YOU, A PRISM

the transformation of shame illuminated

Much of my life has been dictated by the things I have hidden from others. Addictions, habits, choices, fantasies, hopes, desires, fears.

My shame has been the director of my life. Or, my avoidance of feeling shame.

It felt too terrifying and too painful to show myself, in every potentially embarrassing and messy part, and so I hid. I curated myself to myself and to the world.

But in choosing to stop drinking nearly 3 years ago, I also chose to go deeper into my shame. To discover and see for the first time the details, shapes, patterns, feelings of all the things I had been ashamed of and hidden.

That choice illuminated everything. I was witness to the fragmented version of who I became and the many parts I had cut off and cast aside. I faced aspects of myself that I had never addressed, and therefore never accepted. It was, and has continued to be excruciating. I feel raw and everything has come into question.

It’s hard to feel you have any footing when the footing you did have was a shaky platform you built based on projections of the person you wanted to be, but are now currently dismantling.

I have said a lot in the past few years that “I have never gone through something like this before.” And of course that’s true. Because I didn’t have the courage to walk away from the illusory safety of the familiar until now. My version of who I was and the life I created around that is collapsing.

I am free falling. And it is fucking terrifying.

But I can sense something in myself, a profoundly comforting and secure voice, that is telling me that this isn’t wrong. That this falling apart is a part of a bigger process of unlearning and unraveling in order to eradicate shame from my life.

This is the most honest I’ve ever been with myself. And when I talk with people, and they ask me how I’m doing, I do not say I’m doing fine.

I tell the truth:

I am messy right now. I am sad right now. I am struggling right now. I am in the process of dying to a false self in order to discover my truth. I am without a guidebook, alone, wandering the desert. I am lost, I am a little scared.

BUT I am bolstered by a deep knowing that the heartbreaking choice of walking away from what no longer works is the first step on the path towards what does work, in the direction of my greatest good.