Friend,
Shadows are curious creatures.
I’m sure we’ve all noticed how long our shadow can be at the end of a day. As someone who always wished that I was a little bit taller (I wish I was a baller, I wish I had a girl if I did I would call her.- Sorry this 90s kid couldn’t help himself.), it’s a nice dream to imagine I was that tall for a few seconds.
Here is the truth though: Shadows are unreliable narrators.
In literature or story-telling, an unreliable narrator is someone whose version of a story cannot be trusted. It’s a distortion of a story that highlights or diminishes what actually happened.
And that’s shadows. They shrink or exaggerate a complex and colorful 3-D object into a black 2-D figure.
And this is what you do with your mistakes and imperfections.
You either exaggerate it, allowing it to cast a long shadow and the unreliable narrator say, “It’s all your fault. It’s all there in black and white.”
Or
You minimize it, having it show basically no shadow and the unreliable narrator says, “Look you did nothing wrong. There’s nothing to see here.”
What we need are not shadows, but mirrors. We need to be able to see ourselves clearly and correctly in living color.
The harder work is learning when your own deceptive unreliable narrator is speaking and distorting your perspective to serve another agenda.
How do you know you are listening to an unreliable narrator in your head?
It’s all or nothing. There’s no nuance. It’s extreme.
It’s the same story since childhood. Often your unreliable narrator comes from a grounding childhood belief or story. If someone told you that you were worthless as an 8 year-old, and you still insult yourself in the same way, it’s unreliable.
It’s purpose is to protect you. The unreliable narrator is trying to protect you (think Anxiety in Inside Out 2), it just has many flaws in the process.
And just a reminder that you need the voice of truth. Maybe you should take a moment to listen to Lauren Daigle’s You Say. Here’s the link.
Love,
Aaron
Good 👍