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witchbitchheadedtoaditch · 3 years

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Shadow Work Prompts Part 2

Hello my loves! I'm going to add some more shadow work prompts (primarily because... Kaye needs to do shadow work and maybe this will convince them to do it. (It won't. We all know it won't. But we can hope....))

I'm gonna put these below the cut just so people don't have to scroll through this long as fuck list on their dash if they don't want to see them lol

Some of these are really, really heavy, and do touch on things like sexual assault, abuse, death, etc., so this is the trigger warning for you.

A lot of these are also focused on women and AFAB folks because I'm trying to reconcile with my femininity and whatnot.

Anne Carson Quotes

You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. ... Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me.

Desire is no light thing.

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

All mortals owe a debt to death.

...sex is a substitute, like money or language.

...your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

There is no person without a world.

If there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me.

We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing... life.

The underworld's a blank and all the rest just fantasy.

Caught between the tongue and the taste.

What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.

Girls are cruelest to themselves.

What really connects words and things?

Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evil

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days.

Consider incompleteness as a verb.

You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.

I am talking about evil. It blooms. It eats. It grins.

I don't want to be a person. I want to be unbearable.

Beauty makes me hopeless.

The dead... are victims of love, many of them.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

You read a hundred military manuals you won't find the word kill they trick you into killing.

I went mad, a god hurt me, I fell.

Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.

Love does not make me gentle or kind.

Your grief is as great as your splendor was: some god is weighing the one out equal to the other.

You can never know enough, never work enough, ... never leave the mind quickly enough.

Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again.

Where does unbelief begin?

Everything that is me is with me.

A wound gives off its own light...

I began to think I was someone thirsting for God.

You are a person in love with the impossible.

When we are denied a story, a light goes off.

Some conversations are not what they're about.

I lack myself.

Who knows what will happen if I'm alone with my grief.

I... forbid that you should ever lose your screams.

You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.

There is a loneliness that fills the plain.

The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity.

We live by waters breaking out of the heart.

Time as hunger. Time passing and gazing. Time as perseverance. Mountain time. Time as paper folded to look like a mountain. Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of stars.

What are we made of but hunger and rage?

When I look at you, even for a moment, no speaking is left in me.

Kelly Cherry Quotes

I didn't find my story; it found me.

There is blood everywhere and I am lost in it. I breathe blood, not air.

The story of [their] great-grandfather [or any ancestor]... was [their] own story, too.

Ashe Vernon Quotes

Don't you dare, for one minute, believe that my kindness makes me anything but insurmountable.

Understand that I am not your next victim in a laundry list of broken girls.

I will eat you alive before I let you make a meal of me.

What they don't tell you about standing up for what you believe in is that your feet will bruise and your legs will ache.

I'd like to take a moment to submit a formal apology to my soft parts because they kept me warm when I was trying to freeze to death, and I hated them for it.

I let myself be afraid.

When you learn you are only as good as your beauty routine, you forget how to define yourself by anything else.

I will know how to be vulnerable with you, but I won't know how to not regret it.

I know how to put my body inside someone else's but not how to make it beautiful.

I love better at a distance.

I am as much lion as I am lion tamer.

I got good at inflicting pain the same way I got good at soothing it.

Quit picking old wounds and going tor walks in the aches and pains you already made it through--you call it healing, but it sounds like a good way to take a haunting home with you.

I am a cathedral of almost-lovers

Louise Gluck Quotes

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.

I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.

The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.

Intense love always leads to mourning.

You will never let go, you will never be satiated.

It will feed you, it will ravish you, it will not keep you alive.

Why love what you will lose? There is nothing else to love.

I speak because I am shattered.

I don't need your praise to survive.

Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.

Nakedness in women is always a pose. I was not transfigured. I would never be free.

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.

I am tired of human... I want to live on the sun

Death cannot harm me more than you have harmed me, my beloved life.

There are places like this... you enter as a young girl... you never return.

Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance, too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.

The riddle was: why couldn't we live in the mind. The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.

It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

You're not a creature in body. You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity.

And then, suddenly, something is over.

You must be taught to love me. Human beings must be taught to love silence and darkness.

Sappho Quotes

Someone will remember us/I say/even in another time.

Their heart grew cold. They let their wings down.

What cannot be said will be wept.

What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful

Once again love drives me on, that loosener of limbs, bittersweet creature against which nothing can be done.

Love shook my heart like the wind on the mountain rushing over the oak trees

Love is a cunning weaver of fantasies and fables.

I know not what to do, my mind is divided.

The female creature is a letter.

No holy place existed without us then

She who loves roses must be patient and not cry when she is pierced by thorns.

Because I prayed this word: I want.

If you had a desire for good or beautiful things and your tongue were not concocting some evil to say, shame would not hold down your eyes but rather you would speak about what is just.

Wealth without virtue is no harmless neighbor.

I am weary of all your words and soft, strange ways.

Paisley Rekdal Quotes

Does it offend you to watch me working in it, touching my hands to the greening tips or tearing the yellow stalks back, so wild the living and dead both snap off in my hands?

I can wait longer than sadness.

It is such a small thing to be proud of.

Should I, too, not be loved?

We are even now still so young

I loved him. I loved forgiving him.

Yasmin Belkhyr Quotes

Contrary to wound, I still know nothing of defeat.

Contrary to ache, I still know nothing of guilt.

I help: a good daughter.

Someone always ends up holding something mangled.

It wasn't enough to feel... he had to see, to know.

Adrienne Rich Quotes

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

Lying is done with words, and also with silence

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us.

It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath. It will be short, it will not be simple.

You look at me like an emergency.

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

There is no 'the truth', 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.

The moment of change is the only poem

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which the patriarchy is erected.

The scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has been created between people.

You touched me in places so deep I wanted to ignore you

Silence can be a plan rigorously executed, the blueprint to a life, it is a presence, it has a history, a form. Do not confuse it with any kind of absence.

Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.

We have lived with violence for so long.

This is my body, take it and destroy it

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for... many facets of our own oppression.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

A language is a map of our failures.

The more I live the more I think two people together is a miracle.

Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.

How do you make it, all the way from here to morning?

An honorable human relationship--that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love"--is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

You grieve in loneliness, and if I understand you fuck in loneliness.

We write from the marrow of our bones.

The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

William Styron Quotes

We're all in this game together.

In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come-not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute.

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul

We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.

Reading--the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Let your love flow out on all living things.

Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression--in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin.

Kai Cheng Thom Quotes

I wanted to protect you, but I'm starting to think that the best thing you can do for people is teach them how to protect themselves. Every girl needs to be at least a little dangerous.

A sanctuary is a place where the door only locks from the inside.

Sometimes to be somebody else, you have to be nobody first.

You will be able to stop hurting people when you stop hurting yourself.

When you're a child trapped in a situation of physical or psychological depravation, you learn shame as an efficient, elegant mechanism of survival: shame simultaneously shields you from the reality that danger is out of your control (since the problem is not that you're unloved and deprived; it's that you're Bad) and prevents you from doing or saying anything challenging that might provoke a threat.

It's good for you to cry sometimes. Even if there isn't a reason.

When you live in a community of queers, anarchists, & activists, crisis is the baseline and stability an outlier.

You are mine like nothing has ever been before.

Safety is, I believe, an inherently classed, raced, and gendered experience that frequently runs the risk of being used for regressive ends--ironically, for restricting the freedoms of the vulnerable, those who are never really safe. Often, we see the call for safety actually reinforce the power of oppressive institutions, like the police and the prison system, in our lives. When we choose safety over liberation, our movements fail.

When they looked at me and my sister, even their love was hungry.

Some people will cling on to anything that makes them feel even a little bit free.

Forget, if you can, all the promises you've ever made and the lies that you've told.

Once you start hurting people, you can't stop

I feel tired. I don't want to be myself anymore.

Sometimes it's important to be alive.

Sometimes, there is nothing you can do but surrender.

You are always disappearing in the hope of being seen. You are always shrinking to fit into someone else's arms. You are collapsing ever inward, a galaxy to become smaller.

Gregory Orr Quotes

If we're not supposed to dance, why all this music?

Even hell is holy.

I was born with a knife in one hand and a wound in the other.

Maybe she loved me, maybe not--who knows? Not even the gods can see into a human heart--it's that dark.

Writing often reveals us to ourselves, lets us name what's important to us and what has been silent or silenced inside us.

And to live only once--what if that's not enough?

Maybe it was always simple: loss surrounds us. Who would deny it? We ourselves are loss, are lost.

I want to study the book of the world: every vanishing page.

The dead sing us songs I'm learning to answer.

#shadow work #shadowwork #prompts #shadow work prompts #witchblr

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sheikah · 3 years

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How do u think the show will handle Alina’s character. The way I interpreted it, the whole plot of TGT was a twist on the chosen one trope. She was the chosen one but unlike other popular chosen ones, I felt like she never truly loved her power. She just wanted to be free and happy, which is totally fair. She was forced to use her power to save the world but at the end of it all she wanted was to be left alone. I think Leigh didn’t do the best job of this trope but I think that’s what she intended. I wonder if the show will do this trope better or make Alina embrace her power which IMO changes her character, or at least my interpretation of her.

This is a great question, because I think different interpretations of how Alina feels about her power really change how one views her character. Personally, I think Alina started the series just wanting to be left alone and not embracing her power. But I think that over time she did grow to embrace it. I pulled out a lot of book quotes under the cut, because I am very emotionally invested in ambitious/power-hungry Alina haha.

So I think it starts in S&S when she gets the sea whip amplifier and can feel and enjoy the way it adds to her power, but it isn’t really something she acknowledges until the end when she tricks the Darkling. When she uses his power, we’re in her head, getting her thoughts. It isn’t just about her manipulating him. Yeah, she’s doing what she needs to do, but she likes it:

This was not the way he'd touched me in my visions, when he'd come to me as shadow. This was real, and I could drown in it. Power flowed through me--the power of the stag, its strong heart beating in both our bodies, the life he'd taken, the life I tried to save. But I also felt the Darkling's power, the power of the Black Heretic, the power of the Fold.

Like calls to like. I'd sensed it when the Hummingbird entered the Unsea, but I'd been too afraid to embrace it. This time, I didn't fight. I let go of my fear, my guilt, my shame. There was darkness inside of me. He had put it there, and I would no longer deny it. The volcra, the nichevo'ya, they were my monsters, all of them. And he was my monster, too.

This was the beginning, I guess, but there are way more instances in R&R when Alina ponders on her own lust for power.

Gradually, she is willing to admit, both to herself and others, that it isn’t just about beating the Darkling, she wants the firebird and the power of the third amplifier:

I wasn't sure what was driving me, if it was my need for vengeance or something higher, if it was hunger for the firebird.

Baghra's hand shot out. With surprising accuracy, she seized my wrist.

"Put your hunger aside, Alina. Do what Morozova and my son could not and give this up."

My cheeks were wet with tears. I hurt for her. I hurt for her son. But even so, I knew what my answer would be.

"I can't."

He'd killed animals and then brought them back to life, sometimes repeatedly, delving deeper into merzost, creation, the power of life over death, trying to find a way to create amplifiers that might be used together. It was forbidden power, but I knew its temptation, and I shuddered to think that pursuing it had driven him mad.

"I won't deny it. I want the firebird. I want the amplifiers' combined power."

"It doesn't matter why I'm using the Cut, what I'm doing with the power. It always feels good."

Eventually, she realizes Mal is an amplifier, but still wants the power his death could provide:

I had the sense of a door swinging open, and all I wanted was to step through--this taste of perfect, gleaming elation was nothing compared to what lay on the other side. I forgot where I was, forgot everything but the need to cross that threshold, to claim that power ... The burn of power was almost unendurable, a dull whine that filled my head. My heart beat so hard I thought I might not survive it. I needed to walk through that door ... I wanted to blot out this knowledge, carve it from my skull, because I hungered for the power that lay beyond that golden door, desired it with a kind of pure and aching fever that made me want to tear at my skin. The price for that power would be Mal's life.

There are also the iconic scenes with the Darkling when she realizes that she’s drawn to power the same way that he is:

"You were meant to be my balance, Alina. You are the only one who might keep my power in check."

"And who will balance me?" The words emerged before I thought better of them, giving raw voice to a thought that haunted me even more than the possibility that the firebird didn't exist. "What if I'm no better than you? What if instead of stopping you, I'm just another avalanche?"

I include all these because I don’t think book!Alina wanted to be left alone and powerless at all. It’s one of the big problems I have with the ending of R&R. Alina didn’t willingly sacrifice her power. She sacrificed Mal (albeit at great personal cost and with a lot of grief) for the power of the third amplifier. But when that power went to create other Sun Summoners, it was a surprise. She didn’t anticipate it, and didn’t want it. And while the ending is a happy one and I’m sure Alina and Mal are perfectly happy at Keramzin living a normal life, there’s always this passage about Alina mourning the loss of her powers that haunts me a little bit:

“You might make me a better man.”

“And you might make me a monster.”

The boy and the girl had both known loss, and their grief did not leave them. Sometimes he would find her standing by a window, fingers playing in the beams of sunlight that streamed through the glass.

So, to finally answer your question, I actually personally interpret book!Alina as having embraced and wanted her power, but I think the show will characterize Alina in much the way you said. Alina will be the reluctant Chosen One. She will be humble and do her duty to save Ravka, but in a way befitting Sankta Alina. I don’t think we’re going to get glimpses of Alina reveling in her power or the prospect of dark!Alina. I wish we would! But we most likely won’t have a first-person POV or voiceover showing her thoughts to show us these inner conflicts, and even if we did, I anticipate a change in the writing/story that will mean a change in Alina as well.

Archie is in every episode of season one. At least, he’s credited for all of the episodes on IMDb. If that holds up when the show actually airs, it means significant changes in Mal’s inclusion in the story (because Mal is hardly in most of S&B) and thus the Mal/Alina relationship. And the biggest thing holding Alina back from embracing her powers has always been Mal. She loved him and her life at Keramzin so she suppressed her powers when the examiners came as a child because subconsciously she didn't want to leave him. Then after her powers were revealed she and Mal fought about them. Her status as the Sun Summoner was the biggest conflict in their relationship. It made Mal feel like she didn’t need him, and Alina even says that while the people wanted her to be a “Grisha queen,” “Mal wanted a commoner queen.” And there are a bunch of examples of similar sentiments from when they argue. So if the show is going to have more Mal/Alina, which I suspect it will because Leigh wants to change fandom perspective on her preferred and endgame ship (and because Leigh said in one of her instagram live sessions that she thinks Archie’s portrayal is going to win over people who aren’t fans of Mal), I imagine there will be less ambitious Alina, for better or for worse.

#alina starkov #tgt #s&b #grishaverse #answered

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