When I started working with a coach in September, I intended to get coaching on finding a new career. I needed someone to help me put together a resume and find something that aligned with what I wanted in life. 

My coach, Ally, quickly recognized that I wouldn’t be happy switching to another standard job or career. She encouraged me to read Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. She described it as spiritual and a bit “woo-woo,” so I was unsure if it would be the right fit. 

Desperate for answers and direction, I bought the book without thinking. I knew I needed something out of the norm to jump-start my new life, whatever it might turn into. 

My mouth hung open as I read the first pages of The Artist’s Way. Never in my life had I seen myself so clearly in someone else’s writing. It was as though someone had downloaded all of my hopes, dreams, and fears, reorganized them into a book about how to put them into practice, and sold them back to me. 

I cannot go more than a paragraph in the book without thinking, “Yep, I do that,” or “Do other people think like that, too?” I quit my job within a few weeks of opening the book. 

Doing something solely for myself and my mental well-being was a relief. The relief, however, was short-lived when I realized the work was just starting because, for anything to work for me creatively, I needed to do a lot of work on myself. 

Shadow-Work, to be precise. 

The Artist’s Way is adorned with outstanding inspirational quotes from people throughout history. One name is quoted most frequently—a name familiar to me from studying psychology in college: Carl Jung.

If you’ve taken a Myers-Briggs personality assessment, you are more familiar with Dr. Jung than you realize. 

While studying psychology in college, my relationship with Jung’s work was influenced by my relationship with religion as a lapsed Catholic and how his work was taught to me. He was presented as a descendant of Sigmond Freud’s teachings who liked to analyze dreams. 

I can’t stand hearing about the nonsense of people’s dreams. So, the idea that analyzing a dream about sorting paper clips in my underwear in an Arby’s with my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Schirmer, would reveal valuable information about my psyche did not lead me to explore more of his teachings.

Rather, it left me to view him as someone who had a few good ideas but was mostly a kook who thought the answers to life’s problems were in our dreams. As a twenty-year-old, that was all I needed to hear to shrug my shoulders, shake my head, and move on to something more concrete and scientific. 

Jung’s contention is that we all have traits or interests that we have decided to ignore. Some of these are negative, and some might be positive things we were told to give up on at some point in life by parents and/or perceived authority figures. 

“Without a well-developed shadow side, a person can easily become shallow and extremely preoccupied with the opinions of others.”

Carl Jung

That sentence defines how I lived the first thirty-nine years of my life. 

In my brain, shadow work meant I would need to get spiritual and blame my parents for all of the problems in my life, which were two things I had no interest in doing. So, I ignored the idea altogether. 

Reading The Artist’s Way made it clear that avoiding shadow work would not be possible. It is around every corner. To get anywhere, I would need to uncover things that would certainly be uncomfortable and painful at times.

There is one crucial question everyone should ask themselves first and foremost before they dig into their childhood searching for answers about the person they have become as an adult:

Did my parents do the best they could to raise me?

If your immediate and honest answer to that question is yes, you need to understand the work is yours to do.

Chastizing your parents might feel good, but it will not get you further down the road. It will feel nice momentarily, but you will be left battling the same issues. Furthermore, you will have one or two fewer people to turn to for love, guidance, or even a hug. 

If your answer to the question is “No,” you need to talk to someone far more qualified to help you out. You do not need advice from a guy who had to fight for his life to earn a 3.0 GPA and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. 

For the “yes” people (like me), it’s time to grow up.

As an adult who is white-knuckling through this whole parenting thing right now, there are too many nights I go to sleep wishing I had done better for my kids. I resolve to be a better Dad the next day, but then I invent a new way to screw up. 

You know what I don’t need? Having my children recite my ‘greatest hits’ of failures to me twenty or thirty years from now. I wrote the music and lyrics for those chart-toppers; no one knows them better.

You know who else doesn’t need that, your parents.

They are the low-hanging fruit. They are the people desperate for you to visit or pick up the phone and call for an update on your life. You probably aren’t going to go to the effort of tracking down all the bullies and awful teachers who played a significant role in creating your shadow, so don’t put all of it on your parents. 

You don’t need to remind them that there were days they couldn’t take it anymore. The days when if they heard “mom” or “dad” one more time, they were sure they would have a psychotic break. 

Take a look at your own body of work before blaming it all on your parents. 

Does that mean you won’t trace some of your issues back to interactions with your parents? 

Of course not. 

When I’ve uncovered things, I’ve found that they are mostly silly. They wouldn’t register on my list of events on any given day of my adult life. However, they were devastating to the kid they happened to. 

As an adult, it’s silly that I still know the name of the girl who made fun of me for spelling “baby” wrong during my second-grade spelling bee and still, if I’m honest, hold a grudge. 

While it has played a prominent role in my avoiding the spotlight for any reason, personally or professionally, I’ve discovered that there is nothing that the girl or I can say about that incident that changes anything about the thirty-one years that have passed since the incident. Not to mention, she is an adult now, and while it was damaging to me, I’d guess she has no recollection of making fun of me. 

I have been spending a lot of time rounding up these silly things that make up my shadow and shining lights on them, only to find they aren’t worth thinking about, let alone driving my life choices. 

As I write this, I am thirty-nine with two children, ages seven and five. 

My parents were my age and had three children (ages 11, 10, and 8) when I was born. 

I am going to focus on my father through this example for no other reason than the fact that I grew up with Boomer parents who followed gender norms in the household. In those scenarios, our moms had the advantage of being constantly present. She had the luxury of being the parent who dolled out the love and affection at the steep cost of dealing with endless whining, fights, lying, and my two other siblings, Janie and Dave.

My Dad is the oldest of thirteen. He started delivering milk when he was young and stopped working (for the most part) just a couple of years ago.

He went to college, fought in Vietnam, attended medical school at the University of Minnesota, was a resident at Mayo Clinic, and dedicated his life to treating, healing, and saving thousands of children’s lives while maintaining a marriage and a family. That’s barely scratching the surface of his story, and I’m exhausted. 

My Dad cared for every child and family he came across. Going out with him anywhere in Minnesota as a kid was a small taste of what it would be like to have a parent who is a celebrity. We couldn’t go anywhere without a former colleague or patient stopping him to say hello and, usually, thank you. 

I have the things I have in this life thanks to the hard work my Dad put in professionally.

Did that mean there were areas where things lacked? Of course. There were events my Dad couldn’t attend when he was on call or had many patients. I don’t have what would be called an affectionate relationship with him; we don’t hug a lot or say, “I love you” often. 

It would be easy to use that as the reason I am not where I want to be in my life. It would be lovely to remove myself from all responsibility and pin it on one of the two people who gave me this life.

That is akin to mining for shit in a mountain made of gold.

I didn’t need to do any searching to know my parents gave it their all for me. I can’t exist in a day of my adult life without being able to draw a direct line to them for all of the great things I have in my life. 

I’ve found that shadow work is not the search for something or someone to blame for who I am. It’s the search for the person I truly am that I keep hidden away because of something I misinterpreted when I was younger. 

For example, I loved when people would stop my Dad and remind him of how he saved their child’s life when they were younger. I craved that kind of attention. I wanted to have a positive effect on people’s lives. Because I wanted that kind of attention, I decided I needed to be my Dad to get it. I spent a lot of my childhood convinced I would be a doctor. 

There are easier ways to get that attention, but I was an idiot kid who knew nothing about how the world worked. Is the kid who, with a broken wrist and using a cane due to a snowmobile accident, auditioned for his fifth-grade talent show by lip-syncing “This Is How We Do It” by Montell Jordan a good judge of… anything?

Thoughts like that opened things up for me. I started coming up with more and more until I realized that I had held many beliefs about myself, my abilities, and my weaknesses since I was a kid. 

Perpetuating false beliefs I developed in childhood for so long turned me into an idiot adult who doesn’t know anything about how the world works. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I realized it was ‘peace’ of mind rather than ‘piece’ of mind. So, no, calling myself an idiot isn’t harsh.

If I wasn’t a reliable source of knowing what I wanted to do as a kid, then there is no way I could accurately assess what I couldn’t do as an adult. Nevertheless, I trusted my own perception of what I was capable of, allowing these baseless, limiting thoughts to spread like an infection until I had a long list of things I couldn’t do and a short list of what I could do. The problem was I had no interest in doing any of the stuff on the shortlist. 

The only thing that has been a constant want in my life is writing. I have been obsessed with writing for as long as I can remember. 

I wish the path I obsess over was more practical, like being an accountant or doing something technology-based. It’s just not the answer for me. Even if I had the aptitude for those things, I’d be miserable doing them. 

I have been miserable for a large portion of my life because I lived under the assumption that I needed to keep working through the misery to get the money, life, and time I wanted to pursue my dream. When I looked around, that was how life worked. Over time, this way of life took its toll, so I had no idea who I was anymore. 

“Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do in order to have what you want.”

Margaret Young

So, here I sit, typing away, hoping that Margaret is right about this one. I am doing what I want to do, which brings me more happiness between 8 AM and 5 PM on a weekday than I thought possible. 

However, I am still searching for “who I really am.”

The good news? Thirty-nine years of being a moron has given me a lot of good stories and a penchant for good humor. I’ll be sure to bring you more “wisdom” as I pull it out of the shadows.

Cheers.