I am full of shame.
- Shame for my body, for being fat, and comparably unattractive.
- Shame for being transgender, for all the internalize transphobia I’ve bottled up.
- Shame for being kinky, for all the non-vanilla things I like to do that give me some sort of sexual gratification.
- Shame for having gotten suckered into a twenty-five year relationship with an emotionally abusive best friend and not realizing it enough to get out.
- Shame for all the time I wasted being afraid of myself, of the world, of everything.
None of these Shames are real. They are just in my head. They are just internal. They are just things I made myself ashamed of over time as I tried to blend in and not get noticed, or hide the truth of myself from myself. They don’t reflect things that anyone should actually be ashamed of. Let me repeat that. No one should be ashamed of any of the above items. They are just, for me, mechanisms I forced upon myself as I hid from the world because they hid my own truth from me. And that truth is that I am a kinky, fat, trans woman that was conned by a sociopathic narcissist that I knew deep down not to trust, but that I was deeply afraid of and unable to escape.
I thought that when I came out and decided that I wasn’t going to live in fear any more that I would leave all of that behind. However, I have just started to realize that I still am full of all this shame, and that it has been affecting my actions and emotions for a while now. It’s not until recently that I realized that I was still dealing with the shame I had accumulated.
It was hindering my life. Not greatly, but subtly in the places it still had control, like relationships and self-image. And Shame isn’t the same as Fear. I stopped being afraid the moment I finished coming out to the world; however, I was still ashamed of those aforementioned items. I thought Guilt was a necessary component of Shame, but I’ve deliberately stopped myself from feeling guilty unless I’ve done something to actually hurt someone else. So, I figured I didn’t have this much Shame. That was a mistake, a loophole in my own understanding of myself.
So now I begin the process of healing, of letting go of this Shame. Just like Fear, Shame won’t go away overnight. It’s power is already diminished, though, and I know I’ll win this mental battle, too. I’ll leave you with these words of wisdom I wrote when I realized I wanted to leave all this Shame behind.
