Shadow Moods

SHADOW MOODS

❇️ A SHADOW ON THE HORIZON ❇️
Sometimes life turns dark like an old black-and-white photograph. It feels as though no joy can break through the dense clouds, and whatever light once existed disappeared long ago. These are shadow moods: moments when life suddenly seems to lose its meaning. And when the mind is swallowed by darkness, how do you find something that can bring back even a moment of light?

❇️ DOGS IN THE CELLARS ❇️
At times like these I think of Nietzsche and his “dogs in the cellar.” I divide them into two kinds. The first are the ones that bark when they are let out. They run around, make noise, but remain visible, inside the social field — like carefree regulars of parties and clubs. They are not shown on television, though they are often “on the first.” You know what I mean, right? But there are others: those that howl in the cellar, consumed by melancholy and depression, as if life itself did not belong to them. These dogs are absorbed in their own inner nightmare. And the most frightening thing is that they seem uncontrollable.

Shadow moods are like those “dogs in the cellar,” swallowed by despondency and hopelessness. States in which the mind refuses to remember good moments and it feels as though the bright road has vanished somewhere.

❇️ SEARCHING FOR LIGHT ❇️
I walk to Vasilyevsky Island, where the Finnish bones lie.
Above them — Baltic pines and the sleepy sphinxes of Vasilyevsky.
And nearby, in a damp gateway, we kissed each other ferociously.
She said, “Stop!” when cold palms covered a hard nipple. 🎶
I smiled and... In those periods we “loved” blindly and drank in one gulp, drifted away with the wind... 🎶

This is not merely a mood. It is a descent into an abyss where even space seems to split in two. The street itself appears divided: you walk along it while your shadow is already far ahead.

❇️ ECHOES OF THE PAST ❇️
Then we went home through the center, crossing the Bank Bridge. 🎶
As though nothing had happened, yet deep inside there was a feeling that something had been lost.

As one acquaintance once said while sitting on Nevsky,
watching Lyalya pass by, he read reproach in her eyes and, as if answering her, said: “You live through that much first...”
He did not know himself that the phrase sounded like bitter irony.

Like psychologists who take the “Shadow” apart in theory again and again,
yet have never felt how difficult it really is to walk this road,
how “people with bipolar disorder are more dangerous during cataclysms” 🎶 — what that kind of phrase sounds like from inside the life being discussed.

And these shadow moods bring back the words of a Stanford professor who lived through bipolar disorder. She wrote — and the words belong here too:

“And so I recognize with bitter gladness that I exchanged my restless but saturated yesterday for a balanced and prosperous today” (Jamison, 2017, p. 208). [I would say not “exchanged,” but “moved from/to.”]

Yes, I am glad that it passed, and there is bitterness precisely because it passed... As if we will never again wander down Sadovaya with the whole crowd, as if you will never again drink to the bottom. Life is no longer so full of days... And it is genuinely difficult to understand if those “North Winds” have never blown over you.

❇️ THE FORGOTTEN SUN ❇️
At such moments the brain seems to forget every bright color.
It turns off the light, leaving only shadows — blurred, cold, alien.
You seem to lose everything that once mattered. A very long time ago, a childhood friend gave me a wonderful allegory. He said: “As if Dementors sucked all the joy out.”

But precisely then it is important not to forget that light still exists, even if it is weak. It may be barely visible, but it is what makes it possible to believe in yourself again.

❇️ DESCENT ❇️
Let us go down there: a dark night, and on the pole somebody’s daughter is twisting again. 🎶 Over there in the courtyards, a kid caught a knife with his liver. Who is to blame — you cannot tell; he wheezed like a hedgehog. 🎶 All this can sound like poetry and pretty words, but only to someone who has never been there and has never seen it.

That is how life goes: boys and girls sniff co**e, 🎶 mothers worry about where they are and what is happening to them... And while somewhere above they teach people to solve equations, 🎶 someone else’s daughter is forced onto her knees in an entrance hall. 🎶 The city is divided vertically: when the street kids fall asleep, the mafia wakes up — and with it, our Shadow.

And in this psychological territory I know exactly what I am talking about. I have seen it and I understand how it works. I know how to work with the Shadow and I know it firsthand. Here it is crucial to remember that not everything is lost. At the moment when there seems to be no way out, it matters to strengthen even slightly the certainty that you have done something good — even if, at first, that certainty is partly a rationalization. With this kind of arrangement, with this kind of dialectic, an orientation toward Overcoming💪 begins to form.

❇️ WHEN THERE IS NO ROAD ❇️
If no road is visible in this ocean of poison,
if you are dying and there is no one beside you,
if a packed metropolis seems empty,
light a fire, and we will see the smoke. 🎶

In the next pieces we will look at how that inner fire gets lit. Light and strength can be found in self-flagellation, and that will be the first bridgehead. We will talk about it in the next article. And then we will see why that bridgehead is actually a gilded trap. It matters to remember that this cycle of posts is not a road to instant healing; it is a beginning.

And perhaps, by the end, we will conclude that shadow moods have value — but only with very large and serious “buts.”

What “advantages” do you see in shadow moods❓ Maybe you have already found a way to use them for personal transformation❓ Share your thoughts.

#ShadowMoods #PersonalTransformation

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Sources

1. Nietzsche, F. Collected Works / Friedrich Nietzsche; Russian translations by Yu. Antonovsky, V. Weinstock, A. Zabolotskaya et al. St. Petersburg: Azbuka, Azbuka-Atticus, 2017. 1056 p. (40)

2. Jamison, K. An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. Russian edition: Moscow, Alpina Publisher, 2017. 226 p. (54)

All phrases, references, and verbal turns taken from tracks are marked with 🎶.
Their use is intended as a gesture of respect toward the artists. I wonder how many tracks you will recognize from these Easter eggs...

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