobs, cars, or homes. They were the bottom of the barrel. The lowest of the low. But one thing they all had in common was they wanted me first.
I want them if they want me. I only know they want me.
Alchemy has a process called rotatio. It implies a cyclical nature to life. I have always loved a spiral. Except I was clearly descending instead of ascending.
After the last man discarded me I was broken in a way I had never felt before. It was hard to breathe. I didn't want to die. But I also didn't want to live.
It is not like I haven’t tried to heal whatever this fucked up thing with relationships is. I have done every version of the work - therapy in every form it comes in, plant medicine, 12 steps in every room that would have me, breathwork, ceremony, ritual, meditation. I have sweated and purged and prayed. I have turned over every stone imaginable, the father wound, the mother wound, much more tender, mental health assessments, psychiatry, medication, no medication, books, so many books, lectures, workshops, workbooks. I had enough knowledge to be dangerous but not effective.
However, there was one stone I never considered until I was forced to.
Because the dreams came. And they were relentless.
They were about my older brother. They were bad. Really bad. More like nightmares. I’d wake up feeling nauseous, disoriented, confused. Being a depth psychologist I know dreams are not real, they are symbolic, but of what?
I have always had a complicated relationship with my older brother that seemed to devolve more and more each year. In fact, in our last conversation a year ago he was so verbally abusive that I stopped talking to him entirely. I just chalked it up to him being him but then I started to wonder, why was it so effortless for him to rage at me like that? I grew up in a house where the alpha men were given full permission to rage. Without consequence. I was not. But I paid the price for it. I have come to terms with my stepfather’s narcissism. But something I have never considered was the impact of my older brother’s behavior and choices.
It has a name, The Brother Wound.
I began researching. There isn’t a lot written out there but there is some.
I found personal and clinical books, scholarly journals, academic papers, and an entire genre of mythology called The Sister Who Had To Flee the House. An experience I know well. I started talking about it with different people, listing experiences and events simply to find out if it was normal or not, overwhelmingly the response was, that is not okay and definitely not normal.
Apparently, growing up in the house I did - when the primary male figures in your life aim their sexuality at you like something casual, careless, a joke and treat your physical boundaries as non-existent - the wires get crossed. You learn to read want as safety. Desire and danger become the same frequency. You have impressively low self-esteem. You move too fast. Discernment is a place you have heard of but never visited. It is incredibly difficult to have satisfying relationships. Check.
So now I had a third name to file beside the father wound and the mother wound. The Brother Wound. Accurate. Useful. Completely inert. Once again I had accumulated enough knowledge to be dangerous but not effective. The map kept getting more detailed. I stayed lost.
Three years ago I had a synchronistic experience so on the nose Carl Jung would have taken notes. I was stuck in a nihilistic trauma-bond with a horrible human who turned out to be a lying abusive drug-dealer that I could not escape no matter what I tried. And I tried everything. It was mind boggling. I was desperate as I watched my life force being drained from my body with each passing interaction with this vile slithering serpent of a man. But I could not stay away.
I was flying back from Japan and watched a randomly picked documentary called Uprooted, The Journey of Jazz dance in America . Not only is it an exceptional film that I highly suggest, it reminded me of something I had forgotten for twenty years.
I need to dance.
And not go-out-with-your-friends-club-dancing. I mean, jazz dancing.
I grew up in dance companies. Tap, jazz, and ballet every weekend all weekend. Then when I finally had a car, every weeknight for four hours at least. Whenever I was dancing, I was okay, I was safe. I stayed out of trouble. The dance studio was my haven. The second I quit, trouble ensued. I majored in modern dance at UCLA. I quit to pursue acting. Danced again in my early thirties when Meredyth read my hands, radically changed my life. Quit for a guy. And here I was. In my late forties in an abusive cycle that was killing me and realized, I had not taken a jazz class in twenty years. How is that possible?
At the same time a friend posted a video of herself on Instagram in a jazz class that didn’t look like the classes I took at The Edge so long ago. They looked joyful, celebratory, non-competitive, non-performative and FUN AS FUCK. I went where she went. I introduced myself to the teacher, he looked at me and said, “Arrowyn, I remember you! We danced together in Cati-Jean’s class twenty years ago!” What are the odds of that?
I know Carl Jung is doing backflips in the collective unconscious as I tell this story because right after coming back to dance I not only was finally able to go no-contact with the drug dealer, but I decided to decline acceptance to Brown for a Master’s in Public Health and instead chose Pacific Graduate Institute for a Master’s in Depth Psychology and Creativity. Hello Jung! Oh, and I started writing again.
What I learned is that when I dance I write with more freedom and when I write I dance with more feeling.
What I quickly remembered, like Joan Didion once said, I write to know what I think and feel. I write to make sense of the senseless. I write to connect with others. I write to survive. And I dance to do the same.
So I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. And danced every day that I could. I started a Substack. I posted and published and danced and wrote some more. All with the desperation of a drowning man.
And when The Brother Wound surfaced, I knew I needed to write about that too.
My plan was to write a series on my experience with The Brother Wound since not much is out there. I wanted to know if I was alone or not. It began with a love letter to him as a little boy. I remembered how close we were as small children and wondering what changed and when. That shift became very clear in the telling. What followed was a list of 100 things I remembered happening that harmed me or helped me or I felt sad about. It was a factual recounting of events. That was all. No analyses. No narrative. Just a list. I sobbed writing them and wanted to throw up posting them, but I also felt the importance of them. I honestly never expected anyone in my family to read them. But they did. And they were pissed. “The Patient” in the family must always remain the patient. God forbid there is any actual accountability or consequence. But ultimately I blame patriarchy and fundamental mormonism, not the individuals wholeheartedly.
Suffice to say, I took both of them down. Even though I had people I never met reaching out and thanking me for talking about this and eagerly awaiting the third installment - an academic and psychological piece about the mythology and the pathology - I never intended to cause harm. So I took them down. This was not the hill I was willing to die on. Being “The Scapegoat” I am familiar with estrangement.
But it left a hole.
I believe truly gifted fiction writers like my friend Ottessa Moshfegh are mediums and channels. Hearing how she talks about her work, it's obvious. Since completing my MA in Depth Psychology, I've become less skeptical of what feels numinous and synchronistic - Jung didn't write The Red Book by being reasonable about it.
I have been writing personal narrative in a testimonial style since I started writing twenty years ago at Meredyth’s insistence. Deprivation Junky is a memoir. This Substack is personal narrative. I have survived so far because I talk about it. All of it. But this part of the process was only meant to take me so far and I have reached the end of this literary rope.
That became evident catching up with Ottessa the other day. I told her about the dating disasters, the brother wound, the slow dawning that I’d been living inside a myth I couldn’t name.
She paused. Looked at me with those soulful big brown eyes and that classic smirk, and said she felt like she had to tell me something.
I’ve learned to listen when she says that.
She said I needed to write fiction and there was a book that I had to get, The 90-Day Novel by Alan Watt.
I bought it that afternoon.
At first I balked, I can’t write fiction! I only know how to write about myself! But then I remembered Mr. Huck and 7th grade English. I saw him standing at the front of the class, I heard him reading out loud my story about a pad of butter perched precariously on the tip of a mountain of mashed potatoes and I knew deep in my bones, Ottessa and Mr. Huck were right.
THIS WAS THE WAY OUT.
James Hillman wrote in Healing Fiction that we do not heal by recovering the literal facts of the past. Although it is an important step of the process, it can only take us so far. He argued that we heal the most by re-authoring the past. By recognizing the “facts” of our childhood is already fiction we’ve been telling and that ultimate freedom is when we compose a soul-story with more truth and more movement than the literal one. He refused to “fix” things and was openly hostile to the medicalized fantasy of cure, suspicious of “growth” as therapeutic merchandise. He would not ask me why I kept choosing the men I did - the familial archaeology bored him. He knew, as I was only beginning to, that I already had every answer to “why,” and not one of them had ever once stopped me. He would rather ask me “What is this pattern making? What does this symptom of repetition want from you? What is your daimon doing by arranging these encounters again and again?” He would treat the pathology not as something to eliminate but as the soul’s poiesis. It is composing something. Staging a scene that wants a different ending or keeping a wound open because it is the eye in which I see. He’d personify the parts of me and have them speak to each other. He’d want me to stick with the image and refuse to translate it into explanation, because explanation kills the image and the image is where the soul lives.
My older brother running down the street with his shirt billowing out behind him. My dollhouse in shambles. A boxing glove.
He would tell me that my wound and my gift are the same. I am a precise seer of others because I was the unseen one. My heightened sensitivity that makes me ache at being unrecognized is the identical sensitivity that allows me to facilitate and relate with exceptional attunement. Amputate the wound and I lose the gift.
Hillman would not heal me. He’d help me learn how to let the wound serve me.
Ottessa somehow knew, the acorn was ready to grow into a tree.
Which brings me to now.
I am writing a fiction novel. There. I said it. Out loud. I thrive on external accountability so now you know. And I know you know which is the most important part. Although I doubt my aptitude, capacity, and tenacity daily, I also believe emphatically that this is the next frontier for me and I am packed up and ready to go.
I believe it will end up more as autofiction, short for autobiographical fiction, because like Ocean Vuong said about his work, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, “For me, as a poet, I was always beginning with truth.” I have to begin with what I know and from there the rhizomatic structure is already revealing itself. The process is fascinating and what I would like to document is a Jungian Arts-Based Research approach to writing where the creation is the knowledge making not just the product. But I’ll get more into that next time.
For now…
Jane says, I am done with Sergio.
I’ll leave it at that.
I’m done with…a few things on this Blue Moon.
The hands never lie.
(Thank you for seeing me so long ago, Mr. Huck, it is a teacher’s greatest gift)
"He would tell me that my wound and my gift are the same. I am a precise seer of others because I was the unseen one. My heightened sensitivity that makes me ache at being unrecognized is the identical sensitivity that allows me to facilitate and relate with exceptional attunement. Amputate the wound and I lose the gift."
Beautiful and can't wait to read the NOVEL. xoxo