The Long Bag: What Have We Put Away?
Shadow Series 1.1
I want to start a little series of Juliet’s Musings about something I find endlessly fascinating: our shadow. The idea comes from Robert Bly’s lovely little book, A Little Book on the Human Shadow. It isn’t a book about being bad or having some dark, horrible side to our personality. In fact, Bly’s idea of the shadow is much more interesting than that. It is about the parts of ourselves that we have learned, usually very early in life, that it is safer, easier or more acceptable to hide.
Bly has a wonderful image for this. He says that during the first twenty years of our lives, we put things into what he calls the long bag. Imagine an enormous invisible bag that we drag behind us. Into it we put the parts of ourselves that don’t seem to fit with what our family, teachers, friends and society want from us. And we start doing this very early. Perhaps you were an angry child and like me, discovered that anger wasn’t welcome in your family. Perhaps you were very loud, and someone told you to stop showing off. That is another one of mine, that still holds me back a bit. Perhaps you were extremely sensitive and were told not to be so emotional. Perhaps you were naturally curious and constantly asking questions, but adults found you exhausting. Perhaps you were ambitious and were told that you shouldn’t think you were better than other people. That was one of mine, but I think I have got over that one. Or perhaps you were naturally creative, sexual, independent, adventurous or strong-willed, and somehow you learned that these qualities weren’t quite acceptable.
And so, into the bag they go.
The fascinating thing is that we don’t usually put these things away consciously. Nobody sits us down at the age of six and says, “We’re going to put your anger in a bag now.” We learn through little experiences: a look on someone’s face, a sharp comment, being laughed at, being ignored, or getting more approval when we behave in one way and less when we behave in another. Eventually, we become very good at knowing which version of ourselves is acceptable and which parts are better kept out of sight.
Perhaps you became the sensible one, or the helpful one, the quiet one, the successful one, the funny one, the good girl, or – like me – the independent one who never needs anything. You may become extraordinarily skilled at being that person. And there is nothing necessarily wrong with those qualities. In fact, they may have helped you enormously. The problem is that the other parts haven’t necessarily disappeared. They’ve gone into the bag.
Bly’s point is that by the time we reach adulthood, that bag can be very long indeed. We have spent around twenty years putting things into it. He says, the bag has got so long behind us that we have trouble getting into a lift!
But then we spend much of our adult lives wondering why we don’t feel quite as alive, spontaneous or whole as we might. We may be highly successful and yet feel strangely disconnected from ourselves. We may be very good at looking after everybody else but have little idea what we actually want. We may be praised for being calm while carrying an enormous amount of anger that we have never learned how to express. We may be admired for our independence while secretly longing to be able to lean on someone.
This is where I think Bly’s idea becomes particularly useful, because the things we have put into our shadow aren’t necessarily bad things. Sometimes they contain some of our greatest vitality. Your anger may contain your ability to know when something isn’t right. Your ambition may contain your capacity to create and achieve. Your sexuality may contain your aliveness. Your sensitivity may contain your empathy. Your assertiveness may contain your ability to protect yourself. Your creativity may contain something that desperately wants to be expressed. What has been put away isn’t necessarily something we need to get rid of. It may be something we need to reclaim.
So perhaps growing up isn’t simply about becoming a more socially acceptable version of ourselves. Perhaps part of becoming an adult is beginning to take things back out of the bag.
And this can be surprisingly uncomfortable. If you’ve spent thirty years being the person who never makes a fuss, suddenly saying, “Actually, I don’t want to do that,” can feel incredibly difficult. If you’ve always been the person who looks after everyone else, beginning to have needs of your own can feel selfish. If you’ve learned that ambition is unattractive, allowing yourself to want more can bring up guilt. If you’ve spent your life being the sensible one, doing something spontaneous can feel almost reckless.
We can discover that we don’t simply have to deal with other people’s reactions. We also have to deal with our own internalised voices telling us that we shouldn’t be this way. The voice that says, Don’t be difficult. Don’t be selfish. Don’t get above yourself. Don’t make a fuss. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Don’t think you’re special. Sometimes those voices can be so familiar that we mistake them for our own thoughts, when in fact they are echoes of things we learned a very long time ago.
So one of the questions I would invite you to play with is: What did you learn you mustn’t be? Not necessarily what were you explicitly told. Think about what you learned from the atmosphere around you. Were you allowed to be angry? Were you allowed to say no? Were you allowed to be ambitious? Were you allowed to be needy? Were you allowed to be sexual? Were you allowed to take up space? Were you allowed to be different? Were you allowed to be more successful than the people around you? Were you allowed to have opinions that challenged other people?
And perhaps another particularly interesting question is: what qualities in other people do you sometimes envy, admire or intensely dislike? Because our reactions to other people can sometimes give us clues about what is sitting inside our own long bag. The person whose confidence irritates us, the person whose creativity we envy, or the person whose freedom fascinates us may sometimes be showing us a quality that we have not yet given ourselves permission to own.
Over the next few Musings, I want to explore what happens when we begin to meet these disowned parts of ourselves, how we sometimes project them onto other people, and what happens when someone else reacts badly to the parts of ourselves that we have reclaimed. We will look at the shadow as a mirror, at envy and the experience of receiving an envy attack, and finally at what it might mean to bring some of these lost parts of ourselves home.
For now, perhaps it is enough simply to become curious. We don’t have to open the whole bag at once, and we certainly don’t have to judge what we find in it. We can simply begin to wonder what is there.
What have you put in your bag?
For me, amongst other things, what went into the bag was anger, pride, showing off, putting myself first, saying no, being assertive and standing up for myself. I was going to say being selfish, but even as I write that, I notice the negative judgement still attached to the word, which perhaps tells me there is a little residue of that old lack of acceptance still hanging around. I learned, in various ways, that these were not necessarily qualities I should express. My mum used to name being proud as showing off; putting myself first was called selfishness; being assertive was considered being difficult. So these parts of me went into the bag, along with the message that being a good person meant being accommodating, thinking about other people first and not making too much of myself. It has taken me quite a long time to realise that putting myself first sometimes isn’t selfish, saying no isn’t unkind, assertiveness isn’t aggression, and being proud of something I’ve achieved doesn’t require me to diminish it so that other people feel more comfortable.
And what’s in your bag, that might be waiting, all these years later, to come home?
Juliet Grayson
August 2026
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