What's Been Going On With Me Lately...

From Women Who Run With the Wolves...


"The shadow, also, however, can contain the divine, the luscious, beautiful, and powerful aspects of personhood. For women especially, the shadow almost always contains very fine aspects of being that are forbidden or given little support by her culture. At the bottom of the well in the psyches of too many women lies the visionary creator, the astute truth-teller, the far-seer, the one who can speak well of herself without denigration, who can face herself without cringing, who works to perfect her craft. The positive impulses in shadow for women in our culture most often revolve around permission for the creation of a handmade life.

These discarded, devalued, and "unacceptable" aspects of soul and self do not just lie there in the dark, but rather conspire about how and when they shall make a break for freedom. They burble down there in the unconscious, they seethe, they boil, till one day, no matter how well the lid over them is sealed, they explode outward and upward in an unchanneled torrent and with a will of their own.
Then it is, as they say in the backwoods, like trying to put ten pounds of mud back into a five-pound sack. What has erupted from shadow is hard to cap once it has been detonated. Though it would have been far better to have found an integral way to consciously live out one's joy in the creative spirit than to have buried it at all, sometimes a woman is pushed to the wall, and this is the outcome.

The shadow life occurs when writers, painters, dancers, mothers, seekers, mystics, students, or journeywomen stop writing, painting, dancing, mothering, looking, peering, learning, practicing. They might stop because whatever they just spent long with did not come out the way they had hoped, or did not recieve the recognition it deserved, or countless other reasons. When the maker stops for whatever reason, the energy that naturally flows to her is diverted underground, where it surfaces whenever and wherever it can. Because a woman feels she cannot in daylight go full-bore at whatever it is she wants, she begins to lead a strange double life, pretending one thing in daylight hours, acting another way when she gets a chance.
When a woman pretends to press her life down into a nice tidy little package, all she accomplishes is spring-loading all her vital energy down into shadow. "Fine, I'm fine," such a woman says. We look at her across the room or in the mirror. We know she is not fine. Then one day, we hear she has taken up with a piccolo player and has run off to Tippicanoe to be a pool hall queen. And we wonder what happened, because we know she hates piccolo players and always wanted to live on Orcas Island, not on Tippicanoe, and she never before mentioned anything about pool halls.

Like Hedda Gabler in Henrik Ibsen's play, the wildish woman can pretend to live "an ordinary life" while gritting her teeth, but there is always a price to pay. Hedda sneaks a passionate and dangerous life, playing games with an ex-lover and with Death. Outwardly, she pretends to be content wearing bonnets and listening to her dry husband cavil about his dusty life. A woman can be outwardly polite and even cynical, but inwardly hemorrhaging.

Or, like Janis Joplin, a woman can try to comply until she can't stand it any longer, and then her creative nature, corroded and sickened by being forced into the shadow, erupts violently to rebel against the tenets of "breeding" in reckless ways that disregard one's gifts and one's very life.
You can call it anything you like, but sneaking a life because the real one is not given room enough to thrive is hard on women's vitality. Captured and starved women sneak all kinds of things: they sneak unsanctioned books and music, they sneak friendships, sexual feeling, religious affiliation. They sneak furtive thinking, dreams of revolution. They sneak time away from their mates and families. They sneak a treasure into the house. They sneak their writing time, their thinking time, their soul-time. They sneak a spirit into the bedroom, a poem before work, they sneak a skip or an embrace when no one's looking.

To detour off this polarized path, a woman has to surrender the pretense. Sneaking a counterfeit soul-life never works. It always blows out the sidewall when you're least expecting it. Then it's misery all around. It's better to get up, stand up, no matter how homemade your platform, and live the most you can, the best you can, and forgo sneaking the counterfeits. Hold out for what has real meaning and health for you.

...It is difficult to sneak little shreds of life this way but women do it every day. When a woman feels compelled to sneak life, she is in minimal subsitence mode. She sneaks life away from the hearing of "them," whoever the them is in her life. She acts disinterested and calm on the surface, but whenever there is a crack of light, her starved self leaps out, runs for the nearest life form, lights up, kicks back, charges madly, dances herself silly, exhausts herself, then tries to creep back to the black cell before anyone notices she is gone.

Women with poor marriages do this. Women made to feel inferior do this. Women filled with shame, women fearing punishment, ridicule, or humiliation do this. Instinct-injured women do this. Sneaking is good for a captured woman only if she sneaks the right thing, only if that thing leads to her liberation. In essence, sneaking good and filling and brave pieces of life causes the soul to be even more determined that the sneaking stop, and that it be free to lead life out in the open as it sees fit.

While we could rightfully be proud of the soul brave enough to try to sneak a something, an anything, under such drought conditions, the fact remains that that alone cannot be the sole issue. A whole psychology has to include not only body, mind, and spirit, but also, equally, culture and environ. And in this light, it must be asked at each level how it came to be that any individual woman feels she has to cringe, flinch, grovel, and plead for a life that is her own to begin with."

(pages 236-240.)