“A person is as free as their mind allows, if the mind creates barriers between the reality of the person and the reality of the rest of the world, delusion and neurosis could take over. When you see people operate in a state of enforced ignorance that attempts to preserve a certain status quo, then the shadow can only grow bigger, enforced ignorance entitles the shadow to take over since the individual is incapable of control of it since the individual is unaware of its existence. We can’t control what we don’t understand." - Carl Jung
“That’s the essence of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: She doesn’t ask for our love, she demands it. But love isn’t enough. She also needs to be romanticized, idealized, fetishized, worshipped and adored. You know, all the stupid shit that young men do. She glares impishly in our direction menacingly with a look that says, ‘You better fall in love with me, fuckface, or I will open up a big can of joy on your ass.’” - Nathan Rabin
“What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.” - Chuck Palahniuk
Automatic Writing (Manic Pixie Dream Priestesses):
My guides want me to stay still today, to meditate, to slip in and out of dream states. Everything I watch, read, and hear is begging me to do this, telling me there are messages everywhere right now, telling me I'm on the cusp of understanding quite a lot that I will need in order to move forward.
It gets strange when they do this, I end up in this trance state in and out of sleep, which feels nice and is restful if I do it for long enough. But I have been so swallowed up by spending all my time writing or in class that they basically said ok... stop... today is for resting and listening.
They went into a long, deep culture-wide thought burst through the lens of a personal set of conditions I'd been questioning over the course of my life… but this was a lot more specific.
There was something they flashed to me already that pertains to how other people have treated me in the past, but it's something they wanted me to understand through the filter of my own experience as an example I could resonate with in order to fully get the breadth and depth of the idea applied culturally so that I would be prepared to communicate it on that level, something that I was maybe on the cusp of getting before but couldn't readily articulate, something they clearly think is important for me to do.
It related back specifically to when someone asked me, in a way that struck me as bizarrely self-deprecating, why I had responded to him, why I’d bothered to speak to him at all. I said, confused by even the thought that the question might be necessary, that he had treated me like a human being and not an encyclopedia or an object.
My guides latched onto this and related it back to my questions about why I had in the past, as a general rule, been treated two-dimensionally by others, why people would get addicted to my energy but, conversely, treat me poorly, and why they would get obsessive when I pulled away, once I realized my energy was being sucked out of me, once I realized I had built some sort of house of mirrors in my head where I convinced myself this wasn't what was happening, once I realized these were mirrors that I needed to habitually shatter whenever this happened in order to return to some semblance of reality even though it often hurt me too in the process.
I was a different person.
Now, I don’t care.
Hand me that sledgehammer.
The siphoning stops.
My guides were really funny about explaining this - probably to make me laugh because there's a side of it that, for me, is really fucking heavy.
They basically said that "manic pixie dream girls" are actually priestesses in crucible mode, catalyzing healing in those they touch.
This healer priestess archetype is practically lost to society, all but deleted from our shared experience. So much time is spent on understanding mere peripheral glimpses of this archetype’s shadow in media without any self-awareness that this is what we are doing. In fact, we are painfully devoid of self-awareness. And so we fail to understand the healer priestess archetype’s true essence. And in its place, we’ve cultivated a two-dimensional cultural obsession with our lack of its presence.
Neither person within these relationships tends to realize that she is a priestess alchemizing the masculine who has a dire need to be reconnected with the fire of his soul, the ability to reconnect with his masculine in a world that wants nothing more than to diminish, mute, and restrict all of its aspects, even the healthy solid ones, in order to return him whole and fully to the land of the living.
In societies where priestesses would have gone through training to do this type of healing work, and not just follow their intuition blindly into relationships with people they should have instead been healing, they would have been prized for their service in restoring life to the lifeless and not cast aside as useless once they had served their purpose. This was honored. This was sacred work.
But our modern would-be priestess is so separated from the knowledge of her purpose and her power that her function seems two-dimensional in this reductive context, while ironically she acts directly upon it intuitively without the benefit of its true context in which her powers as a healer make her the hero of this exchange and not some mediocre writer’s crutch - the writer who reduces down to two-dimensionality what he has no context for fully understanding.
As a society, we aren’t taught this dynamic anymore. We have lost our ancient understanding of the function the priestess takes on in healing the warrior before he returns to his civilization - in our past, there were entire temples dedicated to this, to bringing the wounded warriors with PTSD back from the brink, preparing them to reintegrate, not just tossing them into the fray with no concern for what they’d been through or what it might take to transition from war into peace. We see this kind of hideous disregard for our soldiers returning from war as commonplace now. Few acknowledge it or choose to do anything about it.
And in some cases, fighting the war might even equate to your stamina in maintaining the drudgery of a soul sucking life, as we see is often the trope used for the man who encounters the “manic pixie dream girl” - he’s reduced to some gray toned, flatlining, sorry sack of shit when really we should be examining the world that made him feel that way, that disconnected him from his sense of self to the point of damaging his masculine identity. He doesn’t have to accept this, but given that mental self-imprisonment tends to be the path of least resistance when mired in the expectations of others, he usually does so to his own detriment.
And she is reduced to a trope as well, and not seen as a catalyzing healer.
In that trope mode, she only exists as a person from whom to siphon energy instead of standing in her own feminine power, giving of that power from a position of care and reciprocity, so the point at which the relationship remains ill defined, the healing person becomes greedy for the energy, sick of living in this flatlining state and reveling in the fact that the world now has a bit of color to it, while the priestess creates this mental prison, this house of mirrors full of feelings that never quite materialize in the 3D.…
All of this is damaging to both of them.
Siphoned to the point of becoming gray herself, she is unfulfilled and pulls away to self-protect.
He doesn't realize her value until she tears herself away, and he ends up pining for what's been lost.
And once he heals that wound in a kind of haphazard way, he ends up in something with someone else on a bit more safe and tangible solid ground than the first. But it lacks the passion of the original scenario. So, something is missing, picking at the edges of his consciousness, and he often concocts unhealthy ways to fill a void because he thinks he can't have both conditions met - safety and passion - within one person.
Passion disrupts the mediocre.
Passion inspires the masculine.
Passion forces you to actually live.
Passion makes you question whether or not you really want to be a cube jockey for the rest of your life.
Passion has the potential to infinitely fulfill you or to destroy everything you’ve built.
So, he often thinks he can’t have both… and the rest of this interaction isn’t so romantic. It’s painful. And then it’s downright mundane. It happens after the credits roll. It ends up on the cutting room floor.
Ironically, he often chooses to return to this space of putting disingenuous limiters on his emotions, to a state of not living while romanticizing the moments he felt like he was living, while simultaneously falsely categorizing them as unsustainable, as if protecting this insidious flatline melancholia is more valuable than the act of finding it within yourself to have the balls to step up to the plate.
And the displaced priestess, embodying the same energy she always has once she replenishes it, then ends up in the same pattern again with someone else, seemingly doomed to repetition of pouring, pouring, pouring, pouring, down into a bottomless cup.…
"Is this my function? Why does this keep happening? Why do people end up obsessed with my energy but when faced with actually connecting to it in a real way, and treating me like a 3D human, nothing materializes but the objecthood never dies, and the lust/desire/craving/obsession is always there on their part despite even having moved on?"
She has no one to answer these questions because no societal infrastructure exists. At most, we have these flimsy demeaning tropes of the feminine and the masculine that attempt to explain these behaviors with the wrong codex and a broken lens and end up falling so utterly short it’s pathetic.
How do we heal this as a society?
Clearly, we need healers performing soul retrievals because people don't have appropriate rites of passage and the way we live is inherently soul sucking which is creating this deadened vacant way of living life that we're depicting in all of these movies from the start.…
If we weren’t already living in this empty void, these characters wouldn’t resonate.
Changing this would take teaching our culture the inherent value of the healer priestess and then allowing her to work her magic on the warrior spirit from a place of grounded stability. We would need to teach each others to venerate the healing power of the crucible for bringing people back to life. And we would learn to appreciate the gift of the priestess’s healing energy without being greedy with her energy and endlessly sucking the life force out of her. Ideally, if she knew from proper training how to fill her own cup, as a healer, she would be able to teach him when he’s hurting how to fill his own cup again, not how to endlessly feed off of hers.
No wonder we have depictions of what really amounts to broken and used priestesses like brash Clementine Kruczynski and smile-through-the-pain Penny Lane in pop culture. We see the healer priestess reduced to trope, compared to the Muses, compared to the Nymphs. But she is never seen for who she really is - because who she actually is would highlight that maybe she’s not as two-dimensional as the reductive film critic would have you believe. The film critic, the filmmaker, and humanity as a whole do not understand her function in terms of what we require as a society on a psychospiritual level.
She’s not understood for who she really is.
She doesn’t know who she really is.
And there's zero infrastructure for women with these gifts to understand how to utilize their powers for good, should they choose to do so, and then learn to heal themselves from healing someone else.
So, everyone here is trying to heal - and barely anyone is actually doing any healing.
The very intensity of raw energy that draws everyone to her is inevitably the intensity that ends up pushing them away. For most, it’s just about impossible to keep up. It’s inevitably this raw energy that they become addicted to when they realize they’ve lost it and they can’t get it back - in Joel Barish’s case, even paying someone to destroy his good memories because even those have morphed into some painful reminder of what he didn’t allow himself to have. So it becomes easier to collapse people like this down into the 2D than to deal with the expansiveness of their energy. It cuts the healing power they actually hold off at the knees: Sometimes, what you can’t possess, you destroy.
So they end up coming down from this relationship that was this massive spiritual high, treating it like it was nothing or something unattainable or unsustainable, and then subsequently finding something unfulfilling but ultimately *easier to control* in which to live in from day to day in the 3D, while still pining for the otherness of the aspects of the relationship they decided they couldn't handle because they decided they couldn't grow/expand to encompass that raw energy and chose to denigrate it instead.
You reduce to nothing that which you have zero context to understand: She’s not here to perform some kind of lame character arc assist. She’s a spiritual healer who has the power to reassemble the broken pieces of the warrior’s soul.
I am grateful this question was asked of me - I feel like this experience answered something I have been feeling around at the edges of my whole life without really understanding what it is or how it functions - and I am grateful to my guides for showing me why this is.
I hope this will help to open people’s eyes to what healthier dynamics might look like in a society that isn’t sick itself. At the very least, I hope it gets you thinking. I hope you use it to make your own lives better and to think twice about shying away from the pursuit of your passions. I hope you find a way to incorporate your soul’s expansiveness into your daily experience.
I think showing me this is also their way of telling me I never have to go into crucible mode again if I don't choose it for myself, which is something I asked for - choice, not fate, in the Jungian sense.
I get to choose.
After pulling all of my energy back completely into myself, I think answering this question for me was the universe’s way of saying, "Wish granted."
They’re saying they want me to go meditate again... and "listen to the birds."
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[“Dunst embodies a character type I like to call The Manic Pixie Dream Girl (see Natalie Portman in Garden State for another prime example). The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.”]
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