Over the last few months, I’ve been struggling with this intense sensation of shame. I always wondered why people rarely talk about their shame and share their shortcomings or mistakes. Then I realized how humiliating shame really is. I felt its bruise on my ego, and for the first time in a long time, I saw myself the same way I did many years ago. It’s an awfully reminiscent image of feeling fundamentally flawed, much like how I felt when I was younger. But in my more formative years, I was still growing and learning about myself - I also couldn’t pinpoint shame as a specific emotion; nonetheless, I’ve been brought back to that place. It sounds very self-deprecating, but I think it’s only on brand that this is how I open the renewal of my blog. I think feeling ashamed is one of the heaviest emotions; that said, I also find it most human. It makes you very self-conscious and hyper-aware of who you are. Or at least, I feel that way.
I’ve spent the last three months with a pretty hateful perspective towards, like, everything. I felt like I couldn’t do anything right. I couldn’t make the right decisions for myself. I couldn’t help myself to get ahead; I kept finding myself in these emotionally precarious situations. I was carrying so much of my misfortune on a daily basis. The shame is pretty expansive. It’s more relative to repetitive situations, bad habits, and stupid, avoidable mistakes with a few new lessons learned. It’s not as much about what my life looks like, but if that’s the shame you carry, take what you can from this. It wasn’t/isn’t just love or relationship-related. It came from my abandonment of this blog and my passions, academic success or lack thereof, friendships, and gestures toward others in general - my overall disposition. I felt/feel unreliable. My feelings of shame started in one place with one thing and then began to snowball. Issue after issue, problem after problem, the sadness I used to feel in similar situations had turned inward, and it just became this sort of dull despondency. How often do I have to be upset, sad, or disappointed? The only equation I could come up with was that there was no one to blame but myself for my problems. Pointing the finger can only be an emotional displacement strategy for so long, and that ended many moons ago. I felt terrible about the consistency of bad circumstances to appear in my life. I believed I was the root of all my problems and falling down the carelessness rabbit hole. But maybe that isn’t right either, and even if it were, sulking in it wouldn’t help me.
I had to look at my feelings from an outside perspective and find the root of each negative emotion or situation building onto my shame. It took me some time to realize I never hurt anybody, at least in most of these situations, and if I did, it was unintentional. I didn’t ask to be treated the way I have been and am not at fault or wrong for handling it or taking it the way I did. I wasn’t at fault enough for the things that would happen to be taking on all this blame. Starting there helped me a lot. Rationalization was something I used to work on in CBT, and while I found most of CBT to be bullshit, for once in my life, my awful high school therapist’s words came in handy. Finding myself in more awful situations than positive was stress-inducing and made me feel hopeless about my reality. Allowing all this negativity to take up so much space made it hard to practice gratitude or do things I enjoyed, and in addition to the shame, I felt like I would be unsuccessful in even trying.
Being that I’ve felt this for so long, and I’ve been sullen for more time than I’d like to admit - I’m trying to revel in a few other acknowledgments that my therapist has been laying into me.
Just because there isn’t anyone else to blame doesn’t mean I have to blame myself. It’s okay to acknowledge something for what it is and let it go. People do things they know better than to do all the time, and sometimes it goes south, but that’s just part of the human experience ~ allegedly. My mom used to yell at me all the time when I was little for continuously doing things I was told not to do. Eventually, whether it was many years down the line or the very minute I was told not to, I learned. You can know not to do something, but sometimes something leads you in a different direction. Shitty things have come out of me not listening to what I know, but it doesn’t mean I’m flawed because of it. That whole part has really fucked with me. I’ve written and talked about tons of things multiple times over, and then went and done the complete opposite as if I didn’t know it’d turn out to be a massive fucking shit fire. But again, I can’t make myself miserable on the account of learning a lesson, right?
The flip side of the coin is the other stuff that you know nothing about/have never experienced, and this conglomerate of fucked up feelings falls onto your shoulders, and you’re lost on what to say or do. Maybe you fuck it up the first time around; I think most people do, that’s okay. I could argue that everything is a new experience as long as it’s a new day. Nothing ever really feels the exact same two or more times around. In which case, you have unlimited fuck ups; it’s just a matter of how much you can take. Over the last seven months or so, I found myself continuously going back to/staying in a toxic relationship. At the end of it all, it was a learning lesson that I’m grateful for. That’s really all I can go forward saying about it. At the start of this year, I was faced with something - not terrible - just new, and it was strange and, in a way, significantly violating. I felt so stupid about something that maybe I could’ve prevented, but, ultimately, it wasn’t my fault. That lousy feeling of letting it happen to me, in conjunction with my need to control everything, clouded my perception and ability to accept the situation for what it was. I’ve had to learn that some things are just part of life’s inevitable annoyances. I’m not gonna say the way to deal with stuff is to say, “It is what it is,” but there’s nothing to be done besides working through it every day and acknowledging the reality of a situation. Additionally, negative feelings cannot be avoided - if I’ve learned anything in my early adulthood. They cannot stay on your mind and heart at full capacity. It is hard to be a person and to have strong emotions. It’s hard to work through the heavy things in life, but it’s also okay to feel things. Don’t ignore intense feelings; let them settle and work them out. More than anything, don’t feel bad about how you think about things and your decisions - unless you’re actively trying to hurt someone. In which case, you should fix that separately. Getting through anything is an active process and requires applied effort, but eventually, it will fade. I believe people, when they say the awful, make the joyous moments all the better. I recommend looking forward to that. Holding yourself to an unhealthy extent of blame and shame won’t help dissolve it. It happened. You are who you are; be grateful you gained something. That’s what I’m learning.
I’m not afraid of shame, and I’m not trying to run from it. Everybody feels it at one point and undoubtedly again. The fear of feeling ashamed should not stop you from trying to live your life or motivate some type of unhealthy perfection. All decisions have outcomes and effect circumstances, it’s just a matter of what you make of it. If anything has come from this, I am RICH with experience, mistakes or not - which is better than not having felt anything. I’m not in any position to talk about most of it, not because I’m ashamed… anymore… but because other people might be involved or I’m not ready to put it out for everybody to see yet. Which is fine.
I’ve tried writing this post for a couple of weeks now, and nothing has felt quite good enough, but I’m pushing forward on this fine Monday (now Thursday???? I needed to sit with this for a while). I hope to be a little bit more consistent here again. Getting through this feeling has not been the most arduous task of all time, but getting back to routine in my life has been debilitating. I’m getting over it, though!!!!
I love this blog, and I love writing, and I love you!
Bye!!!!!!
Daniela