On waking this morning, I knew that shame had moved in overnight. The first sign was an overwhelming desire to stay sleeping, but the daylight pulled me from my slumber. I cast about trying to locate the point of entry. What window had I left open that it had slipped through? My mood was in my boots and had that sickly quality unique to shame. I lay there processing the events of the day before with a desperation that was all too familiar. Personal evolution brings clarity, an ability to discern the subtleties of emotion, so being visited by an old enemy was in stark relief. There was nothing extraordinary about the day before, nothing I haven’t dealt with quickly in my recent past. Instead, a constellation of events had collided to create a perfect storm.
‘The woman's heart quickens as she realises what is happening. A pulsating ache starts behind her jaw, and soon after, her gut harmonises with the thrum. "You're not good enough" is on loop for the chorus, but it becomes the whole song. Once it has begun, it is a day of her life that she will never get back. A demon has risen from the underworld of her subconscious and is enjoying the longed-for oxygen. It sets about conducting the shame orchestra of her biochemistry. Her heart pounds, and her bowel knots into a thousand question marks as she drags herself through the terrain with painful familiarity. The woman looks for the off-switch, but she never finds one. Suspended hologram heads are all she can see, and they’re sneering, reminding her of the twenty-four hours of torment that will follow now the shame wheels are in motion.’
Just a few days ago, I wrote a post unashamedly exploring sexual liberation. I wrote it with all the honesty, grit, and bravery I possess because I want women to live according to their full power. They, you, are my first love. I have witnessed, held, and listened to women struggle with the oppression of conditioning for years, and one of the primary weapons in that arsenal is shame. Today, the chief dementor has come for my soul. Usually, I wait for some resolution before sharing what I figure out, but something about this experience has pushed me to the page early.
I use dramatic language because I want to describe how consuming some of this shit that we go through in life feels like. But when I attempt to elucidate the shame triggers, they seem banal. It is what makes the power of the bleakness so insidious and dangerous. Two plus two equals four, but not when it comes to our trauma responses. Somehow, a thief had entered my house illicitly and was now running amok with the light switches, attempting to illuminate incidences in my life with a garish glow. They are screaming at me to repeatedly look at scenes in my memory that yesterday were part of the rich tapestry of life, and yet today seem to have bought me a one-way ticket to hell.
I don’t need to describe the scenes…my honesty can’t reach that far into the thicket of shame right now. But it is an “insert here” type of read. I watch my mind as the perpetrator accurately lands on a chosen few, knowing they cause the biggest hit of toxin. I go on a loop in my brain, all the while knowing yesterday, I had the presence of mind and enough tools in my kit to rope this fucker to the ground. Why was today different?
I wrote the above two weeks ago.
Interestingly, the shame detox I embarked on didn’t include all my usual strategies to return to the land of unashamed living. Instead, I found myself moving towards the source.
I have a bouncer, like a nightclub bouncer, but instead of refusing entry to drunk patrons and breaking up fights, they are stationed at the doorway of my soul and guard it viciously. I could not have survived without them. All the mornings, I have woken with lead in my veins, threatening to poison and bury me; it is the bouncer that has pulled me to standing. The bouncer who whispers, “You will survive this, but you have to move now. I will be with you while you walk. I can’t take the darkness out of your heart, but I will annihilate anyone who comes near.” Then they move ahead of me, slashing at the impenetrable undergrowth with a machete while I stumble along behind with my head hanging.
No one can see them. It is just me, they see, and I am outspoken in defence of myself. I am loud and caustic to camouflage the desolation that has been wreaked across the landscape of my self-esteem. I am gifted step after step and word after word by this well-meaning protector…it gets me through, but I never arrive healed, only fortified. My bouncer has protected me but has also prevented my healing. I feel almost disloyal writing this because I know, in some ways, god stationed them until such a time that I was ready to walk into the fire. They were never going to be able to go with me to the place where shame is alchemised because the pain from watching me burn would have been too great. The fire, it turns out, is indeed where the phoenix rises, but the alchemy includes preserving an unexpected vital ingredient, which is distilled and cleansed of impurities.
The problem is I had let the bouncer go…tearfully handing them a letter of redundancy, because…well…shame didn’t live here anymore, or so I thought.
Until two weeks ago, I was smug in believing that shame could no longer harm me. I had giddily banished what I understood was my matrilineal legacy. The thing that seems to have been handed from generation to generation of women. Shackles put on the wrists of the wriggling female infant, still bloodied from the journey through her mother’s birth canal.
“When Maia was born, the midwife held her up, declaring, “It’s a girl,” to which her mother replied, “Ugh,” and rolled away from her. Maia's mother had convinced herself she was having a boy, Maia was supposed to be Declan - a solid Irish man's name that means "good, excellent, or worthy" or "full of goodness". The mother had unconsciously yearned for a child who embodied the patriarchal form so the matrilineal torment could end. However, this truth stayed hidden in the shadows of the woman's psyche as she rejected her female infant. All she knew was the bloody wailing baby had a vagina, and her heart sank.”
During my first pregnancy, I developed right hip pain, but it took twenty years to realise what had happened. I had found a place in my body to store shame so as not to cover my daughters in it as they arrived screaming into this world. There seemed to be enough presence of mind or subconscious awareness not to hand it on, but unprocessed, it had to go somewhere. It turns out that many women of my generation made this choice for their daughters, and I am gleeful at the way these females we have birthed walk the earth. They are unapologetic, and my heart soars.
“Not wanting to push her firstborn daughter into the world covered in the intergenerational shame that Maia was only subconsciously aware of, she had found a place in her hip to store it. The location of the pain is meaningful, considering the proximity to and access via the birth canal. Realising the significance, Maia could finally put the pieces of this part of her story together and sensed a power building in her. Her body had told her something valuable, and she knew the healing was in the listening and, now, the knowing.”
But what of us, the in-between generation, still carrying the baggage of eons?
How do we heal and thrive?
I thought the understanding would be enough, and for a long while, I flipped shame the bird whenever I saw it approaching in the distance, laughing in its face. I side-stepped and grew complacent in my smugness, but there was more work. There always is because we don’t arrive. There is no destination, only a journey. I risk cliches to illustrate my conviction that we are not meant to stop. Rest, sure, but not stop. And so my oppressor had circled back around for another duel, cackling while I realised my foundations had been laid beneath a moving train and would not help me this time.
On the day I woke febrile with shame, I had to drive hours to get home. I played music as an antipyretic. I called into the fog for my bouncer, begging them to return. I told myself everything that had worked in the past, but deep down, I knew something different had to happen this time. I was not going to bury this in my right hip.
When I returned, I looked at my phone and decided to reply to a lover who had texted, knowing that sex is often where I had sought refuge from shame, but always in a way that created more.
This was my conditioning:
“Sex wasn’t a source of power; it was where we lost it.”
THIS IS A FUCKING LIE.
I walked towards the fire, knowing I was vulnerable to the emotional imbalance in my relationship with this person. It wasn’t a decision to accept the sex invitation but more like a compulsion to rewrite my history. I did things on my way there that I once would not have been proud of, but my bouncer had heeded my call and was telling me it was necessary and we’d deal with it later. In my mounting desire, I hadn’t noticed that my bouncer had transformed during their absence; there was no longer armour or weapons, and in its place, a soft certainty in how they talked to me that I trusted more deeply than I ever had before, “It will be alright” they whispered.
I stormed through the door of my lover’s home and found them slightly bewildered that I had arrived. I needed the sex I was about to have to be transformative, medicinal, empowering, and better than it had ever been. I wanted to heal using the very thing that I had been harmed with, as have centuries of women. I was jumping into the fire, holding hands with shame. I became an animal satisfying a base desire, layers of conditioning melting, forging a new precious metal.
Hours later, I lay sated while my lover slept. I consciously soaked in the energy passing back and forth at the places our skin touched. I knew I was healing, not from shame, but with shame.
Over the next few days and weeks, I realised that healing is not about ridding ourselves of unwanted emotions or fighting and winning. It is about making peace with what exists inside and understanding its role in our lives. I understood that a collaboration ensues when I offer a chair at the governance table of my life to something that wants a voice. The conversation becomes more reasonable, and I hear the subtle difference between warning and threat. When shame is accepted, if not embraced, we can see it is simply a bouncer on the periphery of our boundaries calling a warning when it finds a breach in the fence, but will start screaming if we’re not listening. I had heard the screaming and perceived an attack because of my conditioning.
Shame is my bouncer. The bouncer was my guardian disguised, so I would recognise them and let them lead me away from danger. They never prevented my healing; I just wasn’t ready to do it myself. I have lived a courageous and abundant life, but with secrets that hurt me. Shame and my guardian have done what they could to minimise that harm. I consciously release those secrets, rewrite the stories, and understand their purpose. I heal fully, knowing that the paradox of recovery includes holding gentle space for the thing that has caused pain. In this way, I take the darkness out of my own heart.
The paragraphs in italics are from a chapter I wrote on shame while attempting to fictionalise my experience. I was too ashamed of my story to share the bloody gore in the first person. In writing this essay, I release myself from that shame, hoping to reach others who hate their secrets.
So, yeah…I’m Maia x
This is pure gold! Straight from your wonderful heart. I love every word, all so hearteningly honest 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻