Pepita & The Girl Who Stopped Wanting

“Pepita.

Her little black rabbit.

The first animal that had ever been presented to her, to be hers, to care for all by herself.

She was tiny, and couldn't have weighed even as much as a chihuahua. Her long black ears flipped over in different directions while she was contentedly munching on greenies. She fed Pepita dandelion leaves, and when she called her name…”-Pepita!”...the little rabbit came hopping over for a snuggle.

She had to watch Pepita carefully, all the time, because there was no fence around the lawn…so outside of her little cage she could easily get lost. She loved watching her, and Pepita thrived.

But one day everything changed.

She was ordered to give Pepita away, and she was told that her brother’s white rabbit was now hers instead. She cried hot tears…but it was decided.

She could no longer feed Pepita the dandelion leaves, or call her name. She felt like she abandoned her.

But she cared for the little white rabbit the best she could, with a hollow heart, although it wasn't ever the same. 

The joy was gone.”

That little girl was me, and Pepita was my little rabbit.

But the story of Pepita isn’t just about a little black rabbit, or about a child’s first heartbreak. It was part of a pattern…a pattern of repeatedly having to give up on what I wanted and cared about.

Over time I got so used to having to look away from my own wants and needs, that I slowly forgot that I ever had them…or how it felt when they were taken away from me, or denied to me. Not out of hardship or lack of resources, that I could have understood and accepted, eventually. I just wasn’t supposed to need or want anything. Instead I was given things I didn’t need or want as compensation, and was expected to perform gratitude…while silently the resentment hardened inside of me.

I was slowly abandoning myself.

I adopted this apparent happy-go-lucky personality, that gave the impression I was happy with whatever was at hand and never cared very deeply about anything.

I forgot about Pepita. 

She faded into the recesses of my subconscious, became part of the “shadow”, a symbol of the long forgotten part of me that WANTED something.

She didn’t resurface in my consciousness until fifty years later, when an upheaval in my family, one of many involving myself, shook whatever foundation we were all still standing on.

My father was slowly disappearing into the mists of dementia, while my mother was disappearing into another kind of mist, brought on by failing sight. Because I lived so far away, in Spain, I tried to have a legal guardian appointed for my parents.

This attempt wasn’t successful, and ended with my mother virtually disowning me…although not in the legal sense of the word. And let’s not get down that particular rabbit hole!

Suffice it to say, that it all made me feel particularly forlorn. I was also going through other major changes in my life…f ex I was about to get into my third marriage, and trying desperately to reach for some kind of professional growth or development, without a clear image of what I really WANTED.

The keyword here I think is undoubtedly “wanted”.

I tried to imagine myself doing different things that might suit me and that felt like a natural progression from what I was already doing, but without any kind of idea of how to go about getting there, or even what it entailed. 

I was unsure of whether the ideas came from myself or from my earlier parental and societal conditioning. Somehow I couldn’t tell the difference, and it was exceptionally confusing.

One of the emerging ideas from this period was of the business Aura Nordica, that I’m now finally nurturing.

Another idea was to write a book about a little witch called…Pepita Black.

At the time I had no idea from where this name had emerged…I just thought it sounded “cool”.

For the coin to drop and for me to make the connection back to my childhood, took at least another couple of years. That’s how deeply this experience was buried.

I had already lived far away from my country of origin and my family for almost 15 years, before there was enough emotional “space” around me for my subconscious to finally be able to reach out to me.

From here on, I want to explore the landscape of how the personality is formed, and why the subconscious — or “shadow” — plays such an important part in the reclaiming of the self…this most precious of endeavors. 

For, with the words of Carl G Jung ringing in my mind: ”The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate”. (Aion, 1951)