Sometimes I can hear the world insist there’s something essentially wrong about me.
Twenty-six years ago, I didn’t have a name for what I felt when I imitated the dance moves of The Misfits, from the Jem cartoon, and my mother snarled at me to stop moving like a girl. Neither could I understand why she looked so sad when she bought my sister a fascinating musical doll and I asked to play with it. By the time I was nine, any wish I might have kept to explore my feminine side had been angrily yelled out of me.
Maybe because my parents were so scared of my gender issues, whenever I spoke of a girl I had met at school they overreacted with such an eager mix of pestering comments and knowing smiles that I was pushed to learn the dubious survival tactic of not discussing my feelings at home. It didn’t feel normal that a heterosexual interest would come as such a relief. My first serious crush on a girl still weighed on me years after we moved to different schools, because I never told anyone.
Then came Catholic high school, a carefully guarded, all-boy microcosm wherein we never took notice of the famously dangerous neighborhood that surrounded the building. Now I realize that it had an infantilizing effect on us. A classmate and I invented a game where we would pretend to be robots and obey simple commands, like stand, clap, or nod, and the way we would give those commands was by pushing imaginary buttons on the robot’s forehead. We were 14. We stopped playing that game after a teacher saw us and mocked us because we were touching each other’s faces.
During my last year of high school I fell in love with another classmate, a devout Pentecostal who would never knowingly have had gay friends. The many excuses I told my parents to visit his house got more ridiculous each time, until he joined the navy and stayed out of my life for almost a decade. When we met again, he asked me why I had never sent him a letter. I wasn’t able to tell him that I first needed to get over my feelings for him. It hurts me to know that he’s an otherwise stupendously good human being who would cut off all contact with me if he truly knew me. We seldom speak now, and he’ll never know why.
My no less clumsy attempts to approach women ended with the same lesson: Who did I think I was, to have such aspirations? No matter how delicately I tried to present my case, no matter how deeply it looked like we had connected, every woman I liked in college was emphatically clear in letting me know they weren’t interested. The conclusion that something must be wrong with me appeared obvious.
My college years were a slow turning point during which everything that I believed about myself was turned on its head. I had always been a stellar student, until my parents pressured me to pursue a degree that held absolutely no interest for me, and all my motivation to study was crushed. At home I never spoke about the barely acceptable grades I was getting, and the many remedial courses I was going to need. I ended up hating college and feeling bad about hating it. When I got my degree I refused to attend the graduation ceremony, but I wasn’t able to dissuade my father from hanging the diploma in our living room. It mortified me to see it there, publicly announcing the weakness I had showed by letting my parents choose my career for me.
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Afterwards I had to live with both my father’s disappointment at my inexplicable inability to find a job, and my own disappointment at having let myself be driven into a professional dead end. My older brother was rapidly jumping from promotion to promotion in the same field I had studied, so it was clear to everyone that I simply didn’t want to work. I was made to feel a parasite, a pampered kid who had no excuse not to face reality and join the mandatory rat race.
What did I truly want? To be a writer. That’s not a livelihood, that’s a hobby, my father always claimed. The general message was that whatever was most precious to me was not worth an irritated sigh in his world. As soon as I found a moderately-well paying job, I announced that I intended to move out, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand why I was so anxious to put distance between us. I was actually close to doing it twice, and both times he manipulated me into feeling guilty for wanting my independence. I didn’t manage to leave his house until I was 26.
There’s the shame I supposedly should feel for not living up to a hundred imposed expectations, and the (honest?) shame that lingers inside me for not living up to my own.
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I changed cities. I needed to test myself in a bigger fishbowl. True to expectation, the years I had wasted pursuing another career had set me far behind in my true path. During my years here, I’ve met artists, writers and intellectuals with whom I cannot hold an equal conversation because our experiences are badly mismatched. Books I haven’t read, authors I haven’t studied, theories I haven’t learned. So much to catch up with. Even when I’ve joined writing workshops and literary clubs, I still feel out of place. This city shines with a cultural life where I’m always reminded I don’t belong, because the crucial formative years that I should have spent reading and becoming a better writer were spent trying to keep myself sane. The general stage of life where I am is the same one occupied by those friends of mine who are ten years younger than me.
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As toxic as I know comparing myself to others is, it’s a beacon I’ve always needed to keep lit, to remind me of my destination. I’m surrounded by good-meaning friends who can’t help having had a hundred times more meaningful experiences than me. Independence, learning, travel, romance, passion, maturity, I’m missing all that, and I’m painfully ashamed to admit that I haven’t actually lived, and it doesn’t even do to assign my parents their more than deserved share of the blame for that.
My brother still asks me when I’m going to find a serious job. Every time I visit my sister, she asks me when I’m planning to marry. My aunts give me a huge smile and ask me when I’m going to have children. An old friend keeps asking me when I’m going to put my diploma to good use.
I ask myself when it’s going to stop.
There’s the shame I supposedly should feel for not living up to a hundred imposed expectations, and the (honest?) shame that lingers inside me for not living up to my own. And don’t get me started on the meta-shame I feel for not knowing how to stop those two. Apparently it should be easy: If the antidote of shame is pride, all I need to do is focus on the things I can be sincerely proud about, and always look for new sources of satisfaction. And put that way, it sounds too simplistic.
Can the solution be so straightforward? Pride? There goes my Catholic education again, opposing a virtue to every vice. But pride is one of the vices, we were taught, yet I refuse to label shame a virtue. It’s not the normal state. Shame is not how I ought to feel. Life shouldn’t feel like this. But shame has also served the function of reminding me that life shouldn’t be like this, that I yearn for something much better.
Turning my burden into my tool is the task that lies ahead.
Photo: r.f.m. II/Flickr
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I feel you. Your story has a wound that is very, very deep and the word shame could not be more appropo to what waxes and wanes but is probably always there somewhere in the background. The answer is to move into the feeling. Face it as you have in writing about it. More than that, see your story as an unfolding one with its own timeline which had these early barriers for a reason. They have not stopped you. What is coming up for you will be a vastly more owned and enriched experience of who you really are… Read more »
I think shame has, or perhaps had, a purpose. Especially when we needed some level of approval from others in our prehistoric and early historic groups to merely survive, that terrible uneasy feeling that we were appearing too out of step motivated us to stop, and indirectly, to stay alive. So there’s that. But then there’s the dark knowledge so many have that this almost vestigial emotion can be manipulated to get us to stay in line. I’m not sure the practitioners of this dark art are fully aware of what they’re doing or it’s impact, but the result is… Read more »