In primary school we had learned about ‘myths’ – Greek gods and Aesop’s Fables and Robin Hood. What I didn’t realise was that ‘child protection’ professionals in England in 1989 clung more fiercely to myths about child abuse than they did to the truth.
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I was born 35 years ago. With this body. This body that is a little too short and a little too plump. This body that sags in all the wrong places and looks the age it is, not the age I feel. This body that has produced two healthy children and enabled me to watch them grow. This body has been with me my entire life.
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No matter how logically illogical it apparently is, I know I choose to listen to barbed words and vindictive self-beliefs about me: I am a subhuman being. I wrap the heavy chainmail-blanket of blame tightly around me. That is my fall-back position.
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I feel ‘shame’ that I have emotions, while desperately seeking out those very emotions. Feeling shame for not owning them. Feeling shame for feeling them. Paradox.
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You ask me how I feel … I feel panic, nothingness, panic, more nothingness. Laced into the panic is sadness, guilt, doubt, paranoia, then dreadful nothingness. And worst of all, shame. Always here, I feel the shame.
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