A love Letter to my Shame

Thank you, Shame. You have been a great teacher and a clever challenger in my life.

We first met when I was still so young, vulnerable, and fragile. You took me in your big arms, and you protected me from many things that were dangerous to my survival. With time, you became so good that you even managed to protect me from my own self. Stubbornly, you polluted my entire life with your sticky smell, like magical sprinkles of silent, complex and systemic suffering.

You made me survive, you made me almost indestructibly powerful, and you were the one to destroy me too.

You gave me resilience and independence. You taught me the value of my own pride and dignity. You showed me that my limits are far beyond what humans consider normal today. You pushed my boundaries more and more, each time revealing to me my "real" place, the areas of potential improvement—making sure to properly voice your limited perspective about my chronic not-enoughness and unworthiness.

You made a powerful perfectionist of me. But you never said when to stop.

You never told me that you walk hand in hand with pride. Pride is one of your favorite skills and protection mechanisms, isn't it? You use pride to hide yourself. But the more pride I feel, the more food you have to eat. You too become stronger. The more you empower me, the more I empower you in return. The more I have to lose, the easier it might be for you to hide from me. The less I have to lose, the more you might make my life even more miserable.

You are like a clever but quite painful catch-22.

You are not even a real emotion; you are just a simple belief. And yet you have managed to take control over my inner emotional space so many times and for so long. Honestly, I would be foolish to deny your authentic power and your skillful mastery of it. You can use almost all emotions as masks and costumes to exist, to keep hiding and to survive. But you are just a belief. You are a very persistent lie, nothing more.

Your story about my innate wrongness makes no sense. I have an inherent value as a human being—always had and always will. No matter what. You can use all the strategies and tools you want; deep down, I already know that I am enough, I am loved, and I am worthy exactly as I already am. It took me time to fully realize this, but now I know for sure: you don't have any real control over my inner space or my personal decision process.

And having this kind of authority was never your role to start with. Like many other parts in our shared system, you were put in the position of a protector of our essence. Your main job became making sure I survive in this world. You developed an entire army of self-critics in my psyche to protect my heart from the careless suffering imposed by others. But I feel like you never realized that in that process, you were hurting me as well. At some point, I started to believe in your lies, and I even got very sick and lonely because of them.

You weren't talking about my behavior. You weren't kind enough to use guilt to show your discontent, which is at least fixable and manageable. At least, you can do something about guilt to feel a bit less like crap. But you, you went further and deeper. You used something that is unsolvable. You didn't make it about my actions; you made it about my deep inner self.

You didn't say what I did was bad or somehow hurtful; you claimed and even made me believe I was wrong, unlovable and unworthy as a being. Simply because of who I truly am inside. Just for existing like my authentic self. Being truly me meant wrong and “shameful” to you. You were telling me it was a weakness to show the real self; it is a threat to survival to be vulnerable and true in this world.

You put me in a prison with no exit, and you were also the one to create and to guard that prison. You never came visiting yourself; you sent others on your behalf. You used the fear, the despair, the sadness, the guilt, the anger, and even the apathy, but you never showed me your real face. You just confused me. You made me feel everything, the hell and heaven, but kept me completely powerless about being able to change anything about it myself. I know in your perspective you probably think you did it for my own good. Maybe to protect. Maybe to save me. Maybe to show me your love in your own unique and misguided way.

I get it, the intention was pure and well-meaning, and I thank you very much for everything you have done until now and what you have taught me as wisdom of your power. However, you should really start realizing who is the real boss in my inner system.

I love you very much, but it is not you, Shame; you are not in real power of making any decision in my system or for my soul. Not anymore.

You make me laugh a lot and you give me very valuable lessons of life. You make me remember I am human, and you show me with clarity the current limits of my ego. You give me very tasty enigmas to expend my mind further. You open my heart even more. You make me more compassionate and humbler about the world we live in. You have many gifts, and you are a great messenger sometimes. But you have no power over me. What you think, your critics and judgments about any part of my authentic self or other beings are completely irrelevant to me.

I still care about what you think, and I do want your help. I want you to protect me from illusions my mind could be sometimes throwing at me in the form of desires of ideal self or fears of losing connections. Maybe my immense and weird ego will prefer to wear a costume or a mask of some kind of persona sometimes, instead of showing my true face. If that happens, please talk to me. Remind me kindly that my authentic self is already more beautiful than any other projections I am thinking about or anything someone else would like me to be.

Use your powers to support my journey, our shared journey. Be my friend. Continue using your powers, share your wisdom and show your deep love, but please don't use it anymore against me, your own host. Our authentic self is not our enemy. And we certainly don't need to use the shame-based protection strategy from our soul anymore.

My dear Shame, you are worthy, and you are enough as well. I respect and honor you. Honestly, with much pride, I still bend my knee in front of you. However, I am also firing you from your current role and your responsibilities in my inner system. You can take an early retirement if you want, or you can stick around, but with some new rules in place. The authentic self is your boss. This is what you empower and support the coherently meaningful expression of. Everything else is decoration. It's a part of the theatre we are all playing together.

You can play a role if you want, but you should know we don't play the drama in here anymore. We prefer the comedy. We decided that judgment of others or their validation about who we are or should be is completely useless. The new game we are playing in here is not based on comparison or criticism. We all believe we are perfect already as we are, and we simply explore and learn together how to have a lot of fun and pleasure from being alive.

We don't undermine others in here; we empower each other.

We don't hide or numb. We heal and we regenerate together. We experiment and discover with courage and vulnerability who we truly are. We let ourselves be felt, heard, seen by others transparently and in our innate imperfect beauty.

The door for connection is always open to you in our secret space. If you choose to be a part in our inner community, you can, but you need to know how to honor the set and settings of the games we decide to play in here together. Know your place. Know your role. Know your boss. Know your team. Support the deeper intentions, contribute to the shared vision, and help me, if you wish, to always remain aligned with the authentic desires and purpose of our soul.

It's very weird to write a letter to a system of shame-based beliefs in me. Yet, well, now it is done. And it was a really cool, transformative, and fun process. Thank you, Shame, for inspiring me to write you a love letter in such form. The cleverness of your wisdom truly blows my mind sometimes. I guess in those moments, it becomes easier to forgive you for all the suffering you put me through lately.

Once again, apparently, shame is not even a real emotion. And, even if it is, it is an illusion and a lie. It is still something valuable, useful, and quite unique as a strategy in your consciousness on a path of your evolution. However, always remember, there is absolutely nothing and no one in the entire universe that has a right to tell you that you are not enough or worthy of love as you already are.

You are already more than what you think. You are already unconditionally loved no matter who you are. You are already forgiven no matter what you have done.

You are already complete, beautiful and so perfectly imperfect.

Thank you, Shame, for teaching me all of this in your own mysterious ways. I love you deeply even if my teeth still cringe a bit when I write it. I know you did your best until now, and I probably should never have expected or asked for more from you. I am sorry you were put in a position of doing a job that was never meant to be done by you.

You too are already enough and worthy in your essence. I am sorry you felt like you had no choice but to confuse me about who I truly am in order to protect me from the merciless violence in this world. Yes, you used painful tools of criticism, condemnation, and judgment; you did greatly contribute to my suffering. But you still did an amazing job protecting me. I survived no matter what. I am who I am today in large part thanks to you. And I am deeply grateful for this. Yes, I fell from very high a few times. With your precious help, I burned my own core a few times as well. But I am still here, and I still trust.

And this kind of pride and stubbornness about unconditional love is potentially one of the most amazing and wildest gifts you have offered to me so far, my dear Shame.

You made me stronger.

You made me humbler.

You cracked my heart open.

You showed me the path to my own authentic self.