touching the shadow

In my dream my Thatha becomes the president. And all of a sudden I have a secret service

detail. And in this dream he’s not a benevolent, thoughtful president. He’s “the bad guy”. The one everyone’s scared. Thatha, in reality, is a kind and thoughtful person. But I also see the ways he’s a kid. He refuses to surrender, to learn, to follow. He is very set in his ways and his ideas. If he wasn’t so far away, he would be more of a patriarch, more in charge and more forceful on everyone. Even now, he has that kind of power over his kids.

My mom agrees about the kind of work we can do together to take care of others. It’s kind of a relief, realizing that I don’t have to be the only one holding healing on behalf of my family. But it’s also scary to admit that I won’t be the only one. Amma and I will keep growing together. There will be more and more opportunities for learning and development and settling and discovering who we are. And in those opportunities, life blooms. Healing is blooming in my family. Perhaps it’s fair to say that while things are awful around the world, healing is blooming. Collective care is blooming. Tenderness is blooming.

I yearn to be an agent of tenderness. To sit at the feet of sweetness and massage its legs. To prostrate myself to unconditional love. To witness beautiful and ugly demonstrations alike and say… I choose to open my heart. I yearn to honor my own shadow. To make space for the anger and violence brewing in my deepest regions of pain. To offer unconditional love back to myself and release judgement. To hold, with care and firmness, the inner child that didn’t have all his needs met.

I miss when things were more simple. When we used to hang out at Bicentennial park, playing volleyball and shooting the shit. The many picnics and hangouts we used to have. The ways that when people came together, they said “I see you” and left it at that. The difficulty integrating the shadow led to my family being shunned and discarded. We were a cancerous tumor, fully disallowed from being seen as a whole part of the whole. We were to be excised.

I wouldn’t have it. I excised myself. I pushed out of the amniotic sac of dissociation and moved across the country. I refused to be a prop in someone else’s narrative. I am worthy of my own self-determination.

Even now, as I consider sharing this writing, I feel a shadow fall over me. The desire to be seen. The difficulty with imperfection. Is it my place to reveal my family’s shadow? But doesn’t every family have a shadow? I couldn’t have gotten sober without integrating more with my shadow. I couldn’t have moved from rage to forgiveness without looking more deeply at the ways that what I hate about my mother is in me, and may be the exact thing my kids hate about me.

I choose to love my hatred. My grief. My longing. My grasping. I am a complexity, filled with strife and joy alike. I am sovereign to love how and where I choose, and I choose peace. No more war with myself. No more dissociation. No more pretending things are better or worse than they are. Everything Is.

I’m learning to breathe more in conversation. I’m learning to ask people to slow down with me, and be present to exactly what’s alive in each moment. To interrupt and redirect flows and make space for what is unsaid, unseen, or marginalized. I am finding joy in integration with myself.