Shame is Just a Garment You Wear
There was a night I felt so sad. It felt oceanic, no end in sight...
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I am not great at deleting emails (my friends who have seen the amount of unread texts I currently have on my phone are not remotely surprised by this). Every once in a while I try to clear up space in my inbox by deleting all the ads that come through, but still—I have a lot of emails. This is why I stayed up late last night perusing the old emails that narrate my divorce. There are messages between me and my ex, between me and my brothers, between me and my friends. It’s a whole lot of tea, as the kids like to say, and I poured over them. It was like reading a compelling book that I mostly remember, but some of the details had become blurry.
I read emails in which I detail my hurt and anger, and I barely recognize myself in the words. Before I knew about my ex’s indiscretion, I wondered endlessly why he didn’t seem to want to spend more time with me. I ask him this in sentence after sentence, I pled with him to change. Now I have the benefit of sidling up to my desperate little past self and whispering to her, He didn’t love you, hon. This is why he didn’t want to spend more time with you.
It makes sense now.
I moved to NYC after our divorce and vividly remember going to the bodegas in (way) upper Manhattan (like past Dykeman, upper Manhattan), and perusing the dairy aisle. There, among all the options a girl could ever want, was the tiniest little plastic jug of milk I’d ever seen. It was like the classic gallon jug had been shrunk down for the benefit of all the girls who’d just moved to the city because their husband had left and as a result, they just didn’t need nearly as much milk as before. I actually saw the tiny not-gallon (was it a quarter gallon? Was it named after the little Keebler elf who’d conceived of it—perhaps it was called an elvish gallon?) and smiled. Never before had I thought milk was adorable, but never before had I been living on my own, divorced, so this was just a year of firsts for me. I put the tiny milk in my basket and kept walking.
There was a night I felt so sad. It felt oceanic, no end in sight, like my sadness stretched out before me, indistinguishable from the horizon. I wandered the city in the rain until I sat by a fountain on the Upper Westside and let all my sad thoughts sit with me and speak. I knew the rain would eventually stop, but I could not be so sure about my sadness. I felt small and lonely and my brain seemed to be incapable of doing anything except measure the stark difference between how things used to be and how things are. People hurried past me in the rain, glancing at me over their shoulder, and I wondered if my story showed on my face.
Around this time, I joined a website that connected models with photographers in the city. A photographer reached out and asked to meet me in Central Park. I figured there would be enough people around to keep him from doing anything other than truly take pictures, so I put on some of my favorite clothes and the beat up little boots I wore every single day and met up with him. He was a kind man with the dark, soulful eyes of an artist that makes you wonder what he sees while he looks at you. He didn’t want me to pose; he knew I was a dancer, so he asked me to just move any way I wanted and tell him some of my story. I mostly moved while he snapped away in silence, but finally he said something. “What happened to make you so sad?” he asked gently. “What did he do to you?”
His question was an answer to my own: apparently my story did show on my face.
So I told him a little about my old life and my new one and what a wonder it is to be in the same skin in such different places. I told him about how much I hurt, that it was a place so deeply buried inside, I wasn’t sure how to touch it, how to heal it. And I also told him that life was still so very interesting—and that was something I never knew. That life could feed you terrible pain, refuse any other thing on your plate until you’ve taken it all in, steadily, for days and months and now it’s even been a year—and yet, you still find life to be incredibly interesting. It is enough to get you up out of bed in the morning. I told him about some people I’d met, how they were so different from me, how a few had wanted to date me and this made me feel a little something other than pain, so I rolled it around on my palate—let it land on my tongue like the first snow of December—because I had forgotten that tangy, salty, sweet taste of anticipation.
“You’re smiling now,” this photographer noticed, still holding his camera in front of his face.
“I guess I am,” I admitted, my face feeling warm, like I was confessing a secret I hadn’t planned on telling.
I don’t know if I felt particularly beautiful during that shoot, but I remember feeling wholly alive. I remember not wanting to hide, and this felt so hopeful. And I remember feeling less like my story was an ugly step-child life had handed me and told me to befriend. My story belonged to me as much as my limbs, as much as all the parts of me my new photographer friend could never photograph because they are felt and experienced, but not necessarily seen with the camera’s lens.
There is a photo he took of the inside of my wrist. On it is my one tattoo: a sentence fragment that simply says: peace. I had been thinking about a word I could attach to my story. And one night in NYC, I knew what the word was. It was as sure as my own name. I needed to tell the world—but probably more myself—that I get to choose the words that belong to me. That God has a greater purpose for me than simply shame and despair and divorce, though it was partly through experiencing these words first hand that I learned this, which is wild. Could you imagine? A door that says nothing other than SHAME stands before you. You hesitate, but you realize there is no other way forward and to simply stay still would be to give up living at all, so you move and the door swings open. It feels like an invitation to be buried but you stumble forward as if with no choice. You walk through it with eyes closed, body on fire from the inside, and this desperate, knotted up hope within that nobody will meet you here. They cannot see me like this, you think, for the illusion—the big lie—that we are more palatable when hidden, when wearing just a few threads to cover ourselves and not let people see our wounds, our flaws, the very fact of our persistent and powerful needs is the air we breathe here and you’ve bought it too.
But then you open your eyes and you see people who care about you. They look at you and for maybe even the first time ever, they see you. They stay. They tell you they love you. They say this with words and tears and baked bread and letters and invitations for walks and chats and big, gulping laughter at the gallows humor you’ve developed since he left. You become less afraid, you realize something that just about knocks you over: shame is just a garment you wear. It’s not your skin. It’s not your breath. It’s not even your hair that you can cut or dye or tie behind you and get out of the way. Shame is something you can take off, cast aside, put on freedom instead. This discovery changes your breathing, slows you down, takes your ego from a lump that is frozen and injured and rigid within to something that melts, that runs out of you like water, that leaves you with less to prove.
“I like your tattoo,” the photographer tells me, pointing his camera at it. “It’s my story, you know,” I say and he nods. “I get the final word, not what’s happened to me.”
If you missed the day my husband, TJ, drove his mom out to the middle of a field to shoot off fireworks with her (she hates fireworks), you can listen to that in his Friday radio show here. Some people I know cried laughing listening to this.
Love this 💕. I relate to this one, though I suppose for me I would use the word "irredeemable" to describe the situation, more so than feeling shame for things that didn't work out.
I have a funny relationship with these blog posts that I might as well share. They are really good and I look forward to them. And then on the other hand, my inbox is a wasteland and I never know if I'll have enough time to read the latest writing before it gets buried in the slow march of inbox dogpile effect. I try to unsubscribe from everything, but somehow they still find me