Beside Shame

What resides next to shame?

Trigger Warning: discussion of sexual assault and physical and emotional abuse

I’m learning to be with myself. To accept the fact that I’m hurting, to accept that I will never be fully free from trauma, to accept that I will never be cured. I can learn to be with myself, to nurse my wounds tenderly and sweetly, learn to connect with and illuminate the vast expanses of dark shame that cover and strangle my heart. What does it tell me? Every feeling tells us something, and every piece of experience contains knowledge. The task before us is to understand what we can learn from it when we give it voice and illumination, when we resist the efforts of the world and our own self-punishment to distort and contort the essential truth that manifests in each moment of existence.

What does my shame tell me? What knowledge does it project onto my soul? How do I resist this knowledge? How is my interpretation of it currently distorted and contorted? Toward what end do I distort it? Toward what end can I redirect it? With what purpose can I give it meaning? How can I sit with my shame and hold it close to me instead of pushing it away? How can I let it in? Is it threatening to do this or something more empowering? How can I accept the blistered wound of my past and move forward to a brighter tomorrow with resolve and courage? How can I face myself?

I am going to start with the last question. How can I face myself? Ahana. Ceros. Akhil. You are autistic and borderline. You are Indian and trans. Bisexual and a woman. You have muscular dystrophy and ADHD. You have not always been all of these things. What else can you not always be? What can you become? You were not always borderline, not always trans, not always a woman—but these things are now deeply essential to you. What else can be deeply reflective of your selfhood that you are not yet? What things that defined your experience in the past no longer define you? What things define you now but won’t in the future? How did your shame never define you but was the interpretation of the human imperfection, struggle, contradiction, conflict and difficulty in which you and every person is born? How can you forgive yourself for a life situation and story that you did not choose? How have you moved through this lack of choice with some level of grace, courage and sweetness—how have you always strived through it all? How have you learned hard lessons that most people never learn or even encounter? How has that grown you instead of breaking you? Are you that grown person rather than anything else?

Shame engulfs my entire past, my entire life, my entire existence, my entire sense of self, my entire body, my entire presence, every moment I slide into. It is like napalm—clinging and sticking to and burning my soul. But this is an experience of shame rather than its reality or nature. It is how I respond to it. It is symptomatic of how I struggle against its existence in my life. If I let shame into the more vulnerable and hurting parts of myself, what can I find that exists beside that shame? Not outside or around or beyond shame, but next to it, like twins in a womb.

Jolted from my body by my dad’s broken-open anger, I run away from home. I am 11. Crying and screaming deep in the pits of my stomach, I pack a small bag with everything I prize. Packed tightly with only books. No clothes, no stuffed animals, no games, not my computer, no food, nothing but containers of knowledge and paths to worlds on the other side of the shameful present. Knowledge and imagination and curiosity and the relentless need to learn existed right next to shame, hugging my survival instinct—get out of this dangerous house while preserving the wonder of knowledge. That was my sense of self at that moment. Knowledge was the thing I decided I needed to preserve, to protect, to take with me as I left everything behind. I ran away to protect myself and took the things that defined me—books. I got lost and wandered the highway, at risk of kidnapping, being run over or going missing. I had to leave behind my books on the side of the road, a more horrific loss than losing my home. My true home has always been within the yawning horizon of words, the ones I witnessed around me, recognizing the ones I found struggling from my own hands and throat. I might have died, but I survived because there was something that existed next to shame and hurt, which gave light and meaning to me when I needed it the most, giving me something to fight for, to be courageous and alive about. In the moment of danger, I found a way to move through it, and in that movement, to shine with a spirit that values learning as much as safety from my father. Next to shame due to a lack of safety is the shine of learning. When my body disintegrated, I still stayed with not only myself but the joys that were the most precious.

My heart in my ears, my tears in my hair. My dad is pulling me upside down, hanging me from my feet. He screams with shattering rage—”How dare you remove all the caps of the markers!? Are you an idiot!? Why are you lining them up!? You have no regard for things!” I had more regard for those marker caps than he could ever possibly understand. They were friends, people I imagined who were in their own world, having their own dreams and worries like me. Except my fears were too big to bear; my dreams too expansive for my father to comprehend. I am 7. My body is upside down, being beaten: all for dreaming too big, for having an imagination bigger than the utility marker caps usually have. Beside a beaten body, beside the shame rippling under my skin, seeping into my muscles, beside the moment in which I am sprawled on the floor, crying, carefully massaging the shame deeper and deeper. Next to all this shame is the wonder of imagining the rich lives of marker caps. I hurt for a purpose, in defense of something crucial to the world—wonder. My shame is the chasm that opens between, on the one hand, the dehumanizing power that beat me and, on the other, the aliveness that humanizes marker caps.

Two decades later. Last month, I experienced sexual abuse. Shame overwhelms and exhausts me. I broke my partial hospitalization program’s housing agreement to let one of the perpetrators stay in my apartment because he told me he had an unsafe home environment. I wished to give him moments of safety, just as a day later, he wished to assault me. How can I give voice to this shame? I called the Uber that brought him and the other perpetrator to my place. Did I participate in my own abuse? Did I let it happen? Did I ask for it? Am I to blame? Overwhelming, exhausting shame, marrow poisoning shame. How can I give voice to something so heartbreaking, the confluence of self-antagonism and the antagonism of others? How can I give voice to destruction so awful? How can I? Can I? A storm brewing; beside this shame is vulnerability so tender it can barely be mentioned. The vulnerability of love in connection with hatred. I loved them but hated myself. They hated me when I loved them. They destroyed me while I offered them myself. How tender, so red like my blushing face when I first met them. Now bursting with shame, with anger, with deep sorrow. Red then, red now. Tender then, tender now.

At this point, this essay is split open. I am split open. How do I put this essay back together in order to make an argument and conclude it as a finished piece of writing? I refuse to put this essay back together and have a narrative end. I want to separate two parts of me—the part of me that is shameful and the part that subsisted creatively within that shame. I want to recover the latter part and put it in tension with shame’s narratives of encirclement. I am still finding my way hand-in-hand with shame. I feel overwhelmed and passionate about the value this shame has for me. For with shame came priceless experiences existing right beside it—learning, wonder, tenderness.