Black Swan, Shadow Work, And The Job Of An Artist

If you’ve been around anything I’ve written in the last couple years, you’d have seen the phrase “everything is about everything”.  It’s a multi-faceted phrase, but a major way in which I use it is to denote a kind of synchronicity.  

Synchronicity is the notion that coincidences (literally “things coinciding”) have meaning if we’re willing to pay attention.  

So when I was spending the weekend deep diving into Jungian shadow work and ended up taking a break to watch a movie and stumbled upon Black Swan (which I had never seen before), it was no surprise when the movie was basically a two hour allegory about a woman confronting her shadow side.  

If you haven’t seen Black Swan, the short version is this: it’s about a prima ballerina named Nina who is set to play the parts of the white swan and black swan in the ballet Swan Lake.  Although Nina’s timidness, rigidity, and “purity” lend herself perfectly toward playing the white swan, her director makes it very clear (as if the audience doesn’t understand by just looking at her iciness) that playing the role of the Black Swan will be her biggest challenge as a ballerina yet.  

This role is meant to be looser and a bit imperfect, but within that freedom is a fresh kind of beauty.  It is meant to be attractive and even seductive. 

The director tells Nina to “just let go” about a handful of times throughout the film, but he says it in a way as if losing oneself is the key to becoming free.

What Nina really needs to do is integrate her shadow side.  Which I’m realizing now might not have been the proper line to replace “just let go.”  Can you imagine if the director instead kept reciting “Just do some Jungian shadow work, Nina!”  

At this point, let me take a little time to describe to you what our shadow side is. It’s a term coined by psychologist Carl Jung and it’s super simple, even if it’s not easy: your shadow side are the pieces of yourself that aren’t in your consciousness.  That’s it.  They’re just parts you’re not aware of, because they’re the parts that you have learned to repress, not question, or maybe you don’t even acknowledge about yourself.  

These parts aren’t shadowy because they’re bad, but because we just don’t see them.  The problem is when we don’t honor their presence, they can often come out sideways.  Like that angry part of you you learned to stuff down?  You know when it suddenly erupts over the smallest infraction?   That’s because it’s in your shadow. 

Or shadow parts could be some lovely qualities you have that you just never knew about, so you see them in others and get envious that they aren’t yours (when they’ve actually been latent within you all along….you just didn’t know it.) 

We see Nina’s shadow side come out in everyone around her (just as we do in real life).  We especially see many of these qualities in her ballerina frenemy Lily, a new transplant from San Francisco.  

We watch as Nina longs for Lily’s flirty, vivacious, sexually free persona.  While Nina remains trapped in the quiet, docile, perfect little princess persona of the white swan.  

In the end we see Nina tap into her black swan shadow side but only in a way that allows her to perfectly perform the role.  In reality, she is shoving her shadow side further down and experiences grave consequences for it.  

I only watched the movie because it was noted as “recently added to Plex”, but of course it was a completely synchronistic act given the weekend of reading, watching videos, thinking about and listening to podcasts on Jungian shadow work.  

Afterward I went for a run and listened to a random podcast episode about shadow work, and in it they ended up analyzing a dream of a subscriber.  In the dream, the subscriber described the dream and one of the main plotlines was that he was tasked with finding a swan.  

The analysts on the podcast loved the fact that the swan played such a significant role in the dream because swans symbolize an awakening of the Self.  

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Are we seeing all this synchronicity?  So apparently swans symbolize the Self, and shadow work is about integrating the Self.  And although I chose to watch Black Swan, I had no idea its connection to shadow work, and the dream analysis in the podcast was completely out of left field.  So not only am I now paying attention to shadowy sides, but also swans (because I can only imagine how many times I will run into them now that they have started appearing. I already saw a swan in an email I got tonight while writing this.) 

Everything is about everything after all.

Maybe you’re rightfully wondering why I am deep diving into shadow work at the moment.  I’d argue all self-improvement work is (or should be) shadow work.  We need to take these parts that aren’t in our awareness and expose them so we can integrate them and become more whole.  

Once again, the shadow side of us isn’t to be eliminated or thought of as “bad”, but it’s to be tended to because there’s so much beauty there.  

It’s kind of like when I had a garage in the alley.  I could go from the garage to my house and only encounter the backyard and back of my house for weeks on end.  But the front yard is still there, and if the grass is dying and the paint is chipping on the house, my neighbors will notice that I haven’t tended to it.  Even if I haven’t noticed it, because I always go out the back. 

Shadow work is tending to those parts that exist and it’s a never-ending process (just like tending to a yard and house), but keeping up with it creates a more beautiful space for us and others to live.  

We’re all doing the best we can with the tools we have, and one of those major tools is awareness.  So what does it look like to be able to become more aware of ourselves? 

It means diving into those shadowy parts with curiosity and empathy for ourselves and others.  It’s no surprise when those parts contain grief and sorrow and I am learning that can be a scary place for people to willingly go to.  

The shadow parts need to be seen to be disarmed.  When we suppress them it’s like locking up wild dogs in the basement and not feeding them.  They’ll get angrier and hungrier and louder.  In our lives, we might see this manifest in symptoms such as depression, anxiety, sickness, addiction, and the like.  It’s our body’s way of saying “PAY ATTENTION TO ME!”

But as artists, we are often a bit more comfortable going to those uncomfortable places.  We know that beauty can be found in any part of life, no matter how hard or dark.  

I view one of the jobs of an artist as this: we go to the shadowy parts, light a candle and show others it’s not so scary and they’re not alone.  Art is the language that communicates we’re in these universal human experiences together.  Walking through these parts is the only way to see them and understand them and that means seeing and understanding our whole selves more deeply and richly.