Complicated Feelings: Shame and Stability

Cold weather has returned to the nation’s capital after this year’s “false Spring” last week which saw highs in the mid-60s. I left home this morning (well, yesterday morning when I tried to write this for the first time) at 8:15 to catch the bus and felt the bitter sting of winter wind on my bare face which, after a short but restorative stretch of more temperate weather, might as well have been the heavens calling me a slur. I love crisp weather, but I’ve never needed to feel cold further than skin-deep.

I recently moved into a new office for my day job; where not long ago ‘a trip to the office’ meant sitting alone in an empty multi-room suite, it now means working in a well-staffed co-working space downtown, seeing the same faces consistently, and access to a number of new perks, so I’ve been spending most days working in office. My commute is a lot easier now, contained within just one bus route with a short to/from jaunt on each end – it prompts more blood to flow than rolling from bed to my desk, and it cuts 15 minutes from the trip to our old office.

It’s a strange time to live in D.C., deeper than the local climate playing tricks. Elon Musk, who looks like if the evil gremlin got 95% of the way through morphing into an actual human being, is making more money every day than I will make in my entire life to destroy peoples’ livelihoods. Every day new cohorts of caring and qualified professionals are being slashed from the workforce and joining the already overcrowded pool of job hunters, in which I’ve been treading water for nearly two years trying, unsuccessfully, to find my next step. It’s hard to keep despair from creeping in when I think about the reality of trying to reconcile my professional ambitions and the state of everything.

In my writing, I’ve been trying to find the delicate middle-ground that I’m certain lies somewhere between my ornate narration when writing fiction and the clinical tone to which I often veer when I discuss ‘real world issues’. And what has struck me particularly hard in this exploration is my own shame about not knowing. There is truly no reason for me to feel shame for delivering less-than Pulitzer level writing on a Substack that I write for free, and there is no reason for me to feel shame about the state of the world given that it is out of my control. But I feel it all the same. I hope, and at times believe, that someday I will be able to reflect back on these posts having created some sort of stability for myself, but every day it feels clearer that for myself and the people I care about, ‘stability’ lies somewhere very far away, growing further by the second.

And so I feel ashamed. Shame about the things I am powerless to fix, shame for feeling so ashamed, shame for the knowledge that my feeling that way is what powerful people want, because shame is a paralyzing agent and it is in the water supply. I reflect on the “recycle, reuse, reduce” campaigns of the 2000s that so effectively made my generation believe we could combat climate change through individual choices while corporations spent hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure no substantive change would come to pass. I think about the American dream and its immateriality, the game of lottery that everyone has to believe they can win to ensure that almost nobody ever does. I think about how close I came to dying almost a year ago and the absurd shame I feel that, even after almost losing it, my life still looks more or less the same.

I want to write beautiful poetry about a beautiful world, but I don’t want it to come at the expense of honesty. I want to critique this imperfect and often brutal time in history without letting it dull the joy I’ve spent so long whittling into something sharp. I want to express what I feel with candor and not worry about how it might impact my career. In these frigid days where my tendency to fill my coffee near to the open brim is at frequent odds with the bitchiness of my down-hall walk, and I spend far too many of my moments on the precipice of sleep trying to conjure sentences as incredible and unique as this, I wish I could separate myself from my anger; from my shame; from my shine; from my beating heart.

Who am I to feel a shame this deep? I’m not Catholic. (I don’t feel ashamed of being hilarious). All I feel prepared to do is flutter my lashes as the sunlight creeps across my bedroom floor each morning and engage the world with the tenderness I wish it would reflect back to me. With that being said, I wanted to share some of the art I’ve been consuming lately:

What I’ve enjoyed recently:

• “The Message” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

• “No Name in the Streets” by James Baldwin

• “The Marriage Portrait” by Maggie O’Farrell

• “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson (for Uncanny Magazine)

What I’m enjoying now:

• “Minor Detail” by Adania Shibli

• “My Friends” by Hisham Matar

• “Democracy’s Data” by Dan Bouk

• Season 2 of Severance (possibly the best season of television TO ME I’ve ever seen)

• The music of Nothing But Thieves

What I’m excited about (to be reads, upcoming releases, etc):

• “Invisible Rulers” by Renee DiResta

• “The Emperor of Gladness” by Ocean Vuong (my most anticipated of 2025, releasing in May!)

• “When I Sing, Mountains Dance” by Irene Solà

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Thank you for reading. I sincerely hope that, wherever you are, you are able to savor little moments of stability as we all strive to make it lasting. As always, you can find me on Instagram and nowhere else on the Internet for now. If you enjoy this post please consider sharing it with your network or subscribing (for free!) if you haven’t already. I write poetry, fiction, and sometimes I just feel like having a quick rant.