Seismic Shifts

I've arrived at this point by operating for years under an essentially unchanged framework - trying to be a little wiser each day, trying to systematically remove harmful and counterproductive habits, and continuously optimizing how I spend my time and resources. It all sounds great on paper. And yet, now when I turn around, I can no longer see the shoreline. There's nothing recognizable out here, no reference point for me to reverse my course towards. What happened? Was my strategy unsound? Or am I imagining this? Was I wrong then, or am I wrong now?

I've been thinking about Jung seriously for the first time in many years, and trying to understand what is going on inside of me. There are so many things that feel out of balance in my life:

1. Free time just brings me anxiety that I will waste it - a self-fulfilling prophecy, since anxiety annihilates joy.
2. I rarely find any sort of connection - even tenuous - with other people, and so I have almost completely stopped trying. Even my friends seem to be drifting away, one by one, and I find myself with less and less to say to them.
3. I feel like I've forgotten what was special about Merry and I's relationship, and how to re-engage with it.
4. I've long had a vision of fatherhood as becoming someone my child could admire. But now that I'm a father, I don't feel admirable, I most often feel clueless and without inspiration to be anything more than merely present.
5. I live in my head, trying to weave feelings and impressions into stories, but it feels like this well has run dry. Mostly I just find myself re-reading what I've written and longing to feel more of the same things that I've already written, or express them in deeper ways, without quite knowing what that means. What does it mean to have taken so much time unearthing these old impressions? Should this produce some particular effect, like setting off some psychic chemical reaction? I guess I had come to believe that hard-won expression was supposed to produce a virtuous cycle with inspiration.
6. I dream often of staying in or exploring unfamiliar houses, often populated by a mix of people I know or used to know. These dreams seem very exciting to me, but despite their repetition, I don't know what they are trying to tell me.

I have an overriding psychic feeling of "something large passing me silently in the dark," to quote a source I can no longer find. It is as if substantial dislocations are occurring subliminally, whose effects upon my consciousness go by, barely noticed.

I have only my own optimism to tell me that I will overcome this, and a primitive sense that what I am facing is a natural process - one I have gone through myself and merely forgotten, in part. My hope is that, amidst my own incomprehension, I have found a clue in Jungian psychology, described here:

“[...] to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. [...] If he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God.”

- Marie-Louise von Franz 

Or, stated simpler:

"When things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation."

- Rainer Maria Rilke