My Shadow works for me.

The quiet of a Sunday afternoon offers a specific kind of clarity. The noise of the work week has faded and the anticipation of Monday has not yet fully set in. In this stillness I find myself confronting the things I usually run from. We spend so much of our lives curating a version of ourselves that is acceptable to the world. We polish our virtues and we silence our vices. We present a front that is calm and competent and kind. We act as if this curated exhibit is the entirety of who we are.

I have come to realize that this performance comes at a cost. We are not statues carved from a single block of white marble. We are complex living systems full of contradictions. Carl Jung called the parts of ourselves we reject the Shadow. This is not necessarily evil. It is simply the collection of everything we decided was not allowed to exist. It is the anger we swallowed because we were told to be nice. It is the ambition we stifled because we did not want to seem greedy. It is the vulnerability we hid because we needed to appear strong.

We treat these parts of ourselves like unwanted guests. We lock them in the basement and hope they will stay quiet. We assume that if we ignore them long enough they will eventually die of starvation. This is a dangerous misconception. The psychological reality is that buried things do not die. They ferment. They grow in the darkness and they gain a strange and chaotic power over us.

I see this mechanism at work when I have a reaction that feels out of proportion to the situation. I might snap at a friend for a minor mistake or feel a sudden surge of jealousy toward a stranger. I used to think these were random glitches in my character. I now understand they are leaks. The pressure in the basement has become too high and the shadow is forcing its way out. The anger I denied in myself acts out. The greed I suppressed projects itself onto others.

We often project our shadow onto the people around us. This is one of the most humbling realizations of shadow work. The traits I despise most in others are often the traits I cannot accept in myself. If I am triggered by someone who is loud and demanding it might be because I have repressed my own desire to take up space. I am not really fighting with them. I am fighting with a ghost of myself that I exiled long ago.

The process of acknowledging these hidden parts is uncomfortable. It goes against our instinct for self-preservation. We want to believe we are the hero of the story. Admitting that we are also the villain requires a kind of bravery that is rare. It requires us to look in the mirror and see the selfishness and the cruelty and the laziness. We have to sit with the fact that we are capable of terrible things.

There is a profound relief in this admission. The energy we spend hiding our shadow is immense. It takes constant effort to keep the door to the basement shut. When we finally open the door and let the monsters into the light we stop fighting. We realize that the monster was only a monster because it was starved and ignored. When we acknowledge our anger it becomes a boundary. When we acknowledge our selfishness it becomes self-care. When we acknowledge our fear it becomes caution.

The goal of this work is not to become perfect. The goal is to become whole. A whole human being casts a shadow. A whole human being has depth. We are taught to chase the light but a painting without shadows is flat and lifeless. We need our darkness to give us dimension.

I am learning to view my shadow not as a defect but as a reservoir of potential. It holds the creativity I was too afraid to express. It holds the passion I was too polite to show. By integrating these parts I am reclaiming the fullness of my humanity. Sunday is a good day for this work. It is a day to rest from the exhausting labor of pretending to be perfect. It is a day to sit in the quiet and invite all the parts of myself to the table. Even the ones I am afraid of. Especially the ones I am afraid of. They have been waiting a long time to be heard.