The year I had to reinvent myself

There are moments in life that arrive without asking permission and make you restart from scratch. In an instant, the floor disappears beneath your feet, and everything you had taken for certain vanishes with it. 

That is how I felt in 2020.

Navigating lockdown alone, and then being confronted with the reality that I had to leave not only my country, but I had to leave everything else behind. I packed my life into two suitcases and moved from my hometown to London. One of them was filled almost entirely with books.

I left behind my home, my cats, my clothes, my sense of self. I later realised that I was carrying an emotional baggage that had a lot of emotional wounds, fears of changing and self-doubt. All of that happening during the pandemic and social isolation. The process to adaptation was lonely. The combination of all these factors made me face a growing unbearable sadness and with a painful realisation that something inside of me had to change.

That is where my search began.

As it often happens, it is during the stage of crisis that the seed for something new and better initiates. With a stroke of serendipity, which later I started calling synchronicity, I started seeing advertisements on Instagram for Inner Child Therapy. Even though I got curious, big part of me was sceptical of holistic approaches. My Social Science background has taught me to seek logic, and I was also angry with God and therefore, suspicious of spirituality. But I was desperate to lift the heavy weight from my shoulders, and I decided to give it a try. That was the gateway for me.

Later, I began following an account that explored self-development, esoteric knowledge, and Jungian psychology. 

Until that point, I was familiar with Freud. I had been in Freudian analysis for five years. But Jung felt different. Inspiring in a way I hadn't expected. Intriguing. Even, somehow, fun. He offered a new way of seeing myself, my challenges, my shadow: the parts of the psyche we prefer not to look at. Most significantly, he offered a way of understanding the soul, opening space for spirituality that didn't require religion. 

I was, as I can only describe it, hooked.

A Different Kind of Introduction

I did not discover Jung through a university library.

I encountered him first through social media, through courses, through active imagination exercises, through a mode of learning that was alive and exploratory rather than academic. Whether one agrees with every interpretation offered in those spaces is secondary. What mattered was that, for the first time, I found myself in a conversation where spirituality and psychology were not opposites. Where the inner life was treated not as a problem to be solved but as a landscape to be explored.

Something opened.

It felt as though psychology was no longer confined to diagnosing what was wrong with people. It became a way of asking entirely different questions: Why do we dream? Why do myths emerge across different cultures with similar motifs? Why do certain symbols move us before we can explain why? 

I liked what I was learning so much that I made a decision that surprised even me.

I applied for a Master's degree in Jungian and Post-Jungian Studies.

The Year of Immersion

I was full of anticipation.

I imagined a year spent deep inside the symbolic world that had first drawn me to Jung: fairy tales, archetypes, the language of dreams, mythology and the rich and strange territory of the unconscious.

The reality was more complex.

Much of the programme focused on historical debates: Jung's relationship with Freud, the institutional controversies that surrounded him, the critical examinations of his ideas and his life. Was he a womaniser? Self-centred? Privately sympathetic to troubling political movements? The questions were real, and they unsettled me.

The frustration was so acute that I considered abandoning the programme entirely.

How could one person carry so many contradictory interpretations? I began to wonder whether everything I had learned before had been wrong. Whether the Jung I had fallen in love with was simply a comfortable fiction, a version of a complicated man carefully curated for Instagram.

I remember feeling the distance between the Jung who had first captured my imagination and the Jung I was now being asked to study. One had felt like a doorway. The other, sometimes, felt like a locked room.

What Disillusionment Can Teach

In time, I came to understand that this tension was not simply a disappointment.

It was an invitation.

Caught between enthusiasm and rigour, between the living exploration and the critical academy, I found myself asking a question I had not thought to ask before:

Who is Jung according to my own understanding?

Not according to his most devoted admirers. Not according to his most rigorous critics. What do I actually find when I read his work directly without the frame of either devotion or dismissal?

That question led me toward my dissertation. I became absorbed in Jung's ideas about symbolic imagination, the anima, and the psychological significance of mythology and archetypes. At the same time, I discovered the work of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. Her research into prehistoric European cultures, the symbolism of the goddess in the ancient world was fascinating to me. I'll dedicate an article exclusively about it later.

I began to explore whether there were meaningful parallels between Jung's understanding of archetypal imagery and Gimbutas' interpretations of ancient symbolic systems. And from that inquiry, a larger question emerged:

How do the stories a culture tells about the feminine shape the way women experience themselves in Western society?

Throughout history, feminine figures have appeared in endlessly contrasting forms.

The pure mother. The temptress. The saint. The witch. The virgin. The whore. The nurturing goddess. The dangerous feminine.

These images were attacked and pushed away in a society that is driven by a distorted masculine, the patriarchal system, but they did not disappear. They continued quietly, insistently shaping through our unconscious collective our culture, surviving, waiting to be rediscovered to uncover powerful nuances of how women see themselves. 

What the Study Became

Studying Jung eventually became much more than studying Jung.

It became an exploration of mythology, symbolism, storytelling, archaeology, psychology, and the many ways in which human beings construct and inhabit meaning. Each discipline illuminated something the others left in shadow. And the space between them, the interdisciplinary, turned out to be where I most wanted to think.

What has kept me returning to these subjects, years later, is that they never seem exhausted. Each time I return to a myth, a symbol, a story, or a psychological concept, I discover another layer. Something I had not seen before. A question I had not thought to ask.

I am not interested in arriving at the final interpretation.

I am interested in remaining in conversation with the questions.

Perhaps that is what Alchemyssa is. Not an archive of answers, but a dwelling place for that kind of curiosity. An invitation to explore the hidden dimensions of human experience: not in order to master them, but to be changed, gently and over time, by the encounter.

The search that began in a London room with two suitcases and a hunger for something I couldn't yet name has not ended.

It has simply found a home.

Come explore with me.

With love, Natasha