Shame
2024.11.27.
Lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about situations from my past that fill me with deep shame or guilt. Moments where I behaved terribly or where others treated me that way. Am I getting old? Or is it something about the alignment of the stars that brings these buried memories to the surface?
What am I supposed to do with this?
There’s so much written and said about accepting our lives, our experiences, that everything happens for a reason, that we must face who we are and embrace our fate. But if you see a slap coming your way, what would you do? Would you accept it, or would you duck?
Shame!
The feeling is terrible when the thought arrives, when, out of nowhere, that memory crawls into your face, dragging that emotion with it, engulfing you completely. And in an instant, you’re back in that old situation. Reliving it all over again.
It rushes at me so quickly, so inevitably, that at first, I didn’t know what to do. I just got smeared across it. My shame. And if I was still standing after the first blow, the urge to flee would come rushing in… But no matter how loudly the spiritual gurus, the internationally certified life coaches, and the authors of motivational books yell at me from the ringside to stand my ground, hold on, wear it down… I know I have to run.
But there’s nowhere to go.
Nowhere, because this isn’t about the slap anymore. I got that slap long ago, from someone else, from myself—does it even matter? Really, there’s no slap anymore. What’s left is the aching pain because back when that slap came, I couldn’t dodge it. Now, this feeling is nothing more than the memory of the pain from my broken nose, my knocked-out tooth, which torments me out of nowhere, again and again. You can’t duck it, and there’s no remedy for it either, because this pain doesn’t flow from the nerves around the broken parts; it’s become a part of my existence. Perhaps an inseparable memento.
We sit on the couch at dawn. Everyone is here.
It’s dark; the others are asleep. Ottó lies on his back with his legs splayed, head turned away, utterly relaxed, maybe dreaming of chewing a bone as his body occasionally twitches. The cat is silent too, curled up and softly breathing in the armchair. Kata is in the bedroom behind a closed door. I make sure not to wake her with the loud clatter of emotions and thoughts rattling inside me, capable of replaying an old scene within me in an instant. Sparing me nothing, showing me new and newer angles of my shame. As if I were inside the other person, the one I wronged or who wronged me. I feel how the emotion twists me, how I want to run, to escape the memory, the feeling, myself, the notion that I am not good, the fear that I might indeed be what I am in that feeling.
And I am. Of course, I am.
There was a time when I denied it, rationalized it, blamed others, or simply shut the door on it and maybe even bricked it up. Maybe this feeling is here now because of all those years of loneliness and humiliation, insisting on staying so close to me.
It’s sitting next to me on the couch…
Even today. Someone came again today. Came to celebrate their presence, to embrace me, to never let go. I surrender—I’ve run out of ideas. Am I tired? Have I accepted it? I don’t know. Maybe together we’ll figure something out. Maybe if it stays long enough, it will eventually want to leave, sending me only the occasional postcard: “Hello, I’m doing well! Hope you are too.”
Perhaps this time of year is the best for this. For being together. All of us. Me, who I am. Me, who I was seen as. Me, what I thought about who I was seen as. Me, the good, the bad, everything. Every day, a different guest from within me—a memory, an old version of myself—that I gift myself.
And I, a well-behaved child, unwrap my daily gift each day to get to know what lies hidden in the darkest coffee-drinking season of the year…
…my spiritual advent calendar.
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The article was translated from Hungarian to English by ChatGPT. Thank you, ChatGPT, for being here.
