Do You Really KNOW Me?

When you look at my face, what do you see? Do you see a person of trust? Do you see a person of respect? Do you see someone you can have fun with? Do you see someone you can confide in? Do I look like a person who pays all her bills on time? Am I someone you could envision yourself doing business with?

A lot of people do not know me. That’s because I spent a long time not knowing myself. Sometimes that can happen when a person is deeply traumatized; they retreat into another world to escape the pain felt being present in this one. I've gone through the day to day life (you may have lived with me, or gone to school with me, or work(ed)with me, you may have befriended/dated/partied with me) but I wasn't fully engaged. Well in the words of Erykah Badu “I don’t wanna time travel no mo’. I wanna be here.”

I want people to know me. "Know me” means something totally different now, than what it used to mean when I was, say, 21. Back then, “know me” meant having people say “oh she is SUCH a sweet person!” These days, “know me” means something more like the tangible versions of trust and respect and charity. "Know me" means seeing and relating to the totality of my character, flaws & all. "Know me" means allowing my writings to speak to a place within you that exists within me (within all of us) that you are too afraid to acknowledge and love. A place of vulnerability, yet a place of untapped and unlimited thought and potential for greatness.

Allow me, through the writing gift that God has given me, to reintroduce myself to YOU

Shame, pt. 2

I’d say the solitary event that brought the most shame and changed the trajectory of my esteem for 17 years is when I was raped at age 14. Sure there was prison and counseling involved at the time, but it didn’t go far enough. No relative outside of my immediate family knew (immediate being mother and younger brother). I may have only told one or two close friends about it. I even had a boyfriend I told used it against me when we got into an argument and I vowed to never talk about it again.

Prior to my experience, I do not recall being sat down and explained to what rape was. My idea of rape was courtesy of television. Rape was violent. Rape involved a woman at least putting up a struggle to keep her honor. But, sometimes rape isn’t violent. Sometimes the victim is blamed. Sometimes the victim can get counseling but still suffers, like a person involved in a car accident with side effects long after the moment of impact happened. I felt shame because I was raped and I did not fight back. I felt like a loser. Counseling did not explain this feeling away.

As a young adult, I witnessed some with the courage to air their dirty laundry face criticism. And it was not just of rape, but whatever else society considers to be dirty laundry (molestation, addictions, abuse, poverty, etc). I silenced myself for fear of experiencing the same and pretended to be a well adjusted human being and get on with “normal” life. But there are some things you cannot work away; you cannot party and drink away, and you cannot sex away; you cannot eat or exercise away, you cannot shop away, you cannot concert away, and dare I say you cannot even church & pray away with fervor (yes, I wholeheartedly done that too).

It makes sense now, the difficulty I’ve faced trying to trudge through life goals full steam ahead while dismissing what I perceived to be trivial mental distractions. It was really my intuition calling me to address what I’d suppressed for so many years – the deceitfulness and betrayal of the shame I felt in being me, a young girl who did not fight back. Every wrong, every unfavorable outcome or opinion, every imagined rejection, every soured relationship, I would tell myself how I allowed it to happen and didn’t fight back, and suddenly I was 14 again. This pattern wasn’t a conscious realization until now.

The right questions and answers have been coming to help me figure out how to go about getting true healing for myself. I no longer shun the idea of seeking counseling again. And as I said in pt 1, I believe part of my healing & letting go was being transparent and writing about it. I am going add complete self-honesty and really thinking about my needs first. I need love without judgment. I need people I can trust. I need to practice trusting wisely and loving without judgment and not running away when things get ugly or imperfect. I believe it all starts with me - loving and trusting myself without judgment, and without shame.

Coming out of the Closet (of Shame)

I want to talk about shame, and how shame has shaped roughly 17 out of 31 years of my life. I’m writing this because I’ve been holding on to something for a long time, feeling ashamed about it, and didn’t realize I still was (see Shame pt. 2). I understand the effect shame has had over my life and I believe in order to heal and truly let it go I need to be transparent and talk (write) about it.

First, let’s define shame. Some definitions (all from the Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English):

“A painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior”

“A loss of respect or esteem; dishonor”

“A person, action or situation that brings a loss of respect or honor”

“cause (someone) to feel ashamed or inadequate by outdoing or surpassing them”

So, to use some of these definitions in place of the word shame: I have been carrying with me some very painful feelings of humiliation and distress, caused by both subliminal and overt messages and circumstance, basically telling me who I am is wrong and undesirable. I felt humiliated and ashamed to be me. For being tall, for being poor, with small eyes and a wide nose like my father and dark brown skin. It felt painful. I felt inadequate for not being loud and entertaining; not being well known and well connected. I felt inadequate for not being the so called black man’s dream, for having no ass, or not showing my ass; for having small breasts and the inability (and later flat out refusal) to stay in the mall and the salon.

Yeah, the frustration and constant reminder of my so called “flaws” replaying over and over again in my mind and not knowing how to turn them off, is enough to make anyone slightly neurotic.

Here is how shame has impacted me:

1) I viewed myself as a burden therefore I did everything I could to stay in the background, as close to invisible as possible. However shame begat shame, as staying in the background meant the shame of not being a popular and outgoing (fun) personality. I tried managing what people thought and felt about me by being sweet, silent, submissive (and adversely, forgettable); the Omega female. Looking back, this was really all an attempt to indirectly minimize my feelings of inferiority (shame).

2) I never learned how to effectively communicate my feelings. I learned to suppress them because I assumed that nobody cared to know. I recall as a teen, when I wanted to talk to my mother about my thoughts and my feelings, I didn’t receive the feedback I longed for that let me know she heard and understood me. My attempts to gain clarity were met with subject changing, passive ignoring, and attention on something else of her interest. This is how I perceived and interpreted our interactions, and I further interpreted them to mean I must not be interesting enough to give attention to (shame). So, again, be quiet. What other people say, think & feel is more interesting and surpasses my own words, thought and feelings. My coping mechanisms became writing and “thinking out loud” when I was alone.

3) I learned to run away when things got too real. Relationships can get messy. If someone did something I didn’t like, I have seethed in self-righteous silence or sabotaged or flat out ended the entire relationship. It was easier than saying “hey, you did/said xyz and it made me feel like this.” Again, I was ashamed of my feelings. I felt hopeless that anything would change. My decision making skills were based upon imagined events that had never even taken place. This is what happens when an overactive creative imagination is used in a negative way.

4) Having to be my own coach and mentor, my own friend, my own therapist because shame imprisoned me from trusting others and reaching out for help because “that’s what ‘weak’ people do and the last thing I want to do is be perceived as weak because that’s what I already think everybody is thinking about me”…feeling weak for needing outside validation. No. What I was really seeking was somebody to tell me I was okay just the way I was. What I was really seeking was for somebody to LISTEN to ME and ask me what I thought and how I felt, without being prompted, and actually care about the answer just as much as I made it my business to care what others thought and felt (reciprocity). But I didn’t know how to communicate that.

I probably could have made this into several posts but my thoughts and urgency to share began to flow faster than I could type. Like the root of a tree that has many branches there will be more to come. And I needed to get this out because I have a CPA exam to finish and a few malnourished business ideas I need to develop, among other goals.