I’m starting this with the vigorous caveat that I have a wretched cold. The festival of phlegm has migrated from my chest to my head, to the point where I wish I could take off my forehead and hose out my nasal passages. This is one of those days I’m glad my substack is (still) free.
I’m not sure why we like to trace the origin of our sick and ask who gave it to us. It’s often phrased as active, the dank gift pressed upon us, or something we brought upon ourselves “she gave me the flu” or “I picked up a cold” rather than the reality of a random connection between germ and body in any open space.
I picked up my three-year-old grandson from day care the other day and thought I am walking into a miasma of germs right now, all those small, adorable Petri dishes with their Disney movie t shirts and runny noses. I was sick a few days later.
I’m a Car Seat Grandmother, one of those lucky grandparents who spend enough time with her grandkids to warrant car seats in the back of my car. It’s not a full-time gig by any means, just the odd pick up or evening, but it’s joyful for all involved. But it does mean signing up for more head colds. The shadow side of the gift.
Which brings me, to segue with the lyrical grace of a gear-grinding downshift, to what I wanted to talk about – shame. Specifically, the shame spiral that can come with achieving some modicum of success or acclaim. The shadow side of the gift.
Like many of us, I was taught shame early. We learn it from our parents or family, our culture or church. Appropriate socialization of children says, “this behavior is not acceptable, we don’t hit, bite, or poop on the kitchen floor.” In a shame-based system the message is that we ourselves, innately, are wrong, a mistake, bad, unlovable.
If we are taught shame early we are more susceptible to the cultural messages that are quick to point out how we are wrong. Social media is full of shame-based hectoring. I am regularly told how my older body is all wrong, I don’t support the right causes in the right ways, etc etc. It’s a great way to get me to spend money, to engage in the content, to read and buy and learn my way to not being a mistake.
A shame spiral is a wave of shame that doesn’t stop, that continues to gain momentum, like an avalanche. It is not connected to reality, it’s not guilt over a bad act, it’s shame at full volume. You fall down the spiral, like a psychic black hole. I experience a shame spiral with the somatic intensity of a panic attack – my stomach feels the drop as if my body were actually losing altitude precipitously. My chest gets tight, and my lungs clamor as if they are deprived of oxygen.
The slice of the shame pie I am encountering right now, the shadow side of the gift, is that I am slipping into shame spirals when I get attention. I’ve written before about growing up with a mother who needed to be the center of attention and how I learned very early that if the spotlight was on me it was going to be dangerous.
The day after my birthday I always waited with trepidation for the explosion that would arrive, inevitably, about what a horrible child I was and how I didn’t deserve the presents or the cake or the modest summer birthday party we had, usually at my grandmother’s house.
I realize now this was more about me getting attention from the tiny audience of grandparents, father, sister and maybe an uncle for the span of the brief dinner capped with a cake with candles. I think my mother wanted to be the kind of mother that would happily throw a party for her child, but she didn’t have that capacity. So, I learned early to link attention with gifts and danger. And it was always about shame.
Cultural messages enforce the shame. We are told, as girls and women, any one in a marginalized group, not to speak up too much or too loudly. “Who do you think you are?” was a childhood refrain leveled at me, the awkward, nerdy, talkative smart kid with few friends, moving to a new school every couple of years.
When I published a book last month, I understood the shame would show up. It’s been around too long, I am familiar with its habits, like someone who lives in the wilderness and gets to know when the bears will come out of hibernation, ursine threats stunned by daylight but ravenous. I had anticipatory shame spirals, especially when, as a newbie to publishing, I made the inevitable mistakes along the way – things I didn’t know to do, or did badly.
My success and acclaim is so small it is at homeopathic levels, but I am still having an outsize shame reaction. I still find myself slipping, feet flying up, ass over teakettle as the saying used to go, sliding underground into the dank cave of shame.
Tressie McMillan Cottom, whose work I respect deeply, posted something on social a while back that I can’t find now but it was about how as she became more successful she had to stretch, there was a discomfort to adjusting to the acclaim and attention. It resonated with me, to hear a writer talk about the fact that it can hurt, the success, the gift, even at MacArthur Genius Grant level achievement.
I suspected this part, but now that I’m in it I’m surprised, with the kind of surprise I hear from new parents. It is one thing to understand intellectually that it is hard to give birth, to attend to the insistent demands of a newborn. We know this, we’ve seen it. But when we live it ourselves there is the visceral shock of how very hard it is, emotionally, physically, psychologically. We adore the baby, but that child is a tyrant and everything is different. If new parents are lucky, they have community; their parents or in-laws, siblings, friends, trusted adults who can take the baby so they can get a nap or a shower or just have a cup of coffee in peace.
The parents who suffer most are isolated, carrying a burden no individual or couple was meant to carry alone. Writers are mostly alone. Writers sometimes have community, but most, like me, have only a few friends who are published writers. My friends, and helpful acquaintances or friends of friends have been very generous with advice and assistance.
But the industry leaves most of the flogging of the book to the author. At least I have a publisher. But few publishers can afford extensive PR, book tours, social media, publicity, so we do as much of it as we can.
Of course, I can pay people to do these things, but it is very expensive. When my son was born he had colic and woke up to breast feed every two hours for months. When, years later, I learned that some people pay for a night nurse or nanny to take those feedings, leaving rich parents tucked up to get a good night’s sleep, I was surprised. But we can all feel the financial and emotional difference between having a grandma or auntie take that 2am feeding and a hired helper who charges a hefty hourly rate.
I know how to write, how to review edits, try to catch typos. The rest of this sleepless night of tending to colicky booktok and trying to get events or speaking engagements and begging for blurbs is something I do mostly by myself. I’m lucky to have some support, a helpful publisher, and a great social media manager. And a day job.
It’s a gift, and this is a small shadow, in much the same proportion as having a few more head colds each year against the extravagant joy of being a Two Car Seat Nana. It’s just that every shadow is deeper and scarier because of the shame spiral. Something innocuous and barely irritating can hide the slippery entrance to the old shame and I find myself ass over teakettle, again.
My book, The Saint and the Drunk A Guide to Making the Big Decisions in Your Life is available now at Bookshop.org and Amazon. If you get the book, it would be a big help if you could post about it on social media. If you want me to do a reading or workshop in your town, get in touch. More at speirolo.com