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For a long time, my desire was at odds with my behavior.
More than anything, I wanted to be good. I wanted to be good, and I wanted to know that I was good, to believe it, and to never question the veracity of that belief. I wanted to be good, and yet I kept behaving in ways that made me feel bad. Inside of this discrepancy, I became a person whose entire lived experience was colored by a low-grade, yet omnipresent, felt-sense of shame.
Shame is a lonesome dance. I couldn’t talk about it. I hardly had language for it. And so I kept it private. I held it so close. What would I have said? This is what I actually believed: that there was something very wrong with me. That I was broken beyond repair. That if the people I loved most found out the truth, that they wouldn’t want anything to do with me ever again.
Inside the binary of wanting to be good, but experiencing myself as bad, I was at the mercy of my basest impulses. I didn’t trust myself—how could I, when my sense of self was about as solid as smoke? I didn’t know who I was, and instead of doing the work to figure that out, I became a master shapeshifter. I would be the person I thought whoever I was with wanted me to be (as if I could possibly have known what that was). I had zero boundaries, neither with myself nor others. I felt split, beholden to an inner pendulum that had me swinging between light and dark extremes.
Along the way, I got really good at shoving down and casting aside all my wants and desires, watching instead as, for years, they just sat there, crowding up every available back-burner.
In my body, shame is a clenching in my gut, a closing of my throat. It is crumpled shoulders, a hollowed out chest. It is insomnia and anxiety and hyper self-focus. Maybe it’s obvious, but shame is exhausting.
From where I sit now, here in this quiet room, sun still far from rising, I read these words, I reflect on my past, and it seems dramatic, hyperbolic (on brand, as it were). And yet. I remember the intensity. Sometimes it was so intense it felt like my ribcage was collapsing into itself. I would go into freeze, waiting for the feeling to pass, or to go out into the world and get into something that would have me escape, numb, run.
It wasn’t until—you guessed it—I stopped drinking that a window opened in my brain, and I saw for the first time that it might be possible to integrate my darkness instead of continuing to run from it.
That is a tight little sentence that belies what it takes to actually make integration a reality, which, I’m sorry to report, is a whole lot of discomfort. I don’t love revisiting this! Sometimes I think about how shitty I used to feel about myself and it breaks my damn heart. But I share because I know it’s an experience that so many of us must reckon with as we do the work of becoming less fragmented, and more whole and complete.
Here we are, first week of a new year. I feel the January engine whispering my name, my foot thoughtlessly pressing down on the gas pedal. I want to disrupt this pattern. I want to blow up the engine.
My “word of the year” catches me off-guard. The word that keeps coming to me is shameless.
There’s a great quote that I’ve heard attributed to so many different people (current Google efforts report that it was Lily Tomlin, but if I’m wrong here, I trust you’ll correct me) that goes something like this: forgiveness is letting go of all hope of having a different past.
The way we become shameless is by making the shame beautiful.
I remember the first time I said the hardest thing out loud, something that for years I believed I would take to the grave. I said the thing out loud and I was met with care, and love, staring into the eyes of a friend who reflected back to me that thing I’d been chasing: my goodness. A sound followed—click—and I knew it was the sound of that false narrative, the one that would insist that I was broken, cracking open and floating away.
We become shameless when we forgive ourselves our pasts, because we know that we did the best we could with the tools we had. We stop pining for do-overs, because we no longer are caught in the loop of magical thinking (something I remind myself of often: even if I *did* have a do-over, I have no way of knowing a do-over would have led to better outcomes). We own our story, we take agency over the design of our lives.
Healing is possible. And, stakes are high, and I’ve already spent enough time inside the chaos and tumult of an untrue story. So I’m stepping forward: lewd, improper, unabashed, immodest, unchaste; I’m casting off all of your limitations; my words are arrows now, my actions bold and unapologetic.
Inside of my commitment to adapting to the times, instead of waiting for times to change, I am questioning everything. I am prioritizing deep care for my pobrecita nervous system. I am saying NO (remember when we were saying yes all the time? Whoa). I am building Self Made. I am laying down every last mask, I won’t waste my time trying to convince you of anything. My patience for extending the benefit of the doubt has worn thin; I am no longer making excuses for even the flimsiest of red flags. I am audacious, bold, unwilling, incorrigible (god, I love that word). I am boundless as a river; I am boundaried as a redwood. I am here, shameless; I have nothing left to hide.
From the archives ~ this time last year:
⭐️No One Knows Better Than You (some thoughts on Dry January)
SELF MADE is a newsletter for fellow 🌺late bloomers🌺 with a focus on recovery, creativity and community. It's written by me, Dani, a writer, coach, and recovery advocate in San Francisco, CA.
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I relate so hard! Are you perhaps an Eannegram 4?
Sense going back to drinking 6 weeks ago I've had the opportunity to see both sides of the coin.. and oh my godess what a difference on each side.. and how the drinking side just rund away and pulls with it every rug that could possibly be pulled under me and how HARD it is to get back up again. The self trickery, the total lack of boundaries and the shit self esteem.. for me it's all linked to my alcohol abuse.
Looking forward to my future soberness and the next sober from bullshit meeting.
Thank you for your words that makes me feel hopeful and less alone 💓
What an AMAZING piece. So much of this resonated deeply. "...wanting to be good, but experiencing myself as bad" ... ooooof. My shame was something so big and terrifying -- I was so, so afraid of it, I would flinch away (often physically) when it frequently intruded my mind. And then I would numb it, or distract myself from it, and boy howdy if booze wasn't a really convenient numbing/distraction agent.
When I stopped flinching away -- when I actually turned toward and sat with my shame, and accepted myself and my past and everything -- I was astonished at how this thing that had been so terrifying was actually something I could encompass. The pain I was so afraid of and was so convinced would overcome me if I didn't flee, so convinced would somehow be fatal, wasn't pain at all. Was actually a kind of growth and emergence. Letting go of the (as you put it) magical thinking about what could-have-should-have-might-have-been is the only was to move forward unshackled.
May we all be shameless, bold and audacious, unabashed and unbroken.