The shadow

It’s been a long month. A good one, but a long one. What started as being afraid of what was coming down the pipeline regarding my dad’s health became a month of pre-grief, grief, and travel.

I bought a book about trauma and read it cover to cover. While the information was helpful and useful, a lot of it was “no shit” information, like how trauma stays in the body. As someone who has been chronically tired his entire adult life, because he’s constantly scanning for the next threat, I know how trauma affects a person. I watch people use their energy for constructive and productive means, but prior to and right after work most days, I just want to sleep.

It’s not like I’m eating poorly. I’m eating well, in the broad sense, and I’m sleeping well, and trying to do the things that give a person energy, cutting down on the scrolling and the media consumption. But I’m just tired.

I think I’m in recovery mode. Now that I’m not looking across the horizon for the lion waiting in the bushes, the message sent to my body is that I no longer have to be ready to move at a moment’s notice. I no longer have to be scared and hoard my energy for that sprint that I’m going to have to undertake.

It’s going to be a long, slow climb, and one that will involve a lot of therapy and self-reflection, but I’ve already done that much, too.

I also put about 300 pages of introspection into a “shadow work” journal. Now, I don’t believe, largely, in the fru-fru nature of self-improvement, but as I started reading the book, prior to the journaling, it was talking a lot about doing the work of finding the dark corners of one’s self, the places you normally don’t talk about, or the places you run away from or ignore, and finding the ways to bring them into the sunlight.

Well, hours and hours later, I finished. And what’s come out of it, with the aid of me putting it all into ChatGPT, is noting patterns. Shame, guilt, self-punishment, abandonment, self-worth… these are just a few of the issues that I learned I hit myself with a lot.

I started to think about myself in those terms, what gets me into those patterns, and now I’m starting to see a way through the maelstrom. Developing a clear vision for my future and hope for a world where I’m not trying to constantly control everything or productivize/optimize myself into fulfillment, but where I get to enjoy the world AND what I make of the world.

I’m tired, but I’m excited. AND, I’m starting the second draft of my second feature of the year, with a lot more behind it.

Now, if you don’t mind, I have a lot of soul-searching to do, and a life to build back up from scratch.