Shame and Fraudulence

The Subtle Art of Shame

Photo by Resource Database on Unsplash

Sometimes I feel like a total fraud. I’m talking emotionally, mainly. I just talked to a friend—who I’ll call A—who reminded me of my inherent messy humanness.

Shame is defined in Oxford Languages as: “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.” Miriam Webster describes shame as follows: “a condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute: ignominy.”

In turn, Webster defines “ignominy” as follows: “disgraceful or dishonorable conduct, quality, or action.” “Ignominy” has an interesting etymology: “Middle French or Latin; Middle French ignominie, from Latin ignominia, from ig- (as in ignorare to be ignorant of, ignore) + nomin-, nomen name, repute.”

The ‘painful feeling of humiliation’ and ‘ignorance’ and I’ll repute feels dirtily familiar. There’s a self-consciousness that comes into play with shame, too, for me at least.

What am I ashamed about?

Everything. My alcoholic past. My past womanizing. My anger. The way I’ve treated my parents, myself, my girlfriend. My intrinsic selfishness. My spoiled-brat-only-child syndrome. My placing writing above almost everything else in my life. My taboo thoughts. My wild, lurid fears. I’m ashamed about the over-the-top fear I have of being—gasp—ordinary. I’m ashamed of some of the things I’ve done, said, seen. I’m ashamed of being such a hardcore asshole sometimes. I’m ashamed of being forty and not being married or having kids, despite the fact that I don’t want kids. I’m ashamed of my fear. I’m ashamed of my shame. I’m ashamed of myself for writing about my shame. I’m ashamed of my obsessive-compulsive, discursive mind.

But what, really, does any of this matter? It’s one mind belonging to one body trapped in this free-yet-cornered self-conscious essence called Human. We’re born, we live, we die. We have but a brief, clipped moment. As Nabokov wrote so sumptuously in Speak, Memory (I’ve written this many times but it never ceases to be delicious): “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

My shame, then, means very little in the grand scheme of things. It falls away into the abyss of eternities on either end of consciousness. I am a man having a human experience. And why not? A little shame won’t kill me. It might dampen my ego, my pride, but that’s rarely a bad thing.

I left New York City to care for my terminally sick father, and yet I can’t seem to wrap my head around that being kind, thoughtful, of service. This despite countless doctors over the past eighteen months assuring me that many children leave their parents in the abyss. That many kids don’t leave their work and lives in order to help. Maybe it’s because I was such a little angry, alcoholic shithead to my parents when I was young; I feel I owe it to them. And I do, not just because of my past behavior but because they’re my parents and I’m their only son. Despite my selfishness, I managed to leave my dream to come help.

Perhaps my shame is over-exaggerated, over-indulgent, even narcissistic, to use an incredibly popular and overused contemporary millennial favorite. Who knows. I don’t think it matters. What does matter is this: Despite my shame, despite my jagged, knife-like fear, despite my terror, despite my self-conscious insecurities, I am alive, cradled harshly yet gently between two dark abysses, two black eternities of emptiness.

I exist. That, really, is enough.