Confronting the shadow

Emerging from the darkness at 3am

It’s fair to say that I have spent the last seven months running around like a headless chicken. The last two months have been particularly rough, and one of the main things to suffer has been my sleep. This means that, on more occasions than not, I’ve awoken in the night, at around 1-2am, and then struggled to get back to sleep, sometimes for several hours.

This hasn’t always been a negative experience: I’ve posted before about having unexpected creative breakthroughs as I lie there in the darkness. However, there have been many more times when I’ve found myself beset by a variety of agonies that keep my brain ticking over fruitlessly as I curse its inability to switch off and let me return to the land of dreams.

But, in the last couple of weeks, I have been surprised by a development in my nocturnal ramblings. For the first couple of hours of wakefulness, I lie there, staring at the ceiling, my emotional state in tatters of confusion. I know I’m upset about something, I usually have a vague clue what it is (Mum, love, money etc), but it’s chaotic: my thoughts run all over the place, they don’t fit together in a coherent train of complaints that I can get a handle on. But after about two hours of this, I find myself experiencing a shift. It’s as if I settle into the emotions, stop actively trying to understand them, and simply let them be - and it is at this point that they start to make sense. I can almost perceptibly feel them untangling, arranging themselves into cohesion, and suddenly what I am truly feeling becomes clear. Sometimes there is just one very strong sensation pushing to make itself felt; at other times, separate emotions tease themselves apart from each other, and I can recognise them, quite independently, for what they are.

For example, one night I lay there, feeling more clenched and tensed up inside than I’d felt in a long time. I couldn’t work out if it was romantic loneliness, frustration over my artistic purpose, or simply discomfort after an ill-advised takeaway. After a couple of hours, when I’d accepted sleep was going to elude me for more hours to come, I simply went with it and, rather than trying to figure it out, let the feelings wash over me. It wasn’t long before it dawned on me with utter clarity that what I really, really needed was to go for a walk: a proper long walk in the country. I realised it had been almost a month since I’d got out into nature, and the sudden awareness of what I was missing hit me like a lightning strike. Suddenly it was obvious! My muscles and stomach didn’t exactly unclench at that precise moment, but I knew what would do it: I made a plan to get out first thing in the morning and head for the hills. I followed through with the plan, and it was like a recalibration. It was exactly what I needed - and I don’t think I’d have realised it if I hadn’t gone through those sleepless hours to reach that point of understanding.

It really does feel as if I have to experience these agonies in the dark hours to reach that point of clarity, as if I must struggle through the mire of confusion in order to get to the other side; and, no matter how difficult it may feel at the time, what I find on the other side is… illumination. The darkness gives way to the light. The only way out is through.

And sometimes the clarity of emotion I discover, there on the other side, itself sheds light on something greater. One night, I was agonising over whether I would ever find love again, figuring I’d probably have to leave Newport in the pursuit of it, and worrying that this would be financially out of my current reach. I tossed and turned and fretted, feeling powerless and hopeless. However, once again, after a couple of hours of this, I gave in to it: I stopped trying to figure out how to ‘solve’ this problem and just let myself feel the loneliness. And something odd happened. Except, now that I think about it, it’s not odd at all: I found myself missing my mum. I wished I could talk to her, have her look after me, tuck me up in bed and bring me hot drinks and nourishing food while I cried my heart out. And I couldn’t. Because she wasn’t there any more.

While this sounds like a rather obvious thing for me to be feeling, at the time it felt like a revelation. What was revelatory was that I consciously felt myself transitioning from one form of pain (lack of romantic love) to another (missing my mum). The hurt in my heart was the same, but the two feelings were noticeably different - and, strangely, I found the lack of my mum easier to bear. Not less painful: I must be absolutely clear on that. Just easier to bear. I think the reason is this: it was a definite loss. Nothing I could do would bring her back, nothing I could think or feel or say would make any difference to the situation; and this certainty felt peculiarly comforting. I felt at peace in a way I hadn’t done with the romantic yearnings, perhaps because with the latter there is always the feeling that I could be doing something (except I don’t know what). And I realised that the comparative peace I gained from the certain fact of my bereavement was a reaction to the tumult of uncertainty I have been experiencing in my life for the past several months.

And this is where the ‘shadow’ comes in. This transition of feelings - and my realisation that a key component was certainty, or the lack of it - caused me to see deep into my shadow self. And in my shadow self lies a need for control. Now, control isn’t the same as certainty, but they are closely linked: we exercise control in an attempt to bring certainty. Over the years I have got much better at relinquishing the need for control over things that are not within my power, but I do still have a tendency to it when faced with situations I think I can influence. And so my grief over my mum’s passing was more manageable than my agonies over finding love - because my shadow control freak knows when it’s beaten and when it’s still in the game.

Once I’d gone through this extraordinary moment of awareness, my dishevelled mental faculties settled somewhat and I managed to rediscover sleep. When I awoke in the morning, it was with a renewed recognition of the part uncertainty had played in my trials and tribulations of recent months, and - particularly - my attempts to control things that cannot be controlled (primarily work-related). While I cannot prevent life continuing to foist uncertainties upon me, I can at least perhaps recognise that the way to face this is by relinquishing control over them: that is, by relieving myself of the expectation that I should be able to impose certainty where I cannot. With regard to love, I now choose to believe that the universe will deliver it when the time is right and I am ready to receive it - and simply making this choice has lifted a weight from my mind, allowing me to focus on things that are truly within my power, such as my art.

One last thing. I was interested to note that my feelings transitioned from ‘lovelorn’ to ‘bereft’ and not the other way around. This reassured me that I am not seeking a romantic partner as a way of filling the gap left by my mum: the two emotions are quite distinct, and I feel them each in their own way. Painful though that long dark night of the soul was, it has given me a priceless gift: the knowledge that it is only by confronting our shadows that we can truly hope to emerge into the light. What we ignore will come back to bite us, but if we can keep our shadows in sight, we can keep them in check. Now that does sound like something worth controlling.