ATENEO DE NAGA UNIVERSITY | SHADOW | Meeting my Own Shadow | | Submitted by:ODETTE E. ESTEVE, PYN2II-Bs Psychology |

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Mischievous Mischief
I know that I have been aware of my own shadow for a while now. For years I let it direct my life, living through many consequences by allowing it to run my life. In fact, shadow finds its way in my life and now it has some important role to play in. Getting to know my shadow takes a lot of self-criticism, comparing and evaluation on my side. It was like I am defying myself down in order to build a new one from the lessons of my past.

Now that I know my shadow, I named it the ‘Mischievous Mischief’ (yeah it sounds fancy but no.) MM, starts when I hate being with the people who love being or having extravagant things. While with them I started to babble things about how can they keep on doing things extravagant without thinking about the others who are suffering, and so on. It makes me really irritated to scenes like that. It was nauseating. But now that I know it, I just realized I also do things extravagantly. I even like it too, but not on the higher level of extravagance. Because of this realization I felt like being hypocrite in front of the others and even on myself. And thought I just remember that at a certain time of my life, probably when I learned the word shadow during my personality class, even thought at first I don’t understand it, I still go and asked my friends about it. It resulted to an ending of asking myself, ‘what was it in my shadow?’. And then I just realized that I am doing things that were totally against my beliefs and standards. I was like “ahhh for real?!” Shadow is revolting, tough and yet remarkable.

Another thing of MM is that if it is in an affiliation of any kind, unexpectedly the scene becomes dramatic, and then MM had been rearranged and I have no idea of what’s happening. It was like my past and my present tangled together and MM mingled with it. At this moment I don’t know what to do and just be careful of myself, and to keep my awareness intact. Projection has to do with it but I remind myself to stop blaming it to something. Confronting MM, my shadow, and having some kind of rapports with it has an altering effect. Yet it taught me to be patient and to stop judging.
Selfishta
It was really hard to meet my shadow, but here’s ‘Shelfista’ another shadow which was driven from my selfish unconsciousness. This was very fragile one to meet. Since it was mostly the thing I am afraid to be.

This is when I became easily annoyed by people who show inappropriate behaviours especially in public, and I don’t even want to be like it. I know that I am very much of a conceited girl about being with a family who loves charity, so I adopted being generous and charitable person, just as what I also learned from my previous school. And when I am around people who are selfish, who don’t share, and just being their self-centred life, I get pretty irritated, and I gave them look in the eye saying ‘share it with them, bigyan mo’, I really do have a lot of say about events like this. But after knowing the quote “everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves”, I’d realized that, that moment above mention is a paradox that I have a selfish side that I try to deny. And when I felt bad about myself, I whine and do unexpected childish things wondering why one cares about me. It's a very deprived part of me that I cast-off.

Now that I know about it, I start to acknowledge this kind of things I possessed and evolving it in myself. Because maybe telling myself that once I get used to it, I’ll no longer be prompted by other people’s selfishness.

I just realized that hating others, judging them is just a way for me to avoid a confrontation with my own shadow. It was like passing my emotion to another to let them own it, and this is where I have the chance to acknowledge it and tame it by means of accepting as part of my life. I have to appreciate it and be friendly with my shadow.

Working with Selfishta is very well shadowy. And I know that I can’t just rid of it, because it’s a part of me. I learned that being part with a shadow, does not mean I am to achieved perfection rather its making me a ‘human’. Because in fact our ‘enemies’ is our helpers to our subconscious being, so I learned that if someone irritates me, I should be grateful instead since it put some sense in my head to re-evaluate again the cons of the events surrounding them. And all I need is to take full responsibility of my own life by simply admitting that I have flaws and a dark side is the majority of the battle.