I am often ashamed of myself. I can remember having been so when quite young.
There are different types of shame. The commonest form is also the weakest, and primarily haunts us in youth: the shame of not being what we wish we were. This aspirational embarrassment is silly: where is the shame in not being as handsome, intelligent, or well-liked as we might wish? Such shame is merely imaginative, and has nothing to do with the deeds that define us.
Real shame arises from our awareness that we are not who we say we are, even who we think we are; that we profit from and exploit others in subtle ways we ourselves don’t always recognize; that we seek adoration and coax its development by representing ourselves in calculated ways (even when ‘spontaneous’); and so on.
Above all, it comes from the fact that there are many versions of our selves: the public, the private, the intimate, and the inside, the last of which none see. That there is dissonance between them, between their moralities and proclamations and behaviors, is the source of shame (and of our desire for privacy).
That we should feel this shame is natural and even good: not only does it check our ordinary tendency towards self-aggrandizing, self-pity, and empathy for ourselves above others, but it provides us something to share with those we love. If you had no inner life, if your outer and inner worlds were utterly the same, to what inner space would you admit those you love?
Shame exists at the thresholds between our selves, thresholds already present in youth, when you are just becoming a person. My public self is ashamed that my private self is hurt when people don’t pay attention to him; my private self is ashamed that my intimate self wants love, needs love, like a pitiful child; my intimate self, however, is most ashamed, ashamed that my inside self is a moral void, an empty dark space where there is nothing but self-regard and a flickering awareness of how I shift who I am to be what others want.
In friendship and love, you allow others to pass over these thresholds; that is what constitutes the bond, and that is what entails the risk. And the closer they get to the core, the more the qualities that define your outer selves (and attract others to you!) fade: the inner you is less funny, less intelligent, less engaging, because those are partly affectations. It is frightening when others come closer to your essence for this reason: What is it? A void? A desire to be loved? Is that all you are?
Is that what a child is?
Nevertheless, I pity those in our chattering, confessional culture who have no such thresholds, for whom nothing remains to be disclosed after the always-disclosing public self has compulsively vomited forth all their secrets for attention and applause. In their desperation, they wear the void on the outside.
Without shame, they lose their selves.
