Facing My Shadow

I remember very clearly that instant in my teenage years, where I realized just how absurd everything is. I was at home with my close family, leaning on the doorframe of the living room, arms crossed. Everyone was busy with some board game and leaning there I was overcome with a profound lucidity; I was an onlooker, witness to a brief moment in everyday life, that inevitably gets forgotten. I just couldn't understand what was the point of it all. All I could think was, ''that's it?''

At once a deep, paralysing fear overcame me : I need to do what I truly wish to do, right now before it's too late!

A sort of existential dread, an epiphany on my mortality. In a flash, ideas flooded my mind, so dark and repulsive I couldn't remember who I was. Of running away and claiming that girl I wanted for so long. Of taking her, no matter the life-changing consequences, no matter what it means about myself. Of running away and living for me for the first time.

On that day, I faced my shadow, nay, my shadow surprised me, and so vile and despicable it was I pushed it away, pushed it down a hole, deep within myself. And only at my weakest would my corrupt nature resurface, bearing its ugly head, akin to a rotting, terrible corpse, to remind me of the troubled self that inhabits my very being.

What a nightmare;

This univeral drive, this absurd rejection of the future, in favour of disgusting desires, to get what one shouldn't be getting. To obtain, at whatever cost, what one wants. To simply act on instinct, to reject logic and social constructs, to reject the future; to go back to being a mere animal-

The horror.

Yet with the years since then I've come to the realization that there are people that actually live that way. At one with their shadow. Nurturing their every desires without a thought, their conscience free from any doubts. I've met such people, living as if only they matter, and whatever their actions, they have no real consequences. Abuse, violence, harassment, rape, nothing is too much for them, as long as they do what they want.

I've even known such a person very closely, enough so that they confessed to me that they knew that all of existance, reality itself, myself included, was there only for him! The stupidity of the solipsist...

I don't really use the word, but when I am faced with such people I can only think of evil. Of the shadow, of madness, of rejection of all that is good and reasonable, in favour of one's absurd pleasures and desires, depravation.

Hell is other people, as some would agree-

And what irony, what hilarious twist of fate that inside all of us, no matter how righteous angelic good and examplary one is, there is still deep within us the root of the self, the seed of evil, the looming of the shadow.

What can one do, then, but become the very best one can be? To become, to strive, to lead by example, and cast aside the animalistic drives that plague so many.

To face one's shadow and overcome it, and become so much more than a slave to primal needs.

Come then, walk out of the shadow, into the feeble light of our own making.

Come then, friends of friends. Away, away from all that is lowly and earthly-

Come then, grow these innate dove wings and fly out of your shadow, in the blissful sunlight of our virtues!