People tell me all the time that I “shouldn’t take things so personally.”
What they don’t know is that I would love to be the kind of person who could let slights and rejections roll off my shoulders.
But I’m not. I used to try and convince myself otherwise. To always be the light version of myself that let everything go and never did anything from a place of negative emotion. I killed my shadow.
I quickly found myself feeling like a human doormat, and like a shell who was only allowed to feel half of the spectrum of human emotion. I was less motivated, less authentic, and deep down I knew I was betraying myself.
Part of life’s beauty is contrast. We feel anger, and resentment, and shame for a reason. Anger is rocket fuel. Resentment is our nervous system telling us that something has to change. Shame usually means that we might not be the person we think we are and we need to grow.
I was trying to lock these emotions away in a cage, but I was expending so much energy mentally doing that, and I was locking a huge part of my real self away, when what I really needed to be doing was figuring out a way to master all my emotions, dark ones included.
Carl Jung calls this “integrating the shadow”. A balance between killing the shadow and being possessed by it. The parts of ourselves we fear the most are also the most powerful, and maybe that’s precisely why we fear them.
Mace Windu called this Vaapad. He alone among all the Jedi of his time was able to use the Dark Side of the Force to make himself stronger. Instead of fearing it and completely shutting himself off to the shadow of the Force, he was able to dip into the dark while staying in the light, and that’s what enables him to defeat Emperor Palpatine at the end of Revenge of the Sith.
It is psychological alchemy. You take a negative thing, a traumatic thing, and you transmute it into something positive.
I didn’t get a return offer from the company I worked at last summer. I was expected to work ~35-40 hours a week, but most weeks I was closer to 60. I spearheaded a project with seven figures in business value as just an intern, and the performance review I got during my exit interview with my mentor and manager was glowing. Despite that, a few months later, they told me that they wouldn’t be bringing me back because I didn’t have what it took to “deliver independently as a full-time software engineer.” That was bullshit, and I knew it. Everyone told me not to look at it as a reflection of my efforts and capabilities. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t look past the pain of being told that I wasn’t worthy. So I stopped trying to look past it. I walked headlong into it, cloaked myself in it, and used it to power my way through recruiting for a different full time job. Before every interview, I called to mind exactly how I felt getting off that phone call with my old manager. The self-doubt. The fear that I wasn’t cut out for this space. I swore to myself that I would get an offer far more exciting than the one I was denied.
The climax of my recruiting cycle was a trip to San Francisco to do onsites for two startups. Somehow, I came home with three offers.
Thanks, Mace Windu.