The Responsibility of Shame

I’ve been avoiding Social Media. Trying to, anyway, but you know how that goes. Life gives us strange gifts sometimes, and one of the most unorthodox advantages I’ve received over the past few years is the exemption I get from having to participate in more “global conversations” about the drama in the world. I, after all, have had my own, more “pressing”, drama to attend to, and therefore there is less expectation for me to have awareness or responsibility for the fate of the planet.

It's been interesting. A relief at times. During our first round of treatment, COVID complications were at their peak, but while my community struggled with issues like face masks in the classroom and government conspiracy and whether or not they should communicate with their neighbours based on their vaccination choices, I was waking up every morning for months with fear that my daughter’s heart would stop beating.

So, I got a pass. I didn’t have to feel like it was all my fault, or my job to fix.

It’s a different beast these days. Lately, politics have shifted, taken on a different monster, a different topic to writhe around in and try to figure out who’s accountable.

By personality, I am not political. This is likely for lots of reasons. As a child, I was the opposite. I was so opinionated that I could barely carry on a conversation without the world knowing exactly where, by my accounting, THEY should stand on any given subject. But being a know-it-all comes with its consequences, and the relationship liability this became wasn’t worth the loss. People got annoyed with me, and I with myself. As a grown-up, one of my dominant “traits” is that of multi-perspective narrator, always seeing everything from every angle, obsessing about mediating conflict, and trying, at all times, to seek understanding and common ground (it’s exhausting, let me tell you).

The thing is, it is absolutely impossible not to be political. Not right now, not in history where our culture has become entirely defined by judgment. In order to counteract the overwhelm of too much information, of finding your “tribe” in the chaos of hyper-connection and relationships built entirely online, we are consumed by trying to figure out where we fit in – what values do we share with others? Who are our “people”? And on top of it, the natural momentum of evolution makes for more diversity and nuance, particularly in every individual. We have more uniqueness than ever before, and are trying desperately to cram this complexity into boxes we can manage.

And throw fear in the mix and we are all screwed. When you are afraid, you are trying to survive, and your brain is no longer in a place to discern and collaborate and create. It is in hyperdrive to identify threats and prepare for attack.

I know Fear. If there is anything that my own life curriculum has presented to me, it is a very visceral, hands-on lesson plan on what it means to be afraid. To be disempowered. To live in dread. Before Violet got sick, I had panic disorder. “They” still don’t know where it came from or why, but like any “disorder”, momentum began with a panic attack and triggered a patterned response that made my life incredibly unmanageable. And then cancer came, and Fear became a whole new thing. A real thing. A justifiable thing, in every sense of the word.

And I have had to work with this – this Fear – for years, trying to understand it, to make a place for it, and to make sure it didn’t (doesn’t) take me right the %$#@ down.

This week, we received information that has breathed life back into our lives. Violet’s cancer is on the retreat, against all odds and expectations, and momentum is again on our side. I have been focusing on the positive, as I do, for a long time, but now there is evidence that the world is catching up. I’ve been able to ease myself out of that fear, talk myself down off the ledge, before I’ve had any tactile reason to, and things are now manifesting around that “work”. I have learned some things, and that is one of them – our world molds to our expectations.

This moment in time where I am again in alignment with things, feeling a sense of security in the world knowing where my sphere of influence is (and isn’t), is beautiful. I don’t need all of Violet’s cancer to be gone to feel safe again. I don’t need the whole world to be fixed to feel happy in it again. I understand, today at least, that everything other than this moment is a story. We take what we are witnessing, what we observe through our miniscule lens of “what is”, and we interpret it into meaning – into a story. But that’s all it is, a story. Until it has manifested into something tangible right in our laps, we get to tell the story any way we want. And even in our laps, there is the interpretation of it.

I have been wanting to share more about our story, the way I did before, with all the intricate details and observations and interpretations of events, but I haven’t. I have been quieter this time. And I understand why. I have had to ensure that my interpretation of events remained my own. There was just too much fear surrounding Violet’s prognosis, and too much pain around our adjustment to life. I didn’t want feedback. I couldn’t handle it.

We bite the hook. That’s how fear works. It grabs our attention and holds us down. It makes us wriggle and thrash against the weight of it, the sense uncertainty and lack of control saturating us in discomfort. Sitting in that discomfort isn’t an option for almost anyone. Unless you are yogi, or have, for whatever reason, made it a practice in your life to work with this discomfort on a balanced, beneficial level, chances are that when fear strikes, you strike back.

I certainly do. In blame. In resentment. In judgment, at others and at myself. I point fingers. I cry and scream and make other things and people wrong. Because somebody has to do something, right? It has to be somebody’s fault.

I opened Social Media yesterday to make a post about the beauty in this world, and about second chances. About how utterly miraculous it is to be here on this planet breathing the air and being offered infinite opportunities to be in awe of the perfection of things. And then I read the room. That’s a story for me to savour, because my current lens is different. I’m not relatable. At least, not to the peanut gallery of people posting on my feed.

What I saw was post after post after post of blame. Of shaming. Of fear.

And I bit the hook.

The problem for me is that I don’t have “a side”. Not normally, and not right now. I have too many people in my life across the full spectrum of political beliefs and angles to “side” with. And me being me, I get it. I get them all. They are all beautiful, intelligent, loving, value-driven people with completely conflicting viewpoints. Hating each other. Pointing out each other’s perceived idiocies. Making the other one accountable for the tragedies in the world.

Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher, has a story about a man she visited in prison when he was on death row, who told her that each day he would watch a television screen from his cell. It was outside of his room and far enough away that he couldn’t hear what was being said or the context of the news content. It would show various events and protests – groups advocating for Green Peace, for Human Rights, against government controls, promoting change and supporting this cause or that. He didn’t get the backstory, but what he did see, without the language and labels, was “a lot of angry faces”.

A lot of angry faces. That’s what I see. And when I engage, when I bite the hook, that’s my face, too.

I want to go home and celebrate. I want to go back this time lit up with this renewed energy and vitality and excitement at every single second I get with my daughter, my family, my community, my life. I want this to be the story, the takeaway, for my life right now. I am so very, very tired of being afraid, and although I have a lot of stability in this, fear is addictive. It’s grabs you. It makes you feel like you owe it your attention.

For me, that’s what stood out when I doom-scrolled before bed. It’s why I’ve been avoiding it. I read, over and over, from people that I love and respect, that it is our OBLIGATION to be afraid and to feel responsible. We are teaching our children - in our schools, in our media, in our conversations - that they are to BLAME. They are born bad guys. If they don’t get behind the right cause, show up at the right rally, carry the right flag, live in the right COUNTRY (don’t get me started on that accusation – if you’re American right now, you are a very bad person, sorry about your luck, the fate of the world is on you), they better figure out how to demonstrate their proper allegiance to all current causes put forth by the media, in the right order and priority, and answer the questions on the test in school with just the right amount of contrition, or someone will make sure to call them out for their inhumanity.

And now listen to ME pointing fingers. Blaming. A sick, dangerous cycle.

Cancer’s gift is this – if we spent all of our time after diagnosis obsessing about whose fault it is that she got sick, who we need to chastise, what person fed who what and when and how this and that contributed to her failing health instead of looking for a solution, she would no longer be with us. And if you want honesty, there was some of that throughout our journey with some of the people closest to us. Judgment. Criticism. Pointing fingers. Ugly, awful stuff. But in that context, it seemed obvious that this was not a productive strategy. It makes sense and I get it – when we are afraid and don’t have any control, this is our default mode. We want someone to fix it, and when it seems like no one can, it feels better to be angry at someone than to do the hard work and find creative solutions. To focus on what we can control. To put our energy into faith and love.

I don’t blame anyone along our path anymore that bucked the current of our choices. Those that made things “difficult” for us were only in that place of disempowerment. I see that now, too, any time I talk politics with anyone engaged enough to have a strong opinion. Whatever that opinion is is governed, in the end, by a sense of loss of control – of someone or something having perceived power to hurt them, or impact their reality or their world. I get it. I feel it. I’m not outside of it. I’ve just lived a very, very personal example of what it means to let go of the reins. Of having no other choice but let go and love. Trust. Find the good. Focus on what’s working.

Chemo is working. If I look much further, much deeper, than that, I can get sucked right back in to Fear. But I won’t. Because I get to choose where I look and what that means. I get to choose. Everyone does. And anyone telling other people that they don’t – that they owe it to them or anyone else to think a certain way or put their energy into advocating for this or standing up for that is trying to compensate for their own sense of unease. And I get it. And I do it. But I’m recognizing more and more that this tendency to fear things and feel responsible for them is not the same as “fixing” them. Or, more importantly, for making the world better. Identifying problems is one thing. Actually building a better tomorrow is another.

I can’t fix the world, and I am learning not to feel responsible for its “problems”, despite what the world desperately wants me to believe. Maybe there aren’t problems. Maybe it’s all exactly as it should be. Not because things can’t be better, because obviously they can. There is always infinite room for improvement. And we need to identify the areas we would like to change in order to evolve. That’s part of the process. I get that.

But a little less time finger pointing, going back in history and highlighting all of the shit we don’t like and think we should make other people regret (or ourselves, for that matter), and a little more focus on what we would like to see instead would do us all some good.

I don’t like to be political – I don’t have passionate opinions in this realm anymore, and I don’t stand up strong in debates. Because I get it, from all angles. We are all human, after all. We are all seeking the same fundamental things – security, freedom, connection, agency. So much of being in relationship with others is impacted by miscommunication and misunderstanding. What if we found out that the whole time we thought our enemies were in the way of our happiness and freedom, they turned out to be the doorway to it? If we made peace, ACTUAL peace, with our differences, perhaps we would discover just how much overlap there actually is.

Cancer has been a doorway into my own salvation. It has taught me more than anything else ever could, and I’m eternally grateful for that. I would never have understood the world in the way I do without that pain - that face-to-face match up against fear, against my own assumptions. We need contrast to see anything with any clarity, to discover what means what to us personally. If we approached conflict with that kind of appreciation instead of anger, imagine what we could do with it?

I don’t want my children to grow up in a world that they feel victimized and disempowered by. I’m tired of the curriculum, in school and the world, teaching them to feel guilty and confused about what part they are “supposed” to play and what guilt they are responsible for carrying. I want them to be guided by their hearts, by a belief that who they are and what they want is right and valuable. I don’t want them to seek guidance and direction from a shaming, counterintuitive, contradictory message system that tells them they are bad by association, or wrong simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time and didn’t check the memo of the day on what’s supposed to be important to them. I want them to feel safe and secure in themselves, comfortable in their own skin, hopeful for the future and focused on the good around them. I want them to seek to nurture compassion and empathy and kindness in themselves because it feels GOOD, not because its mandated. And I certainly don’t want them to waste their time in this one precious life worrying about who they are supposed to be angry at and fear.

This is something I feel passionate about. This is where I feel opinionated. Maybe this will appease all of the people that argue with me that they wish I had a “stance” (of course, those people only say something when they feel like I’m not taking theirs). I stand for love, truly. Life has left me with no other choice. Maybe we could all use a little cancer (too soon?) to put things back into perspective.