I’m convinced that when I was little, I knew exactly who I was. When I looked in a mirror, my body was a person with a head, torso and limbs just like every other person—like the stick families on the back windows of minivans—my parents, sister, and dog by my side. But my insides. I had this ‘me’ inside that filled me up and wasn’t afraid to push right through the walls of my skin for the world to see.

Where did she go?

I have memories of first discovering things about me, things I didn’t want to be a part of my insides. When I was about five, I discovered I was Stupid and a Liar.

A big box of burgundy cherries sat on a shelf in our family friends’ garage; the visitors were welcome to them. I grabbed a handful, some dangling down from my small fingers by their bright green stems like jewelry scooped out of a treasure chest. I wandered blissfully around on the concrete floor, looking at pictures of half-naked women propped up against cars while I pretended that the sweet juice running down my throat was cough syrup. Plink. Cherry pit.

I smiled thinking about the creek my family and our friends had swam in that weekend, even the adults had indulged themselves and went in. I slid another cherry into my mouth, placing it just at the opening of my lips and sucking hard inward, quickly, so that it shot into my mouth with a pop. My molars sunk in, my tongue pushed to the roof of my mouth to separate the pit from the flesh. Plink. Cherry pit.

My dad had promised ice cream cones on the way home. And it was my sister’s turn to lay on the floor of our long, flat 1976 Chrysler Cordoba, our “boat”, with the lump in the middle of the scratchy, red carpeted floor in the back to separate the two sides—I would have the whole back seat to myself to lounge across while I read my Archie comics. Plink. Cherry pit.

After my parents brought the last of our luggage out from our friends’ house, we said our goodbyes and readied ourselves to climb into our car for the drive home.

“What the hell? Who dropped their cherry pits on the floor of my garage? There’s a garbage can right here for crissakes, my new floor is stained!”

As the words “cherry pits” came out of the man’s mouth, I was pulled from my dream-like state like a live crab hitting boiling water. I had never seen anger come from the father of the hosting family and it was now spitting out of him like the sparks I had seen when my dad welded machinery parts. My tender skin already felt the sting of the sparks and I wasn’t prepared to step into the fire for what I was certain would be a witch burning.

I looked at my older sister who said distractedly to the man, as she smeared on her Dr. Pepper Lip Smacker, “Wasn’t me,” and then crawled onto the floor of the back of our car. I wished so desperately I were her in that moment. I wished I had gone with her to look at our friend’s sticker collection instead of eating those cherries.

My mind jumped about as my shell became unbearably hot in the crab pot. There were several kids there that day who could have been careless as well. Did they all do stupid things too? How could I have been so stupid? Stupid, stupid me.

I then did what innumerable kids in my situation had done before: I denied, denied, and denied. It was obvious by the time all the evidence came forward that it was me, but the more I denied, the less of a chance I had to go back to anything that resembled the truth. I had decided that holding onto the lie was less painful than entering that fire.

But Liar was now added to Stupid and I wanted neither to be in my insides, or on my outsides, for people to see. Shame, sadness, and fear spread through me. I immediately wanted it all gone just as much as I wanted that man’s fire gone. I looked desperately about, feeling like I had to rid of Stupid and Liar like I would a bag of illegal drugs into a dumpster. And then, I did something that would change the course of my insides: I dropped them into the closest hiding spot I could find, my shadow. Just like the fallen cherry pits, plink, in they went, hopefully never to be seen again.

That’s the great thing about shadows, they never see light. But just to be sure no one else could see that garbage, including me, I threw my baby blanket, the one I still carried with me everywhere, over the shadow. And then I didn’t look back. What I didn’t understand about shadows at the time, however, is that no matter what you throw on them, the darkness still ends up on top. Nothing is really hidden, the shadow is always there, including everything in it—dark but transparent.

“Well whoever made this mess and didn’t fess up is a liar,” the father said, staring at me; he was pissed that I was about to get away with the offense.

Everything that had come to light was now out of sight. Phew. But as I stared at this angry man, the shame, sadness and fear fought to resurface. Fruitlessly pushing them down like bobbing toys in a bathtub, a miracle happened: the “easier” feelings began to bounce to the surface, the feelings that I didn’t have to own! I could just hurl anger and hate haphazardly at him in order to rid of them—enter blame.

Who are you to be so high and mighty about your bloody garage floor, you bastard? is what my now-adult mind guesses may have been running through my mind as we drove out of our friends’ driveway. Though I doubt my thoughts were that insolent, they may have been close due to having witnessed my dad’s well-established venting vocabulary many a time.

Now that felt better, didn’t it?

With a convenient place to put the yucky stuff I started to feel about myself over the coming years, all sorts of things were thrown into my shadow, some more hurtful than others:

“Go away, we don’t want to play with you” – plink went loser.

“You could lose a little on your thighs” – plink went unattractive.

“Don’t you ever talk?” – plink went odd and boring.

My shadow became like a cement slab dragging around behind me, its powerful whispers infiltrating my thoughts and words. Nothing is really hidden, the shadow is always there, including everything in it—dark but transparent. But still, I tried. If I stood directly under the light, the shadow would only be a spot underneath me and I could trick myself into believing that it wasn’t there. But I became numb standing in one place for so long, immobile. And then, like a bag of gremlins, it would all come bursting out at the most inconvenient times, like during a fight with my spouse or my children.

When getting angry at my young son one day, when I had found his uneaten vegetables in his lunch kit, I turned to see shame wash over him while he sat at our dining room table. Stupid. Liar.

Cherry pits I whispered to myself.

“You know,” I told him, “when I was younger, if I didn’t eat all of my lunch, I would sometimes throw it in the garbage so I wouldn’t get in trouble. I hated getting in trouble, I was a sensitive kid like you. That you feel deeply is beautiful and though it sometimes hurts, it allows your compassion to also run deeply. And you’ve been honest by leaving your vegetables in your lunch.”

He then slowly leaned his torso back in his chair and looked up to ceiling as though trying to get the tears to fall back into his body. He looked back down at me with a muddled mixture of shame and relief and said, “I’ve done that too. I’ve thrown my vegetables away so you wouldn’t get mad.”

I hugged him and felt his shame dissolve like wet cotton candy. We embraced his humanness in that moment, both the formidable and the undesirable pieces of it. Through our sharing, there was no need for anything to be hidden.

Was it possible that what I had tried to dispose of in my shadow were valuable pieces of me rather than pieces to be discarded? Were there pieces in there that I needed so as to remember who I truly was when I came into this world?

I walked out into the late day sunlight and turned toward my long shadow. There lay the baby blanket I had thrown over it years previous, now tattered and filthy. I squatted down and lifted an edge, remnants of the tenderness and innocence that I once felt when snuggling with it wafted through me like an inebriating perfume.

But under the blanket was cold darkness. Fear seized hold of my chest and shook me hard, hollering at me to, “leave it alone, you’ve hidden those things for a reason!” I grabbed a flashlight and reluctantly shone it under the blanket. I realized, however, that the light made the shadow disappear. I put down the flashlight, took a deep breath, and stepped down into the darkness as though descending into a manhole leading to the depths of a sewer.

Shuffling my bottom along a set of damp steps, my feet reached out in front of me like antennae both searching and ready to defend. When I got to what felt like the bottom, one of my hands landed on a round pebble. And then my other hand pressed down on two more. Picking one of them up, in the darkness, I felt it carefully; it had a thin ridge running around the circumference. Cherry pit. I dropped it, my hand shaking.

But then, the voice of a five-year-old dreamer who had chewed on those pits and let them drop out of her mouth without thinking about it, whispered, “I’ve missed you.”

A thick curtain of tears rested tenuously over my eyes. She had made a mistake, but she wasn’t Stupid; she had lied, but she wasn’t a Liar. How awesome she had been, a dreamer; how scared she had been, incredibly sensitive, not wanting to get hurt; how human of her that she hadn’t wanted others to judge her.

I closed my lids to let my tears drop and then felt the girl’s hand in mine, the cherry pit between our palms. She led me back up the stairs and when we entered the light, she motioned toward the ground. We dropped down to our knees and together, dug a hole in the soft ground. Plink, I dropped the cherry pit into the hole.

As the tree grew, I grew. It’s far from perfect. Some branches are gnarled and twisted from damaging storms, but they’re strong; some cherries are full of holes made from judgement and deceit, but their ugliness reminds me that I can endeavor to be more compassionate and honest. That is my humanness and that is my cherry tree. And when I climb to the top and see new, limitless vistas, I know that I am more whole than ever.

 

~

I’ve recently connected with Lianna Jansen who has just started an amazing company called Power House http://powerhousesource.com/ Alongside this, she is gathering women to write about obstacles they’ve overcome in their lives, to be published in a book (the proceeds going to our local women’s shelter). She has asked me to contribute and the above is the result. In a busy life, it’s always great when we can do one project and use it for dual purposes (book and blog), woohoo!

This story comes from my adult eyes looking back to an unconscious experience of my younger self. I’m a strong believer of being aware of our thoughts, feelings and motivations as much as we can be — so much of who we are becomes unconscious habit. I’ve found that just being curious is a good start. When we can bring those things we’re ashamed of into our consciousness and embrace the learning (and even the flecks of gold they may carry) we can become more whole, a benefit to both ourselves and our world. That’s not to say that I feel we should all regress back to childhood and unearth the ugliness from our shadows — this may work for some and not for others — but rather, as adults, begin or continue to reflect on the way we are in the world. The answers aren’t always found where there’s light. We can also share our cherry tree stories with the children around us and help them understand that both the sweet and sour is what makes a cherry a cherry.

Finally, Carl Jung, a famous Swiss psychiatrist (1875 – 1961), formulated the concept of the Shadow, so here, I pay my respects to him and his work.

Cover photo by Inma Ibáñez on Unsplash