My Road to Self Sabotage and Back

The Long Pour: On Masks, Shadows, and Why Becoming Yourself Might Be a Civic Problem

Saturday night, the Cokes poured, and I’ve been sitting with a thought all week that I’m not sure I can resolve by the end of this column. Fair warning.

It started with Jung. I have been reading a ton of his works. He’s a Swiss psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and psychologist born in the late 19th century. He is considered one of the most influential psychologists of all time. Carl Jung thought the mind wasn’t one thing pretending to be whole; it was several things, mostly strangers to each other, sharing an address. The persona is the one who answers the door. The shadow is the one that lives in the spare room you stopped going into years ago, not because anything’s wrong with it, just you stopped. Individuation, his big word for the whole project, means eventually walking down that hall and introducing them. Not evicting anyone. Introducing.

That’s it. That’s the theory. Everything else is commentary. And I have a lot of commentary.

The persona is the easy part to explain because we all do it constantly without thinking. The barista doesn’t need your 2 am thoughts; she needs “a competent person ordering coffee.” Your accountant needs “a client with organized receipts,” not your inner world. Society mostly runs on people performing a slightly curated version of themselves, so everyone else doesn’t have to manage the uncurated one. That’s not fake. That’s just load-bearing.

Let’s quickly consider this persona. People are making good money off their Personas. That is basically the description of an ‘Influencer’. Every social media app you have a profile on is a representation of your persona. It’s a fluffed-up version of it, but it’s you. We talk about judging ourselves against everyone else’s highlight reel. That is 100% true. The mask that we expose to the public. We even have filters to change how we actually look. I see it in the online dating profiles. Mostly women are doing it, but I have seen a few men add a nice little James Bond-esque filter to their facade. It’s comical at best and sad at worst. Watching women jam ass fat into their lips and take parts of their belly fat to make a new ear. It’s bonkers to me. Their shadows aren’t in the spare room; they are in a cell in Siberia. I feel sorry for people who are unable to differentiate themselves from what is true and what is not, and by adding a way to monetize it…we’ve lost the plot.

Mine’s been some flavour of fierce-and-accomplished for so long I genuinely lost track of where it ends, and I begin. Which, I looked it up, is apparently exactly the failure mode Jung warned about. Cool – Cool- Cool. Good to know I’m a case study.

Okay, the shadow. This is the part I’ve been avoiding actually writing for like a week.

I have a superiority complex. I’ve known this for a while; it’s all over my journals, I’ve side-eyed it from across the room more times than I can count, but I never really asked where it came from until now. My grade 12 legacy, which is what we leave behind, was literally “her superiority complex.” At the time, I thought it was honourable. Oof.

Here’s where: I grew up with a disease nobody around me had heard of. I was probaly 1 of 15 people in my entire province that was born with cystic fibrosis. I had to take these pills every time I ate food. I missed a lot of school due to repeated lung infections. That was impossible to hide. And on top of that, I had these polyps blocking my nasal passage as a kid, couldn’t breathe through my nose, constantly wiping it on my sleeve, the whole visibly-not-okay-kid package. And kids notice that stuff. Kids tease. So somewhere in there, some small strategic part of me went: okay, if I can’t be normal, I’ll be exceptional instead. In grade 3, that looked like telling everyone I’d been in a dog food commercial. Total fabrication. Delivered with complete confidence. Because being “the kid with the leaky nose and the weird disease” wasn’t a role I was willing to play if I had any say in it.

And the thing about strategies that work when you’re eight is they keep running. I’m not eight. But I’ll catch myself doing some grown-up version of the dog food commercial thing. Embellishing. Making sure people see the impressive cut before they see anything else. And sometimes mid-sentence, I’ll think, wait — who is this for? Them or me? I genuinely don’t always know.

Somewhere in here I went down a rabbit hole on what the shadow actually is, technically, because I wanted to know if I was using the word right or just borrowing it because it sounds dramatic.

Turns out it’s both simpler and weirder than I expected. The shadow isn’t just “the bad stuff.” It’s everything that got shoved into the unconscious because it didn’t fit the version of you that was allowed to exist out loud, and that includes things you’d think of as good. Ambition, creativity, wanting things loudly. If the environment you grew up in didn’t have room for those either, they go in the spare room too, right next to the anger and the jealousy. Jung apparently called it “dark” not because it’s evil, just because it’s unlit. Nobody’s been in there with the lights on.

The part that actually stopped me was the projection piece. Apparently the more aggressively you criticize someone for a specific flaw, the more likely it is you’re looking at your own shadow wearing their face. Which- fine, great, thanks, that explains a lot about what I’m about to get into.

There’s also apparently a whole process for this, which I did not know was a process; I thought it was just “have an upsetting realization in the shower.” But noooo, there are steps. First, you notice the trigger: the moment something gives you a reaction way bigger than the situation warrants. Then you sit with it without immediately explaining it away. Then you go back and find where it actually started — usually some childhood thing, or some rule you absorbed about what you were allowed to be. And then, the last step, you let it be part of you instead of something running you from offstage.

I read that and went oh😕. That’s just… what I’ve been doing this whole column. I just didn’t know it had steps. I thought I was rambling with extra feelings.

Here’s the one I really didn’t want to put in writing.

I get jealous of other CFers who are healthier than me. Like, genuinely, ugly jealous. And every once in a while, that jealousy turns into a jab — some unwarranted little dig online at someone whose only actual crime was having a body that gave them more room than mine gave me. I know two CFers who became lawyers. I idolize them. I also feel something a lot less flattering than admiration when I think about them, and no version of this column works if I pretend otherwise.

Because under the jealousy is the actual thing: I wanted to be a lawyer. Still do, somewhere. I’d love to go back to school. But the disease eats most of my energy and most of my time and I don’t have the stamina for full-time campus life anymore, and that’s just true, not a failing.

Except, and here’s where it gets harder, law school wasn’t only taken from me. Some of it I gave away. I didn’t have the grades because I was too busy trying to be popular instead of doing the work. And underneath that, I wasn’t taking care of myself, and that cost me lung function I will never get back. The disease did its own damage. But I handed it some extra ground too, at exactly the age I should’ve been protecting what health I had left instead of spending it trying to be liked by people who, statistically, I probably don’t think about anymore.

So there are two griefs stacked on top of each other, and they don’t cancel out; they just sit there together. One is “this was taken from me.” The other is “I was part of how it got taken.” And honestly? I’m still mad at nineteen-year-old me. Not in the cute, water-under-the-bridge way. In the real way.

So, where’s the lesson. I don’t think there is one, exactly, which might be its own answer.

I keep wanting to write the sentence where it all resolves — nineteen-year-old me gets understood, the jealousy gets named and therefore handled, I walk away slightly wiser with my drink. I could write that sentence. I’m good at writing that sentence. That’s kind of the problem, actually, that sentence is its own little persona.

What’s true is messier. I’m still annoyed at her. The girl who skipped studying to go be liked somewhere, who didn’t think “lung capacity” was something with a bottom, because nineteen-year-olds don’t think anything has a bottom. I get why she did it. Doesn’t mean I’m over it. Both of those can be true at the same time, and neither one has to leave the room.

Same with the jealousy thing. I’d love to say I’ve spotted the pattern and now I just don’t do it. I’ll probably still see some healthier CFer post about a half-marathon and feel that flare. The only difference — and it’s small — is maybe I catch it a beat sooner now. Maybe.

Which, weirdly, brings me back to the society question I started with, whether all this self-excavation is actually good for anyone besides the person doing it.

Because if everyone did this — really sat with their own dog-food-commercial moments, their own nineteen-year-old grudges, what happens to all the stuff that runs on people NOT doing this? Workplaces run on personas. So do families. The “easygoing friend,” the “low-maintenance coworker” — those roles work because people keep playing them. If everyone individuated at once, a lot of the unglamorous, role-shaped labour that holds things together might just… stop happening, because everyone’s busy in their spare room having a long-overdue conversation with themselves.

And there’s a less flattering version of that, too, which is, this is MY work. Hours I’m spending on myself. Not on anyone else. Multiply that by everyone doing the same thing and maybe you get a lot of very self-aware people who are also a little more disengaged from each other than before.

I don’t think that means don’t do it. I think it just means know the bill exists. Even if you can’t always see who’s paying.

Jung’s whole integration idea isn’t a finish line. It’s more like a roommate situation. The shadow doesn’t move out. You just eventually stop pretending you can’t hear it through the wall. So in a world where you can be someone else…don’t.

Glass is mostly ice now. I think that’s fine too.

Stay fierce. The world will adjust.