Work on the inside changes your world on the outside
On Lady Gaga, artistry, and how shadow work brings out truest selves into alignment
I think the reason Lady Gaga is winning, serving, eating, etc. so consistently is because she’s brutally honest with herself.
And then she dares to share that honesty with others.
The depth of her honesty is impressive. I’m envious. What’s her secret? Maybe she’s a witch—hiding away and excavating the intricate and infinite cave system of her mind, conjuring the next emotional potion and projecting it into the world only when she’s confident it’ll resonate. Disease is that latest projection. It’s an exploration of inner demons, with lyrics like:
Screaming for me, baby
Like you're gonna die
Poison on the inside
I could be your antidote tonight
She’s talking to herself, about herself. The video is disgusting, violent, and hot. Like, really hot. And it’s impressive.
I think a lot about the relationship I have with my own inner demons. It’s never been easy for me to face how I get seduced by chaos and turmoil. It makes me feel claustrophobic. Disease is about facing that fear, facing myself and my inner darkness, and realizing that sometimes I can’t win or escape the parts of myself that scare me. That I can try and run from them but they are still part of me and I can run and run but eventually I’ll meet that part of myself again, even if only for a moment. Dancing, morphing, running, purging. Again and again, back with myself. This integration is ultimately beautiful to me because it’s mine and I’ve learned to handle it. I am the conductor of my own symphony. I am every actor in the plays that are my art and my life. No matter how scary the question, the answers are inside of me. Essential, inextricable parts of what makes me me. I save myself by keeping going. I am the whole me, I am strong, and I am up for the challenge.
― Lady Gaga
Two weeks after she released Disease, she released a live version where it’s just her, a piano, and her guitar player, and it’s fucking incredible:
Goddamn, Gaga.
This is a woman who turns off the lights, sits in the dark, and digs until she’s has something to say.
Everybody's talented, fucking everyone in this bar is talented at one thing or another. But having something to say and a way to say it so that people listen to it, that's a whole other bag. And unless you get out and you try to do it, you'll never know. That's just the truth. And there's one reason we're supposed to be here is to say something so people want to hear.
— Bradley Cooper, A Star is Born
It’s clear to me that Gaga’s process of digging is akin to shadow work, which is a term popularized by psychiatrist Carl Jung. It’s trendy, and therefore misunderstood. Yes, it’s talking to a therapist. Yes, it’s journaling. Yes, it’s reading a book. But it’s also using all of the tools—not just the easy ones—at our disposal. Like silent retreats. Like CRM therapy. Like psychedelics. It’s staring directly into our soul and acknowledging the aspects within ourselves that we reject1 and integrating them.
I literally looked into the mirror the other day and said, out loud, “I don’t want to fight you anymore.” Gaga’s Disease resonates with me because I’ve recently come to understand that all of the fights we have with others are really just fights we're having with ourselves. We are the disease.
Since that day I’ve been calmer. More focused. Less reactive. A better partner to Noah.
It turns out that doing the work works.
That is—if you can handle it. Shadow work is fucking intense. And sometimes disruptive in the short term. But truthfully, I’m convinced that this is the surest path to a life worth living. My friend Chris would disagree, and recommend a more straightforward approach: follow the fun. And though I’ve had a hard time wrapping my head around his approach, the truth is I deeply respect Chris for having an approach—any approach, really. Most people’s approach is four hours of TikTok before bed.
Just know that if you avoid the darker parts of yourself, you’ll end up suppressing them. But they won’t go away. They’ll simply make choices for you from the shadows.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung
The truth is, I’m willing to write about the idea of shadow work, but I’m not quite ready to share all the specifics of what I’m discovering.
But here’s something I can share: the chaos I once tolerated—and the people in my life who thrived in that chaos—were reflections of unresolved parts of me. As I began to confront those parts, something unexpected happened: the people who gravitated toward me because of our shared instability no longer found me interesting. Chaos-seekers need chaos to survive. And now, they’ve moved on to find it elsewhere.
Doing the inner work isn’t just about excavating some metaphorical mental cave—it’s about watching the world outside of you shift in response. The people who once mirrored my unresolved darkness have been replaced by those who resonate with my clarity.
Which, right now, feels like quite a cure.
We reject parts of ourselves for various reasons but two common ones are because they aren’t socially acceptable or because they don’t align with who we think ourselves to be.
"the people who gravitated toward me because of our shared instability no longer found me interesting." I really related to this. It's a subtle thing and I don't think I had language to describe it until reading this now.
Sometimes we don't even realizing we're changing and one of the ways we notice is by how others react to us. When our friends start reacting to us differently we're tempted to avoid the change because we don't want to risk losing relationships. We can't avoid it though, you only end up delaying whatever confrontation you fear or prevent yourself from growing. Thanks Jesse!