How to Banish Your Shame

And let your romantic, exuberant self breathe free for a change.

Untitled (1954), Jane Graverol

Shame is a shapeshifter. It takes the shape of confusion, self-hatred, avoidance, anxiety, paralysis, blame, and long-term depression.

Shame is cumulative. Whispers of remorse build to a steady drumbeat of regret. Murmurs of self-doubt form a short story about mistakes, then grow into an epic life-long odyssey of failure.

We add up the data points on ourselves and our pasts, attribute cause and effect, and attach a moral retroactively, the way we were instructed as children, the way our parents were instructed by their parents. Uncertainty means we’re doing it wrong. Ambivalence reflects giant missteps and bigger flaws. Sadness triggers anxiety only because sorrow was always encountered as a personal error, a moral failure. All of our emotional weather is linked to our bad choices: If only you were sunnier and more optimistic, if only you understood how to triumph over your body and mind, stepping over all hesitation and fear, plowing into the future without heeding your underlying doubts and desires, marching to victory instead of asking what the fighting is for.

In each moment, we recite shame-driven flash fiction: Our so-called hero pauses on the edge of battle, contemplating a return home to safety, proving that he’s doomed. Our beautiful protagonist breaks out in hives, her hair falls out, she gains ten pounds, and her prince rides off into the woods never to be seen again. Our lead character succumbs to bewilderment and self-doubt, resigns herself to being a plucky sidekick, a passive supporting character, an echo of the other people’s dreams and desires.

And as the years go by, our stories become increasingly rigid and entrenched. We can’t wriggle out from under them. The sound of our shame is deafening but it’s been around for so long we can’t remember music and silence, we can’t remember believing in ourselves, we can’t recall the feeling of blind desire, of bluster, of swaggering into the unknown. We watch stories about romance and adventure on our screens every night, but resign ourselves to small lives of quiet longing and regret.

GODDAMN, THAT’S DARK. Sorry about that. Luckily I’m visiting you from a bright planet where shame has been banished, swept off to an underground cell. When the wind shifts, I can hear it howling from far away, but mostly I forget that it exists at all. I don’t make decisions out of shame. I don’t weigh down every emotion with shame. I don’t refuse adventures or opportunities or conversations or relationships out of shame. Without shame, life is lighter, more romantic, more beautiful, and much more fun.

My life isn’t close to perfect. In fact, I’m not all that exciting or impressive right now. I’m not nearly as industrious or as charming as I was a few decades ago. But my emotions rarely drag me under. Instead of cynicism and blame returning after brief spells without it, my optimism is what returns. Instead of cloaking me in each quiet or unoccupied moment, darkness feels like exactly what it is: bad weather, a temporary state of fear, a natural reckoning with sadness.

Paradoxically, the less shame I have, the more I live in reality, the more grounded I feel, and the more my connections with others feel satisfying and real. Shame requires fantasy and escape. How else to momentarily avoid its suffocating dread? Shame demands rigid, stock answers, forcing you to speak from your idea of how a person should sound instead of from your heart. Shame turns all of your words into arbitrary statements, chosen to impress. You try to sound like the person you want to become. But after years of keeping up your careful performance, you wake up one day feeling like an actor without a script.

Letting go of shame feels like becoming naked in a crowded room and instead of worrying about what other people see, you run around like a baby, shrieking and laughing with joy.

I want every single person reading this column to feel that good. Wanting that for you is only possible because I’m not preoccupied with my own needs, my own fears, my own failures. That’s what happens when shame is swept out of the picture repeatedly. Your focus shifts away from the anxious machine inside your skull and moves to your body, to the air, to the trees outside, to the people around you who might be suffering, who might need your love more badly than they’re willing to show.

Life without shame — mostly without shame! — doesn’t make you perfect. It definitely doesn’t make you more attractive. (I’ve been swimming this summer and my hair, Jesus. Yes I wear a cap. I don’t want to talk about it, man.) But life without shame makes you so much happier, so much less anxious no matter what’s happening around you, so much less depressed no matter how many times you’ve fucked up over the course of your life. You start to understand that every day is a new chance to build something divine, to share your joy, to lift someone out of their repeating refrain about being abandoned and therefore worthless. You get to guide someone gently away from spreading their hurt in the form of blame and shame and stigmatization. What a gift! When you live on a warm planet that’s mostly devoid of shame, you don’t become a completely different person. You just become someone who can see the shame that clouds up our atmosphere and blocks us from seeing each other.

This makes you indispensable. This makes you glow from within. This gives shape to your day.

Does this make you unbearable? GOOD QUESTION! It is certainly wise not to proclaim to each and every person you know that you’re shameless now. They will test this statement immediately by criticizing you and seeing how it lands! Showing other people your strength, trying to share what you’ve learned, spreading your optimism: these are not simple tasks on a planet ruled by shame! You’ll be tempted to feel ashamed of your lack of shame at times, just like you were tempted for years to feel embarrassed by anything distinct and interesting about you that made you unique.

It's truly incredible, how many of us end up hating ourselves for the very traits that keep us alive. When we’re ruled by shame, our most authentic selves become our most embarrassing selves. When we’re ruled by love, our most authentic selves guide us and everyone around us toward more love, more connection, and more joy. We don’t even have to work hard to do good things, once shame is mostly gone. Less shame means more raw desire, more power, more energy to share with this broken world.

It takes a lot of very hard work to address your shame. To dig it up and look at it and keep digging for more shame under that. Is it worth it?

Yes, it’s beyond worth it. Nothing will change your outlook and your life and the way you feel inside your bones more dramatically.

***

I was aiming to post this follow-up on shame last week, but there were so many comments on my initial post about shame that I spent most of the week reading and responding to your stories and questions. There are more comments now, so I want to dive back in again, and keep reflecting on how shame plays out in our lives and what to do about it.

So I want to encourage everyone reading this to go back to that post and read the comments. I think it’s informative and encouraging for most of us who process our shame in complicated ways to understand exactly how crushing shame can be, how many different forms it takes, and how often it keeps people stuck in lives they don’t want, repeating patterns they don’t want, sealed off from beauty and possibility.

Shame tricks us into thinking that this burden must be dragged around silently. Shame tells us that noticing shame and talking about it will make us look like losers who fail and fail again. Shame says we’ll always need more than we’ll ever get, we’ll always be hurt by the smallest slights, we’ll always be afraid of making the tiniest changes to our lives. We look at pretty pictures on our phones and imagine that a wide gap divides us from the people who perform shamelessness in such lovely settings with such perfect lighting. We forget that most pretty pictures and broadcasts are aimed at alleviating shame and darkness, at creating a fantasy as a diversion from pain. The more relentless and perfectionistic a person’s feed is, the less they’re truly relishing their authentic selves or savoring the beauty they beam into your eyeballs. Sure, it’s a business for many — a testament to the culture of shame, that you can build an empire just by seeming to float above the darkness of our broken world.

Many of the comments after my original post read like an Edgar Alan Poe short story about shame: As shame takes hold, anxiety increases. The world grows darker and darker but there’s no one to talk to about it. Sorrow and regret and fear can’t be expressed, so they never dissipate. Worries build and incite panic. Panic causes hasty and disastrous decisions, punitive and and vengeful choices. Regrets build to total paralysis.

Shame pushes the plot forward. Each time you want too much, shame says that’s a flaw instead of a path toward a lighter existence. Every time you feel too much, care too much, long for too much, shame tells you that your pain means you’re pathetic and embarrassing and weak. Your most unique traits doom you to be isolated and rejected forever. You will always fail.

But just as shame can turn your life into a creepy and suspenseful tale where you know the protagonist is doomed from the start, sweeping shame out of your life transforms that tell-tale heart under the floorboards into a bursting heart emoji. Okay that sounds kind of irritating actually. The point is, banishing shame lets sunshine into the darkest places immediately.

Instead of moving from one plot point to the next like a doomed antihero, you notice that your shame is shoving you into bad situations you don’t want. You don’t have to choose those paths. There is no moral valence to your actions. Your desires aren’t embarrassing. As long as you’re not harming anyone else, you have full freedom to shape your life however you want, and that includes directing your body and your senses and your spirit away from the repeating dark stories that live inside your head.

You can abandon the running moral of your life: “I was too lazy so now I have a shitty job.” “I was too afraid so now my life is small.” “I shut myself off and cut off friends and now I’m all alone.” “I made bad decisions over and over and no one could ever love me.” The simple cause and effect of your stories looks suspect the more you examine it. You weren’t actually lazy. You worked too hard all the time and were so obsessive about productivity that you eventually started to avoid that punitive cycle. You were fearful because life is incredibly fucking scary. You didn’t know how to tolerate conflict or pain because your parents made every miscommunication look like another sign that you were worthless, pathetic, or doomed. You never showed your authentic, unique self to anyone because you were taught that it was the worst, most humiliating part of you, when actually, it was keeping you joyful and alive the whole time.

Remember: In a world ruled by shame, your most beautiful, most authentic qualities and traits are treated with the most suspicion and revulsion.

But banishing shame requires more than just reexamining your old stories and telling new ones. It also demands a steady, loving acceptance of your body’s surging emotions, pains, weaknesses, and strengths. This means that you, who have lived inside your skull in order to avoid shame and pain, have to reestablish clear communication with your body.

You need to notice shame when you feel it, notice the stories it tells you, and also notice when and how your body reacts to these feelings and stories. This is as simple as dropping down into your body repeatedly throughout the course of the day and noticing how you feel. It also means noticing when movement helps, when nature helps, when talking helps, when resting helps.

And you need to say to yourself, over and over: Do I like this?

When the answer is No, I really don’t like this, you get to act. You can pause. You can stop speaking. You can remove yourself. You can reflect. You have options.

Being responsive to your body makes you much less responsive to shame and the stories it tells. Shame and its stories will give you a headache, make you restless and stressed and sick, and trick you into thinking you have to fix everything RIGHT NOW. Your first priority in life is to stop this process in its tracks and reroute your focus so you can give your body and heart and spirit the time, space, and care they need.

***

Reckoning with shame is a lifelong challenge. You remind yourself over and over to stop thinking and just be. You notice your automatic responses and messages to yourself over and over and you replace them with something that works, something that feels better, something that gives you peace or incites joy.

Even though you might receive the same messages about shame and self-love from many different sources on any given day, the path to sweeping shame out of your life is very private and personal. It relies on you committing to yourself, to making time to clean the shame out of every picture. It demands that you stop in your tracks when shame springs up, to remind yourself of your principles and values: I will not punish anyone, I will not impress anyone, I will not do battle, I will surrender to what I am, I will show myself without explanation. I will run naked through the party, laughing and shrieking like a baby.

Okay, maybe not literally. But when you dismiss shame every day, every hour, you do end up feeling lighter and more carefree. You know you will expose who you are but you don’t care. You coax yourself out of tight spots now. You weather nerves with gentleness. You tell bright and loving stories about your foibles and mistakes.

It’s not more complicated than that: You notice shame relentlessly. You examine the faulty logic of shame. You interrogate those moments when you’re unthinkingly serving others a self that you don’t even like. You stop impulsively protecting yourself and learn to tolerate being seen clearly — or unclearly. You endure misunderstandings and allow space for further miscommunication.

In other words, you no longer devote so many of your hours to being legible to others. This is why I talk about the power of art so often. Art is the opposite of shame. Art means building something robust and romantic and sometimes illegible out of the raw materials of your worst emotional weather, your most foolish desires, your most passionate longings. You can write the shittiest poetry or paint the ugliest paintings or write the most unlistenable songs, you can step out into nature and form the least coherent theories about the universe, you can swerve and weave through the most absurd conversations, and it can feel transformative and luminous to your soul, simply because you are making something wild and generous and weird out of the raw forces and the turmoil living inside your body.

Running through the party, shrieking and laughing, is a work of art.

Crying at nothing at all is a work of art.

Embracing this uncertain, terrifying day is a work of art.

Beating back your shame is not complicated. Just step out into the world and show what you are. Go somewhere and be what you are. Speak up and sound exactly the way you feel. Eat something you want to eat. Fail to impress yourself. Wander, drift, smell the world and accept what you are.

Let people disapprove. Let them misunderstand. Remain illegible. This is the opposite of shame. You’re an artist no matter what you do or make or how you seem, as long as you’re steadfastly refusing the shame that our culture foists on us. We are all artists. We are all brimming over with romance and passion. Falling in love is just recognizing some part of someone else that exists without shame: a glimpse of some fallen hope, a whiff of something authentic, something stubborn, something fearful, something real.

Clear your shame out of the way so you can feel how romantic it is, to be exactly what you are.

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly, and thanks for being the exact stubborn, fearful, exuberant, laughing, shrieking motherfucker you are! Send letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. Today, the first time you notice your shame, I want you to tell it to fuck off and then I want you to find something truly delicious and eat it. Be a smug, impossible beast that is entirely illegible to others all day long, and enjoy it as much as you can.