Enemy

My shadows eyes look just like mine.

Symbolic Landscape (1940) by Diego Rivera

Well, it happened. You got swallowed up by insecurity and self doubt which then spiraled into feelings of unworthiness. Your negativity weighed down your entire being, made your eardrums ring, made your legs feel like tree trunks. Your lungs couldn’t handle the added weight, breathing didn’t come naturally, so you randomly tried to remember some breathing exercises you learned on #WellnessTok. You’re alone in this, you think to yourself, fuzzily and confused. Your body and mind struggle with the weight that forces you to trudge along. When you’re alone you notice a dusty figure and you wonder if it's your shadow. It looks like your shadow, and could certainly pass as your shadow, but something is different.

You never noticed her until now, because now your shadow seems twice your size and twice as dark. As she grows she arches over you, and you're surrounded by a pool of black. But as she grew taller she also became a much more beautiful version of yourself. You notice how she’s incredibly well kept; her button downs are pressed, her hair is always blown out with some kind of magic serum that doesn’t allow for one hair to go awry. She rarely spoke, almost as if she’s relying solely on her intimidating appearance to communicate for her. When she did speak, her words were few but firm. Her tone always suggests you need to follow whatever she instructed. You wonder how she developed, how everything in her felt so certain and easy. She’s appeared now during your intense writers block, and she’s very hard to ignore. Is this correlated? You ask yourself one morning as you brush your teeth. Will she continue to hinder me from the page? You continue to wonder. There’s something tainted in the air, everything smells stale wherever you go. 

She follows you into the room where you go to write, which just so happens to be your favorite room. You notice she’s arranged all her belongings and drops them right by your laptop, claiming her stay. This is where she decides to settle, you think to yourself. You begin to wonder about her strategy. 

Still, even with her around, relentlessly in your way, you try to visit your favorite room so you can attempt to write, even if it’s a few words. The room feels cold and stiff, but you try to root yourself into it anyways. You sit down and open your laptop. You feel the onset of sweat in your armpits and the tingle in your eardrums. Your body feels weighed again and the blank page in front of you is out of focus. The literacy has literally left your body, your mind no longer connects to the keyboard to type out words. You’re intimidated by the blank page, you can’t even muster more than three words onto it. The blank page becomes loud; everything feels wrong, distasteful, meaningless. 

At the same time your shadow appears behind the page, rising from an unknown source, mighty and mean. She rises and expands. You meet her eyes and she cracks a vicious smile. Your eyes lower.

Delete, delete, delete. Close your laptop. Leave your favorite room. You’re not worthy of it anymore, you conclude.

The next day your thoughts become worse, and wonder if she’s tainted the oxygen you're breathing. Even when she is not around, she is in your head.  You reach for your toothbrush and determine that everything feels as if it's in jeopardy. There is this voice you hear that sounds muffled, you can’t make out what it’s saying. The voice seems close enough now to make it out: Your life is tainted with inconsistencies, you’ve stopped writing because you found it better to stop seeking the truth, you’ve ended your resistance towards complacency. You finish brushing your teeth, tilt your head forward for a spit, and wonder who’s voice this is. Mine? Or hers?

The sky changes every time you enter your favorite room, you can tell by the windows. Looking through them the sky always turns grey and foggy. It begins to mist and sometimes the sky works up to a full storm. The room gets drafty, your space heater can't ever get the tiny room to warm up. It starts to smell stale. The room adds to your weight, like you have an added load to carry whenever you walk into it. The earth, the sky, the room, your shadow - they are all pressing down upon you with their weight. 

Confer and conform. You hear these words echoing within the room but can't make out its source. It didn’t sound like it was from above or down below, or from within the walls. It wasn’t a loud voice or a soft whisper. It was quickly and bluntly spoken. It came and went and you question if you even heard those words to begin with. You wonder if it's the voice that’s made a home in your head. You wonder if your shadow has anything to do with this voice. Where is she? What is she to gain from my regression? You ask yourself this as you get up to leave your favorite room, once again overwhelmed with disappointment. 

You stop visiting your favorite room altogether and become a slave to your desires, the ones you know don’t benefit you but feel good anyways. You watch reruns of The Office and start projecting onto your friends. You stop reading all together and go on TikTok til your brain turns to mashed potatoes. You go to Sephora and buy a lip liner that's basically the exact shade as the rest of the 12 lipliners in your makeup drawer. These artificial desires never appease your hunger. You feel yourself becoming erased, and for the first time in years, you allow it. But even still, you wonder about this drastic change, the way the blank page repels you, and you feel compelled to talk to your shadow about it. 

In the bathroom as you brush your teeth you get lost in thought. The voice is getting stronger, you hear it at first from a distance but it’s traveling rapidly towards you. You stop brushing to get a sense of where it’s coming from. Finally, it speaks audibly: You have lost intimacy with yourself. The blank page is just that…blank. You’re so afraid of what you're afraid of, you can't even muster to write it down anymore. You used to write from your deep core, you used to achieve self-autonomy, preservation, revolution. Five hundred words can change a self. Now there’s zero. You’re keeping secrets from your fingers. You no longer want to put yourself on the line, you no longer want to feel naked all the time. 

The voice has you figured out. You lean forward for a spit and charge towards your favorite room. You turn to your shadow and ask her if it’s this that you crave, safety. 

She says, yes. Safety and complacency are the same. You are not meant to be an artist because you crave these two things too much, an artist works through fear and you can’t do that. 

After hearing her response you are struck with nostalgia. Something feels familiar but you can’t make the connection. In this moment you realize she’s a vestige of your past, reminders of something real, but your memory only takes you so far.

The voice is stuck with you now, entangled in your eardrums. It goes on: You abandon the page the way your parents abandoned each other time and time again. Your childhood was a lesson on people. People, on a whim, leave. If you keep writing more people will veer off.

You turn to your shadow and ask it if it’s this that you’re afraid of, abandonment. She appears taller, more than before, almost engulfing the whole room in her darkness. She arches over your head with a smile, a Cheshire Cat right in front you, locking eyes with yours. You begin to notice her avaricious and distorted personality, she grows strong with each of your doubts. She’s ravenous for all of your insecurities. 

She says, yes, people abandon each other when they come to discover who they truly are. It’s better that no one knows who you are, even you. Keep yourself safe by keeping yourself quiet. 

You agree with this sentiment. Lately, your innards have been kept inside. Maybe this is what you’re afraid of, veering people away. But what's changed? You begin to remember what it was like before you stopped writing. Before this shift, you’ve become used to spilling your guts, all your living tissues once flowed and poured out of your body to form words, then sentences, then essays. Before this shift, spilling your guts lightened your weight. Your favorite room was a warm place that smelled of croissants and maple syrup. Outside your window there were blue skies and a radiant sun. Your body was mobile, taking you to your destination without a second thought.

Writing feels like a huge leap. Writing had such a pull that you became so immersed and you became the entire world. You used to travel through time and even through different multiverses without ever leaving your favorite room. Sometimes the power that comes from writing is too strong. Five hundred words has indeed veered people away. Your words became too audible for some ears. 

Who gave you permission to perform the act of writing? Who do you think you are? A contribution you are not worthy of, the voice recurs in the distance. 

Whenever you’re in deep self-doubt you remember your masters: Audre Lorde says our silence will never save us. Toni Morrison says writing is something she can not not do, that it’s her form of thinking. Anaïs Nin says writing is the core of individuality, personality, and originality. 

My shadow, seen laughing in the corner of the room, a deep laugh that boasts satisfaction and fulfillment, breaks your train of thought. She’s taking you away from your memories, and bringing you back to the present. She succeeds. 

Finally, my shadow speaks again: Perhaps you should conform. Perhaps you should lower your voice to a whisper. Stop speaking from within, stop writing to cultivate emotion. If you want to make it in this world, stop visiting the page. You should listen to the voices in your head. 

As she says this she comes down to your level. You raise your head and your eyes meet hers and become locked. You stare into the whites of her eyes, a dull, almost matted look to them. There is no moisture glossed over them, and it clicks for you that she is lifeless. The more you stare into them the larger they grow, her pupils expanding larger and larger right in front of you. You become dizzy in the black of them. You have no perception of anything else, you’re completely lost in the grandeur of her inanimate eyes. It is clear now that nothing could ever make her shed a tear, she’s been stiffened by the harshness of her own words, and flattened by her meanness to become anything else other than someone else's shadow. Suddenly you have this cloudy realization that she could've been something, something that she wanted but never came to fruition. Lost in the expansiveness of her eyes you know exactly who she is, she is your former self, and she appeared during your intense writer's block as a way of keeping your present self safe and subdued. 

Since then our encounters have transformed. What was once a highly agitated and fearful confrontation, now is to be felt with a compassionate welcome. Our encounters can no longer be passive and oppressive, but tolerable and understanding. You’re an ally of your shadow now. In order for you to confront your truth, you must confront hers as well. You must sit with her in the room as you try to write. You must denounce all of her narratives about you. You have to self-advocate for yourself even if it’s against yourself. You are your own worst enemy. In your favorite room, in front of the blank page, you’re an enemy and a friend, both at once, a taunting pull in two directions, and you must master how to balance both. You realize this balance can never be even, and they never have been even, one will always outweigh the other. 

The next morning you hear nothing as you brush your teeth. You feel compelled to seek out your shadow so you enter your favorite room. You hold her hand, and with it the whole world. You have felt this feeling before, a feeling that comes rarely, you've only felt it a handful of times in your 36 years. You accept yourself: your shadow, the draft in your favorite room, the constant storm outside your window, the added weight of your body, the entangled voice inside your eardrums, and the general regression you are undergoing. It clicks that the world will continue on its axis regardless of the largeness of your shadow. It clicks that your writer's block does not determine anything about you or your sense of safety. 

You are a vessel, in which all sorts of forces and spirits are coursing and flashing perpetually, the distant voice says, but this time with an encouraging tone. You don’t really understand what that means but you translate it as something positive, enough to feel a little clearer on the situation. The room is calm, you see a tiny ray of light outside your window. You feel compelled to sit down and open your laptop.

You catch a glimpse of your shadow in the corner, she’s no longer so close, but at a safe distance. She’s packing up belongings to leave your favorite room. She grows shorter and skinnier as she departs, the pool of black that once filled the floor quickly grew smaller and smaller until the blondeness of the wood floors came back as if they were always there. You realize she no longer has your insecurity to gas her up, so she up and left. You watch her leave and realize that she’ll be back eventually, and when she does come back you promise you’ll be a little more graceful on yourself. Next time the void comes, you can stare into it, jump inside, watch reruns of The Office and swim in a pool of black until she moves out. Next time you hear the murmuring voice, wondering where it came from, remember you have to sit in dirt for awhile before you can touch the clouds. Next time you stare into your own eyes, lifeless and matted, stop insisting you don’t belong here.