The Shadow that Fuels the Light

The past… it can haunt us.

We remember those moments when opportunity stood before us, radiant and trembling with possibility, and how, in a heartbeat of immaturity, naivety, or fear, we turned away.

Those moments slip through our fingers, and though life moves forward, something within us is marked by their passing.

But perhaps the haunting is not a curse. Perhaps the ghost that walks beside us is not punishment but purpose, the quiet companion that drives us to grow, to become.

Carl Jung once wrote, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” The shadows we carry, rejection, loss, loneliness… are not our enemies; they are the very material of transformation.

When I look back, I remember a relationship that broke me open. She was unlike anyone I had ever known… radiant, intelligent, and composed in a way that felt almost otherworldly to me. She seemed to belong to a realm of brilliance and possibility far beyond my own. I was a poor boy with little to offer, awkward, uncertain, and painfully aware of my difference. 

Standing before her was like standing before a mystery, one that stirred something deep in me, a longing not only for her, but for a life of meaning and depth I could scarcely name. Even now, I sometimes feel a fraud in the world I’ve built, as though I am still that boy at the threshold, humbled and awe-struck by a light I could not hold. 

It brought me to my knees in sorrow and confusion. It tore at wounds that had never truly healed. And yet, from that breaking, something deeper began to stir, a drive to understand, to create, to seek meaning.

I saw, for a fleeting moment, what life could be, filled with wonder, intimacy, and hope. Then, in an instant, it was gone. And I was left alone, not just without another, but without a sense of self that fit the world around me.

My mind worked differently. My way of feeling and perceiving, intense, intuitive, perhaps autistic, was not the way the world rewarded. I was too open, too raw, too alive in the wrong frequencies.

The world seemed to be built for noise, not nuance. And so I disappeared into dreams, into drink, trying to escape the ache of meaninglessness.

But Jung also said, “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.” Even in that haze, a small light endured, the yearning to make sense of it all. That yearning, born of rejection, became the fire of my soul.

Years later, I met the brother of an old friend at a bus stop. He looked at me with that familiar air of superiority and said, “I never thought you’d amount to anything.” The words pierced me. They burned. And yet, as painful as they were, they became fuel.

They reminded me how often those of us who feel different are underestimated, not because we lack depth, but because the world is blind to inner worlds.

As a Unitarian, I hold to the belief that every soul has worth and dignity, and that truth is not found in conformity but in authenticity. As James Martineau wrote, “The soul of man is the seat of the divine; its light, however dim, is still God’s light within.” If that is true and I believe it is, then difference is not deviation. It is a form of divinity.

I have come to see that the wound of rejection was also the crack through which light entered.

It made me compassionate. It made me listen. It made me human.

And when I look into my little boy’s eyes, I see love unfiltered, love that knows no measure, no judgment. In his gaze, I am not “different.” I am simply Dad. And that simple word carries more redemption than all the apologies the past could offer.

For it is in such love that I see what Jung called “the individuation of the soul”, the sacred process of becoming who we are meant to be. And I see too the quiet truth of our faith, that “Love is the doctrine of this church, and the quest for truth its sacrament.”

So I bless the shadow. I bless the moments that broke me open. I bless the past that still walks beside me. 

Yet even now decades later, the moment of rejection still lingers. Will always be quietly present. It still haunts the quiet corners of my mind. But I have come to understand that this haunting is not my enemy. It is the echo that keeps me striving, the reminder that I am alive, still becoming, still creating meaning from the fragments.

For as Emerson wrote, “The soul’s advance is a perpetual unfolding.” And that moment of rejection is the hand that keeps me unfolding.