Beyond Shame
It is getting cold, time to tell this story while I still can. I have kept something to myself my whole life, and not just for my own sake. I haven't wanted to think about what happened, but recently I've begun to see my life from a perspective that doesn't leave it out. It makes me sad but it helps me understand myself better, and I think other people should have the chance too.
When I was very young, I had a best friend, my next-door neighbor’s other next-door neighbor. We played almost every day, and I think that made a big difference for me because I was homeschooled. One funny thing is that he had a house just like mine, all the rooms were in the same place, same doors, same fixtures, except the family room was longer because they had a three car garage. Going over there was like stepping into some alternate reality of my home, and my home was sometimes a scary place to be.
I remember he had an orange cat that would sometimes get lost but we would find it stuck inside the drain under the sidewalk outside their home, the kind that might make you think of scary clowns. One time I climbed in there too, to see what it was like, and I remember thinking it was a lot better than I imagined looking at it from the outside. It was much brighter inside than I expected and I could see how a cat might want to crawl in there.
One day we were in his basement and there were these huge fluffy pink things, almost like a stack of fuzzy mattresses. They were big and soft and we had the idea that we could jump off something high on to them and not get hurt. I remember they were so soft to touch, like cotton candy. A short time later, we became very itchy and started to bleed and we got in trouble.
My mom likes to tell this one story because she thinks it is cute. She tells about how one day, my friend's father called her up, or showed up at her door (I'm not sure). He said he found me and his son, we were sitting stark naked on the large rock at the end of our street, next to the main road, sunbathing or something. She laughs when she tells this story of brazen youthful innocence. I have asked her not to tell it anymore, but she often forgets when I ask her things like that.
I don't remember that time, but I remember something like that happening. Only, we weren't outside, we were hiding in my friend's closet. Funny enough, it is a closet just like the one in my older brother's room, it being almost the same house and all. I remember the day his dad opened the door to the closet and found us in there, naked as a jay. I remember his shock and disgust and not understanding why. I remember his stony face as he made us get dressed. I was afraid of him. I remember not seeing my friend very often after that and wondering why he didn't like me anymore, wondering what was wrong about me.
I remember sometime before that, an older boy showed us how to do the thing we were doing in the closet. He was just a boy too, about 5 years older than us. We were maybe in first or second grade, maybe younger, I can't be sure. He told us it was something grown-ups do, I don't think he understood either. He thought it was like a game, and so did we.
I don't know if I told my mom what happened. I remember feeling very shameful. I don't think I did tell her, otherwise she probably wouldn't tell the story about the rock.
We were a devout christian household. We couldn't watch TV very often, but sometimes when we did, a sex scene would come on and my mom would be outraged and disgusted. Sometimes we had to turn it off and she would tell us about how sex is only ok when it is between a husband and wife. She told us about all the sin these people on the TV were letting into their lives, how it might destroy their chance at happiness, forever. I remember dreading the possibility of sex in whatever we were watching, she always made it terrible. I read all the content warnings in the TV guide just to be sure.
Sometime later, I went to high school. It was the first year I went to school that wasn't at home. I was about as overwhelmed as you are probably imagining. I met a girl, she was beautiful. She had a class where the class project was to get pretend-married, right there in front of the class, and she asked if I would be her pretend groom. I wore pretend nice clothes to school that day and we said our vows, I remember they were inspired by Earth, Wind & Fire and had the words "forever and a day."
Fast forward days or weeks and we were in my basement without any clothes and there was no more pretending. I remember she told me I have a man's body. I didn't understand what she meant and it made me just a little self conscious. We didn't have sex, but she led me much further than I had ever gone before. Those moments were beautiful and sweet, and I wasn’t ready for the intense wave of guilt that followed. I thought maybe I had ruined my chance of ever finding love. I wrote messages to myself in huge letters, reminders to love God, and pinned them to my ceiling and walls. She was still on my bed.
Years later, when I thought back to how she must have felt, I was ashamed again for very different reasons. We wrote emails and she told me how terrible it was how I behaved afterward, and told her I was deeply sorry. My shame turned something beautiful into something that traumatized us both.
Fast forward more, I am living in another basement. I wrote a letter to the older boy, now a man, who showed us the grown-up stuff when we were too young. I wanted to make sense of it and put it behind me. I wrote that I forgive him, thinking that he might carry guilt. I wanted him to know it was safe to talk about and process together, if he wanted to. He wrote back, indignant that I thought he needed my forgiveness. He wrote that he was too young to understand and so he couldn't have done anything wrong. I believe he was too young to understand. It's possible he also had an experience like mine, children usually don't have those ideas on their own. He might not have been ready to think about it, and he deserves to choose.
My mom has always been a fierce opponent to sex education. She doesn't understand what a difference healthy sex education could have made for her own kids. She wanted the best for us, and the best is what she learned listening to a radio show every morning that would close with the message to "turn our hearts toward home." But there was trauma in her own home that she couldn’t see, maybe because she faced trauma too and had become numb, maybe because she was earnestly doing everything that radio show told her and so it couldn’t possibly be off track.
Again, we go forward. I am in the spare bedroom of my own home with the woman I would later marry. She knows I have been saving myself for a special love that would last. And at long last, we found it. She wanted to be my first. We went to bed the night before, passionate and drunk. She wanted me to remember everything, so we waited a little longer, until the morning sun shined through the cottonwood leaves outside and the room was full of golden light.
She was my friend and my love and I have never felt safer than I did in her arms. We called each other tootie and darling and she loved to tickle me to death. She was the lead singer of a band and I was her groupie. We rode the bus to school together, sharing a pair of earbuds, and we were happy. But maybe there has always been a part of me that struggled to love myself, to feel worthy of love, and I suppose it is difficult to be in love with someone like that. Maybe it made her feel like there was something wrong with her too.
She left without any explanation and cut off nearly all contact. I know that when she left me, I was not quite the man she fell in love with. I had begun to struggle in the doctoral program and I had taken a year off to focus on my wellbeing. A few months later, she was gone. I've gone through many different feelings about her and the one that I've settled on is that I wish she had told me why she fell out of love so that I might have had a chance to understand and change. If not for her, for myself and for my next chapter. But even more, I wish her happiness and every good thing.
After spending too much time alone, I tried to find love again. I went out dancing and had my heart broken and sometimes found hidden fairy rings in the night and beautiful souls nearby, true warmth. But the more I looked, the more I felt like something was missing in me, something that the women I met were looking for. I am broken, maybe a little more than most, maybe not. Other people could see it before I could.
I don't have the answers, but here is as far as I've gotten.
I believe the sexual lives of an entire generation have been marred by religious belief. Every once in a while, if you squint, it appears better than the secular understanding of sexuality that it opposes. It is possible that both are flawed. It is difficult to talk about with my family because my failure to be true to the faith may appear to explain my struggle, but they don't know the whole story. I know many others raised in that belief that just haven't pursued love, it seems impossible to navigate the world they find with the map they've been given. Although I have made mistakes, I don't believe that breaking free from the stranglehold on my sexuality was one of them. For another perspective, I recommend Rethinking Sex by Christine Emba.
Some people reflect on life as the sum total of all our choices. I think that is half of it, I have made choices for which I wish I had another chance. But our choices were shaped by something else, sometimes something we can't control. Part of me knows there is nothing truly wrong with me. I believe all people are worthy of compassion and understanding, curiosity and the benefit of the doubt, when it is possible. We should be warm, and kind, and breathe before we get too angry. To the extent that we can reflect and receive this light, we will all find ourselves in a brighter world. But it is difficult to give to others that which we deprive ourselves, it depends on the same muscle group. We can’t lift others up while holding ourselves down. And some people just struggle to see themselves as worthy, maybe it is a part of us that is hard to change after some point, like a broken bone that heals with a bend.
Maybe we are still healing this bend as a species, as homo sapiens. Maybe it comes from a part of us that used to help us survive but now mostly just causes us pain as far as we can tell, like that dang appendix they took out of me. I know shame has its uses, and it also has its misuses. 1
If we are lucky, we had a childhood that taught us to see ourselves as good, even when we make mistakes, even when we are flawed. Even to see the beauty in the flaws. For the rest of us, we can still learn and we learn best when someone can show us how. That is the true power of grace. The love and compassion we receive, in so many different forms, can sometimes kindle it inside. It can guide us through the motion, like physical therapy for the soul. And it blesses us too, as givers. We grow the same strength of compassion we need for ourselves sometimes.
To be beyond shame we must be beyond shaming others.
Maybe I’m more broken than most, maybe not. If you found any chapter of my story too familiar, dear person, I hope you know that you deserve compassion too.
I have known grace, I have felt a fire inside, but on its own it flickers and turns to smoke. For now, I am too tired to struggle against the cold, I will curl up under a blanket.
Shame is scattershot, hitting targets you didn’t intend. Sometimes we hit others when we aim at ourselves, sometimes we hit ourselves when we aim at others. It can travel a very long way, from the time we aimed it at someone else to later on when we inevitably fall short ourselves. It can hit innocent bystanders, who get the message that they should carry shame too. As a solution, it scales poorly with the problem. The people we would shame the most are often the least receptive to it. We cannot set someone on the right path by attacking their sense of dignity. There is something that pretty much always works better than shame: a thorough understanding of what is at stake, communicated with kindness and respect.
Shame giving is a circular firing squad. Maybe shame is a mass shooting in America that we need to pay more attention to. Maybe the only thing we have to shame is shame itself. On second thought, let’s skip that too, sounds confusing.