Loving your shame (my love, your shame)
In search of a career worth having at the end of the world
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The world is ending, or so the current narrative goes, and I don’t know what to do with my life or what I want to be when I grow up. In about five months, I’ll be 40— the last possible moment to delay growing up.
I thought I was close to an answer seven years ago while working on my undergrad after 11 years of full-time parenting. After reading Rolling Stone’s Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, suddenly nothing I studied at university mattered. Especially not literary criticism. I could hardly concentrate. A fog of meaninglessness bloomed around me, thick like the smoke that would later fill our summers.
I thought I would study English. Then Philosophy. Creative Writing. Then, I thought Sociology. Visual Anthropology. Neuroscience. Psychology. After thriving in a contemporary art course, flooded with ideas for art pieces, I thought for a hot second that maybe I could be an artist. I even took a contemporary art professor out for drinks to ask him how it’s done, but his emphasis on luck sullied my fantasies.
Out of desperation to wrap things up quickly, I thought I’d do a fast-tracked degree in Communications through a university that would take career and life experience into account. But it was expensive; my ex-husband wasn’t holding up his end of our separation agreement wherein he was required to pay for my undergrad; I couldn’t get any funding; my family needed me to work; and, hey, who actually wants to study communications anyway?
“What good is what you’ve got if you’re not having any fun?” -Tony Bennett, Are You Havin’ Any Fun?
There’s something about big birthdays that crystallizes indistinct, shadowy feelings and questions into definable answers. The weight of yearning and doubting feels heavier when crossing over the threshold of a new decade.
It’s only 40. But when so many family members, including my mother, have died in their 50s, I’m well aware I may not get another 40 years.
I eat much healthier than did my dead relatives. I exercise regularly, hardly drink, never smoked or have tried a single recreational drug. I’m happy and cheerful most of the time. I laugh every day, as much as I possibly can. I don’t sweat the small stuff and I try to ignore or make peace with the big stuff.
But can any of this compete with family curses? What about the Law of Attraction? What about Murphy’s Law? What if I don’t update my will, and I keep procrastinating illustrating my children’s books—the single goal I’ll most regret not reaching? Won’t that combo make me die early? I really feel that it will.
My fear of early death has me asking myself what I would want to do if. As much as Grey’s Anatomy persuades me to want to become a doctor (because who doesn’t want to wear pajamas all day and have sex in elevators?), there wouldn’t be enough time to enjoy practicing medicine after all the practicing of the practice of medicine.
With only a little time left personally, or only a little time left on this burning planet for all of us, what actually matters? The only thing I know is that we’re here and we feel too much pain when life is for pleasure, fun, connection, and joy. I don’t want that pain for me. I don’t want that for anyone.
Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.
-Rabindranath Tagore
The emotion for which I have the least time and regard is shame. I don’t believe in it. Guilt, sure. Embarrassment? Fine, that’s natural. But shame suggests that we’re not good enough as we are, even though all we can ever be is what we amount to after the billion little bits of contributions outside our control that make us who we are.
I never have believed in shame, even since before Brené Brown’s first TED talk. That doesn’t mean I don’t have any of it; I do, a little. But I try to feed my shame love, reason, optimism, and social science. It’s a potent potion.
I can be indecisive. I’m not always sure how I feel or what I think; I often need time to lay out all my options and analyze each bit of data. So I forced myself recently to imagine what I would say if someone put a gun to my head and told me the only thing that would save me was one concise answer about what I want to do with my life. What would I want to do? Forgetting family obligations, forgetting the job market, forgetting that I live in the 13th most expensive city in the world— what fills my chest with passion and desperation?
Love. That’s it. I want to love people.
If we only have so much time left, if nothing matters, and if life is painful at every possible turn, the only antidote and the only thing that matters is love. But how?
Somatic sex therapy? No, not for me.
Nursing? Too exhausting.
Counselling? Probably.
But what if I could invent a new thing?
“There is no terror like that of being known.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
I picked up Dear Sugar in the book store, a collection of Cheryl Strayed’s advice column pieces, and I read to my partner one of Cheryl’s letters to a jaded man who was unsure if he should tell the woman he was with that he loved her. “This sounds like you,” my partner said, of Cheryl’s answer to him.
I wondered, what if someone created a shame dismantling column? What if people wrote in anonymously with something for which they felt deep shame, and I simply used love, reason, optimism, and social science to dismantle it?
I am certain that everyone wants to be known in their darkest places. I am certain that we can only love others as well as we love ourselves. And I suspect that shame is what holds us back from living more compassionately and generously, and from loving with pure abandon.
If I could have my dream career, it would be to shine light onto festering moldy basements of shame.
Reader, I wonder. Can your shame survive my best efforts to love you? Do you want to try me?
Create a fake email address and email me at natashacoulis@gmail.com. Of what are you most ashamed? I will respond to you here with as much love, reason, optimism and social science as I can muster. :)
❤,
N.
