Dispatches from the middle

Prologue: WordPress has this nifty analytic function that shows me where in the world my readers are located. I looked at my blog yesterday, and while there was only one viewer, that person was in Serbia. Serbia! I don’t know anyone in Serbia (at least, not anyone based there…who knows what y’all get up to when you travel). I thought this was pretty cool, so I checked again today, just for fun. And…Ukraine! People find this blog, whether through a subscription, through Facebook, or through random searches. And I’ve only ever received positive comments on it, which either means everyone’s too polite to say what they actually think, or people really do enjoy it. I’m going to stick with the latter. So, conclusion: people see it and people enjoy it. I can do a lot with something that people see and enjoy!

Post: Of all the things I could start with, I’m going to start with shame. Shame. Boom. Because getting to know shame is turning out to be an incredible help and relief for me, and I suspect it may be for some of you too.

What is shame? What does the word “shame” mean to you? It’s one of those words – those emotions! – that everyone seems to recognize, in one form or another, but no one seems to talk about. Well, I want to talk about it! I recently started reading a book entitled I Thought it Was Just Me: Women Reclaiming Power and Courage in a Culture of Shame. I’ll return to the book in a moment, but I want to provide some background. The author of this book, Dr. Brené Brown, first surfaced on my personal radar when I watched her TED talk on “The Power of Vulnerability”:

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html

I love this talk. When it finished, I watched it again. Then I cried – she’s seen right through me, and doesn’t hate me for it! In fact, she sympathizes. Identifies, even. I’m not the only one! Then I watched it again. And again. Then I found Dr. Brown’s other video, “Listening to Shame”:

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame.html

And watched that, over and over, sniffling and snuffling and positively reveling in the fact that someone had finally given me a way to articulate what I’ve been struggling with for years now.

It’s shame.

I wouldn’t have thought to use the word, as I always assumed I would feel shame when I’d done something to feel ashamed about. I try my best not to do these things, so I’d kind of ruled shame out. But as it turns out, shame is far more insidious than this. It’s not reserved for the deserving. Dr. Brown defines shame as follows:

“shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging. Women often experience shame when they are entangled in a web of layered, conflicting and competing social-community expectations. Shame creates feelings of fear, blame and disconnection” (30).

It is the fear of disconnection and rejection upon being deemed unworthy, not good enough. For some people, it’s body image that causes feelings of shame; for some it’s a perceived lack of professional success; for some it’s a traumatic experience. For all, it’s the fear of not being accepted by those around us, and in particular, by those we love most.

I know from painful personal experience that shame has everything to do with fear. And here’s where it gets really messy, because fear leads to blame – sometimes blaming ourselves, sometimes others – to feelings of powerlessness, and to defensive / preemptive outbursts. These are the worst for me; Dr. Brown describes individuals she interviewed who feared they were going crazy. You see, my mind, when it’s gettin’ its shame on, reasons that, if I can figure out how I’m “deficient” with respect to a given person or situation, I can prepare a rebuttal for when I am, inevitably, confronted with it. And so I stew over every possible thing that could make me unworthy of acceptance, formulate counter-arguments, and get angrier and angrier at the individuals onto whom I’m projecting these thoughts of rejection.  Eeeeeeeeeeeee. Only vowel for it.

Now, the reality is that I’m not deficient in the first place. No one thinks so. No one is plotting to reject me. The attack is never going to come. I just keep stirring my poisonous mental stew and lashing out preemptively at the people who love me most, because I worry about not being good enough. Which is unacceptable. And then I feel shame (…and I do believe that qualifies as metashame – shame felt over feelings of shame and their consequences. Dig it, bitches!). What a mess.

I’ve not finished the book yet, and it’s my first on the subject, so I can’t speak to Dr. Brown’s suggestions for what she calls “shame resilience” (28), but I can surmise that talking about it plays a major role. So I’m talking. This is my story of shame, and I hope it resonates. Not that I’m hoping others are experiencing the same things, but some people probably are, so here’s one little voice telling you that you’re not alone!

Lastly, I’d like to share something that occurred to me while I was writing out a list of things I’m ashamed of in an attempt to get to the root of all this – behind everything that causes me shame is an achievement that I should actually be proud of, a fact that I should be thankful for, or at very least, something I could learn from! Reading some of the examples presented in Dr. Brown’s book has only reinforced this conclusion. For example, I feel ashamed – unworthy, deficient, not suitably amazing – because I find it incredibly difficult to juggle all of my commitments at the moment. It’s not easy, and I feel ashamed that it is not easy, that I’m not happy all the time, and that I’m not learning to cook, practicing my Spanish, and achieving even more besides. But what I should perhaps focus on instead, is the fact that I’m doing these things in the first place. Maybe this is something to be proud of, instead of being ashamed that it’s not effortless.

Instead of feeling ashamed that I don’t spend more time with my parents, and that I’m not more present in my sisters’ lives, I could focus on being grateful for having a family that I want to spend time with!

And so on. It’s something to think about, in any case.

But I do go on. And I need to get back to my revisions, or I’ll really have something to be ashamed about!