It’s hard to untangle the mess of last year, now that we’re in a new year with a fresh start. I chose the word nurture as my word of the year, hoping to gain more peace and rest, to step out of the hustle and be able to listen to the voice in my heart again. That’s exactly what nurture did for me, which wasn’t surprising.
The surprising part was how—how it ripped away dreams and jobs, how I struggled within myself to let go of what I didn’t need anymore, how my family life and marriage shifted and changed.
For most of the year, I felt ashamed. I wanted to hide, so I did. I got off social media. I stopped taking photographs and only wrote in my journal, hoping I’d be able to put down the words that would snap me out of it. I didn’t respond to anything beyond the four walls of my home.
Hiding should have been my word of the year, not nurture. Hiding and shame. Those two wrapped their hands around me and choked the life out of my year. And let’s be honest—I let them. As much as I wanted to get up and get going again, I stayed down. I let the shame eat away at me and I kept hiding. I knew eventually I’d have to come out again, but as long as it wasn’t today, I felt okay.
The thing about shame is how pervasive it is. We feel shame about one thing, but it bleeds out into everything. It digs down into who we are and tells us we’re not good enough. Of course, we want to hide. We want to protect those parts of us that aren’t good enough. We don’t want anyone to see that.
We want to be good enough. We want to be worthy. We want to show up and be loved for who we are.
But we’ll never get that if we hide.
Out for coffee one afternoon, a friend reminded me that the opposite of shame is vulnerability. I was telling her about my year and how awful I felt about everything. I couldn’t figure out how to get out from under all my shame, the worst of which surrounded what I should do next with my writing.
I’ve had a book idea and business idea for almost a year, carrying them with me, hoping the right time would come and everything would magically slip into place. But whenever I thought about the book, I felt awful about myself. Whenever I thought about the business, all I could see was my failure.
I sipped my coffee and paused before the words tumbled out of my mouth: Maybe what I need is closure.
Why hadn’t I considered that before?
I had so much shame around a project I’d poured my heart into that ended. It was devastating. I had a big dream and it came to an abrupt end, in part because of what I chose. I lost a friendship and a partnership and a vision I’d had for three years.
I didn’t know what to say about any of that, and in some ways I still don’t. It was embarrassing and heartbreaking, and I didn’t know how to move forward. So, I buried it. I figured eventually it would go away, but it didn’t. Every time I thought about jumping into something new, it was there—the shame, the guilt, the embarrassment. That feeling that I wasn’t good enough was there.
No wonder I hid.
But closure—that was new. Closure, self-compassion, forgiveness. My friend challenged me to figure out what I needed to do to gain that closure and to do the hardest thing I could think of.
So, I brought it out into the light. I talked openly about it and owned up to my feelings. I wrote myself a letter, forgiving myself for what I knew and didn’t know, for the choices I made that were right and wrong, for giving up. Because that was the clincher—I had given up on a dream instead of fighting for it. And that’s not the kind of person I want to be. I don’t want to be a quitter, even when there’s wisdom in quitting.
What I was forgetting, though, was that in quitting and letting go, I was supposed to be making space for something new. I never let go. I kept holding on to my shame, so nothing new could break through—no new writing project or business idea or anything that might be next.
It’s easy to say everything happens for a reason. That maybe I had to go through all of this to make way for another dream, a bigger dream, something that’s going to be the capital-T thing. But I don’t know if that’s true or not.
What I know is that we can make meaning out of anything. We can make something nonsensical into something meaningful. We can make something painful into something meaningful. We can make the source of our deepest shame into something meaningful.
And then we can share what we’ve been through and where we’re going next. We can bring it all out into the light and show up and be loved for who we are, no matter what’s happened to us.
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