What Sigmund Freud referred to as the repressed side of our personality, the unconscious exclusion of painful impulses, desires, or fears from the conscious mind, and Carl Jung calls our Shadow, our not recognized desires, Robert Bly in “The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us,” an essay in Meeting the Shadow refers to as an invisible bag each of us drags behind us which we begin to fill as children. He writes that all aspects of ourselves that are unacceptable and displeasing to our family, peers, and society, goes into the bag and it continues to fill until we’re twenty, after which we spend the rest of our lives trying to retrieve from. These shadow selves do not disappear nor do they lie dormant but instead creep out to embarrass or shame our ego, the self we present to the world. William Miller in “Finding the Shadow in Daily Life,” in the same anthology explains it simply, “Shadow is all we wouldn’t dare do, but would like to”.... –text from Susan Bremer