When Shadow Throws Me a Curve Ball

Thursday, February 13, 2025

I haven’t written much on my blog for a few weeks now. There were a couple of posts at the end of January related to a big storm that was passing through the islands, otherwise for the most part I have been silent for almost three weeks. Up until that point I was posting most days.

It isn’t that my blog has lost interest for me. I value this space. My little corner of the internet. A place where I can get to share thoughts and write simply because I want to, need to.

In fact if I step back, I have done little writing anywhere. My blog, my digital journal and my physical journal.

I feel as though the wind has been blown out of my writing sails. Only just now am I feeling the breeze again.

Why?

I could say that it was because I was unwell for over a week with various seasonal ailments…but that’s not the reason. It might have been a cause, a down tick in posting for a few days as the energy drained out of me, but that’s not the why.

I could have said that it was because my wife and I went to Kauai for a long weekend to visit some friends who were staying there. But that is not the reason. It was my first visit to Kauai. I took a good few photos, and could have shared much about my impressions of the island. So the complete opposite of me not posting. There were plenty of reasons for me to post about that trip, but it went by unrecognized.

No, I believe that what knocked the wind out of my posting sails was my reaction to a disagreement between the founders of two online platforms that I use, like and admire. I’m not going into what happened. There has been plenty of online commentary covering that if you care to go searching. So this is not about the incident. It is about my reaction to the incident. I will explore what about the incident threw me a curve ball and turned off my writing faucet.

Shadow

As the proverbial sh** started flying online, I could feel the yuk ball start to form in my throat. I was both riveted, looking out for what the next reply would be, and sad, disappointed. I felt nauseous. I didn’t want to go near what in my book was a quickly degenerating conversation, and at the same time I couldn’t take my eyes off the next reply.

And so staying away here from content and focusing on my reaction, I could feel myself shutting down. That which up until then had felt like safe places to me, now felt unsafe. I did not want to engage, not only in the argument, but also in my own content on the platform.

I had been triggered.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
~ Carl Jung

That I believe is what shut me down from writing. The nature of the online argument triggered something in me, a shadow, which made me feel unsafe in places that until then I had felt perfectly safe in. In the ManKind Project we explain,

shadow as a belief about myself, negative or positive, that I hide, repress, or deny – emphasis on belief.

I am not going to start searching here as to what the cause of that trigger might have been, what the belief is, what the shadow is, that’s for another time and place. I’m simply acknowledging its presence within me. The right conditions come together, and the shadow is triggered, enabling a reaction.

To explain further,

The choices and actions that arise from shadow are not the shadows. Shadow is the belief about myself that would allow me to choose that action which then produced the impact.
~ Are you owning your stuff?

So some belief that I hold, a learnt belief based on experiences from my past, my younger days, has caused me to go silent in my online posting. And it happens so subconsciously, so automatically, that I do not see the cause, the shadow.

Coming back online

My online time the last few weeks has been spent both reading and also watching to see how the two communities have regrouped after the episode. Some have stayed where they are, some have moved on. I think that now for the most part things have settled down.

For me there are echoes in my head, in my heart, of what happened. I can still feel a cautiousness in me as I move forward. However I am pleased that I listened to myself and did what was helpful for me to feel comfortable, safe online. I might initiate more movement, I might not, but I will do so in my own time.

As I said, this was about me trying to understand my own reaction to the incident, which sort of took me by surprise - my reaction, I mean.

Hopefully this post is the start of more posts again.