The Search and the Re-search

“I didn’t have a sense of purpose.”

“You might as well live a lot, really hard, and not give a shit, because you can always walk through that door. So I started to live as if I could die any day.” [Our emphasis, not hers]

But she couldn’t.

She couldn’t live as if she had no purpose. It wasn’t in her nature.

So she had started her search, not knowing why or how, or even where. She didn’t even know that she was searching.

How can you be authentic, when you don’t know what to be authentic about?

“I knew little about the world and I was completely self-absorbed.”

This was the dilemma Angie Voight had. Angie Voight – did not want to be known as, the famous actor, Jon Voight‘s daughter.  She wanted to be her own self, but…  what is her own true self?

The room was stark and bare: white carpet, white curtains, white walls, and no furniture except for a white crib. For more than a year, a baby girl lived there, cared for by a ragtag assortment of babysitters — mainly out-of-work actors or acquaintances, working shifts at three dollars an hour around the clock.

… There were days at a stretch when her mother who lived in an apartment three stories below, would not visit her. When the mother sometimes came upstairs for coffee, she would sit there with the babysitter, crying and lamenting her lot.  … “Angie reminds me so much of Jon right now that I cannot be around her. It’s just too painful.”

Angelina’s earliest childhood memory is of lying in her crib looking out a window toward the sky.

[Angelina, Unauthorized Biography, Andrew Morton]

“I’ve just been staring out a window all my life…”

The problem is, Angie Voight, aka Angelina Jolie, is a Healer Idealist.

To the INFP [Healer Idealist] healing means mending those divisions that plague one’s private life and one’s relationship.  It means treating oneself and relating to others in a conciliatory manner, helping to restore lost unity, integrity, or what INFPs call “oneness.”  These Healers present a tranquil and noticeably pleasant face to the world, but while to all appearances they may seem gentle and easy-going, on the inside they are anything but serene, having a capacity for caring not usually found in other types.  Healers care deeply — passionately — about a few special persons or a favorite cause, and they fervent aim is to bring peace to the world and wholeness to themselves and their loved ones.

It may be that Healers seek unity within themselves, and between themselves and others, because of a feeling of alienation which comes from their often unhappy childhood.  Please Understand Me II, page 158.

“But I woke up one day realizing, God, I’m an actor. I don’t think I intended to be an actor. I think my mother wanted it for me. I loved telling stories, and I enjoyed the profession, but it is too late to be something else?”

In the Land of Blood and Honey.

As a new director, Angelina Jolie, director of In the Land of Blood and Honey, had had a reputation of a wild child, a goth, she had cut herself: fascinated by the dark side. She wore a vial of her second husband, bad boy, Billy Bob Thorton, around her neck.  Devilish Angel, Angelina Jolie.  “I had that problem early on when I couldn’t feel a bond with another human being.” — “Mostly it was all about trying to connect.”

… Healers find it difficult to believe in themselves and to trust themselves.  Deeply committed to the positive and the good, yet taught to believe there is evil in them, they can come to develop a certain fascination with the problem of good and evil, sacred and profane.  They are drawn toward purity, but can become engrossed  with sin, continuously on the lookout for the wickedness that lurks with them.  Then, when they believe they have yielded to an impure temptation, they may be given to acts of self-sacrifice in atonement.  Others seldom detect this inner turmoil, however, for the struggle between good and evil is within the INFP, who does not feel compelled to make the issue public.  Please Understand Me II, page 159.

“It’s very difficult to make me sit and see this [movie] for two hours, it’s so hard to watch, so you can imagine living it for years, as many of our cast did,” “We want people to feel what it is like to live in war, and we also want to people who watch this movie to pray that … something will stop this.”

Jolie’s attention to authentic detail despite being only 17 when the war erupted — the actress said her UN ambassador role helped her develop the habit of learning in depth.

“This was, you know, the worst genocide since World War II in Europe,” she said, adding: “What were we all doing? And did we do enough? And why do we not speak about this enough?”

“I used to think I was unstable, because I had this thirst for something. I could never figure out what it wasI couldn’t sleep at night, and I always wanted to be somewhere else, and I have a window tattooed, this little box, and it’s because wherever I was, I wanted to be somewhere else. And I always saw myself — wherever I was in life — staring out the window.”

“And so I wanted to learn. I felt a responsibility to learn,” added Jolie.

It had been her trip to Cambodia, in 2002.  “This time I know the things I will see, and I know there is also so much I am unaware of that I am about to discover. I am embarrassed to realize (and to admit) how much I was able to return to my life after Africa.”

Re-search.

She approached it the way she does her job for UNHCR, like a student. “When I go on a field mission, I get multiple briefings, including from the CFR [Council on Foreign Relations],” she said. “And I took a course on international law. So I did the same thing I did with missions. I studied.” For the film, she “read a lot of books about the war. I talked to a lot of people, I watched, I listened. I just wanted to tell the real story.” She repeated what she has said several times: “I wanted to be respectful of people.” If she did not know something, “I asked.”

Dark Escape

On the other hand, she still has areas of her life where the re-search is too painful to do at the moment.

Having a adulterous affair, Jon Voight had been frozen out by, Marcheline Bertrand, Jolie’s mother.  It was called the “Bertrand freeze.” No matter how he had tried to maintain the relationship with his kids, Jolie’s mother’s animosity toward Jon was always a wedge between them.  Angie clearly had chosen her mother side, Angie as a young girl quickly took umbrage with Jon’s bungled attempts relating, the relationship became strained and was eventually cut and frozen. He claimed publicly on national TV in 2002 that she had ‘serious mental problems.’

 “Families are earned” — Jolie.

After being mostly estranged from him for nearly a decade, Angelina Jolie has revealed that the only way she can have a relationship with her father is if they do not talk about their past: No questions asked. Since their reconciliation following her mother’s death, in 2007, Angelina and her father had never discussed their differences that blighted her childhood. Were they to delve into the problems of the past, their relationship could collapse again, Jolie believed.

It was not until Miss Bertrand died that father and daughter patched things up. In a candid interview, Angelina said: ‘I thought about my children never meeting their grandfather.”

‘If They Can’t Eat, I Can’t Eat’

Anorexia nervosa: Immolated Zealot

“(Angelina) puts herself on fasts to make statements for the children she visits,”  “She says, ‘If they can’t eat, I can’t eat.’ ”  The super-skinny 5’8″ Jolie “does different cleanses from around the world. It’s very dramatic, but that’s how she gets,” claims the insider.  If these claims are true, Angelina is apparently mirroring the behavior of another famous United Nations goodwill ambassador, the late Audrey Hepburn.

For the Future.

“I don’t think I’ll still be acting.”  That doesn’t mean I’m stopping tomorrow.

“I just have other things I hope to do in my life and you know, I would love to live a long life but my mother didn’t live a long life and you never know how long you’ve got and I’d like to learn languages, and I’d like to be there as my kids become adults, beyond drive them from place to place as they go on their first auditions for whatever job they’re trying to get and thing they’re trying to do. I want to travel. There’s just other things. I’d like to be more than that.”

One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn’t have to understand something to feel it.  By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

10 thoughts on “The Search and the Re-search”

  1. Thanks for this post, Dave. I have never before realized how much I have in common with her, especially the mom thing and not feeling human connection. I’m glad Goodie told me to read this. Now if I could just figure out how to get here from the other site…

  2. I often felt like someone looking through the window at other people’s lives; in my own, I stand at the winter window looking out.

  3. Sheesh! What terrible commentary! And how easy it is to condemn people and write them off – mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
    Here is a person that I thoroughly disliked, and saw as a hypocrite. And I should have suspected better – given that I have been studying and using the Keirsey model for 15y, I have no excuse.
    Thank you for this insightful aricle. You have changed my perspective completely. (INTP)

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