Shame is a Great Destabilizer

Peace can't really last alongside "something is wrong with me"

A long time ago my emotional life swung between twin extremes of paralyzing depression and frenzied mania. I wouldn’t call it a manifestation of ‘bipolar disorder’, since whatever I was dealing with I was able to resolve without medication - it was more that my emotional life was agitated and intensified by the overwhelming sensation that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, a phenomenon which I now call “shame”. 

When I felt low I felt like I would be trapped in my brokenness forever, that there was nothing I could do and that there was no hope for me, no reason to do anything and no real reason to even move a muscle. When I felt high, I felt like I had finally found the thing that would make me feel like a whole and complete person, or at least that I had found something that brought me desperately needed relief. When I was excited by something or someone I would pour energy in that direction like crazy, thinking on some unconscious level that I had finally found the deliverance I desperately craved. When I drank, and I drank a lot, I would get so supremely excited and energetic since at least for a moment I felt like the loudness of my torment had been turned down and everything felt possible for me. 

In the middle of the limits was anxiety, the feeling that there was something I was supposed to do to fix myself but I had no idea what it was and that if I didn’t do it then something terrible would happen and things would get even worse for me and things were already near-unbearably bad as it was but I still felt in my bones that things were about to get worse in a way I couldn’t imagine yet all the same I felt it coming and I could stop it somehow and was definitely expected to stop it but I didn’t know what to do to stop it and that this ignorance and weakness was just more proof to me that there was indeed something wrong with me and that I would never get better unless I figured out what to do and so I needed to think about my pain as hard as I could but focusing on it never made it any better and I was sick of my bullshit anyways and I felt like I was a tire spinning at full speed in the mud making a big useless mess and going absolutely nowhere. 

So I had “there is something wrong with me” as the core of my emotional life, making me frantic and paralyzed and high strung all at the same time. Nothing I felt and nothing I did brought me relief from this for as long as I believed it to be true - no emotion or experience could disprove it for as long as it remained the foundation for my emotional experience. 

Relief - real, lasting, long-term relief - took a certain kind of miracle. Not a supernatural kind of miracle, just the kind of miracle where something happens that I could never have predicted, that indeed seemed completely counter to anything I would consider justified from my old standpoint. Specifically, I had to be loved even when I felt least deserving of love, and on top of that I had to be willing to accept myself as lovable even when I didn’t understand why. It’s something I had to be open to and reach towards, and it’s also something I could never have conjured in isolation. 

Shame is still something that can get its hooks in me sometimes, because I think it’s pretty much at the core of the human condition. We are finite creatures, which means we are forever unfinished and guaranteed to make tons of mistakes in our one and only shot at life and will feel and cause lots and lots of pain as we learn things the hard way, and we are also guaranteed to feel like we are somehow individually unique in this situation and that our private pain is somehow more vivid and important and complex and hopeless than that of other people.

I couldn’t change any of the above if I tried - what I can  do is relieve myself of judgment about our finitude, to quit recoiling from myself and others as if any of us could be anything other than finite and prone to failure. I see it as a sort of grace that we can offer each other, and most importantly to ourselves. It’s a sort of grace in that it’s an action that really can’t be justified beforehand - the beginning of a better life, and really the only way into it, is to acknowledge that we feel profoundly unworthy of love and to nevertheless choose to start loving ourselves anyway.