Authors: Augusten Burroughs
Dealing with shame is like dealing with a cancer that’s spread. There’s no single tumor you can remove. No single insight that will cleanse you of the feeling.
What you can do, though, is observe what that inner voice is saying. Is it kind of a nag? Kind of a bitch? Kind of a bully?
If so, it’s not you.
If it’s not you, it’s extra crap. And you shouldn’t step on to
the plane with stuff in your baggage that you didn’t personally pack.
With practice—and it requires practice, like playing an instrument—you can learn to hear the off-key melody of a tape playing inside your head that somebody else put there.
A lot of people
think
they believe things about themselves—not talented, too talkative, too reserved, pudgy, scrawny, average looking, not good at public speaking—because they hear a voice inside their own heads that reminds them of this “fact.” If you can pay attention every single time you are hit or stung with feeling, when you feel that weight suddenly fall inside your chest—“Oh. I forgot. I can’t sing, I’m not good at it“—stop and examine it.
Did you put that there?
Who did?
Shame is a barnacle that you have to find, then scrape away. Shame is the reason you feel less than, not enough, too much ———————————.
People shame other people because they are jealous, reminded of themselves, recognize in somebody else something they themselves have been taught to hate.
Parents sometimes use shame to expedite obedience. Shame makes you feel bad. It makes you stop what you’re doing.
H
OW TO
S
EE THE
T
RUTH
B
EHIND THE
T
RUTH
S
EEING THE TRUTH MEANS
looking at everything for the first time, every time.
Sometimes, the actual, rock-bottom truth about your circumstances resides behind what you assume is the truth and have never thought twice about.
You must learn to carefully examine both your feelings and the facts and see if you can find yet another door that leads you deeper still.
It’s simple. It’s not easy.
Blocking your view of what is true is what you think is true—your assumptions, ingrained beliefs, fears, and needs. There can be serious consequences a part of you is not ready to accept if you lift the curtain on what you believe, only to discover the opposite is true behind it.
I recall a woman who struggled for years with intimacy issues with her spouse. She was in therapy to try to learn why she was so uninterested in making love with her husband.
They had, after all, the perfect marriage: they never fought, they were always kind to each other, she didn’t trust it at all.
That last part just kind of slipped out in the form of a joke: “It’s too perfect to be true.”
Later, she would learn of his own deep unhappiness in the marriage, how for the last few years of it he had spent much of his free time planning his own suicide.
In addition, they may not have fought, but plenty about her bothered him. He’d kept a mental list over the years and was able to share some of the things on this list.
It went on and on and on.
Even the fact that she drank diet soda instead of something healthier bothered him and he’d made a note of it.
Hearing this, she felt betrayed. She also knew the marriage was over.
Because she didn’t even know this man she was married to. She assumed she did but she had been completely wrong.
The instant she realized this she realized what the sexual problems had been: she’d never been interested in sex with strangers.
Which is exactly what her husband had been: a stranger.
Only she couldn’t admit it to herself because to do so would mean her world would fall apart.
It did fall apart.
But she rebuilt it.
Many years later she would read a diary she’d kept from the time when she first met the man. In it she had written that he seemed secretive and there was something she didn’t trust.
But she had wanted it to work so she ignored these things.
This is what happens when you go against the grain of truth: you get splinters later on.
Possibly, the real, rock-bottom truth that you need to see in your own life resides behind a similar scrim, which has passed itself off as “the truth” for so long that you wouldn’t even think to question it.
In your life, you have a very small, tight bundle of certainties. These are the things that are truly there for you. They may be people, the place you live, your partner, your abilities, maybe even your sobriety. These core certainties are sheltered from your scrutiny. Because you know you can depend on them, you never question them.
That needs to change. You must at least examine them to make sure they’re still intact.
One day you may find yourself in an unhappy place where you feel trapped and without options. You may feel you have looked at your situation and realized it’s hopeless.
I can promise you that it’s not. I can promise you that there is an option and possibly several.
You just might have to move something out of the way first to get a clearer view.
It can be a bit of a puzzle, locating the single aspect of your life that isn’t what it appears to be, the belief you assume you hold dear but that, in fact, you’ve never even questioned.
It’s hard to find what you don’t know you’re searching for.
You have to examine everything up close and look for signs of forgery or those deep scratches that come from forcing something into place that shouldn’t be there.
Like a marriage that doesn’t contain any sex.
Before you can even begin to heal a sexless marriage, you must know why it’s sexless.
I don’t need to tell you how dangerous that can be.
Childbirth is dangerous as well.
Heating something to a temperature of eleven thousand degrees is, of course, so dangerous that it perhaps crosses the border into madness.
Which is why we wear sunglasses when we go outside in the summer. Because that’s the temperature of the sun.
Dangerous things have to happen sometimes.
Just be careful.
Then make direct eye contact and face them.
H
OW TO
E
ND
Y
OUR
L
IFE
T
HERE’S ALWAYS SUICIDE
.
Suicide can deliver you to a place of peace and release.
At least, that’s what I believed when I was fourteen years old and running scalding-hot tap water over my wrists at the bathroom sink to numb them for the razor blade.
This water-numbing trick had not been my idea; somebody had told me about it, revealed it to me in nearly a whisper, and at the time I had the feeling of sacred, secret information being passed along from conspirator to conspirator. Like having a really beautiful and successful bulimic sit you down and explain, “The reason it’s not working for you is because you have to eat your food in colors, right? So have the cake, but follow it with some carrots. So when you puke up the orange carrots, you know where you are and when you should stop or when it’s okay to keep going.”
It was explained to me that cutting my wrists in the bathtub was by far the best method of suicide and that it wouldn’t hurt “hardly at all” if I numbed my wrists first with hot water.
I of course did not think to ask, “How do you know it doesn’t hurt? Has anybody ever done this successfully and then come back to offer a report?”
What I did think to ask was, “But doesn’t the hot water hurt worse than the razor blade?”
I was told that very hot water burns at first but then almost right away it feels cool. And standing there at the sink quite nearly trembling with an unlikely excitement, as though I was about to load a video game I had waited for since the previous spring, I turned the hot water spigot all the way to the left and I waited until there was a film of steam clinging to the mirror above the sink and then I closed my eyes and lowered my hand into the basin.
I felt a hideous scrape of pain across my knuckles and my instinct was to yank my hand from beneath the faucet and plunge my fist into a refrigerated horse liver; a snowbank would be far too fluffy and useless.
Instead, I repositioned my hand so that the hot water hit the tender underside of my wrist and from this small area arose a sensation so enormous and psychologically overwhelming it could not be described as “hot” or anything other than what it truly was: a room that imprisoned the mind.
Almost instantly, there was a belch of decompression as this stunning sensation beyond mere “hot” became simply a feeling: uncomfortable—now, it was hot—before transforming yet again into the most unlikely sensation of cold.
My fingers began to feel plump and stiff, as though it might be difficult now to make a fist.
And just like that my hand was numb.
It was like an object that my arm bone had decided to carry around—something I was no longer responsible for and didn’t have to care about anymore.
I turned off the hot water and turned on the cold and my lip-red hand burned more at this cold than it had at the hot.
I knew then: I can do this.
I can numb both wrists and then climb into the filled bathtub and slice them open lengthwise with one of the razor blades in the medicine cabinet.
My blood would pump, pump, pump into the tub in silky, crimson ribbons before dispersing into a vaporous cloud and turning all the water in the bathtub red.
I would be transported from what to me seemed like the most hopeless and appalling childhood it was humanly possible to have and into a place of release and, ultimately, silence.
I KNEW ALMOST AS SOON
as I imagined my delivery into this place of release and silence that there could not possibly be such a place.
Peace and release, silence and escape: these were some of the promises suicide made. The problem was, you would have to still be alive to experience the benefits.
The overhead fluorescent lighting of logic had switched on and I saw the design flaw of suicide: if your life is so emotionally painful or empty or just something you desperately need to shed and escape from, suicide is exactly the opposite of what you want because you will still feel these feelings as you angle the corner of the razor blade into your flesh or you curl your lips around the fistful of pills. The steps one must take to initiate a
suicidal act and carry it through to completion do not alleviate feelings of depression or provide a feeling of relief; if they did, the suicide would be stopped in progress.
The hardwired human instinct to survive is extremely powerful. It is the reason even the most willful person will not attempt a suicide by holding their breath and then plunging their head into a bathtub.
If the steps involved in executing one’s suicide provided one with even the slightest sense of relief or peace or anything at all that reduced the intensity of emotional pain, isolation, hopelessness—if there was any improvement in mood at all, the instinct to survive would plow over the suicidal impulse and the suicide would be aborted.
I saw that in fact, the act of suicide would add—not subtract—to one’s feelings of misery. Because even the swiftest method of suicide involves particular steps and is not instantaneous.
If you choose, for example, to cut your wrists in the tub as I had planned to do, once you’ve sliced both wrists, the suffering that compelled you to reach this moment will now be intensified by what you are about to witness.
Since you were very small you have seen your own naked body in a bathtub innumerable times. To your visual cortex, this is not a novel or surprising image. But once you cut your wrists, the visual center of your brain will instantly recognize a new and unique image and will direct the focus of your mind to this visual. Assuming you’ve cut your wrists correctly, you will be looking at what resembles two gently pulsing vents, one on each arm, ribbons of blood pumping into the water. Because our brains automatically pay special attention to new
information, these pulsing slices will become the largest things in the room.
Your depressive, drunken, or psychotic suffering would now be overlaid with new feelings of horror, awe, fear, and, as adrenaline releases into your bloodstream, the “fight or flight” reflex would engage. This would raise your heart rate and cause the blood to pump into the water even faster. Possibly, you would experience panic.
And yet, at the same time your energy would be draining from you at a rapid speed.
So the last moments of your life would be a very uncomfortable soup of the same suicidally intense emotional pain and suffering, now mixed oil-and-water style, with the desire to flee, confusion possibly, doubt, and, most likely, regret. And this is where you will remain; this is what you will be for the remainder of your life. Inside of this soup.
You will, of course, pass into unconsciousness and death, but you will never be aware of this transition any more than you can be aware of the exact moment when you pass from awake into asleep. For the remainder of your life, you will experience only all the misery that made you want to die plus the horror and discomfort that results from taking the steps needed to end your life.
I realized that “suicide” is just a word, like “kill myself” is a phrase. Words and phrases represent things; they are placeholders. When I speak the word “chair,” you likely form an immediate mental image; you know exactly what real-life object I am referring to. I don’t need to pick up a chair or point to it to bring it to your attention. I saw that the dishonesty of suicide and all the romantic idealizations that have occurred
around it only served to distance one from the brick-and-mortar reality of the physical experience itself.
To see the truth of suicide, you must go through the word itself, which is only a familiar, cushy placeholder for the act, and you must mentally explore and fully imagine—visualize, if you can—each consecutive moment involved in the completion of your suicidal act. It is by doing this that you can see perfectly clearly that no feeling of release or peace is possible.