A Stern Lecture on Shame

So, let's talk about shame spirals. I have them (lots, loudly), you've had them. Some people I know seem to have them basically constantly. It is a recurring theme with a bunch of people I really like recently and I have been thinking about it a lot. So here it is.

A friend recently linked to a blog post by some guy who wanted to talk about shame and I read it and just wanted to smack the writer upside the head. In his case, his shame was around the fact that he failed at business and had to move out of NYC and found himself lying to people and acting like a shithead because he couldn't admit he was struggling. He was talking about the process of coming to terms with that, which would obviously be incredibly hard, but that fucker whined and WHINED and acted like both his behaviour and his subsequent shame about it was somehow outside of his control, or out of character or something. An affliction that was happening to him that he was learning to carry with him blah blah blah. He vaguely mentioned his marriage ending throughout this process and I see why. No one wants to be married to (or do business with, apparently) someone who treats their life like it is something that just happens to them and then weeps about their shame when they are not winning. Whatta dipstick. I flipped through a few other posts and he's a good writer, likeable when he is not talking about himself, and has some really good things to say, but is ultimately a victim in his life. Sad.

We all know that feeling shame is our choice, right? I mean it's kind of fun to wring your hands and smack your forehead on the table and howl about REMORSE once in a while, but really, if you think about it, shame is totally invented to insulate you from either knowing or admitting what kind of person you are. You get that little twinge that lets you know you are not a psychopath, but beyond that the rest is basically just making yourself feel better (or feel gratified by feeling worse). And also it is a pretty useless waste of your time and emotional energy. You have better things to do, I know you do. Just fucking deal with it. You act like yourself all the time, no matter what you are doing. To have a nervous breakdown about it after the fact just means that you are trying to fight being what you actually are.

People are funny. We do stupid things, even really smart, awesome, driven, kind and lovely people do them. We drink too much or get too stressed out and flip our lids, act like maniacs, do things that do not reflect the person that we think we are. But seriously, if that wasn't the person you are then you wouldn't be doing the things you do. So, instead of spending a week laying on the floor feeling like shit about living your life like a normal healthy person (because we ALL do these things) why not congratulate yourself on not being a fucking corpse, and head on to whatever you have to do next? By all means, freak out if you want to, shame spiral and wring your hands and feel TERRIBLE. But just understand that it is a self-indulgence. You are authoring this, it is not being done to you. You should probably just laugh about it all instead.
xo


(P.S. In all fairness, that blogger sort of arrived at the fact that shame is stupid too by the end of his post, but it was still in a new age-y transcendent way that suggested he was overcoming something difficult, rather than rethinking his choice to torture himself, still not really admitting that he acted like a lying shithead because part of his personality is a lying shithead, which makes me think he's still got some work to do).