02 My Light – Spot 2
The fear of embarrassment: I am not my mistakes
I am sitting in the car. Outside my own front door. The engine is off. Today everything collapsed on top of me. All at once.
The night already: barely slept. Nerves in shreds by morning. The coffee at the meeting – brown splashes down my dress. At the office I snapped at a colleague, over nothing. Then a dressing-down from my boss. Caught by a speed camera on the way home.
And then, in the supermarket, the milk. Slips out of my hand. Bursts on the floor. A white puddle in the middle of the aisle. And me? I stand in front of it – and start to cry. In front of everyone. Can’t pull myself together. Over a carton of milk.
Only as I turn into our street does it come back to me. The costume for my daughter’s performance tomorrow. Forgotten. And now the shop is shut.
The lights are on inside. My husband and my daughter are in there. They only know the woman who has everything under control. I stare at the front door.
How am I supposed to walk in? How can I look them in the eye? My head goes hot, something tightens in my chest.
I am a cry-baby. A failure. I let everybody down. What on earth is wrong with me.
What is rising up in me has a name. Shame. And shame is insidious. It doesn’t say: you have had a bad day. It says:You are a failure.Not the act. Not the situation. Me. Entirely.
My head is burning, my stomach is a stone. I want to disappear, dissolve, simply be gone. Anything not to be seen.
And in my head the loop is running.You’re no good. You never had it in you. Look at yourself.Over and over.
Why does it hit me so deep? It was only a lousy day. Because my head makes no distinction between today and back then. For my inner child this is not a lousy day. It is a threat to its life.
As a child I depended on my family. Belonging meant surviving. Anyone who was cast out was lost. That fear has been sitting in us for ten thousand years.
And that is exactly what is sounding the alarm now. My nervous system switches into survival mode.Any second now they will cast you out. Any second now you will be alone.It screams as if my life were at stake.
That is why shame is not a quiet doubt. It is panic. But there is a difference nobody ever showed me. The one between shame and guilt. Shame says: I am bad. Guilt says: I did that badly.
It sounds like a small thing. But it is everything. Guilt points at an act – and an act I can change, put right, do differently next time. Shame points at me. And I can’t run away from myself.
Guilt gets me moving. Shame paralyses me.
So I translate. As soon as I think “I am”, I turn it into “I have”. I am not a failure – I have had a bad day. That is not splitting hairs. That is a completely different place to stand.
Because “I am a failure” is a verdict on my whole life. “I have had a bad day” is only a situation. And a situation I can tackle.
And that harsh sentence – is it even true? Or is it just an old sentence I decided to believe a long time ago? An old decision, not a verdict from on high. And what I once decided, I can decide again.
For years my head only collected evidence that I am a failure. Now I collect the evidence against it. So I take my DoD. On the left I write my verdict: I am a failure. On the right, the evidence against it.
Last year, when my mother was in hospital. Everyone lost their head. I organised, I comforted, I held it all together. For weeks. And nobody asked how I was doing.
My daughter. When she is frightened at night, she comes to me. To nobody else. Because she knows: with me she is safe. Nobody ever comforted me as a child.
And that is supposed to be a failure? The evidence was always there. I simply didn’t want to see it. The longer the right-hand column gets, the quieter the sentence on the left becomes. Until it dissolves.
But the strongest part is still to come. Because shame lives on hiding. In the dark it grows. Say it out loud and it shrinks. So I get out of the car. I go in. My heart is hammering as if I were going into battle.
My husband looks up. “What’s wrong?” And I say it. Haltingly, my voice breaking: “I’ve had a terrible day. I just broke down in the supermarket. I forgot the costume.”
There it is, the moment I was so afraid of. Any second now he will see that I am not the strong one. Any second now he will turn away.
He doesn’t turn away. He comes over to me. He asks. What happened? He listens.
And he stays. We talk for a long time. At some point he says: “It’s hardly the end of the world. I’ll fetch the costume first thing and take it in to her at school.” That is why I love him. That is what a real partnership is. And I am allowed to be the one who gets held, for once.
No magic words wipe out the day. I am still tired. But I am not alone with it any more. And the shame that stopped me breathing in the car has got smaller. Simply because I said it out loud.
Something strikes me. My husband didn’t use the word once. Failure. He didn’t even think it. Only I say it. Over and over. I speak to nobody as harshly as I speak to myself.
To a friend who had a day like that I would never say: you failure. I would say: that is rough, it will all look different tomorrow, I am here.
Why don’t I grant myself what I give everyone else? From today I talk to myself the way he talks to me. The way you talk to somebody you love.
It depends on how solid the ground under me is. My self-worth. If it is solid, the shame bounces off. If it is thin, the shame breaks through.
My ground was thin early on. As a child I heard: you are not good enough. Not like that. Try harder. My worth was never simply there. I had to earn it.
So I earned it. By functioning. By being strong. By being there for everyone. By never being a burden. I stood on what I achieved. On what other people could see.
But that is not solid ground. That is a thin blanket over a hole. Let one bad day knock me out of the role and I fall straight through. If I build my self-worth on functioning, every breakdown brings me down.
But worth isn’t something you earn at all. A newborn child has achieved nothing – and is infinitely precious. Worth is not a reward. It is simply there. I am worth something. Not for anything. Just because. Today as well. Even after a day like this.
The shame will come back. At the next mistake, the next defeat, the next sideways look. It is part of life.
But it doesn’t knock me over any more. I know now what it is. Not a verdict on me – only an old alarm going off.
And I know what helps. I turn “I am” into “I have”. I collect the evidence against it in my DoD. I say it out loud. I am good to myself.
As long as I was afraid of embarrassing myself, I could never show myself. I stayed behind the armour. Anyone afraid of other people’s judgement stays invisible.
That fear gets smaller. And with it the armour falls. For the first time I can show myself. With mistakes. With tears. With everything.
For a long time I lived for the applause. For other people nodding. For looking good. That is exactly what kept me small.
I go into the arena anyway. Not for the applause. But because it is mine. Because I want to. Because I have the courage for it. A few hours ago I was still sitting in the car. Frozen. Unable to walk through my own door.
Now I am inside. With my family. The day was hard, the tiredness is here. But the shame doesn’t have me any more. I am good enough. Not because somebody confirms it. But because I am.