The Monster You Keep Calling a Stranger
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” — Carl Jung
I used to hear footsteps
in the empty hall,
convinced something stalked me.
But when I turned,
I only found
a mirror too dim to catch my face.
The weight I feared
was my own shoulder
pressed against the door.
Every thud in the walls
was my pulse
arguing with silence.
The shadow never left.
It waited.
It knew I would finally stop running.
And when I did,
it didn’t speak with fangs.
It whispered my name.
“The shadow isn’t some monster lurking in the dark. It’s a part of you. Something to understand, not fear. Shine a light into those hidden corners, and you might just find a path to feeling whole.”
Most people think the shadow is hunting them. That belief keeps them from seeing what it really is: a fragment of themselves waiting to be noticed. Fear rises because the body confuses the hidden with the foreign. But the shadow isn’t foreign. It carries your memories. It knows your posture. It has your voice.
The most painful confrontations are often with what you’ve repressed. Anger you weren’t allowed to show. Grief you buried to survive. Vulnerability that felt too dangerous to let anyone witness. Those moments didn’t vanish; they split off and lingered, building the shape you now call “shadow.”
Integration begins not by forcing a breakthrough but by letting that part exist without judgment. It doesn’t need punishment, and it doesn’t need erasure. It needs acknowledgment. Naming what has been denied pulls it back into the body, where it can stop haunting and start belonging.
I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for preorder now. Release date: October 1. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.
If this hit a nerve, you’re not alone.
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