A long time ago, I pictured my psyche as having a basement area that was full of filth of varying kinds.  I kept having to scrape the walls and flush everything down a drain in the middle of the floor.  At some point this morphed into a septic tank that needed repairing.  I emptied it, cleaned it, and fixed it.  Upon climbing out filthy, I found myself in the backyard of an old house.  I stripped down and hosed myself off and went inside.

Over the ensuing months, I made various repairs and cleanups of this house, which eventually turned out to have a basement, three floors, and an attic, and resembles a cross between a San Francisco Victorian mansion and a 1920s Craftsman-style house.  Its main problem was a lack of plumbing and bathroom fixtures, plus dicey wiring.

Psychologically, whenever I had a major realization I needed to let sink in, I would picture a meme on the internet of a photo of a sink sitting in the doorway of a house with the caption “let that sink in”.  I would bring the sink into the house and install it in one of  the many bathrooms.  Whether the plumbing worked was another question.  Some plumbing wasn’t hooked up at all, others had the hot and cold switched, some didn’t have a working drain.  It was a mess.  I did what I could do and kept working on the house in general.

Many months and bathroom sinks later (this place has like 13 bathrooms), the house was generally in good repair, but very messy from the ongoing rehab.  Also, there was no kitchen sink.  One day I had something very important to let sink in that is written down elsewhere, and it wasn’t a bathroom sink, it was a very large kitchen sink, one of those huge, deep, double-wide porcelain jobs, very heavy.  I couldn’t move it in myself, I needed a crew of Helpers, which immediately manifested.

This crew not only moved the sink into the kitchen, they correctly hooked up the plumbing, and  then went through the rest of the house fixing any remaining plumbing issues in the bathroom sinks and gathered up all of the rehab trash, putting it on the curb on their way out.  I found myself left with a relatively clean if slightly dusty, empty house with good bones, good plumbing, and good wiring.  It wasn’t precisely empty, though: at some point I found the living room filled with trunks filled with memories and experiences.  They’re how I’ll decorate the house.

The house is my integrated/fused intellectual half: the trunks are my still-fragmented emotional half.  The water in the pipes are my feelings: the plumbing controls potential flooding.  The wiring conducts my thoughts.  The house does appear to have working lights and power outlets.

It occurs to me as I write that there are no working toilets in this house yet, but that’s because I haven’t been living in it yet.  So at least one working john needs installing, which will be the test of the hopefully repaired septic tank.  I’m sure it will be fine, I don’t do anything half-assed.

The kitchen did and does have one very important working appliance: the stove and oven.  It’s very large: six burners with a griddle and a very wide oven.  My mind turned the concept of putting something on “the back burner” into a fully-functioning range.  The griddle is for right-now stuff, the front burners are for important ongoing things, and the back burners are, of course, for things that need maintaining but aren’t done cooking.

The oven is what’s interesting: it represents a part of my subconscious where I stick things that just need to bake for a while out of sight of my mind’s eye.  Like any oven, once something goes in, you don’t open the door until the timer goes off or you’ll ruin it.  I don’t set the timer on this oven, I never have any idea how long the baking process is, so I put things in and then forget about them.  This is a very strange oven, as what goes in through the oven door doesn’t always  come out that way.  Sometimes the finished product shows up as a sink at the door, oddly enough, or a trunk full of stuff to go through.

I puttered around this house in my mind for a while, setting up my own room on the third floor, which has a lovely balcony overlooking the Sea.  I could see the trail that leads to the Garden in the Dark Forest (a story for another post).  In my real life, I was on something of a restful plateau mentally speaking, not spending a lot of  time ruminating or contemplating, just letting the work I had been doing settle into place.

Some time later, I had a visualization of the Inner Ship that has been a part of my visions for over five years.  It was docked at the end of the Valley that exists in my inner landscape, where my inner self lived along with my disparate parts.  I and my parts all boarded the Ship and set out for our final port next to the Home by the Sea.  My other parts, who are mostly children, ran off the Ship in excitement and into the House, quickly dispersing to their individual rooms and filling the space with their happy noises.  As I looked around the living room, I saw that they had taken a large number of  the trunks and boxes with them to their rooms, and understood that they contain each of their memories and experiences.

This is how we are all living now, Myself and all of my Parts, safe inside this House perched on a cliff by the Sea.  I/we have the space, time, and freedom now to sift through the contents of our boxes and trunks, so to speak, and to get to know one another as we discover things that belong to someone else.  The metaphorical bathrooms all work, which means that ‘mental waste’ can be discarded.  Like any family, there are arguments and disagreements that take the form of inner conflicts within my mind, but if I treat them like actual people and can get them to have a conversation, I can often resolve the conflict, which helps meld disparate parts.  With my inner family, I am teaching myself the lessons that I should have learned from my external family growing up, and in doing so those parts are healed.

And that is, after all, my goal here: to achieve wholeness without losing the perspectives of my differing parts, because they’re valuable.  I believe many adults are unhappy because they essentially killed their inner children, or at least buried them.  While my psyche is unquestionably fractured in a way that most people’s are not, it has given me the ability to retain some of the qualities I had at various ages: 6, 11, 14, 17, and 23 most notably.  The six-year-old still knows how to play, which is helpful with my creative endeavors.  The tween and teens still remember what it’s like to be young, which keeps me from truly becoming “old”.  The young 20-something remembers being confident and solid in her identity, which gives me something to refer to as I go through the process of solidifying my new identity.

I am no less proud of my Inner House than I would be if I had built a real house with my own hands.  This House was created from my mind, and then transformed into something far more useful than it began as.  It is the mental representation of my wrecked psyche and my apparently successful attempt to repair it, at least partially.  I’m not sure what the process of continued repair will look like.  Will each of my parts heal and then “move out”?  Or will they slowly fuse together, gradually reducing the overall population of the House, but not the energy, until I am essentially living with myself?

I also wonder if my internal landscape will slowly disappear as I heal, if it is merely an artifact of my broken mind generated so that I can handle what is happening.  Will the end of the Inner House involve slowly fusing and melding until only I am left and there’s no baggage left to go through, and it’s time for Me myself to “move out”, symbolizing a return to “the real world”?  I don’t know.  For the time being, I am still extremely dependent upon this internal process of visualizations and conversations to deal with my damaged parts, and I doubt my subconscious will take that away from me as long as I do need it.  If a time ever comes that I don’t need my inner landscape anymore, I’m sure I will bid it a grateful farewell.  For now, though, I would feel bereft and lonely without it.