The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (20 page)

Though I had never managed to articulate the distinction as well as Mairs has, I have organized my life as though I understood it that well. I imagine shame as a dark and subterranean thing, slimy and cool and lurking, curling itself around our lives and then beginning to rot and smell. The inevitable serpent images come to mind, but a snake is a far kinder and more pleasant thing than the item I envision. That sort of sightless, hungry worm that lives in the unfortunate sludge at the bottom of a trash can in the garage is more what I mean; the foul thing that even the most softhearted person who carries potato bugs out of the house between a drinking glass and a magazine subscription card doesn’t mind bleaching into oblivion. That’s the thing I mean. And when they are in our trash cans, we do it righteously. A good scrub, a few days out in the sun, and the slimy, stinky thing is a dim memory. No more unpleasant smell, decay under control, the whole arrangement working nicely again.

I have an idea that the decay is caused in the shady sides of our tender hearts by the same things that tend to cause decay in the natural world. Sometimes it’s the untended wound that is ignored rather than being dried and dressed and protected: whether the quick slice of being cut out of one’s family life for being queer or trans, or the long miserable abrasion of disapproval, of displeasure, of distaste. We have so many things to feel shame about, some days it feels difficult to know where to begin.

We are made ashamed of who and how we love, and in what ways this sets us apart from the mainstream. The bitter truth is that even when we grow up and live in our own self-actualized lives there is often still this particular place of decay that we can never address. We tell ourselves we’re past it, but we do not look at it too much because looking too carefully comes with being smacked all over again with how our parents or grandparents made a much bigger deal about our heterosexual siblings’ weddings, or how we sometimes just do not come out to cabdrivers or postal clerks. Or how the weirdness of never dating in high school when everyone’s a clueless thirteen-year-old fumbling around trying to figure out sex pushed us toward bad choices when we started dating so very, very long after we wanted to be having sex. (Or what we did to experiment with sex when there were no appropriate dating options; perhaps you were better about this than me, but I was only barely smart and self-protective enough to stay clear of the Very Bad.)

We feel shame about our bodies, what they want, how they look, and for transfolks it not just how much they don’t look like a magazine cover, but how they don’t look like anyone we would want to be, ever. We both do and do not want to look at them, and we examine ourselves for any hint of the gender or sex we want for people to see when we’re out in the world. We are told we’re freaks, and not in the nice way that I mean it when I say it, either. We can replay the crash of being mispronouned by one person for weeks, or months, the feeling of the body like a whole shelf of glass and china crashing unchecked to the ground—noisy, dangerous, unmendable. And G-d forbid we should ever want those bodies, these complicated trans bodies, to be touched by another person. The shame of this begins with the fact that the common vernacular does not even have words for us, for what we have to be touched or how we want to touch, fuck, love, revel in our or others’ trans bodies.

We have no words for the kinds of families we create, no way to talk about how all of these things have happened to us, no sense that we are not alone or, at least, in community at the sufferance of a few people who we believe are somehow far better or smarter or more “real” than we are, who have read all the right books and know the Official Trans Answers. A community from which we could get booted at any moment, without warning, if we cannot make ourselves sufficiently likable.

So these wounds fester. We cannot reach them ourselves most of the time, and we often do not even know what to tell someone we believe might be willing to help us, if we could stand it. Sometimes it’s okay if we tell another trans or gender-adjacent person, but mostly it’s like asking the pharmacist for medicine to heal a part of the body she’s never heard of. And like a wound to the body, whether it heals even while you pretend it doesn’t exist or gets worse and worse, depends in some part on your overall well-being. Depends on the shame load you’re already carrying. Depends on how well you are able to tend the other areas of your health.

In a culture and time that offers us a never-ending series of messages about how we’re bad, wrong, and different, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by them. Easy to let things slide, easy to skip what we know is good for us, easy to turn to cheap fixes with big highs and bigger lows, but while we’re busy distracting ourselves by poking our pleasure centers with a stick, those injured places don’t heal. They get worse. They become the portals through which other damaging ideas enter when the tough and flexible skin of our psyches is too badly damaged to keep them out. We’ve all felt this, though I hope for your sake it’s been a while; I hope that by the time you’re holding this you’ve been able to get clean and dry and dressed and treated nicely somewhere they like you and want you to be happy (almost as much as I hope that you remember how extraordinary that is, and make sure to offer it to others as soon as you have your strength up).

Then there is the other decay, the specific one, the kind of shame that is planted and grown and encouraged, and I wish I did not have to write about this kind. I wish it, but I’ve been there and so have a whole lot of the transthings I adore, and if we are going to stop this, someone is going to have to talk about it. That shame is the repeated freeze-and-thaw cycle; love and being shut out and then redeemed again, over and over. We get into the clutches of someone who feeds on our shame, all the shames enumerated above, who tells us that we are too freakish or fucked-up to be loved, that no one else would ever want us. They sell us on the idea that however badly they want to mistreat us, as least we’re not alone like we deserve. They freeze us out and then heat us up again and, baby, the end of this movie does not
ever
feature the asshole holding the end of the string realizing in a flash what many wonders and pleasures the sweet freak has to offer the world. I am sorry to say it, because I know in my bones that some people reading this are in that place this minute, and still hoping they can, in fact, live on a diet of shame and recrimination forever if it features very occasional fat juicy steaks (tofu, beef, or otherwise).

Maybe you can. But it is not a good idea. When you eventually get free of this toxic bullshit, you will find that every unexamined area has developed the sickening aroma of shame in the exact same way that food frozen and thawed too many times will spoil fast but never rot away; it will just hang on and hang on, tricking you with the idea that it is still viable. It is not. What you need to do is chuck it out right away. And if the person who has helped you to create it needs to go as well, in order to make sure that you don’t spend your life throwing bits of yourself off the back of the sleigh involuntarily, then send them out with all the wrapped and reeking packages of your shame in their arms. I swear, I absolutely promise that if you can, there will be better things ahead. That thing about how no one else will ever love you is almost certainly not true.

And if you can’t get free—if you’re really sure that ze’d kill you if you tried and you can’t see any way out right now—then please stay alive. However you have to. Please scheme and save and plot; please have a secret email address you access only from the library with which you reach out for help; please remember that you are precious and that living to fight again another day is a lot.

I am full of advice, of course (anyone who has ever met me for even five minutes isn’t surprised at this), but I am shitty at this particular follow-through. I have not yet managed to evict my shame, or expose it to the healing elements until it curls up and dies. In fact, what I notice in myself is that I protect and defend those chilly and dim places of my soul, sometimes far more vigorously than I am able to care for the well-lit spots. I keep other people, even those whom I perceive to be armed with bleach solution and sunlamps for the shameful heart, far away. Maybe especially them, because there’s a further truth to shame for me, and I think for many of us, which is what keeps us from ever opening up those places so they can heal. I am ashamed of them. And ashamed to be ashamed of them in a cycle of nested unpleasantness that leads me to package the entire mess in heavy black psychic plastic, stash it under the concrete back steps of my body, and pretend it doesn’t exist. I do not want it, but I also do not want anyone to know I have it, and the exposure to air and sunlight necessary for dealing with it means, among other things, that other people might see. So when anyone, no matter how well-meaning, gets close to it, I say, “Look! A bird!” (or the conversational equivalent) and change the subject. No, thank you. Lots of thank you, actually, but a substantially larger amount of No.

I cannot seem to protect my pleasures or warm places by hiding my shame, though. When someone bent on causing damage to me wants to trash a warm oasis of joy in my life I can almost never stop them. I wish I could; I wish for the equilibrium to smile as gently and politely as I do at the person who wants to help and ask them to please, very kindly, fuck right off (which seems to work just
fine
then!). But somehow, this is not possible, and I am beginning to trace the reasons for this to the increasingly foul miasma around the back stairs. That shame, which I have allowed to sit and stew, begins to affect the rest of me as surely as a rotten piece of food makes every other item in a refrigerator taste terrible. Over time, I and you and all of us begin to believe that all of us is as horrible as the parts we are ashamed of. They all smell and taste the same.

I am feeling brave at my keyboard; I want to make a laundry list of what I am ashamed of right now and publish it in this book and let everyone in the world see the Superfund sites of my internal landscape, with latitude and longitude and an open invitation to do-gooders of all varieties to come and bring their rubber gloves and bleach. In this moment, all alone in my office except for the dog, I feel as though I could almost allow it. As though there were some way in which I could start to heal myself.

Instead, I try to heal other people, which I trick myself into thinking is both Better and More Noble, when, in fact, it is largely impossible and basically useless except as a good way to keep me distracted from my own shames. Knowing this doesn’t stop me, of course. It turns out that it’s hard to encourage someone to let go of hir shame when you’re actively protecting yours; oddly, they don’t seem to really invest in what you’re saying. It is from this that I came to understand the shame-as-a-rotten-thing-inthe-fridge effect. In whatever unknowable way, it’s not just me who can smell it. Some role model.

As a storyteller, I strive to fulfill that tradition’s ancient function, to transmit the values of the culture in which I am raised. But also, like a lot of storytellers, I have the opportunity to slip in a bit here and there about what I would prefer those values to be, or at least the direction in which I would like to see them move. Many of the modern storytellers I know, whether in theater or writing, write into their work the messages they wish to sell. When I locate sites of shame in myself and display or perform them, it not only heals me, but (I dearly hope) it acts prophylactically against other shames for other people; opening the curtains or luring it into the daylight in the kinder metaphors, turning on the heat lamps and dragging it into the burning sun in those a little less nice. I have started to write not only about shame but also to it, or maybe against it; have started to talk about my refusal of the pity narrative as much for my own benefit as for anyone else’s. Please notice here that I am more or less tricking myself into doing my own work. I package it up for the suspicious peering protection department in my own brain as something to help other people, and in the process break my own fucked-up shames wide open, one at a time. I am as ever a proponent of doing whatever is needful to take care of yourself, by which I almost always mean you—you should take care of yourself—but occasionally I manage to do it myself, and if you have to do an end run around your hindbrain in order to take care of yourself sometimes, just remember that it still works, no matter how you get there. Necessity is the birth parent of invention.

But here is the other thing I have learned: when I say that something is a source of shame for me, it opens something between me and everyone else who feels that shame. When I talk about how the constant stares and glares and whispers, challenges and upsets, homophobic ads and gender-policing television shows, really pile up on me and grind me down, or how past lovers (and not that long ago, either) have worked me down to a smear with their freezes and their thaws, it makes a way. Sometimes it makes a way better than the praise-singing I do in my work to counteract the shame messages. Sometimes the redolent and diseased places of shame, when I can inhabit them with someone else, are such disaster sites that they inspire disaster behaviors of the good kind: everyone bands together and shares resources. And as much as I resist being part of a group of people bound in part by shame, maybe I and we and all of us have to accept it before we can transcend it.

Perhaps it will require all of these things to help us, to heal us. Maybe all these shames
and
all of these new messages
and
all of our good intentions and sunlight and fresh air and all the rest of it are what we’ll need to walk forward without any shame at all. To eliminate even the last lingering fruity trace of decay. To be the people that I and we and you and all of us would like to be— real role models, so that we can one day imagine a generation not hobbled by shame, not distracted constantly from the valuable work we need to do by the damage done to us, but ready to live entirely in the light.