10/16/2026
“I sink in fear where you already soar, beautiful sister.”
An Active Imagination exercise to explore what lays in my unconscious.
When I look at this sentence, I see the tension between my grief and my wish to imagine my sister at peace. Seven months after she took her life, I am still trying to understand her absence. From a Jungian depth psychological perspective, “sink” and “soar” represent opposing movements within my experience: the heaviness pulling me downward and the image of my sister beyond my reach.
“I sink in fear” expresses my fear of how deeply grief can pull me. The last time I lost someone close to me, I experienced a psychic breakdown. I became addicted to pills, lost my job, and attended outpatient substance abuse treatment. I was also ready to throw away my marriage because I believed I did not deserve it. My fear now is connected to that history. I know what it has felt like to lose someone and then begin losing my connection to myself and the life around me.
Through a psychoanalytic lens, I understand this sentence as bringing my present grief into contact with an earlier experience of loss. The word “sink” carries the possibility of becoming overwhelmed again. It also brings me back to the painful belief that I did not deserve love when I was struggling. Recognizing that connection helps me understand what I am afraid of without assuming that the same outcome is inevitable.
“You already soar” expresses my longing to picture my sister beyond the suffering she experienced. “Already” holds the painful difference between her death and my ongoing struggle to absorb it. Calling her “beautiful sister” allows me to address her with love and preserve something of our relationship beyond the circumstances of her death.
For me, this sentence gives form to grief that can otherwise feel difficult to contain. I can see both my fear of falling apart and my continuing love for her. Putting them into words may be one way of recognizing when I need support and allowing myself to remain connected to the people and life I still have.
