In 2010, I started this blog, in part, to dispel the rampant shame that had so characterized my life up until then. Sexual shame, relational shame, fundamental, essential, I-am-a-shitty-person shame.
Shame was a deep bodily sensation in me, one the circumstances my family imbued me with from infancy.
In 2010, when I started this blog, I proceeded from the insight that sunlight cures shame and that mistakes, bad acts, do not make a person bad. Somehow, through some combination of psychoanalysis and 12-step programs, I had come to understand that I had done terrible things, but nonetheless remained a good person. That the terrible things I had done were evidence not of my badness, but of my pain, and depending on whom you ask, either my weakness, my vulnerability, my stupidity, or my disease. Or of course, some combination of these and other traits.
I don’t particularly love the disease model of addiction, mental health, or emotional pain. It simply doesn’t resonate for me. I do, however, note my decades-long tropism toward shame. Weirdly, as I wrote the other day, if I look closely, I can find evidence all over the place of things I do that seem almost calculated to produce shame in me. I do things actively and passively, I avoid things and chase things, all of which, each of which, individually, produces its own little neurotransmitter rush of a jolt of shame in my mind.
In 2010, my stance with regard to shame was soft, gentle, and open. There was nothing about myself that I wouldn’t write here. Maybe the most raw versions of this, or evidence for it, are two: my post about girls at a bat mitzvah, and my series of posts about creep shots. In each of these instances, I wrote about behaviors and feelings about which one might imagine I might feel shame, about which many reading the blog thought I should feel shame. In each case, I didn’t. In the case of my writing about girls at a bat mitzvah, if anything, I felt a sense of pride, not at my feelings, not at my having registered 12 and 13 and 14-year-old girls as sexual objects, but in how I responded to an involuntary bodily reaction, which is to say, rather than stuff it down and pretend it didn’t exist, I acknowledged it, dissected it, concussed it, and then discussed it, all openly and honestly, and without flinching.
The creep shots episode was a little different. I certainly don’t feel pride at any element of that story, other than my having written about it honestly. I think I was wrong. I think creep shots are wrong. I think they represent a genuine act of aggression, and while I continue to believe that they don’t harm anyone in any meaningful way, I nonetheless have shifted completely in my understanding of their moral valence. Fast forward to today. As I said, if I look around me, I can find all sorts of evidence of shame – shame within my control, and shame seemingly out of it. And I’ll note that the ease and comprehensiveness with which I described my shameful impulses, actions, and feelings isn’t so much in evidence today. I’ll just note all the things that I’m not really comfortable confessing to here. Partly, I suppose, this is a function of my diminished anonymity. When I started the blog, T and L were the only people in my real life who knew of its existence.
Nowadays, a couple of dozen people about whom I care occasionally dip their teeth into the waters of these words. What I write here finds its way into a number of my social and familial relationships. So there are consequences to my confessing here that didn’t exist fifteen years ago. And, and maybe this feels more important, my stance just isn’t as relaxed and comfortable and self-accepting as it was back then. My rejection of myself, my judgment of myself, my contempt for myself has returned to a certain extent and wraps itself around my actions and inactions defensively, insisting my shame is deserved, even while it hints that my shame is in my control.