Integrating...

I just completed the book Sybil, which is 450 pages of intense.  This is not a book; it is a relationship.  It's content is of such a highly personal nature that I had to plan appropriate times to read it.  I don't mean that I blubbered through it, just that it gets inside you and makes you think and feel differently.  At least it did for me, which is why I plowed right through it. 

Driving around today, enjoying the Rhode Island-esque air, I couldn't get the book out of my mind.  In it, a woman with 16 different personalities works with a psychoanalyst to "integrate" all of her selves into one whole person.  She has personalities who are afraid, who are confident, who are angry, who play piano, who excel in math, who are social, and who are religious fanatics.  In the end, she recognizes that each one offers a specific strength that separate allowed for her survival as a child, but that now, if rallied together, could help Sybil function as a complete and content person.  In my mind, I applied all of this to the world as a whole.  Anytime I read a newspaper article, a forward, or watch the news, I am sickened at how dissociative our society is.  Each person has a different fear, a different passion, all working at odds against the others.  When Sybil's personalities were at odds, they went out of their ways to impede her goals, to create obstacles for her, thereby making Sybil- and the rest of them- miserable.  And, not only miserable, but ill.  Seriously ill.  That is our society.  We all have fears; we all have strengths.  If pulled together, those fears would be allayed.  The strengths together would function for each other and not against each other.  Until then, our world will be stricken with the psychosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder, also known as Multiple Personality Disorder.   

Different colors of the same.