‘I Am What I Choose to Become’ Was Said By This Jungian, Not Jung Himself

Stuart K. Hayashi





“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”

That is an excellent and wise quotation. It is a perfect affirmation of the presence of free will. 

All too often in our culture we hear the phrase “Nature versus Nurture.” The insinuation is that your personal identity, as an adult, is the result of you being passive in being shaped by forces external to your conscious decision-making. As the phrase goes, what molded you into you was either inborn biological mechanisms beyond your control (“nature”), or conditioning from circumstances impinging upon you (“nurture”). Those factors do have some influence. But as the quotation reminds us, the biggest factor in making you the person you are as an adult is the one that goes unmentioned and unacknowledged. That factor is the series of choices you made on your own, proactively. (It is no accident that “Nature versus Nurture” was coined by Sir Francis Galton, the founder and namer of eugenics. He favored Nature over Nurture, and ignored free will completely.)

And all over the World Wide Web and in memes in Google Images, and even throughout works you can find in Google Books, that quotation is misattributed to Carl Jung.

Here is the actual source:

Betty DeShong Meador, “Uncursing the Dark: Restoring the Lost Feminine,” Quadrant: Journal of the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytic Psychology vol. 22 (no. 1, 1989): 27–39.

This was in a journal published by the C. G. Jung Foundation. That is how the quotation ended up being ascribed inaccurately to the man himself.

As I write this, I must say that this psychoanalyst and therapist, Betty DeShong Meador, died relatively recently. She was born in 1931 and died on February 20, 2023. I wish that it could have been within her lifetime that this quotation was sourced properly to her. 

Childhood Mystery Solved? Hong Kong Company Imperial Copied Its T. Rex Design

Stuart K. Hayashi



It seems that a mystery that nagged at me since childhood might be solved. Many collectors of Godzilla toys are familiar with the Hong Kong company Imperial. It made the Godzilla action figure with the red lips. The action figure has a strange silver blotch on its chest because the people at Imperial copied that feature from the Godzilla action figure that Bandai made in Japan years earlier. Imperial also made King Kong.

Pertinent here is that Imperial made a googly-eyed Tyrannosaurus with unique features: it has thin-but-wide plates going down its chest. It has osteoderms (little spikes) running down its back similar to a crocodile’s. And it is yellow. It was made in 1985. While many toy collectors know of this toy, they seem not to know that this toy’s design features — the chest plates and dorsal spikes — are based on another toy company’s design.

I learned of this because of my cousin. Years ago, he gave me many toys of Godzilla and Ultraman monsters made by Bullmark, not Bandai. Likewise, he gave me some thick paperback books, full of thick pages, profiling Ultraman. He gave me yet another book from the same publishing house that was about dinosaurs. And the book heavily featured a sculpture that closely resembled the 1985 Imperial toy, with the dorsal spikes and chest plates. But this sculpture had much more realistic eyes and was overall fancier. It also was not yellow. This book was published in 1981. I cannot read the kanji, and neither could my cousin. I always wondered if this sculpture was some model kit released in Japan in 1981 or earlier.

It seems I now have some answers. As you can see above, I took photos of the pages of the Japanese book. I then ran a Google image search. It appears that the sculpture was photographed by Top Trumps in 1979 for its card game called Prehistoric Monsters. And the sculpture has an earlier appearance still. It is in the 1977 book Purnell’s Book of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Mammals. This is profiled on the blog Love in the Time of Chasmosaurus. One of the commenters says, “Since these models were featured in the London museum, I theorize that they were sculpted by a British paleontologist named Arthur Hayward — he had sculpted dinos for Ray Harryhausen [for One Million Years B.C. starring Raquel Welch].”  

Important design features of Imperial’s Godzilla toy were copied from Bandai’s. Likewise, it seems Imperial copied the design of its 1985 Tyrannosaurus from a sculpture that Arthur Hayward made at least as early as 1977.