On Wrongness

and turning towards it with love

Photo by Kent Pilcher on Unsplash

I’m sitting here feeling a lot of pressure – fear – to write My First Substack Post.

I have so many ideas. I have a long list of topics I want to write on, things I believe in fiercely, things about me, about grief, about pain, about hope, about everything.

But in truth, on the 23^rd anniversary of my mum’s death, I am sitting here in a tender place. My body feels a little trembly. I think there’s tears here, just under the surface. Oceans of them, perhaps. Or just that brief cry, scrunch of my face and few shuddering sobs a little while ago, when I sat on my bed and closed my eyes and asked a part of myself a question and the part replied: I’m afraid.

The truth is, one of the things I’m feeling is shame. Or, wrongness. Wrongness is what it often feels like. Not a wrongness as in: I’ve done something wrong. I’ve broken a vase, I’ve added up 2 and 2 and got 5. But a deep wrongness. A deep, dark sense of wrongness in the depths of my belly. A belief that there is something profoundly, irreparably wrong with me. Something defective. A rottenness at my core.

And this wrongness, if seen, is what will make people hate me. This wrongness is the reason for my loneliness, my separateness, my exile.

And it can also be called shame. The belief - not that I do bad things but that I am bad.

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The reason I cried earlier - I asked this wrongness: what do you want to tell me? And it replied: I’m afraid.

I’m afraid people will be angry

I’m afraid people will leave me

I’m afraid people will hate me

I put my hand on my heart, rubbed round in circles over fibres of my jumper. I nodded. I said yes. This is what it’s like for you.

It’s easy to want to jump to fixing. Being with shame, especially, takes courage. The courage to stay. And listen. Just to let it speak. And be heard.

Yes, fear. Yes, there’s fear here. So much fear. I hear you. I’m with you. I love you.

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This isn’t a How To. This is just what I do. What I have to do – because it’s intolerable, otherwise. Feeling shame, and trying to escape from it. Believing in the wrongness of it. Trying to make it shut up. It just gets louder. It has felt to me like it will eat me alive.

But it just wants to be heard. It just wants me to listen. To hear what it has to say, without trying to change it.

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Compassion means with-suffering. To be with our suffering is the bravest and most loving thing we can do sometimes.

To say: yes, this is here.

Yes, this is painful.

Yes, this is so hard.

And I love you.

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