I saw a video where someone did what they called shadow yoga.

White room. Ring light behind them. Everything evenly lit. No dark corners. No edges. Their silhouette looked cut out and pasted on.

A ring light is made to erase shadows from faces.

That’s the product.

It didn’t take long for the rest of it to show up.

A link in bio. A download. A PDF guide with bullet points. A playlist with “ambient” in every track name. A price that looked like a lunch. The word “reclaim” in the caption, like a promise nobody asked for.

There’s probably a certification already.

Weekend workshop. “Shadow Movement Facilitator.” A badge for a profile. Clean fonts. Brand colors.

The thing about an even light is what it does to people.

Even illumination. Even energy. Even skin. Even mood.

A store display effect.

The clamp light I use is the opposite of that.

It’s chipped. The cord twists in the middle. The switch has a click that feels mechanical, not digital. The bulb heats the metal until you can’t touch it. When it’s on, you know it’s on.

It makes a circle of light about three feet wide.

And it makes a shadow that argues.

Not in a dramatic way. Just in the way it refuses to match your idea of yourself.

The moment you get good at shadow shapes, you’re rehearsing.

Technique turns the shadow into a puppet. Rabbit ears on cue. A bird that always looks like a bird. The shadow stops surprising you when you know what you’re doing.

Failure is the right outcome here.

Not in a spiritual sense. Just practically. The interesting part lives in the wobble. The shoulder shake. The finger that won’t hold the angle. The body that remembers something you forgot.

I moved my arm once and my shoulder brought back throwing a ball. Backyard. Late eighties, maybe. The specific rotation nobody taught me. It just happened enough times to become automatic.

The wall showed the outline of a habit I’d kept without meaning to.

This doesn’t produce anything.

It doesn’t improve anything. It doesn’t fit in a square video in a way that makes sense. The room has to be part of it. The heat. The dust smell. The silence. The small delay between thought and motion.

I read an article about “productivity hacks for creative recovery.”

The word hack appeared four times.

Each time it meant skipping the part that takes time.

There isn’t a hack for this.

There’s only the part where you stand beside a light and watch your own shape get rewritten on a wall you haven’t looked at in years.

When I’m done, I put the clamp light back on the shelf.

Unplugged. Cord wound badly, loop too big, twist in the middle. The reflector still chipped.

I walk past the wall.

It holds nothing.

Just a surface. Waiting.