Speaking more truth to shame:

Another way the creative process is shaping who I am becoming

“Shame loves secrecy. The most dangerous thing to do after a shaming experience is hide or bury our story. When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes.” – Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

“When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.” ― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Photo by tabitha turner on Unsplash

This past weekend I shared parts of myself with a few close friends that I had never shared with them before. I’m not sure that I would have done so if not for Maud and her story—a story I’ve lived with for the past eight years. Hers is a story of hardship and perseverance and triumph. It’s also a story of the destructive power of shame and secrecy. One of the lessons I’ve taken from Maud is the importance of sharing our deepest selves, including our deepest pains, with our closest people. I’m trying to live a little more into that lesson.

In my writing, I’ve found myself returning time and again to threads of truth and shame. Even the word shame makes me squirm; and yet at the heart of what I want to do in my writing—illuminate someone and what matters most to them—is shame. We knot at the shameful memories because something in those experiences mattered to us. Only by telling more truth with our trusted people can we start to untangle the knots.

Truth has mattered a great deal to me for as long as I can remember. I confessed to taking a rock from a childhood friend’s rock collection—my only foray into thiefdom—and returned it after a night wracked by guilt. But over the years, and without realizing it, I had built a little brick house around the parts of myself that I thought others may not understand. In my quest for approval, I learned to be careful—especially in my friendships. Being careful doesn’t mean telling a lie, but it can mean withholding. Truth isn’t the simple thing I thought it was when I was young.

Truth is an incremental thing. One of the most surprising parts of my journey in writing Maud’s story has been how it has gotten easier for me to tell my own. To be less apologetic for who I am. And as part of that, I’ve started to notice myself speaking more truth to shame.

Of the truths I shared last weekend, some of the deepest were about friendship. I said out loud the words middle- and high-school “friends” had said that cut me to my core. I shared how my brick house became most fortified around women because they have hurt me the most. And just by acknowledging the existence of that house, it started to look different—less permanent and easier to take down.

Brené Brown doesn’t advocate indiscriminate sharing, and I certainly don’t either. But she does encourage sharing with people who have earned the right.

I opened up last weekend, and a funny thing happened. Knots have been untangling all week. What had seemed flawed and messy became shared and human.