MAKING FRIENDS WITH SHADOWS

YOU KNOW WHAT’S WORSE THAN BEING HAUNTED BY YOUR GHOSTS? Coming face to face with your shadow. Ghosts come and go, they’re bound to you but they’re mostly remnants of other people. It’s other-centric and grounded in the past. Whereas your shadow? Well, it’s pretty much you. Your darkness, your flaws, your weaknesses. What you’ve done that is still part of you now. The side of you that you don’t often acknowledge but once you come face to face with it, it presses you with an unbearable weight. You run away from it and you brush it off, until the next time it goes on spotlight. Sometimes, the hardest person to forgive is yourself. You measure yourself against such high standards because you know yourself best and you know how much more you are capable of. How could you have been so foolish!? You’re much smarter than that! Or sometimes, you end up measuring yourself against other people’s perception of you or even what society dictates someone like you should be. You know better than to take into account the opinion of everyone else, but you fall into the trap logic that clearly there must be some universal understanding to what it is to be “good”, right?

You’re not perfect and you won’t ever be perfect. You will make mistakes. You will fall short. You will fail people and you will fail yourself. I wouldn’t say that it’s fine coz I know what it’s like to close your eyes and have every variation of how you could’ve done it differently play in front of you. Much like how it is to unconsciously cringe and cover your eyes every time you remember a certain incident – it sucks. But it’s normal. It’s okay to subject yourself to the same judgement you and your friends loosely pass onto others.

But you must also learn to let it go. Use it to motivate you to become better and do not carry it around as an anchor. Make peace with your shadows and step into the light.

x