Becoming Restoried Reflections
#15 | Shelters & Shadows Part 2 — Full Circle
Preface: Until now (the day I posted this blog (and on a New Moon of all times)), I didn’t realize that I’d titled it—the last of 2023—the same as the first of 2023 (aside from the blog introduction post). Goodness. What a year. I’ve linked Part 1 below. Keep reading for part 2. :)
It was Thursday, August 12th, 2021, early evening here in Ontario, Canada. One of my best friends had turned 23, and I was seconds from logging into a Zoom catch-up with two other friends in San Francisco. Just a few weeks prior, I’d self-published a novel that I’d written during my senior year in university (2019–2020). I hadn’t celebrated, launched, promoted, marketed, or shared the book aside from a few Instagram posts because in complete vulnerable honesty: I did not care. Lonely, depressed, apathetic, and suicidal, I knew I hadn’t given this book everything I’d hoped to. I was ashamed and embarrassed by it because I didn’t have the capacity for the potential of its depth. I loathed it and couldn’t meet the grace that the process asked for. And yet, there was so much love turning each choppy page.
When I opened the Zoom call, I saw my two friends in San Francisco, drinks in hand. Mid-pandemic isolation, it was wonderful to see them. They’d asked me to bring a drink, which I’d forgotten about. Upon the kind reminder, I rushed downstairs to fill a glass with water. Out of breath on my way back upstairs, I wondered why it was so important that I have a drink.
When I re-joined the Zoom meeting, I spoke to my friends for a few moments before the floodgates opened. My screen filled with faces calling in from across the globe — on their way to and from work, practice, class, driving, shopping, and everything in between. There were so many people I had to scroll between participant screens to see everyone. I’d never been so warmly surprised in my life.
And above all, the gathering was orchestrated by the first friend I mentioned above. It was her birthday and she organized invitations to a virtual book launch for me. I still don’t have words. Love. Gratitude.
I listened to boundless kindness and thoughtfulness from everyone, digesting the somewhat uncomfortable feeling of love on the spot. It filled me up, yet, I very much struggled to allow it to resurface outside of this Zoom call. Shame is a sticky beast.
I’ve never shared that my book didn’t sell. At all. And that’s mostly my own doing — I didn’t want it to because I wasn’t capable of taking on what “selling” might have meant (not to say that it would have become a wildly popular bestseller (it was a bit rough around the sentences)).
Recently, during one of our Becoming Restoried community calls, we explored the relationship between shelter and shadow, specifically how both are often present at once (and how we tend to label and categorize experiences in our lives as one or the other).
When Michael asked us to think of a moment where we experienced shelter, I wasn’t surprised that this moment surfaced as both a moment of shelter and shadow — at the same time. But I was surprised by how much it mirrored.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but I’d argue that 2023 has been the most challenging year I’ve lived. In the past, specifically referring to 2021 in this case, I saw “challenging” as how often I lost battles to depression, OCD, suicidal thoughts, grief, and loss. 2023 was exigent because I didn’t lose any of those battles. But I didn’t win them either.
Somewhere along the way — perhaps a bit late — I realized that winning versus losing is an excruciatingly uncongenial binary. I’m leaving 2023, seemingly with more scars, not because I was hurt on more occasions, but because I acknowledged and excavated the past, present, and future of their primary wounds. I was willing to see them, and learned how to fight to close them, now exposed to what it takes to grow into a space of healing.
2023 has also been the year I mindfully sought the most shelter, connecting with my therapist, the Becoming Restoried community, a writing group, mentors, spiritual support, project collaborators & advisory boards, research partners, work teams, and the list continues. A few months ago, in September, I stepped away from many commitments because I was in an exceedingly low place, deferring my projects and PhD to fall 2024. I drafted an email to share with everyone whom I wanted to let know and cried looking through the names I’d gathered. I cry harder re-reading their responses to my email (which I do frequently). I noticed, too, that all along I was learning how to accept shelter in the presence of shadows — ones I’ve both cast and been tortured by.
Since September, I’ve re-written my book and submitted it to agents (fingers crossed).
Just this past week, I flew to Nashville for a two-day intensive with Michael, where I excavated a period of my childhood and teenage years — a timeframe that, in my mind, was so dark because I couldn’t yet distinguish between the shadows imposed on me and the ones I’d inflicted. I couldn’t yet differentiate the shadow of helplessness from the ways I unintentionally offer it light to expand.
Shadows need two things: an opaque object specifically in the path of light rays. Light cannot not pass through the object but around its edges. The more light the more muscular the shadow, yet, it’s often the frontier fringes—perhaps the perimeter of a shadow—where magic happens.
We don’t need to be able to see perfectly — just well enough to keep moving, and although the human body is opaque, it can absorb.
In the direct path of light we absorb the shelter of warmth.
In the direct path of light we cast and see shadows.
And only if we keep moving can these shift, allowing us to be guided by what we can’t yet see (and here is a wonderful poem, in case you don’t quite believe me).
Cheers to you, 2023.
You can take Becoming Restoried’s What Story Are You Living assessment, or join one of their ongoing free virtual workshops.
