Susi, my mum and me - Late 70’s
Where shame is spoken out loud, it can no longer exist. So it is said.
But shame is a curious thing. It kneads itself into a solid ball in your belly. Sometimes malignant, often malicious, always a ghoul, a harpy chorus, like a William Blake vision of hellish flames pulling you down into an underworld of despair. For what you have done. For what you have not done. For who you are. For who you are not. Shame is not only on you, it is wholly and debilitatingly in you.
Heavy shit.
My shame began with being the outsider. The hippy kid. The weirdo in a small Welsh village in the late 70s. The horror of my mum refusing me a uniform. Her beaten-up camper van clattering us into town. And jeans that never fit because my bum was either too big or too small. Too much. Not enough.
“Please mum. PLEASE. Please drop us off around the corner from school.”
Familiar, isn’t it. That desperate young ache to belong, to be accepted, to avoid humiliation, to fit somewhere.
London - 2015.
Enter the next protagonist in the story: “SHOULD”.
Forty-five years later, I have built an intricate neurological, emotional, psychological ecosystem of conscious and unconscious beliefs. One hand allowing me to live what looks like an extraordinary life, the other like an Escher painting, stairs climbing yet somehow descending, water flowing but always folding back. My shame has both fuelled me and felled me. And now it hides, not under my bed, but in my flesh, in my limbic system, dressed up in the SHOULD paradigm.
Because SHOULDS are shame’s language. They thrive in silence. They thicken in the bloodstream. They tighten in the dark. They choke like a constrictor. And they speak in voices that sound like care, like guidance, like direction.
“You should own your own place by now.”
“You should take better care of yourself.”
“You should have savings.”
“You should not have let your stomach stretch like that.”
“You should pick a career that will make sense when you retire.”
“You should have seen your marriage unravel.”
“You should be thinner by now.”
“You should have had a contingency plan for redundancy.”
“You should not have stayed so long.”
“You should have made better choices.”
“You should hide the stretch marks.”
“You should have had more self-control.”
“You should cover your grey.”
“You shouldn’t have eaten that.”
“I should look better on all fours.”
“I should have moved on.”
“I should look younger.”
“I should not need anyone by now.”
Fuck, it’s exhausting. Is it not?
I like to think I am above shame. That I have evolved. That I have risen. But then it strikes. When I feel I have failed my cubs. When I cannot see how next year will pay for itself. When someone drops in, lightly, “Oh, you don’t own your place?” And I hear myself, part explaining, part spitting back, “No. I chose to raise my cubs rather than orphan them to a career that would have stolen me from them.” And even there, in my defence, I catch it. SHOULDS. And underneath them, shame.
Here is what I know now. When the SHOULDS are carried, not with ridicule or jeering, but lifted with care and compassion from the noise of the town square and into a space where uniqueness is welcomed, something shifts. The SHOULDS begin to loosen, and through that crack, COULD enters.
COULD is the practice of possibility. It is the turn from fixed to growth. From fear to choice. From scarcity to expansion.
COULD says, I could try. I could learn. I could begin again. I could ask for help. I could choose differently.
COULD does not erase the past. It creates space for the future. It does not dissolve responsibility. It expands what is possible.
This is my tool. My reframe and my reminder.
And so I end where I began. Shame cannot breathe when it is spoken out loud. It feeds in silence, it festers in the dark, it hides in the SHOULDS. But when it is named, when the SHOULDS are dragged into the open and cracked apart, what spills out is the possibility of COULD. And COULD is what unapologetically, compassionately, and creatively opens the door to the permission and the power of CAN.
Bondi Beach - 2021
Nothing but love,
VWx