What Is A Shadow?

Shadow. A word filled with mystery, darkness, and nuance.

It is an image cast on a surface, faint and filled with the suggestion of things that are not as they appear. It is a trace, a hint, a semblance of something that was, that is, but it is not the thing. It is not the literal thing. You cannot find its detail, only its rough outline or the areas where depth and light are made obvious by another source.

Shadows are the illusion of an object projected and left for the viewer to interpret. Do we know what we see or do our eyes recreate what we imagine is there? Shadows hint at gloom and uncertainty. They scare us in the dark as children. They frighten us as women walking alone or skitter ominously across a window during a stormy night, reminding us of our vulnerability or our aloneness.

Therapists and spiritual types speak of the shadow self. That part of humanity intentionally hidden or darkened because it is ugly and shameful or too naked to show to the world. We don’t admit to our shadow selves, for that would leave us exposed to judgement or ridicule or force us to face the very things we are unwilling to see inside ourselves. We keep these shadows deep in our hearts and minds, willing them to go away, to be brushed aside somehow as if they hold no more weight than smoke.

A shadow is indistinct. A mere semblance of a thing.

Or it is a hidden thing. A thing occupying a space behind walls and layers of secrecy such as a shadow government controlling the puppet strings of life behind the facade of normalcy.

It is merely a ghost, seen only by those with the propensity to receive it.

It is women.

Throughout eternity we have been pushed back, forced into roles of submission where our needs and desires have been left unacknowledged. Have been rendered unimportant. Unworthy.

It has happened in society. It has happened in our work lives. It has happened in our marriages. It has happened in our families.

We have been shadows of the women we wanted to be. Shadows of the women we knew were in us back before life became a place where others came first.

We have been shadows to ourselves, our natures and desires unexplored, left behind in long forgotten dreams of what we wanted to do, or be, or explore. We became shadows because we believed everyone else needed more than we did.

We became shadows because we’ve been told it was selfish to put ourselves first, as if our only choices were between narcissistic indulgence and invisibility.

It wasn’t conscious. We didn’t make a deliberate choice to render ourselves unworthy of needs or wants. We don’t consciously believe that we are irrelevant or invisible. We simply put our families first, our male bosses first, the historical order of power first. But in the process, we are accepting our role as shadow, seen only by those with the gift of seeing the ghost of what we are.

But the flip side of a shadow is that it dances. It can exist in the light of day, not just darkness, if we let it. It can dance with joy at sunset. It can warm the room at sunrise. It can cast long, languorous, playful rays across the sand of the beach. It can flicker its tongue at the flames of life itself.

What is your shadow? How wide is it cast?

Mine is still emerging. Moving from that which has not been seen, to that which will not be denied.