The narrative of this memoir is brought to life through the lenses of hundreds of dreams, fairy tales, myths, news clips, fiction, scripture, songs, and poems, including quotes from numerous scholarly journals, spiritual works, and psychology textbooks. With about 300 links to more than 100 sources and Internet resources, including dozens of YouTube videos, this memoir doesn't just tell you a story, it invites you to live it. In search for home, for Mama, for Truth, for something, she doesn't know what, Gabrielle Hayes tiptoes through the mines in her war-torn psyche to explore the remnants of psychological damage caused by decades of abuse and Self-annihilation. She examines each piece of evidence under the light of prominent Jungian analysts-not to find fault but to find peace. Detonating explosives, long thought to be duds, forces her to rebuild the foundation of her psyche, a stone-by-stone metamorphism. The proverbial brick (in her case, a frying pan) hadn't hit Gabrielle in the head until she was 44 years old. But when it did, the injury was massive. Her husband, who she romanticized as her soulmate, just slammed the door on their life together, forever. She should have seen the shadow of the frying pan on the wall; she had seen it in dream after dream. But she didn't know what it symbolized until it was too late. The thing she had feared most had happened. Shattered, she lost the will to live-because she knew it was her own damn fault. Some inexplicable anger had been eating her alive for much of her life and now it was sucking dry everything and anything that crossed her path. Saved by the bell, Gabrielle answers the phone. Her parents, who live 2,000 miles away, sense something wrong. They insist she come home to recover, to regroup. They do not want to experience what it would be like on Earth without her. Little do they know, they are inviting home the very monster they helped to create.
About the Author: I am what I feel, think, remember, and perceive, that is, my ego-good or bad, right or wrong, true or false, real or imagined. I am the mask I wear, which strives to influence your opinion of me while hiding my true inner Self. I am the faults I find in others, that is, my repressed desires and fears, what Jung coined the "shadow," what I call my witch, who surfaces when I think I am under attack. I am at war because what I think and say often contradict what I do. I am masculine energy (yang): fast, hard, dry, and aggressive. I am feminine energy (yin): slow, soft, wet, and passive. I am of God, of the Divine Source, as the flame is of the fire, as the wave is of the ocean. And I am a vessel through which Divine Source expands to know itself through my journey, that is, my mistakes, my revelations, my joys, my heartaches, and my loves and my hates. I hope that one day, as did Jung at age 10, I will step out of the mist, and know I am what I am.