Validation Lives In The Shadows

Most people aren’t drowning in the deep end. They’re flailing in the kiddie pool of their own avoidance, screaming for a lifeguard that isn’t on duty. The water isn’t the real threat. The outright denial that you can stand up at any time and save yourself is.

Remember, you are the light. But don’t be naive. Being the light means you’ll cast shadows too. Every glimmering flame casts darkness behind it. The question is: will you be courageous enough to keep moving forward anyway, knowing your own shadow is following? Most of us try to outrun it or deny it exists, but living in a dream world does us no favors.

In the world of competitive athletics, the shadow of yourself isn’t just poetic. It’s real. It’s the internal space within you that tracks every missed shot, stores every mistake, and whispers doubt in the room where you lay your head at night. It’s the voice running laps in your mind like a toddler screaming for your attention.

If you’re like most, you glamorize it by giving it the title of “competitor,” as if it’s a badge of honor. You've been taught, if not outright conditioned, to believe it desires something noble like another click in the win column. But the shadow self doesn’t want greatness. It wants domination, revenge, and validation.

The ever growing need for validation is a bottomless pit with no exit but to climb back out. Your shadow will convince you that you're digging for purpose, but really, you're just going deeper into the earth. It wants you to shovel for one more compliment, one more contract, one more repost, one more 'we see you'... and maybe then you’ll feel like you’re enough. Maybe then you'll feel like you're finally where you should be. But the more you feed the beast of validation, the more it’s appetite grows.

I see athletes seek the validation of coaches and parents more than anything else. This grasping to their validation is a treadmill disguised as a ladder to the promised land. You’ll feel the burn, feel the pounding in your bones, feel the all out effort, but you’re not going anywhere.

Because the thing you’re chasing?

You already are it.

You are enough.

You are where you need to be.

When you decide to use validation as your compass, you hand over your worth, your performance, your accolades, and your failures to someone else’s opinion. Your self-worth shifts from internal to external. And your game follows suit. If we charted it, it would look like a graph of volatility. Steep climbs to euphoric highs, then violent crashes into doubt filled with self deprecating language. All with few periods of stability in between. Nothing resembling consistency. It is, in every sense of the word, fragile.

The truth is you don’t need the crowd to clap. You don’t need to fight for your parents’ approval. You don’t need to tie your identity to meeting the assumed expectations of your coach. You don’t even need the win to feel like you're enough. Because the goal was never to be validated by the outside world.

The pursuit is to see yourself more clearly.

And once you stop clinging to the weak branches, begging for proof, you start becoming the proof. The walking embodiment of what it means to evolve as yourself.

If you leave the shadow on read, it doesn’t disappear like stars swallowed by the dawn. It trains in the silence of your subconscious. And one day, it shows up unannounced: mid-game, on the mound, at the free throw line and you spiral. You talk to yourself like you you are your worst enemy. You miss a big shot you’ve made a thousand times before. You blame your team. You retreat into the narrative of victimhood because your shadow finally got tired of being ignored and decided it needed playing time too.

But when you dare to face it, when you look at the parts of you that are angry, sad, frustrated, insecure, arrogant, envious, perfectionistic, disappointed, you begin to fuse together the pieces hidden in the dark.

This deep internal work leads to something rare.

It leads to wholeness.

The competitive parts of you become

precise.

Calculated.

Grounded.

You grow into the unshakeable leader. Poised. Ready for whatever battle stands in front of you.

It’s crucial to understand that the goal isn’t to fix yourself. The goal is to know yourself so deeply that even the parts lying dormant in darkness don’t surprise you when they wake up and beg for attention. Because in this life, the ones who don’t know themselves are always at the mercy of their shadow.

High performance doesn’t reward those who wait for self awareness to arrive by invitation. It rewards those willing to walk into the basement of their minds and say, “Let’s get to work.”