reimagining shame, on writing and being seen

how will you honor yourself today? how is it that you want to be seen? what will you leave for the morning to come?

dear reader,

what is shame? i have only known it all my life. perhaps, in another life, i am braver but in this, i sit behind my words and write them to strangers, hoping it means something. i have not written anything meaningful in a year. which is not to say i have not written anything at all but i have not written anything that has felt remotely close to what i want to say. 

it is an exercise of trust between yourself. the act of writing, reading, dancing, making food. it is honoring who you are and your truth. it is knowing that you can come close to knowing who you are. that knowing who you are is not the answer at all but the very beginning.

i spent a year in temporary solace. i left a job that was terrible and found a new one. i promised myself i would write. my cat died and made me realize i knew nothing of grief. i came home late in the evening, with the city half dying behind me and wondered if i was doomed to life of restraint or if i was just turning 24. i came to the terrible realization that i cannot write art without it being honest. i am without my hands without my words. i cannot write without being sincere. 

Cinemas by Sylvia Ballhause.

joan didion in her essay on self respect said, “to do without self-respect… is to be an unwilling audience to an interminable home movie that document’s one’s failings”. she continued, “in brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve: they display what was once called a character, a quality which, although, approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues.” 

she argued to have a sense of one’s own worth was what made one’s self-respect. it made all the difference for one to understand if they had nothing or everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent through the best and worst of times. to lack one’s self-worth, then, was to be trapped within oneself, to neither love or hate but deny themselves of being human, to adopt into compulsion and doom themselves to despair. 

she dubbed the phenomenon “the alienation of the self”, describing its final stages where one coughs and finds themselves grasping at their throats from the expectations from others. it is this act of self-abandonment that we cannot afford ourselves from what we witness today. what does it mean that we respect shame more than we respect ourselves? what is it we can do to honor who we are?

i find myself asking more and more now about what sincerity is. i miss too much of myself in my own words. there is an invisible audience behind my words. they watch as my fingers scrape my tongue for something meaningful. i come to the realization that i would rather be honest than be quiet and reprieve myself. i gag on a sentence that is not true.

what else should a life be but the truth? how long can we deny ourselves of who we are? to deny ourselves of our grief? our anger? our sense of selves?  what does it mean when we can look away from who we are and what surrounds us? the evil that plagues this world and rots us from the inside. our silence that acts as an axe. our dignified suffering. our polite coughs. 

what does it mean to be at a crossroad with oneself? what is it to be who we are? how does one give up on who they are before they understand their own intentions? we plant our own trees, and we poison them. we deny ourselves our worst traits. we hide what it means to be ugly.

we pretend there is nothing and somehow that is better. we bat away our disgust, our righteousness, our grace. we engage with a form of civility, even in the face of undeniable cruelty and fool ourselves. to be human is to be one with shame. to self-sabotage is to deny oneself.  to accept shame is to deny any transformation. you cannot deny yourself the efforts to live life freely and complain about feeling badly. about the world making a mockery out of us. how is it that we know everything of shame and nothing to get rid of it?

for far too long has shame been used against us and for far too long have we used shame against our own. what can we do with what we know now? what we can do with each other? to deny our sense of being is to deny what we can do with ourselves. to deny our pain is to deny what we mean to one another. we affirm our sense of recklessness; we absolve ourselves of our own responsibility. it is far easier to turn from ourselves and to pretend there is no one home, to pretend there is no home we can go to. 

the late perils of the world rob us from our own awakenings. we spend our time in endless pursuits of the self that remain far from what we are and what we owe to one another. we fill ourselves with nothing that is good to us. we deny ourselves of our own humanity, of our ability to create and express ourselves. we force ourselves to look away.

there is nothing more humiliating than our own reckoning. there is nothing more shameful than wanting to be seen. we are pathetic in our desires to be treated with dignity and to be understood. we are human with our desires to be seen. 

i ask you this. how will you honor yourself today? how is it that you want to be seen?what will you leave for the morning to come? 

with love (deeply),

fawzul