My year of Jung and yassification
Hotel Waterloo and Backpackers
SUMMER
Sometimes things are hard. Sometimes you have to come back to Wellington after being on holiday for five weeks and it rains every day in what is meant to be the middle of summer. Sometimes you have to deal with the pain of rejection and sometimes you have to dish it out, sometimes in the same week. Sometimes you have to stay in a shitty backpackers because a house-sit you were meant to be doing fell through and your neighbour in the next room relentlessly pisses on the floor of the shared bathroom every day. This was me in January. I was miserable and felt really bad about myself and all I had to look forward to was having a long shower and a melatonin and sleeping for 10 hours at a stretch. But times like these are an opportunity to reflect on your life and plan how you’re going to make things better. It’s a time to eat crackers and peanut butter at the desk in your hostel room and ask yourself how did I get here? where am I going? why am I like this? More than anything else, it’s a time to think about your financial commitments for the next few months and figure out how many injections you can afford to get in your face.
The reflex is a familiar one. Believe me I’m not new to this game. In the 2020s appearance medicine is as routine as brushing your teeth, but I think I can claim to be an early adopter, or at least a fairly experimental one. In my 20s I was in the trenches buying unregulated bimatoprost from Poland, medical grade cosmetic acid from Amazon and a combination radiofrequency/cavitation machine from eBay. I own an IPL laser and a microneedling pen. I’ve self-injected HA filler. Before anyone knew what mewing was I was looking up exercises for stroke victims to try to improve my facial symmetry. I used to watch TV with ice packs between my thighs to try to induce cryolipolysis. Some of this worked, some of it was ineffectual and some of it was really dangerous. Which just goes to show that the thousands of dollars I’ve spent at cosmetic clinics in my 30s is actually the moderate route.
In the grips of this January mood I planned some interventions that I would stagger for medical and financial reasons. Briefly: tret, sculptra, masseter botox, DCA and maybe get my lips done again. I’ve wanted to get on tretinoin for a while now. The big boss retinoid. If anything topical is actually going to stop your skin from changing as you get older, it’s this giant tube of ointment that you can get from your GP, not the tiny expensive bottles from department stores. I seem to be one of the lucky few who can slather it on without any side effects; there’s a whole subreddit to support people who are going through hard times for the first few weeks. Sculptra is the most effective cosmetic injectable I’ve tried and having had two vials about a year ago, I booked in for a maintenance treatment. The botox is therapeutic as well as aesthetic. My jaw is insanely strong and it affects the muscles in my neck and shoulders. I can’t really drink coffee because I clench so much. The pain has been bothering me for the past few months and I’m getting sick of my chad jawline. 50 units ($750) is enough to weaken my masseters and do my normal forehead paralysis. Deoxycholic acid is the generic of Belkyra/Kybella, which you can now get at a clinic in Churton Park for $500 per treatment, versus $1500 for the branded stuff. Exciting times. DCA is injected into the submental area (double chin) to destroy the membranes of fat cells, which the body then metabolises over the course of a few weeks. Last but not least I know a place that does filler in 0.5mL increments and the injector there is very artful at doing the border of the upper lip. I don’t need more of it, but sometimes it’s fun to have fun.
So there we have it, I look the way I do on purpose and it costs me and I’m not supposed to tell you that. I’m also probably toxic for promoting the idea that anyone should do this (you look great by the way, don’t worry about anything, just wear sunscreen and get enough sleep). I’m also probably shallow and mercenary for reaping the rewards of being normatively hot as much as I can before I hit menopause. However on the other hand, I find those rewards to be very enjoyable. Sometimes it’s nice to look nice. Sometimes it’s good to feel good. The truth of my experience is that if you want to do this stuff and you’re not too mentally ill about it, it does make you feel great and other people tell you that you look good a lot. I actually like getting older because I have these long-term aesthetic investments that keep paying off. Looking forward to hitting a year on tret because that’s when you start to see the real differences from collagen induction. Looking forward to a long and rewarding relationship with the needle and the knife.
As a counterpoint to all this outer work I also thought about doing some therapy as a gesture to the rest of me. In the past I’ve found it of limited use to sit in an office and tell someone that I’m sad for the same reasons everyone else is sad. On a whim I tried to figure out if I can go to any Jungian psychotherapists through EAP, with the thought that at least there might be some entertaining esoteric stuff in it which could give me a new diversion to use when people ask me what my star sign is. I didn’t find anyone I could go to for free. There aren’t many local Jungian therapists at all, which of course made me want it more. I downloaded a badly written and extremely repetitive book about inner work, which did teach me the basic method of dream analysis. I started a dream journal, in addition to the gratitude journal I’ve maintained since January 12th (you know things have gone to shit when you have to start gratitude journaling). As I’ve found before, as soon as you start putting your dreams into words you can recall them a lot better. I had a lot to work with. Something felt slightly different when I was awake too, there was a really beautiful still evening when I went for a swim in the harbour and felt like I was dreaming. The very blue sky was reflecting in the water and I swam towards a raft with three men on it; everything seemed vivid and meaningful.
My Sculptra appointment rolled around but the nurse talked me out of it because I couldn’t say anything I wanted to change about myself. If it was the nurse I had previously I think she would’ve just done it and I would’ve been happy with it, but this way I saved $900 I guess. It’s kind of a letdown when you’ve psyched yourself up for a cannula and you don’t get it, so I booked my Botox for a few days later. That was an instant return on investment. As the needle repeatedly penetrated the thick knots of muscle on my jaw the relief was immediate. The nurse said there was a lot of resistance. Maybe I should just be doing acupuncture instead. But the effects of the liquid toxin are undeniable, two weeks later my bite force has decreased to a normal human level and my jaw is no longer the widest point of my face. I chickened out on doing the DCA because they warned me the swelling would be really bad for up to a week. When they couldn’t do it on the day I originally booked I was so relieved I just cancelled it. I wanted to be able to go outside and swim and look normal that week. I’ll probably still do it, but in winter. Lately I’ve been thinking about whether I’m influenced by the secret belief that there’s a level of attractiveness where you don’t get hurt anymore, where you don’t feel sad, where you’re worthy of meaningful romantic connection. I don’t rationally think that this is real, or if it is I’ve never qualified, but perhaps it’s emotionally real to me. Regardless I’d still prefer to be sad and look good.
The first thing I noticed from tracking my dreams was some really distressing stuff about surfaces being compromised and extreme danger. I still don’t know if that was something to do with thinking about my looks, but I took it to be more about my personality. Then there was some stuff about the push-pull of dying to be seen and wanting to disappear, which has been ongoing. I haven't described the content of the dreams because it's personal and no-one cares, but I couldn’t have accessed this level of understanding without doing symbolic analysis. Every dream I have is like “this is stupid and nothing” until I break it down, and then every dream means something. The key part is that the unconscious gives you these encrypted messages every night, but the unconscious also holds the meanings for all the symbols it throws at you. You just have to go through and write down everything that you associate with each symbol and then one of them will feel right. Sometimes I don’t get anywhere, or I can’t recall enough of the dream, or I understand the theme of it but I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do with it. This is all fine, it’s still a rewarding practice.
There’s definitely something very real about developing a connection with the unconscious part of the psyche. Jung says that dream interpretation “enriches the poverty of the consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts.” I thought of myself as being a pretty creative and intuitive person already, but now I understand myself to be really closed down. I think most people are. A lot more stuff has come out of my dream work, mostly boring and personal but to give you an idea:
I’ve been able to continue writing while working fulltime, which hasn’t been possible in the past because that part of my brain would usually shut down
I’ve been able to write and post some fiction and not hate it
I think I’m closer to understanding my favourite film, Inland Empire
Working on decoding my dreams has pulled me out of some terrible moods
I’ve received some pretty specific directives about relating to people which I’ve successfully enacted
This last point means the most to me, because this would all be solipsistic nonsense otherwise. One of the things I like about Jung is that he’s pretty uncompromising about getting over yourself and becoming a useful person. I’d like to do that one day. I feel certain that if I keep doing this work I will be fabulously rewarded - but probably not with the things I think I want now (not being sad, not getting hurt, being worthy of meaningful romantic connection). I’ve known for a while that I can go into myself and get everything that I need for my own fulfillment, but I always thought it was a bad thing developed from being alone too much. It might not be bad though, I think that’s kind of the aim of Jungian therapy. I’ll have to try to engage a therapist to find out. I have one in mind, her website is a blank page with a single line of text with a landline number to contact her. I like her style. Haven’t been brave enough to call yet. By the time I write about this again I will have called, and I will have read some more, and I will hopefully have something more lucid to say about all of this. Maybe I will have done some more stuff to my face. Maybe my body too! I’m not getting any younger.
