Shame Brain
My friend, my lover, my nemesis, my boss, or maybe just my neutral little passenger.
I entered 2024 with a mind split cleanly in two, like firewood split by an axe on a stump. As I looked upon the two halves, cold fingertips and hope in my heart for a nice big roaring crackling fire around which—maybe, this year—people could gather, I saw with despair that they were two entirely different kinds of tree. Not in the scientific, left-brain right-brain sense, but rather—me being who I am—in a much more theoretical, emotional, vibe-y pie chart kind of way. Maybe a piece of fruit sliced in half is a better metaphor. Now I am thinking about pie, and thus fruit, and pomegranates and Persephone and goddesses and this long dark night we’re all stumbling around in together.
Anyway:
One half of my bisected brain, full of seeds and juice and still rolling to a soft landing in the grass of a fresh new year, said: This is the year we really transform or destroy our shame.
The other half said: This is the year we really transform or destroy all of the parts of ourselves that we’re ashamed of.
A math problem—again, me being who I am (and yes, my lack of math skills are a bottomless source of deep liquid shame, a void which deepens like the coastal shelf, as Mr. Larkin told and continues to tell me)—with no solution. A single sentence, revealed to be holding two contradictory ideas and some terrible fucking grammar.
So much of an abortion care worker and/or doula’s work is battling shame. Our own and everyone else’s. Shame is at the heart of every anti-abortion belief: that we don’t deserve sex, pleasure, autonomy, care, spaces and opportunities to play. That our mistakes and missteps separate us from other human beings and disqualify us from tenderness, rest, good feelings, love. That health is earned, rights are earned, safety and freedom and existence are earned.
But so much of a human’s work is to feel the things we feel, including shame. We owe each other exactly what we owe ourselves: an honest accounting of what we are doing, why we think we might be doing it, and how it feels to do it. As I wrote about in the book, often people who feel shame around their abortions are then shamed for feeling it. Instead of meeting every last little part of their experience and emotions with compassion and openness, folks and orgs in the movement—through their choices in language and in the abortion stories they uplift and those they don’t—tell them that their shame is not acceptable nor welcome, further isolating and…well…shaming them.
I do think it can be useful to ask yourself if and why you feel shame around your abortion—or around your reading habits, the art you make, your body, your sexual preferences, your religious practices, any and all of it.
Are there threads of stigma and misinformation sewn into the fabric of your view of yourself and the world, and can they be pulled out? Are there old memories living in your body? Are there words that have been spoken to you, that you now speak to yourself? Can we ask the shame about itself, in order to understand it, instead of just desperately slapping and kicking at it in any attempt to make it disappear? Instead of pretending we don’t see it, we don’t feel it, we’re healed and healthy and evolved? Instead of pretending that it isn’t there, at the table, taking shots and doing karaoke and whispering in our ears alongside all of our other feelings?
Ok, and now that we’ve heard what it has to say, asked it a few follow-up questions, acknowledged that it’s come to the party with us and will probably need a ride home? Leave it alone.
As Murphy writes, in an issue of their newsletter I really needed to read today, called, deliciously, The Sweet, Sweet Medicine of Leaving Yourself Alone:
“New year's resolutions were hot for a long time. Now the anti-resolution is hot. Turns out, resolving not to resolve is still resolving. I have seen charming lists making rounds on the internet about softened resolutions, like noticing birds and foraging ramps and hosting more beloveds for dinner. This all sounds wonderful, but if making it a resolution also gives you an excuse to be an ass hole to yourself, then spare yourself the list. Leave yourself alone.
Nature is snoozing. You are likely signing on and off of work with very little sunlight on either end. Many of our Ancestors on this hemisphere prepared all year to leave things alone in the colder months. You can do the same. I would dislike very much for you to make promises to yourself and your world right now that you won’t want to keep in the months to come.”
If I have not made my daily calls to my elected officials to plead with them for a ceasefire in Gaza, though that would take only a minute or two, and my phone is glued to my hand for hours a day? If I have not responded to a text message for two weeks, though to do so would cost me very little time or effort and would make the sender feel important, loved, understood? Yes, I do think it’s healthy or at least neutral to feel a little bit of shame, and to let that shame compel me to change my behavior tomorrow—or next month, or maybe never! I am a human being with many limitations I will always wish I didn’t have, and there are sources of shame that I will never “fix” for the rest of my life.
As long as I’m actually feeling it, and not trying to numb it or distract myself from it, I think my shame can be a companion just like my anger and my grief and my silly little fantasies and daydreams and flirtations and daily treats are. Shame is a passenger, and maybe sometimes not a dark one. One I notice and am aware of, singing along to the music and probably irritating and off-key, but one I do not need to scream at, toss from the moving vehicle that is my , tie up and shove into my trunk and drive across the border to dispose of.
A short and incomplete list of things I feel ashamed of at this moment:
That it has taken me over an hour to write this letter to you because while doing so I have also been gossiping, with two separate friends and about two separate events, in ways that weren’t entirely kind or necessary. And also watching blackhead extraction videos.
The sink full of unwashed dishes and hamper full of unfolded laundry, and the board meeting that I haven’t written on the family calendar or told my partner about yet even though I should have absolutely given him more notice than the few hours he’ll have now.
The emails I absolutely could have read and responded to over the last few days (Weeks? Who’s to say) that I have instead chosen to let languish in my inboxes, allowing the snowball of my social and professional anxiety to collect more and more e-snow as it rolls down the mountain of my procrastination and avoidance.
The power I continue to give to thinness. The ground I continue to cede to notions of conventional & white supremacist beauty standards, desirability, and the weird antiquated strictures of feminity and femme queer visibility in my purchases and in the aesthetic and social choices I’m making all the time. Why am I drawn to the makeup and clothing and forms of movement and language and all the rest that I am drawn to? It’s not all good, and it’s not all real, I’ll tell you that much. And I’m finding it very difficult to release (though I have mastered the art of going out in public looking nakedly and exactly like my sleep-deprived, beanie-static-hair-unbrushed, no-clean-laundry self, which you’ll know if you’ve seen me around town, in the daycare drop-off line, or entering a local Walgreens lately).
Likewise, the power I continue to give to the attention and affection of a few people who—either because they are playing games of self-protection and coolness and vulnerability-avoidance, or simply because they just don’t care or even think about me that much—have made that attention and affection scarce and infrequent and unpredictable.
The attention and affection I continue to take for granted, or discount, or not pay the careful and worshipful attention I owe it, because the people who give it to me have been consistent and generous with it, and because I feel safe with them.
(Let’s just go ahead and flip those last two in 2024, Hannah, shall we?)
My posture. Dear God, my posture. If you could see me right now on this couch, that shame would multiply tenfold, but I probably still would not straighten this gnarled old swamp oak of a spine and push my shoulders back, as I was taught over and over again in ballet classes and cello lessons and Alexander Technique and all the countless other opportunities to correct myself over the last 36 years.
The hours my toddler has been logging with Peppa Pig and The Magic Schoolbus, and the minutes in which I can’t bear to be present with him because I’ve just seen some horrifying violence visited upon a tiny body just like his and have to process that the maimed or murdered toddler I just saw—thousands of miles away and terrorized by my tax dollars—is my responsibility just as he is.
I watched a TikTok recently (Don’t worry, I’m ashamed!) in which a therapist opined that you can never say the wrong thing to the right person. They meant in a relational sense, a romantic sense, a speaking-to-other-people sense. And certainly, this is how I want every person who has an abortion to feel in my company, whether I’m their doula or funder or care worker or just someone they’re telling me about it.
You cannot say the wrong thing to me about your abortion. Period. In that sense I will always be “the right person”.
And I know that there are people in my life to whom I can never say the wrong thing, about my abortion and everything else.
But what if I’m my own right person, too? What if, when that Shame Brain says some fuckshit to the other Brain, it’s just another thing that’s happening and not a crisis? What if, whenever I say “the wrong thing” to myself (Your body sucks, your brain sucks, you made that social interaction weird, you should have been smarter/more careful/gone slower and prevented that pregnancy, you should have caught that mistake, you should have asked a different question, you laughed too loudly, you eat too much, you drink too much, you talk too much, you want too much, you are too much, you said too much about your abortion), I could just meet it with a “huh” or an “I hear you” or an “I know where this is coming from and it’s not actually a place I like or respect or need to revisit, but thank you so much for the feedback”?
(Have I been spending too much time with my girlies in Internal Family Systems model therapy? Should I be ashamed that, after breaking up with my longtime therapist last year, I still have not made a real good-faith effort to find another? Perhaps and yes, probably)!
What if we could run our fingers over our bellies or our noses or our self-harm scars or our unpaid parking tickets or our unfolded laundry or our unanswered texts or our abortion records, and think: “I feel ashamed of you, but that’s not your fault, or mine. You’re just another piece of information about me, and so’s the way I feel about you” ?
My shame is just another part of me, so I think this year I’ll leave all of myself alone.
Just this once, spilling your juice and seeds everywhere in the grass of this fresh new year, maybe you can leave your shame alone, too.
Love love love love love