About Shadow Thoughts
This is not a wellness newsletter.
There are no morning routines here.
No sunshine mantras. No pastel affirmations.
No rewired nervous systems wrapped in toxic bows.
This is not the place for “good vibes only.”
This is the place for the thoughts you buried in the crawl space.
For the moments you swallowed whole just to keep functioning.
For the grief that never learned to speak in polite volumes.
Here, you won’t be told to rise and grind.
You’ll be invited to descend.
Into the ache.
Into the rupture.
Into the conversations you’ve only ever had with yourself
at 3 AM,
in a pool of tears,
because no one else would’ve understood.
Shadow Thoughts is for the ones who overthink in metaphors
and heal in private.
The ones who kept everyone else afloat
while quietly drowning in their own unspoken story.
The ones who don’t need inspiration.
They need honesty so sharp it leaves a scar.
Created by me, Ryan Puusaari,
a once-silent kid turned writer,
armed with a journal, a jagged past,
and the stubborn belief that truth is worth bleeding for.
Every day, I write Shadow Thoughts,
short, poetic gut punches for the parts of you
that were told to stay quiet, stay kind, stay invisible.
And when the wound starts to scream in story form,
I release a novella:
part psychological thriller,
part emotional exorcism,
always a mirror you won’t be able to look away from.
Think: Carl Jung and Stephen King at camp,
passing around ghost stories that sound suspiciously like trauma responses.
Each story is a descent.
Each character is a mirror.
Each story is a haunting you recognize in your gut before your mind catches up.
Come for the plot.
Stay for the confrontation.
And maybe, just maybe, leave with a flashlight for your own dark.
This is not for everyone.
But if you’ve ever felt too much and said too little,
you might’ve just found your people.
If “I’m fine” is your most-used lie
said with a practiced smile and eyes that ache behind it…
this is for you.
If you’ve ever been told you’re “too sensitive,” “too intense,” “too much,”
when all you wanted was to be seen without shrinking…
this is for you.
If you’ve mastered the art of being agreeable
while secretly unraveling in silence…
this is for you.
If you’d rather face your shadow in the mirror
than keep cutting pieces off yourself to fit someone else’s version of lovable…
this is for you.
This is not where we rise,
it's where we descend.
Into the parts you weren’t allowed to grieve.
The feelings you filed under “too inconvenient.”
The truths you only admit when no one’s watching.
You can subscribe for free
and get daily poems,
quiet gut-punches made of ink and old wounds.
Or you can go deeper:
become a paid member and unlock the full archive:
novellas, essays, shadow work journals,
and whatever else spills out when I stop self-editing
and start telling the truth.
This isn’t self-help.
It’s self-confrontation.
It doesn’t offer closure.
It offers a mirror.
You’ve been warned.
But also…
welcome home.
Daily Thoughts — short, poetic incisions. Not affirmations. Reminders that you're still bleeding for a reason.
Weekly Wound — everything you missed, stitched into one scar. A mirror for your own unraveling.
Camp Jung — shadow fiction told by firelight. Emotional horror. Psychological hauntings. Truth in disguise.
Conscious Divided — Ego and Shadow, arguing inside borrowed minds. Fictional or historical, no one escapes the mirror.
My Story — from silence to ink. The pain behind the pen.
News & Updates — the shifts. The behind-the-scenes. The subtle earthquakes inside the work—and sometimes inside you.
Shadow Journals — bi-weekly, 30-day shadow work journeys. Shame. Anger. Fear. Not content. A daily confrontation.
You can read for free.
You can descend deeper if you choose.
But either way this isn’t where we rise.
This is where w
e stop pretending.
This is where we sit with the ache
long enough to hear what it’s really been trying to say.
This is Shadow Thoughts.
A descent worth taking.
A place where pain gets its voice back.
This isn’t inspiration.
It’s excavation.
And you’ve already started digging.
Because you’re tired of surface-level healing.
Tired of being told to “just let it go”
when what you’re holding has claws
and a name you were never allowed to speak aloud.
Because something in you still whispers,
There’s more beneath this,
and you’re brave enough to stop shushing it.
Shadow Thoughts isn’t here to motivate you.
It’s not interested in positivity or palatability.
It’s here to disarm you.
To take what you buried in silence and hand it back in language.
To sit with you in the wreckage
and say,
Look. This hurt mattered.
To subscribe is to show up for yourself.
Every day, a poem that stings like memory.
Every week, a scar held up to the light.
Every full moon, a descent into fiction that doesn’t pretend it’s fiction.
This is where metaphors bleed.
Where characters break in ways you recognize too well.
Where essays become emotional autopsies
and shadow work doesn’t wear white.
Subscribe if:
You crave poetry that doesn’t condescend.
You’re done with numbness pretending to be strength.
You want to feel… fully, dangerously, honestly.
Free gets you daily gut-punches wrapped in ink.
Paid gets you everything else:
Shadow journals, haunting novellas, philosophical ego duels,
and the kinds of truths no one says out loud—until now.
This isn’t self-help.
It’s self-confrontation.
A mirror that doesn’t flinch.
A place where your ache is valid,
your silence is witnessed,
and your shadow has a voice.
Subscribe not because it’s easy.
Subscribe because you’re ready to stop running
from the parts of yourself that always knew the way back.
Because I’ve lived it.
Not the filtered version. Not the glossy “after” photo.
But the before.
The breaking.
The years I disappeared into silence just to stay safe.
The nights I swallowed my voice because survival demanded it.
The days I wore someone else’s comfort just to keep the peace.
I didn’t learn shadow work from a podium.
I learned it on the floor,
curled around grief I didn’t have language for,
writing truths no one would ever read,
prying open wounds because no one else ever dared to look.
My education wasn’t academic.
It was emotional.
Cellular.
Scrawled in journals stained with panic and ink and prayers that didn’t sound like prayers.
And then something shifted.
Not a breakthrough. A reckoning.
I made a promise to stop abandoning the parts of myself that had done the hardest work.
The part that screamed in silence.
The part that stayed.
The part that still believed I was worth telling the truth for.
I don’t write from a stage.
I write from the cave.
From the mirror I used to avoid.
From the ache I’ve named over and over until it softened enough to speak back.
I write because I know what it means to unravel quietly.
To crave language for pain that no one validated.
To need words that don’t flinch.
That’s why this space exists.
Not to lead you.
Not to fix you.
But to sit beside you in the dark,
and whisper what I once needed to hear:
You are not the only one who feels this way.
And no,
you are not broken beyond repair.
Not every wound needs to scream.
Some just need space.
A breath between breakdowns.
A moment to unclench the jaw that’s been locked for years.
That’s where Healing Thoughts lives.
If Shadow Thoughts is the voice that claws its way up from the basement,
Healing Thoughts is the one that meets you at the doorway,
wraps a blanket around your shoulders,
and says, “I know. Me too.”
It’s less rupture.
More resonance.
Still honest just not as haunted.
Not because the pain disappeared,
but because it learned how to sit without swallowing you whole.
I send daily reflections there,
soft, steady reckonings
for the parts of you still re-learning how to breathe without bracing.
It doesn’t demand. It doesn’t shout.
It waits quietly until you’re ready to feel safe again.
Gentle doesn’t mean shallow.
It means survived.
It means still here.
Because the story doesn’t end in your inbox.
This newsletter is the heartbeat,
but there’s a whole body of work pulsing around it.
Fragments. Mirrors. Survival tools.
Made not to fix you,
but to walk with you through the wreckage.
I’ve created:
Not everything I write lives in your inbox. Some things live in the palm of your hand, the spine of a book, or the silence between texts that land when you need them most.
🩸 Trigger Warning – The Workbook Series
Not safe. Not soft. Not sanitized.
Each workbook in this series slices into one psychological wound at a time—shame, guilt, anger, loneliness, repression.
These are not journals. They are confrontations.
Each page is a mirror you won’t be able to look away from.
🖤 365-Day Shadow Work Journal Series
One wound. One year.
This is your ritual.
A structured descent into your shadow, with 365 prompts that don’t ask for performance—only honesty.
Offered as digital downloads and physical keepsakes, for the ones doing the work alone but never truly in silence.
📖 Healing Thoughts – The Book
The voice I buried is the one I wrote this with.
A raw collection of poetry, essays, and personal reflections born from silence, rupture, and the slow climb toward breath.
Not a self-help book. A self-recognition. A place to rest inside your own ache.
📲 Healing Thoughts - The Daily Texts
Some messages don't need to be long. Just right on time.
This is my daily text service—one raw, grounding line per day, sent directly to your phone.
For when you need a lifeline that knows the language of ache.
Gentle. Honest. Never fluff.
🩶 Healing Merch
You won’t find pastel quotes or toxic positivity here.
Just minimalist designs. Shadow-toned art. Truth you can wear.
Each piece is a reminder that survival is sacred and so is telling the truth out loud.
🖋 Medium Blog
Longer thoughts. Deeper cuts.
Essays, stories, and hard truths that didn’t fit inside an email.
For the ones who want to go further into the abyss and come back with language.
🖤 You don’t need to grab everything.
Just the thing that meets you where you are.
Start with a book.
Or a text.
Or a journal you’re brave enough to open.
Let your shadow choose what it needs.
This isn’t a brand.
It’s a body.
Of truth. Of art. Of survival.
And it keeps growing with every scar I stop hiding.
→ Explore it all at [RyanPuusaari.com]
Or reach out directly if something in you is shouting, “Let’s make something together.”
You made it this far for a reason.
Not by accident. Not out of boredom.
But because something in these lines felt familiar.
Maybe it resonated.
Maybe it ached.
Maybe it named a silence you’ve been carrying so long
you forgot it had weight.
Shadow Thoughts isn’t here to fix you.
It’s not polished.
It’s not palatable.
It doesn’t speak in mantras, it speaks in scars.
This space was built for the part of you that never felt seen.
The part that got good at nodding, smiling, shrinking.
The part that stayed quiet because the world never asked what hurt.
This is where the descent begins.
Not to break you,
but to break the performance.
To speak your truth without flinching.
To turn pain into language.
To hold memory like a mirror.
To bleed in ink instead of silence.
It’s not easy.
But neither was pretending you were fine.
So if this feels like home,
stay a while.
We don’t rise here.
We unfold.
We reclaim.
We descend, together.
🖤
