Shadow

"Are you a decent girl with the potential to become an evil monster, or are you an evil monster who thinks she's decent?"

"Wouldn't I know which one I was?"*

"Good God, no. The lies we tell other people are nothing compared to the lies we tell ourselves."

I always believed I would confront my shadow entirely on my own terms. Deliberately. Intentionally. I had this idea that I would wait until a season when I felt structurally unshakeable, fully prepared to dive into the dark architecture of who I am. That is heavy, volatile work; logic dictates you should be insulated before you go there. Acknowledging deeply rooted pain and generational trauma? That turned out to be just skimming the surface. The real, ferocious beast is coming to terms with what that pain made me do.

I have always been brutally hard on myself, a tendency that at one point mutated into something actively destructive. That fractured part of me still exists, dormant, waiting for a specific trigger or a careless slip to justify a relapse into old patterns. I know how slick that slope is, and how easily I can lose myself to the dark if I stumble.

So, I ran a tactical bypass. I told myself I needed to maximize my self-love first. Build a flawless foundation before I stopped focusing on my own wounds and began reckoning with the wounds I had inflicted on others. Besides, I rationalized, I don’t fully understand the mechanics of shadow work. I didn’t want to fall into a psychological rabbit hole I couldn’t crawl out of, or move through the dark too fast, become overwhelmed, and reduce my identity to a definitive: I am a piece of shit. What if I broke, gave up, and simply ran with that narrative forever?

It was a brilliant mix of avoidance and trying to hack the healing process. I simply wasn’t ready to see my own reflection without its armor. I was giving myself time.

But the universe doesn’t operate on our timeline.

The breakthrough hit me mid-sentence, like stepping directly into a freezing shower. It was a sudden, cold, undeniable knowing that sliced straight through every carefully constructed lie I had told myself for years. It was the kind of truth you don’t just comprehend, you feel it trace its way down into your very bones.

We all harbor a vague, polite list of our own flaws. We possess just enough curated self-awareness to see where we could stand to improve. But yesterday, I realized that my baseline understanding of how fucked up I’ve been was entirely off the mark. For a decade, I haven’t just been telling myself a distorted story; I have quite literally been using my talent to write it into existence.

Yesterday, I drafted a piece. It was an essay about modern relationships, the friction between men and women, and the psychological landscape of casual intimacy. Objectively, it was solid. It was well-written, logical, and fiercely straightforward, anchored by studies and data. It possessed weight, structure, and clarity. But as I sat back to look at it, a recently acquired mantra bypassed my ego: “Sometimes it’s less about what you’re saying, and more about why you’re saying it.”

So, I scanned the text again. And this time, I forced the scalpel inward:

Why did I write this?

What am I defending?

Who am I actually fighting?

In that quiet moment, I caught myself red-handed. I was executing the exact same choreography I’ve relied on since I was a teenager: arguing with myself under the guise of analytical writing. I was flexing my intellect like a general gearing up for war, lining up data points, fortifying my defenses, and preparing to absolutely steamroll a man.

What I had packaged as an objective, intellectual critique of modern dating was actually a massive, glittering mirror reflecting my own internal battle. The essay was a glaring preemptive justification for the emotional sabotage I was already beginning to exhibit toward a man who had shown genuine care and consideration. All the perceived slights and hyper-vigilant red flags that had motivated the piece weren’t real.

Out of respect for his privacy, the specific details of that dynamic will remain off the page. Context is useful, sure, but ultimately, it’s irrelevant to the larger symptom. The point is that I have been operating under a destructive, revisionist narrative for my entire adult life. I haven’t just been unconsciously repeating the story; I’ve been documenting it, solidifying it, publishing it, and believing it.

And the entire time, I truly believed I was the victim.

I honestly believed I had no choice but to use my womanhood, my love, and my sexuality as a weapon. Whether that calibration was conscious or subconscious, I’m no longer certain. But I know the core doctrine of the illusion: I believed all men were inherently designed to hurt me. And if that was an absolute law of nature, then if I hurt them first, it was just casualty management. They were the default aggressors; I was just surviving the ride.

Yikes.

I stared at the screen of my phone for a long time before I had the courage to type out the realization, before I admitted to myself what the dark already knew.

I couldn’t do this anymore.

I could no longer afford to be the architect of the very wreckage I claimed to flee.

I couldn’t keep repeating the same story. I can’t.