Shame

The angel of our worst nature

“The only shame is to have none.” -  Blaise Pascal

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole. And, confronted with this dark side, one has a sense of shame that sometimes borders on despair.” - Carl Jung

I don’t know if there’s a more uncomfortable emotion than shame.

Even negative emotions like anger and envy can be inspiring. They can feel good, like in the way it feels good to crush an orange and let the juices drip down your fingers. They compel action. They protect you from your own deficiencies by forcing your focus outward.

If I’m lucky, I can transform my guilt into anger. I’m a clever woman; I can almost always figure out how to make my own mistakes someone else's problem. I had a bad childhood. That’s why it’s okay. If only my friends and lovers had been more sensitive to my needs, I wouldn’t have felt the need to claw my fingertips down their backs until they bled into ribbons. I’m a writer, you see. I’m an artist. I need emotional intensity that ends with me blacked out, frothing, near death, near despair, my smoking black heels on your balcony like hoofprints, or else when I turn to the page, I won’t have enough juice inside me to ignite the spark, make my heartbeat turn like a gear. What did Marilyn Monroe say again? If you can’t love me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best? That sounds like the proper philosophy of a beautiful, mad woman. If you want to love me, you’re going to have to sacrifice at the altar of my inadequacy. You’ll suffer to make up the difference.

I used to be able to easily run away from consequences. It was one of the nice things about being young. It was as simple as slamming the rest of my drink and ordering an Uber, disappearing out the back door with lipstick smeared across my chin. I could make new friends tomorrow. I could get a new job next week. I’d buy a plane ticket and land in a new city where the streets weren’t smeared with my inchoate and awful memories.

But sometimes, I become cornered by my own bad decisions. Bad decisions beget more bad decisions. Everywhere I turn, I discover that each bad decision has become a wall, a pathway that’s now obstructed. I’ve made a cage for myself. I can’t rationalize away what I’ve done to myself, can’t order an Uber to disappear from it, can’t scream and spit flying rage at someone else that I want to take the blame. There’s no escape anymore.

I feel the guilt I should have felt a long time ago.

Then, that guilt turns into shame.

Shame sits on my ribcage like a squat, deformed goblin. It makes me lose my appetite, chokes me when I try to eat and closes up my throat when I try to drink. It won’t let me drown it out in alcohol. It’ll spill each sip of vodka down my chin. You thought you could escape me? If you try to turn away I’ll break your bones. I’ll melt down your eyes until they touch the back of your skull and you won’t be able to look away.

Shame tells me I alone was responsible for the bad things that I have done, for the bad things that I haven’t done, for the ways in which I’ve only been saved from horrible deeds by my own cowardice and impotency, the micro-suicide every morning when I decided I didn’t want to live but I didn’t want to die either, so I’d breathe in little sips of disassociation, pinch at my eyes and demand they stop seeing, refuse the beauty that offered itself to me. I couldn’t blame anything else. Not art, not god, not society, not the fact my check never came in the mail, not life, with its blue skies and sails, its splendor that I mistook for a curse. 

It was me all along.

When shame hits, I don’t even have the anger to direct it inward. I can’t slash my arms with a knife and release vengeance upon myself because what good would that do? Self-harm is a fine sacrifice if you’re only paying tribute to yourself, but it’s a poor tribute to the almighty god, to making things right.  Self-harm is just a kind of self-indulgence. It’s not the sacrifice that leads to a greater good. It’s a little release, a scratch of dopamine, so you don’t have to feel the full weight of your enmity toward yourself.

It’s just another way to lead yourself back down the same path you’ve always been on - the circle of mistakes, infinitum, the sin that eats its own tail. 

And shame tells me that I should apologize, to tell the whole world that I’m sorry for how I’ve abused it, but I know that an apology isn’t good enough either. I want the feel-good rush of being forgiven like that will make me a better person. Like that means a river of blood will come to wash away the dirt.

Besides, I don’t want to have to make up for the wrongs I’ve done. I just want them erased. 

I googled the word “shame,” and all the pictures are of people with heads bent, shoulders tight, and hands over their eyes. You want to hide yourself from your own sight. You wish to unstitch yourself and disappear from the fabric of God.

Therapists talk a lot about “toxic shame,” like it’s an emotion to be avoided at all costs. Like it was something implanted in you by forces against your will. And it does, indeed, feel toxic. 

When I went to therapy, I once cried and told my therapist how ashamed I was. She snapped at me and told me I wasn’t allowed to feel that. But why? She welcomed any other feeling I had - anger, sadness, anxiety, fear - but shame was off-limits. Every bad thing I ever did that I felt guilty for was justified in her eyes, someone else’s fault, and any feeling of negativity directed at self was a misdirected arrow.

I couldn’t help but imagine her telling the same thing to everyone who ever hurt me, as long as they paid her fee of $100 an hour. It’s not your fault. It’s the world that’s wrong. I guess nothing is anyone’s fault then. We’re just one long chain of bad mothers moving backward toward the beginning of eternity until we crawl back into the ocean and are sucked back into carbon. Maybe we can’t even blame the stars.

Sometimes, people mistake understanding the reason why you did something as a justification. But just because you have trauma doesn’t mean it’s okay to scream at your partner when he inadvertently triggers you. It doesn’t mean it’s okay to shoot your wife in the head if she triggers your wartime PTSD. It’s not okay to try to conquer all of Europe and kill 6 million Jews just because you’re a mediocre painter.

We can understand that rationally. We understand that pedophiles and murderers need to go to prison no matter who hurt them or what kind of brain damage they have. We understand that our mothers and fathers had a responsibility to us, no matter how bad their own childhoods were. But somehow, often, when it comes to our own responsibility, we want to abdicate it to someone else.

I get it. I want to believe nothing is my fault. There’s nothing worse than the pain of shame.

And when it’s happening, it doesn’t even feel like it’s you doing the bad thing, does it? When you snap in anger, when you take the coward’s way out, when you let anxiety prevent you from performing at your best, it’s like a heated little demon has snuck into your nerves and hijacked them for its own use. If you could just grab it, wriggling and angry

That bad thing isn’t you. The thing that is you is the calm and rational one, the one with good intentions, the soft voice and the quick step. The one who is loving and courageous and empathetic. You are the unplucked flower. You are the infant suspended in a golden membrane of light. You want to be good. You desire it above everything else.

Don’t you?

But that demon is you.

It’s you. Of course, it’s you.

It’s everything you’ve hidden from your eyes.

As long as you believe it’s a demon and not the product of your own nature, you’ll be a slave to your evil impulses. If you don’t allow yourself to feel shame, you’ll be a horrific tool for anyone who wants to use you because you can’t recognize yourself. You’ve become disconnected from yourself. That’s how people convince themselves it’s okay to steal and lie, to stomp on the heads of children, to destroy anything that stands in their way.

I don’t think the worst emotion is toxic shame. It’s toxic righteousness.

I messed up. I know I’ve messed up and it hurts. It hurts. I’ve got the scars to prove it. I’d eat my own fingers if it could take the pain away. 

But I know I’ve got to feel the pain or someone else will. That’s how suffering passes from generation to generation. You refuse to swallow the pain, so you give it to someone else. It becomes a family legacy, an accident of breeding. Energy can neither be created or destroyed. Even emotions are bound by the laws of physics.

I know I have to let myself feel the shame if I have any chance of making it stop.