Shame on me

I’m cursed. I know multiple languages and live in a place, where I use all of them: I talk to people in Polish, consume all the media in English and my mother tongue is Russian. So I don't know what language should I use for my blog. I think writing in Russian allows me to communicate my feelings the best way, I can be more playful and expressive, but most of the people read my blogs with auto-translate. So all of my “deep feelings” and “intelligent writing” are already being lost in translation.
So… Let me butcher my blog myself, without the help of machines, who will soon take over us. So for some of you it's a great improvement, for some… You'll practice your English.

Writing the last post gave me an opportunity to brag about my identity as writer to so many people, so I don't have another choice, but to continue my trajectory to stardom. And the topic of today's confessions is...*drumroll*… Shame! *Noise of the crowd booing*

Evolutionist say it's a tool, that helps build relationships and societal structures, it prevents from doing unhealthy things, keeps us save and on the straight road to survival and prosperity. People who aren't capable of feeling shame struggle to build relationships and to function in modern society, but I'll be talking to the more well-known side of shame. The one we face on every day basis, the one we hate, fear and maybe love.

A lot of modern Christianity is build on shame. A person, a human being, is innately sinful. We are “wrong” from the moment we are born. You can't escape doing something unlawful, even if you try your best to be a good kid. So the only way to go further is to be ashamed of yourself, apologize and repeat the cycle. If you take those things close to heart and participate in that ‘хоровод’ of guilt you end up with a crisis of identity and… let's not focus on that.

I was a very impressionable and sensitive child, I always tried to satisfy the criteria of my parents (especially dad, aka ‘The Father). I was taught from the young age what is right and wrong. Every night I prayed, thanking the Lord for the things I have and asked forgiveness for everything I did wrong. But addition of replacement of values, neglection of emotions, gaslighting and victim blaming, soon made me ask for forgiveness for speaking up, for feeling bad, for being who I am. I was, in some way still am, a very self-conscious person.

I hated that I talk a lot, that I laugh too loud, that I want attention and spend time with others, my clumsiness, impatience. I hated my big teeth, my big ears, my shortness, my acne, my big nose and lips. I thought I was fat and started drinking a couple of litters of water daily, did 100 push-ups a day to lose some weight and gain muscle. (As you can see, this wasn’t a great motivator to learn about exercise or diet… I just had to do something to numb the guilt I was feeling)

My self-image was unquestionably unrealistic and plain sad. I couldn't think of liking the way I look, the way I think, talk and feel. That's the concept that was familiar to me: criticize yourself, beat yourself up in order to stay humble and to stimulate your growth towards perfection, and then you can be loved. If not by people, then by God. This model of the world doesn't contain much place for acceptance of oneself, of self-love. “Love others like you love yourself”. I guess, in that case, I wasn't a great lover to others neither.

In my family, appearance wasn't as talked about as I see in others. But that resulted in some form of dissociation. You don't talk about the scars, the acne, so you don't deal with it, you don't see it, you don't see yourself. Sexuality wasn't present in my world either. Not Hetero or Homosexuality, any sex, lust or any other form of wasting time on earthly pleasures. It was frowned upon, so love and affection was presented as strictly platonic, excuse me, Holy or extremely rationalized. Imagine the scale of catastrophe that mindset meets when faced with all the hormonal chaos of human relationships.

But this blog is about the effects this environment had on me. So lets talk more about me! And only me!

During puberty, I hated. Hated hair appearing anywhere. When I’ve noticed hairy legs of my classmates, the unsolvable dilemma occupied my mind. Hair is disgusting on me, but without it, I'm weird, so I should have it. Yeah, for sure. I was too anxious to wear shorts to PE, so I wore pants instead (as you can see on my first ever picture on the Instagram). I squeezed all the zits I had, so they would disappear, at least for a minute (Now you can see scars on my face at any picture on my Instagram). I hated boring “manly-colored” clothes, but I hated to stand out. Any kind of sexual feeling or act was attached to shame and self-hatred. So only when I was 16/17 I accepted the fact that men can have sex, that they can love each other. And later I accepted that I can have sex with men, I can love men.

I still notice myself detaching myself from that. I wear bright clothes, nail polish, I think everyone around can deduce my “secret”. I came out to everyone I know years ago, but still to this day I feel like I'm coming out every time I step into the room, have an online game of mafia or write my thoughts here. My sexual/gender nature was so separated from my identity, that I'm still battling to feel normal. Gender? Yes, masculinity is a hard thing to associate with yourself, when you were afraid of men and always felt detached from ‘the norm’. Some time ago, I wore a sports outfit (а ля гопник) to a gay fetish party, and i was crying on the floor begging not to wear it. So yeah, there are some things there to explore, but let’s leave it for now.

But shame isn’t the only friend that likes to visit me. I have a great instinctive feeling, that really helps me become a better person and have strong relationships with other – guilt. Oh, yeah! Guilt!!!

Every time I do something wrong (aka do something I'm not sure of, feel unwell, or slightly hurt someone) I feel an immense amount of guilt. It flows through my body, feels every crevice, hardens, pulls me down by its weight and immobilizes me. You know? Guilt!!! And to escape this feeling I have so many options to choose from: anger, self-harm, blaming of others. Sadly, it doesn't actually help me to become a better person, as it was supposed to do, but I have a nice time torturing myself, while neglecting the people I actually hurt. As I found out, actually I am the cruelest person to myself. So it's a very efficient and pleasant way to handle wrongdoing – try this method and share with friends!

It was a very revolting experience – writing this blog, I even discussed it with my therapist (Maybe that's why I postponed editing and posting it for a couple of months). Feeling shame for being unoriginal, trivial, for discussing things I shouldn't in my mind, not feeling very comfortable writing in English—all of it, somehow paralyzed me.

And honestly, know, while editing it I feel the say pain and exhaustion I felt months ago. Hopefully reading won't have the same effect on you.


Not sure if I'll continue writing in English, we will see, I want to leave a possibility for me to do whatever. But for now, please, post a comment here (if you can’t please tell me, so I can fix it). It would be very nice to see the mark of other people reading what I pushed out of me in agony.

Have a nice day <3