my shadow is helping me shine.

I’ve experienced so many different phases and versions of myself. Enough to know that sometimes I will be or experience a version of myself that I never thought I would. It’s easy to get on our high horse and say what we’ll never do or never be, but we never know how we’ll respond or react to certain experiences or encounters. We can mentally plan out how we’d respond, but it isn’t until we’re actually in the experience, feeling it, that we know and see for ourselves.

There’s no manual on how to piece your life back together after a pandemic or after losing yourself or after having your world flipped upside down. The “figuring it out” is in the trial and error and sometimes it gets messy before it ever gets pretty. Some days I feel like I’m still cleaning up the mess and the remnants of a version of me that was so numb, checked out, depressed, disassociated, lost, hurt, and grieving herself. I still step on shards of glass from the brokenness I experienced. Thinking, “Dang, I could’ve sworn I swept all the broken pieces up.” We think we’ve gotten it all but we all know how pesky broken glass can be. There are always those tiny pieces, those stragglers.

I get emotional as I write this because I still have a lot of shame and guilt around the person I became after experiencing deep hurt. I behaved in ways I never thought I would. My actions didn’t align with my “higher self.” I became a stranger to myself. I’m still working on forgiving myself. It’s hard. It feels so much easier to shame the undesirable parts of myself. I want to forget her, erase her, pretend she never existed. But in doing that, I would strip away from the things I love about myself. Because it’s our shadows that make us shine even brighter, ya know? Deep down I think our unpleasantries just want to be embraced and integrated into who we are. Instead of being shamed and ridiculed like the ugly duckling. 

I’m learning how to embrace this “shadow self.” Maybe we need our shadows as a reference point. Because how do we know and appreciate the light if we never know the dark? The contrasts we experience aren’t some sort of punishment, but rather a dance with duality — a full scope of what it means to be human. Even nature exists in these extremes. Night and day. Winter and summer. So on and so forth. I’ve stopped viewing the contrasts as something to duck and dodge and instead, as something to accept. Everything is cyclical. Life will ebb and life will also flow. Everything is always changing, including me. 

Each day I am sowing the seed of forgiveness and freeing myself from the past. We can’t hack or cheat code our way to healing or to our desired path. We have to face and experience all of it. Even the parts that we wish we could fast forward or cut out. It’s ok. Keep it. Stay with it. Know that it isn’t forever. There’s value in it. Let it shape and mold you, but don’t let it break you. We have places to be, and our shadow self deserves to come too. No more compartmentalizing or picking and choosing the pleasant over the unpleasant. The desirable over the undesirable. We are both this over here and that over there. Yes, they may contradict each other and that’s ok! We don’t have to psychoanalyze our human complexity or multi-dimensionality. We just have to be.