A Message For Our Shadow Selves

To our Shadows,
We are sorry.

You shouldn’t be ignored. You shouldn’t be denied. You shouldn’t be hated.

We are sorry for rejecting you. We are sorry for disowning you. You have been exiled for a long time, buried in the remote corner of our minds. Our Ego Selves are so busy adapting to the social world, seeking approval, and protecting our self-image that we push you back and try to forget you.

You are longing to be heard. We are sorry that we failed to listen. Our Ego can’t acknowledge and accept that you exist, because you represent everything we fear and everything we are ashamed of, because you are at odds with the ideals we are socialized into.

You hold those traits that we try so hard to hide from public view because we are conditioned to believe that those traits are unflattering and undesirable. You carry those negative human emotions and impulses that we are told to repress. You bear those wounds, traumas, and unresolved moral conflicts we acquired from childhood. You are the truth we subconsciously reject because we are so afraid to be criticized and judged and ridiculed.

We are sorry for refusing to recognize you. But now, we are starting to see that you are NOT the inferior and wrong aspects of our personalities. You are just a collection of those unaccepted and shunned parts of us in the first 20 years of our lives. You are born out of our conditioning and of our interactions with the world. You are formed out of our attempts to adapt to norms and expectations.

We are just hardwired for survival and for our need to belong that you become the home of those aspects of our Selves rejected by the collective. We resisted you before, now we are here opening up our hearts to you, learning more of you, seeing more of you, so that we can finally embrace you or let you go.

We forgive you.

It’s not always easy to come to terms with you. It’s daunting and frightening to see you face to face. You embody our weakness, our flaws, and everything fragile about us.

Sometimes we catch a glimpse of you in our anger and irritation, in our insecurity, in our envy, in our guilt and shame. Sometimes you are screaming chaos inside our heads at 2 AM. Or sometimes you are staring at us when we project our emotional issues on other people.

You intensify our difficult emotions. You reside in our failures, in our mistakes, in our shortcomings, in our shame. You ruin our relationships with our partners, with our families, with other people. You sabotage our opportunities.

You make us loathe ourselves. You make us deceive ourselves. You bring out the worst in us. And every time we try to hide you away, you get bigger and bigger. You broke us. You fractured us.

But now, we forgive you.

We forgive you for every single pain you have brought us. We forgive you for those days you make us feel empty and worthless, angry and raging, lonely and depressed. We forgive you for those nights you make us drown ourselves in medications, drugs, in alcohol.

We forgive you. Because we now know that those are your ways of telling us that you seek to come out to the light, that those are your ways of telling us that it’s time for us to heal, to grow, and evolve exponentially.

We forgive you. Because we now know that all the painful and worst experiences that have happened to us are never your fault. Never. You are not our enemy nor the villain of our lives. You’re just the wounded, hurt, scared, angry version of us longing for recognition and acceptance.

We thank you.

Thank you for showing us that there are aspects within ourselves that we need to bring to the surface to heal, transform, and integrate. You show us that growth and expansion happen when we are conscious of you, when we are no longer afraid of you, and when we learn to honor you.

We are now ready to make peace with you, to reunite with you. You don’t need to stay in the dark anymore. We are ready to meet you, acknowledge and understand you, and engage with you.

Thank you for teaching us that living authentically and unapologetically includes accepting those parts of us that we don’t want to admit having. Now we are ready to embrace our shadow traits.

You teach us that we shouldn’t be ashamed of those elements in our personalities deemed bad by our societies and frowned upon by our families and peers because we are seeking wholeness, not perfection in the eyes of the world.

When you are calling out to us through our triggers, patterns, and projections, you are giving us the opportunity to explore you, to find you, so that we will become whole again, because we have been fragmented from the moment we denied your existence.

So thank you for waiting for us to give you the acceptance you are longing for. We are now ready to unmask ourselves from that self-image our societies, schooling, families, and peers expected us to wear. We are now ready to claim and own who we are, light and dark.

We love you.

We are now speaking from a place of compassion. We now realize that your existence doesn’t make us less worthy of love. Self-approval and self-love are unconditional and we deserve them. We now see that wholly accepting ourselves is a power itself that allows us to find the strength of those shadows that live within us. You are valued and respected regardless of any collective views and beliefs.

We love you and we are falling in love with ourselves again, with our lives, with our world. To our shadow traits, we are bringing you to light and welcoming you back into use, to leverage you for our personal awakening and spiritual progression, to expand our virtues and characters, and to evolve into the complete best truest version of us.

We love you and we are now calling our power back and claiming our authenticity. We are now putting an end to the constant war within us and stepping into wholeness and freedom, integrating you into our whole true self, seeing through the eyes of divinity where there is no fear and judgment, filling those painful and raw areas of ourselves with acceptance, light, love, and healing.

We love you and we celebrate ourselves. We have found peace inside us and that’s what matters.