The cure for shame.

Step one: practice putting yourself first.

There’s a special kind of depression that comes from shame.

The kind of shame that has you feeling as though you must keep certain thoughts and experiences to yourself, lest you be judged - or, Goddess forbid - offend someone else with your pain.

I’ve only ever experienced this kind of shame once before. It took me 20 years before I allowed myself to speak it out loud with another person; and in doing so, I was finally able to realise that the shame wasn’t even my own.

So why, then, am I making the self-deprecating choice of holding onto this new kind of shame? And not only that, allowing this sort of depression take root with the anger I feel around it all?

I can sit here and acknowledge, that by simply telling those closest to me, the shame - that isn’t even my own to begin with - would dissipate. I would start to feel lighter, and I wouldn’t be holding onto this experience with so much anger in my heart. But knowing the logic behind something has rarely overtaken the emotional impact for me. Not with how deeply I feel things.

So instead, I’ve sat with a sinking feeling in my chest. It’s almost like part of me is drowning and I’m just sat by spectating. Part of me feels like there should be a version of me drowning, and that I deserve it. Whilst the other half screams ‘just because you made a decision that benefited yourself first, above all else, does not mean you deserve to suffer for it’. As if choosing myself will always be the worst deadly sin I could commit.

And as a big, bad(die), scary Aries sun, that thought is quite frankly, abhorrent. What do you mean part of me feels shame for doing what was best for her? What do you mean part of me is suffering because of it? Because the alternative would have been another kind of suffering in other ways. Listening to any sort of authority outside of ourselves is the fastest way to fucking giving up on our life.

So yes, I know logically that I shouldn’t feel shame. I know logically that I did what was best for myself. I know logically that the stories my head has played on a loop recently are nothing but that - stories. And not even good ones; ones that I was told growing up about who I should be a person. Ironic, isn’t it? That we are asked to make a choice as children to decide who we want to be when we grow up, as if that decision was ever in our own hands to begin with. When all along, we were fed stories and witnessed other people’s actions that in turn, moulded us into the people we are today. That influenced every decision we’ve made until now.

In one really big way, despite the shame I feel underneath, I am proud of myself for making a decision that put me first. As a self proclaimed ‘fixer’, I am often driven by a sense of guilt (or maybe it’s empathy) to fix situations for everyone. Whether it’s changing something in someone’s life, or my children’s fave toy that breaks - I’m the one that says ‘don’t worry, I can fix this’. And I could have ‘fixed’ the experience I’ve been sharing in this post (albeit cryptically, I can admit that). I could have found a solution to just get on with things, change our lives around…I could have done that. But for once I chose to do the thing that I knew I needed to do for myself.

As ridiculously hard as that was, I’m proud that I made it. Even if I feel like I’m a terrible person for doing so, or that I could have made things work with the alternative choice; I didn’t just want to just make things work. I wanted to make a choice for myself that meant I could thrive.

But here’s what I’ve rarely heard anyone say to me about their own life decisions. With every big choice to be made in life, there’s an alternative move that requires a sense of grieving. As inconvenient as one option would have been for me, I could have imagined a life where I went along with that choice and been happy with the outcome in the longrun. And as much as I accept and felt relieved with the choice I made in the end, I still feel a level of grief, and now I understand why…I took a very snappy fast track to a new version of myself; and with each new version of ourselves, we must kill off the old one to become her.

The grief I feel is for the version of myself who believed those old stories. Who got me to where I am today, but from that day when I made my decision about how my future would look, she ceased to exist. Her path was no longer the one we would travel along, and that requires time to process.

Perhaps the anger and depression I feel in my heart is because I’m somewhere between stages 3 and 5 right now. I’ve been feeling frustrated with myself for not knowing how to move forward with the decision I made, but really what’s happening is I’ve not let myself fully process the older version of myself who is ultimately gone. The sadness I feel is because there’s a part of me who is now missing - and that doesn’t mean I made the wrong decision, it just means I’m building up this new me who will take the reigns for this next chapter of my life, and I don’t yet know what that looks like.

So what started out as a piece around shame and depression, has ended in understanding and acceptance that I’m quite literally a new version of myself now. One who I have to be kind and patient with whilst we built what comes next. One without the shame of putting myself first.

I’ve rarely gone through any sort of trauma in life, and not come to the conclusion that the feelings I have all stem from a past or future version of my self identity changing. The conflicting feelings, the logical thoughts, the emotions, they’re always coming from either the past or the future - never the present. So this is a reminder to myself - and to you, if you resonate with any of this - that we are always changing. With every decision we make in life, we evolve, we adapt and we change to become the person we need to take it all on in their stride. To do that, we must learn to let go of old stories and patterns that could keep us stuck - and ultimately, hurting for longer than need be.

I was going to say that rather cliche line about how time is the best healer, but it’s more about our actions within that time that makes the difference. We become stronger, not by sitting around waiting for time to pass, but by using those muscles over and over again; until one day we realise that making the choice to put ourselves first came a little easier than it used to.

Maria x