Loving our dark sides:

Bringing our shadow selves along for the creative ride

\Photo by rachel on Unsplash

This week, I watched the documentary Stutz, which tells the story of Jonah Hill’s relationship with his therapist Phil Stutz. It’s the best thing I have seen on television in a while. I had to pause ten times just to feel and think.

In the movie, Stutz talks about the part of us that we are most deeply afraid of other people seeing—our shadow self. It got me thinking about who my shadow self is and what my relationship with her looks like. According to Stutz, we find our shadow self by thinking about the most shameful, inferior, despondent, rejected times in our lives and what we started believing about ourselves during those times.

Sounds like an exercise I want to do NEVER, you may be thinking. But stay with me a minute. It’s not as scary as it sounds.

The movie has a beautiful scene where Hill has a life-size cardboard cutout of his shadow, teenage self that he sits in front of him. This visual allows the audience to sense the changing relationship, the flickers of tenderness in the way Hill is learning to look at his younger self.

Prompted by that visual, I started to form a picture of my shadow self: A teenager with stringy, chlorine-scented hair and an unmade-up face whose perpetually furrowed eyebrows once caused a science teacher to accuse me of giving him “looks from hell” and to sentence me to 25 jumping jacks in front of the class. My furrowed brow had nothing to do with that science teacher. It had to do with every social dynamic I was scrutinizing, every judgment I was projecting on every member of the class, every worry for the health and safety of loved ones and the fate of the world that I was grappling with at night—all while trying to maintain an easy, social, straight-A image.

As a teen, painful rejections led to two big beliefs about myself that I made rapid business of trying to hide: I’m too sensitive, and I’m too serious.

While watching Stutz, I asked myself: What would it mean to invite that serious and sensitive teen along for the ride while I write?

But now I realize that’s not exactly the right question. That teen is already here. She’s right here. What Stutz and Hill are talking about is seeing her. Acknowledging her existence. First just saying hi, and eventually coming to embrace and maybe even love her.

I’ve been doing some of this work slowly over the past twenty years, and especially over the past year as I’ve started to own my sensitivity and introversion. I increasingly find myself speaking these aspects of myself out loud into crowded rooms rather than trying to force extroversion and perfect sociability. But I do still try a lot of the time to force extroversion and perfect sociability.  

A next step toward embracing that frowning teen would mean that I stop secretly beating myself up for writing things that are sensitive and serious. Or denying that I do!

A new kind of conversation plays out in my mind that I would have had a hard time envisioning last year:

Someone else: “AFTER ANNE is a hard book with a lot of pain.”

Me: “No shit!”

No justifications or explanations required.

I am starting to see a path forward that holds my shame points more lightly and lovingly. A me who scoops up my not-always-light and not-always-fun shadow with gratitude and tender humor and invites her to show through on the page instead of shuddering whenever she does.

I am starting to see a future where, when I catch a glimpse of that teenage girl in the mirror with dark undereye circles that betray how much she cares, I don’t immediately reach for my concealer.