The Bag

“The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us” September 6, 2012

Out of Class Journal #4

1. The formation of the shadows:

A. Who are the people/groups responsible for the formation of our shadow and “fill our shadow bag”?

Page 17: Our parents who didn’t like our certain “ball[s] of energy” & on Page 24: “our parents rejected who we were before we could talk, so the pain of the rejection is probably stored in some pre-verbal place”.

Our teachers: When they put rules and limit us

High school: Our peers, to fit in: “Then we do a lot of bag-stuffing in high school. This time its no longer the evil grownups that pressure us, but people our own age” (Paragraph 3, Pg. 17)

Marriages, or the significant other

B. What goes into this bag? All aspects of ourselves that are unacceptable and displeasing to our family, peers, and society, goes into the bag and it continues to fill until we’re twenty, after which we spend the rest of our lives trying to retrieve from.

+ “The part of us that our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents love, put it in the bag. By the time we go to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say:….So we take our anger and put it in the bag” (Paragraph 2, Pg 17)

Page 18:

+ “Any part of myself that was a little slow went into the bag” (Paragraph 3, Pg 17-18).

+ “Different cultures fill the bag with different contents” (Paragraph 3, Pg 18).

+ (According to the author): “…Most males…put their feminine side or interior woman into the bag” and the woman’s masculinity to be accepted for her femininity (Paragraph 2)

C. What happens to our potential and personality as a result of bagging so much material?

Throughout the years we stuff the invisible bag behind us, the bag...