Shame...

Shame. What a doozy of an emotion. In fact, it is my least favorite emotion to encounter in both myself and others. When I thought about possibly one day becoming a counselor I thought that in the same way others have destroyed things like hope and a sense of "okay-ness" in the people I would talk with, I wanted to destroy the powers of shame in them. Annihilate it.

I would don my superhero costume and ceremoniously defeat things like shame and untruths as if they were some villains in a comic book. My super powers are not on the up and up but one thing I do see as God-given is this ability to hate the things that keep people from realizing the good, beautiful things in them.

When I was an RA and RC I saw these things all of the time in the women that I worked with. It would start off as a resident coming to me to talk about something they had never shared with anyone. It would be some awful thing that made my heart beat faster and the tears would come. Something that had been done to them or something that they had done. And it never occurred to me to not love them, not to want to help them. But almost everyone of them would say something like "I know you probably look at me differently now" or "I know this thing is so disgusting that I shouldn't have told you." And my heart would break in a completely different way. The thing itself was bad enough, but for me the hardest villains to encounter were the beliefs and assumption about what they deserved because of what had happened.

Shame.

I hate it because it keeps so many people from living and loving fully. It is the thing that puts up walls, causes disconnects, breaks relationships. I have talked about fighting for the things that I believe in, the people that I believe in. And I will add this thing- this shame thing- to the top of the list of things I fight against without hesitation.

So whether or not I ever become a counselor in the practical sense, I know that I want to spend my life hearing people's stories and combatting shame that comes with some of those stories. I am no superhero, but I am a shame fighter. Dun dun dun.