Self-Awareness Isn’t a Vibe—It’s a Reckoning

Growth isn’t a performance, healing isn’t inevitable, and avoidance isn’t harmless—

Feb 14, 2025

Carl Jung said, "Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."

Character isn’t about what you project to the world through a carefully curated digital presence. Character is about what you practice—how you show up in difficult times, how you navigate conflict, and how you treat people when no one is watching.

The shadow self—the parts of us we suppress or reject—doesn’t vanish when we ignore it. Instead, it lingers in the background, shaping our behavior and decisions unconsciously. True growth comes from confronting and integrating this shadow, from acknowledging the messy, unresolved parts of ourselves instead of denying their existence.

As Jung also said, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

Me, Myself and My Shadow Self

Engaging with your shadow self isn’t fun, but it is necessary for growth. I wouldn’t know mine if a decade ago—well, it’ll be a decade in early April 2025—I hadn’t been—trigger warning—bleeding out on the bathroom floor after my final ( ; 🎉) attempt at taking my own life1.

There’s something about hitting rock bottom that forces you to face yourself. At least, that was true for me—because I chose to. I chose to be radically honest with myself. I crawled out of that deep, dark place where your mind convinces you that you shouldn’t be here. And crawling out (in a way that would make Angela Davis proud –grasping things at the root) —was never about a single moment of clarity or a one-time decision.

Because choosing to live wasn’t the end of my work. Choosing to live, for me, meant radical candour with myself, which meant being in a relationship with my shadow self—every single day—for the last decade2. It meant confronting myself over and over again. It meant realizing that healing wasn’t a destination I reached because I survived. It’s a process I’m still in.

Getting out of rock bottom isn’t the end of the work—it’s not even a guarantee that you’ll start. Because just surviving doesn’t mean you’re engaging with yourself.

Healing isn’t inevitable. You don’t hit a low point and magically become self-aware. A lot of people hit rock bottom and still avoid themselves. Still distort. Still, deflect. Still can’t tell themselves the truth. I think perhaps that means, sadly, there is lower to go or that there is a difference about hitting the bottom with your eyes open vs. closed.

I don’t know why that me, a decade ago, chose to have her eyes open, but I’m fucking so grateful, and so proud of that version of me for doing that. Don’t get me wrong, it’s exhausting. Sometimes I wish I had those blinders (and I’m certain, as a neurodivergent woman, that I have different blinders today, but they aren’t Carl Jung Shadow Self blinders, so #winning). I didn’t just survive—I confronted myself. And not just once, not just in hindsight, but actively, imperfectly, for better or for worse, for the last decade.

I didn’t and don’t let myself off the hook. I didn’t just sit with discomfort—I interrogated it. I challenged my narratives3. I refused to twist the truth to make myself feel better. Because real self-awareness isn’t about admitting you have a shadow—it’s about being in constant engagement with it. To understand it. Heal it. Love it. Nurture it. Respect it. Every single day. For as long as it takes. To make sure it never quietly runs the show again.

Breaking News (for Neurodivergent People)

I say all of this because I don’t think I fully understood (hi, my name is Samanta, and I’m late-diagnosed neurodivergent ) —that some people never meet their shadow selves. I thought everyone at least knew it was there, even if they weren’t engaging with it.

But what I learned recently is that some people genuinely don’t even know they have a shadow self. Or, they know they have one, but they only acknowledge the first six inches—like a kids’ pool at a rec center. Shallow, contained, manageable.

But here’s the thing: you can’t ignore yourself; you don’t get to opt out. Whether or not you acknowledge it, we all come equipped with an Olympic-sized deep end. And it’s part of you, not meeting it, or engaging with it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

And I wouldn’t recommend my approach to engaging with it. (In this metaphor, I’d be the girl who didn’t sleep but somehow was always sleeping for a few years—before throwing on a pair of prescription goggles, duct-taping gym weights to her hands and legs, and catapulting into the deep end. Again, don’t recommend it.)

The Cost of People Who Are Avoidant With Themselves

It’s uncomfortable—horrifying even—to acknowledge the worst parts of yourself. But if you claim to be self-aware and haven’t done the work to engage with, acknowledge, and heal the most painful parts of yourself, then what are you actually aware of?

Because knowing yourself isn’t just about recognizing your strengths or curating an image—it’s about wrestling with the parts of yourself you’d rather not claim.

I get that vulnerability is hard, and not everyone shares as candidly as I now do—so by all means, fake it till you make it externally. Internally, though? You have to be honest with yourself. You can’t pretend your shadow parts don’t exist.

And that’s where I see the biggest pattern in people who refuse to engage with their shadow selves: they work really hard to protect the "fake it till you make it" version of themselves—not just for others, but for themselves.

More often than not, narratives are built to serve it, to justify it, regardless of what the Truth really is.

Because if you refuse to look at the worst parts of yourself, then you have to believe a version of reality where those parts don’t exist. And when reality challenges that belief?

You rewrite it.
You distort events.
You justify actions.
You build layers of explanation that make you feel like the good person you desperately need to be.
You find people who will validate your revisionist version of events—who will reinforce the story you’ve told yourself.

But here’s the thing:

Curation isn’t self-awareness.
Avoidance isn’t growth.
Choosing not to face your shadow doesn’t mean it isn’t there—it just means it’s dictating your behaviour from the background, controlling your choices in ways you won’t even acknowledge.

And in the process, you’re not just lying to yourself. This kind of avoidance doesn’t just stay internal—it inevitably affects the people around you. Because protecting a false image of yourself will always come at someone else’s expense.

4 The Inevitable Reckoning

If you refuse to meet your shadow, it doesn’t disappear. It festers. It shapeshifts. It seeps into your relationships, your decisions, your patterns, your justifications. It governs you from the sidelines, and you will call it fate. You will call it bad luck. You will call it other people’s fault. Anything but what it actually is—your unexamined self running the show.

And that’s the real cost of avoidance.

Because while self-awareness is difficult, avoidance is destructive. While facing your shadow is exhausting, refusing to do so makes you dangerous—to yourself and to others.

This isn’t just about personal growth. It’s about collaboration. About community. About the harm we inflict on community when we refuse to do this self work. Because when someone refuses to look at themselves, it doesn’t just affect them—it affects everyone they come into contact with.

I know, intimately, what it’s like to be that version of myself, from before 2015, before rock bottom turned imperfectly clawing myself out era me—not a “bad” person, but not healthy either. Not kind to myself or others. Surviving and going through the motions. I regret not being kinder to others, but also know I was just trying to survive, and I’m very aware of what it is like to be a person who couldn’t yet see themselves clearly.

That’s why I can recognize what happens when self-protection masquerades as self-awareness, neatly wrapped in the language of dei wokeness.

When accountability and ~the work~ are aesthetic, not embodied. When people rewrite events—not just for external audiences, but for themselves—to preserve their version of themselves, they desperately need to be true.

And now, I know what it’s like to feel the weight of someone else’s inability to face themselves. To sit with the contradictions, the omissions, the quiet erosion of truth—while they keep performing their self-awareness like a well-rehearsed script.

I can’t control how some narratives get shaped—especially when they lean on 'spiritual DEI wokeness' as a shield rather than a practice, more concerned with maintaining a comfortable self-image than with true accountability to community.

An Ending With Grace

Ultimately, none of us can control whether someone ever meets their own shadow. But we can control how we move forward. We can choose to show grace—both to ourselves and to those who haven’t yet grappled with the depth of their shadow self.

This post is how I, an accidental writer, choose to move forward. To heal. To exit the end of a very long friendship that wasn’t all bad or all good—(my god, it would have been so much easier to spot if it had been all bad). But ultimately, it wasn’t sustainable—not when we were both imperfect (as all of us are), but only one of us was willing to swim in the deep end.

I didn’t choose this ending, but I know it’s for the best. I know I had to stop waiting, begging, pleading for someone else to meet me in the pool. At some point, you stop justifying, stop over-explaining, and stop making yourself smaller for the sake of their comfort. You let go—not with bitterness, but with clarity. With love for what was, with gratitude for what it taught you, and with grace for what it could never be.

Grace, because I know what it’s like to be stuck in a version of yourself that can’t yet see the full truth. Because I’ve been there too—and I hope that if I got through, others can too.

Grace, because growth isn’t linear, and some lessons take longer to land.

Grace, because I held on longer than I should have. Because walking away felt like failing. Like giving up. Like confirming every deep-seated fear about being unworthy, unchosen, not enough (things I’ve spent the last few years diving into the deep end to explore more clearly, and for nothing else, I am grateful to have to grapple with these parts of myself, to keep working on holding and healing them).

I’m trusting that I’m learning exactly what I’m meant to learn. That the end of something that once felt so important is just making space for what’s next.

And this time, I’m ready to greet it with grace.