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My Fisher King Wound

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There is a Chinese story about fish. It begins with fish overhearing two fishermen talking about water. The fish decides to quest in order to find this mysterious substance. After many years he comes back to his fish friends who ask him if he found it. And he says “Yes, but you wouldn’t believe what I found.”

I found a version of this story in a book called He by the psychologist Robert Johnson. Johnson is a Jungian psychologist and his book is all about how the myth of the Holy Grail can be used to explain male psychology. He theorizes that every man is like the Fisher King. The Fisher King, according to Arthurian legend, suffers from a wound that cannot be healed except by drinking from the Grail. He is unable to drink from it, though. In such a condition, he must wait for an “idiot fool” to come and ask the question that will save him – “Whom does the Grail serve?” For Johnson, every man has a Fisher King wound. We all have something that is broken that we are seeking to fix.

I know that I have a Fisher King wound. Mine is a sense of inadequacy. I seek others’ approval. I want to feel loved and needed. And because I cling to this wound so hard, I make it impossible for others to love and need me.

A lot of traditions have a name for this wound. Christianity has the concept of original sin or of sin, more generally. Most of my struggles with sin come out of this wound, I think. For example, I struggle with pride because I think if I put on enough of a confident show, people will like me better.

I am often convinced that if I just searched harder for love, happiness, or God that I will find what I seek. But there is no searching. The fish does not need to search for water. He is in water. The answer comes when we approach it from the perspective of the idiot fool. If we ask, more than likely, we will see that the answer has been before us all along. We do not need to search for love/happiness/God; we are in it.

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An Announcement

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I’ve written over 100 posts. That’s quite a few. They range quite a few topics. Some have been more popular than others. Some have been picked up by other sites. I have more subscribers than I could have ever imagined three months ago. My blog has been viewed around 4000 times in the past four months.

There has been dialogue. Sometimes people disagree. Sometimes people agree. Sometimes people encourage. It’s been really positive.

For the past four months, I have posted nearly every day. That’s pretty crazy. I still don’t fully understand how I managed to do that. With your support and patience, mostly.

But here’s a confession. I want to be a writer. I legitimately want to have a book someday or be an essayist or something like that.

This blog has gained much momentum. But I also recognize that I am not doing anything crazy here. I’m making some observations and trying to write about them honestly. Book deals don’t magically fall out of the sky for that sort of thing. Other, more popular blogs, do it better than me or have been doing it longer.

And so here’s the announcement: I’m going to try my hand at submitting to other blogs. Other popular blogs. What that means for this blog is that I will generate new content Sunday through Thursday, post an oldie but a goodie on Friday, and then take Saturday off. That gives me Friday and Saturday to work on posts for other sites.

Here’s what I think you should do. On Friday and Saturday, I think you should work on making your dreams come true, too. Because that would be cool.

If you want to keep up to date on what I am doing on the internet (and want to know when and where I am guest-blogging), you can follow me on Twitter! Thanks for coming on this journey with me.

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Two Incomplete Problems with Living a Better Story

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At the start of the year, I wrote a post about telling a better story. It’s a hard task. There are two problems that I’ve run across already. I have a blog so I get to share these things. It’s a nice arrangement.

1) I should take every opportunity to tell a good story. I was listening to The Moth, one of my favorite podcasts, today. The Moth is a series that features true stories told live without notes, and it’s awesome. Today, I listened to a story from Salman Rushdie, best-selling author of several novels including The Satanic Verses. His story took place while he was working on Verses. He ended up getting writer’s block and traveled to Nicaragua to “experience a revolution.” His story was about war and about the inequality that existed in that country. But he told it with an insane amount of humor and poise, and I had two thoughts: First, should he really be telling the story like that? Shouldn’t he be talking about how horrible it was and how bad war is and all that? But then I realized that this story was decades in the past. Humanity needs to laugh at itself. Second, sometimes we need to tell a sad story happily.

I started thinking about what my life would be like if I stopped dealing in failure and started dealing in success. What if, instead of talking about how many things Freud got wrong, I talked about all of the things he got right? I suppose people would start to call me a Freudian, but perhaps that’s just because they don’t understand.

2) To tell a better story, you have to know who the main character is. Spoiler alert: it’s you. This is not to say you need to know exactly who you are. That’s never going to happen. This is to say that you need to know a few things about yourself and you need to live knowing those things are true. My heart is different than yours. And your heart is different than mine, and that effects how we live our lives.

If you want to know more about telling a better story, I feel like you should visit Donald Miller’s blog. All of my ideas are reflections on his.