I eat people

This is another drawing from my dream journal which came, not from a dream, but just spontaneously entered my mind and made me laugh. I knew it was some kind of gift from my unconscious. Originally, the shirt just said, "I eat people." Later I softened it with the "I want to eat people." I was unable to fully own eating people. Oh dear me, no, I would never eat people. I mean, of course, I want to eat people, and I'm willing to admit that, but I would never actually do it. 

This is a great shadow image for me. I'm a vegetarian. I don't even eat animals. So here's this ravenous, dead-eyed version of myself eating other human beings. Horrible. I love it. It's this monstrous part of myself. I am looking to better understand what to do with these primitive aspects of me. I can laugh at this image, but most of the time I still desperately want to be simple and good. I want to be light and funny and in a way, I am softening this image by making it funny. 

Maybe I need to go out and eat someone. 

Just kidding. 

This image came to me after I had been writing for several pages about a dream I had that illustrated the ways in which I tend to disown darkness, which I associate with my father. I wrote, "This dream indicates, in Kleinian terms, a paranoid-schizoid position, which reflects back to me how I have internalized my early childhood objects. Put simply, mother: good; father: bad. This seems so sad. I have moments of slipping into the depressive position, and I can almost always get there intellectually, but emotionally, most of the time, I'm stuck: parts of self related to mother are good; parts of self related to father are bad. In a classic case of projective identification, I find these hateful qualities abounding in my external environment, while I am the innocent victim... This dynamic is operating quite intensely in all aspects of my life, and I see that, and I feel utterly confused as to how to begin the process of owning what I've been disowning for so long."

I think the process involves owning the fact that, on some level, I really do eat people. I am the aggressor, the perpetrator--enraged, violent, merciless, and very, very hungry. Watch your back.