Hope and Shame
See! I can write sometimes!
First, I’ll say that Black words and causes matter much more than this essay in this current moment. In particular, read this by K and donate to your local bail fund. If you’d like more educational materials on this current moment and racism writ large, check this out.
I’ve been thinking a lot about hope and shame the past couple of weeks. I know a ton of people are in the same boat as me: struggling to find hope for a better world and struggling to let go of the shame we feel for not making it happen. So now you’re getting two essays for the price of one!
(As ever, if these words at all move you to compensate for the labor I did to find them, my venmo is @akatookey. It’s not getting any easier to take care of the people I love on my wages alone.)
Shame
Last week, a friend messaged me worried about how long I was taking to respond to her. Pre-COVID, most people could rely on me to be extremely responsive, and she hadn’t heard from me in four days. I’m certain this isn’t unique. I’m also certain that the fuel for my unresponsiveness wasn't unique either; my depression had taken me to the point where I was scared of being asked how I was doing.
That’s not a feeling I’d felt since early 2010, when I stopped going to classes and, soon after, stopped leaving my dorm room. I was eating maybe two or three times a week, because I was scared that I’d run into a friend in the cafeteria who’d ask how my classes were going. For some reason (clinical depression), I was able to convince myself that losing 50 lbs in two months was worth not dealing with the awkwardness of talking about classes.
Ever since coming out as trans, letting people into my life has been tremendously rewarding. I’ve been pushing myself constantly to be as transparent and vulnerable as possible, to the point where I’ve talked about my trauma on stage in front of hundreds of folks multiple times. This is the first moment where I’ve done a 180 and ran straight away from holding complete honesty as a value. I’d finally done the work of taking off all my masks that I’d worn for 20+ years of my life, and now that I’m in quarantine, I’m noticing myself putting them on again.
We all know that the personal is political, but we’re conditioned to think our status quo existence is apolitical, so sometimes we forget. When you’re deep in a shame spiral, it’s hard to think about where shame comes from or why it exists. It’s easy to feel like you should feel the shame you experience and everything you’re feeling is because of things intrinsic to your being. But I find that sometimes recognizing the politics inherent in my feelings makes them easier to navigate. It helped me with my shame this week and it might help you with yours too.
We feel shame often when our actions don’t align with our values. I value showing up in protest, so when I’m not, I feel shame about it. Similarly, I currently feel shame about not living up to values about responsiveness, sharing space, managing my mental health, or even my personal hygiene to be brutally honest. But values don’t give us the full picture of where shame comes from. We often feel guilt alongside shame but my wife teased apart a difference I find very useful. Guilt is a motivating, internal force that causes us to want to learn, repair, and grow. Shame is an imprisoning force that causes us to hide and self-isolate. The difference is that shame is not just about your values, but other people’s perceptions of you and your expectations of their values. Shame takes our feelings away from an individual action, and turns them into feelings we have about ourselves based on our relationships to the people around us. We internalize failure as an absolute description of ourselves and not as something that happened to a single unmet expectation. I believe other people expect me to respond quickly, so when I don’t, I feel both an internal sense of guilt AND a sense of shame that enables me to continue to not respond.
We’re all products of our experiences; we build up an understanding of what our friends expect of us through social conditioning in constant interaction with many people. This isn’t all bad, of course! Part of friendship is a shared and understood, but often unspoken, expectation to try your best to care for one another, for example. But because our understanding of others’ perceptions is based on social conditioning, it’s inherently political, and that’s where we can see shame turn into a tool of social control. People don’t have expectations of us in a vacuum; our expectations of one another come from dominant narratives of how people exist. Because these narratives are so strong, the common expectations become moral truths we accept for one another. We don’t have autonomy over these values and they become our guiding light.
Queers should be intimately familiar with a history of shame as a tool of exerting power on us. We were shoved to the margins and forced to be extremely secretive about sexuality or suffer the wrath of our families, co-workers, and cops. Many, many people became ashamed of being gay, which led to the movement for queer assimilation. We call it “Pride” because it exists to counter shame. (And as a side note, Gay Shame chose their name to counter the corporitization of pride. You can read more about loving to be garbage here.)
Another particular way I’ve noticed shame being dangerous is that it pushes us to hide ourselves, to be less vulnerable, and to be more alone. This fuels the harm done by neoliberalism. In an economy that pushes us to be self-reliant and in competition with one another for our basic needs, we reproduce the harms of capitalism when we play into our shame and hide from one another. If we want to escape this system, we have to throw away our values of self-sufficiency and introspect deeply about where they come from. I *only* ever want to be in deep relationships and in tight-knit community. I want to love and be loved and that requires sharing vulnerably with each other. In a moment where isolation is at its peak, it’s important that I shed my shame and allow myself to be cared for by the people who love me. Love is liberation; hiding from each other is not.
We’re also in a moment where we’re talking a lot about police and prison abolition. We have to abandon punishment as a framework that justifies denying each other agency and care in moments of harm. We have to abolish the cops in our heads and not just on the streets. Shame polices us into hiding, and I urge you to abandon the punishment you inflict on yourself.
Here is a short list of things I’ve been ashamed of recently in no particular order:
Not being able to do laundry
Hiding from co-workers
Not being able to do relatively simple tasks at work
Not “showing up” as an activist
Not shaving for days at a time despite knowing it gives me dysphoria (and other failures of hygiene)
Piles of depression dishes and empty cans on my desk
Playing videogames to the extent I used to pre-transition
Being bad at those videogames and caring about it
Not feeling able to read
Not feeling politically educated enough
Credit card debt
Not using my planner
Missing meetings
Not being able to reach out to my friends as much as I worked really hard to
Being scared of catching COVID to the point where I don’t leave my house
Missing meds
How reliant I feel on my air conditioner
My room is a trash heap
I’m choosing to shed this shame. Are you?
Hope
A lot of us are struggling to find hope right now, including me. Despite this, a friend thanked me for keeping hope alive for our community (yes this is the exact same framing device as before, pls be patient w me). I couldn’t reconcile my hopelessness with the hope I appeared to be providing others. Thinking through this dissonance helped me realize where the hope I gave people came from, and eventually helped me begin to reach for mine. It might help you too.
One thing any radical, seasoned organizer will tell you is that most of our campaigns are losses. We accept brutal compromises or get suppressed completely. And yet we still keep going. It’s not because we expect our campaigns to win despite an enormous body of evidence; it’s because there are wins in the process of organizing in and of itself. Doing the work with love and care helps us build relationships, which translate to actual power, making winning in the future that much easier. The protests in the streets this past week are evident of this. They would not at all have achieved their success or demonstrate power this successfully without years of prior relationship building and organizing work by frontline activists and abolitionists.
If we look at what drives organizers when we’re at our most driven, this ability to build love, we can translate our own perspective on wins. Obviously the dismantling of capitalism and white supremacy is a huge win, but there are other wins we can recognize too. It’s a win when I share ideas like this and am encouraged to write them. It’s a win when someone reads about abolition for the first time on twitter and gets an intractable seed planted in their head. It’s a win when we take care of the people we love, helping them meet their basic needs so they can become more politically engaged. It’s a win every single time we care for each other because we’re explicitly rewarded for competing instead. Every time we resist the forces that want to crush our love, we should count that as a meaningful win. A revolution isn’t just built on one moment, even when this moment appears to be. A revolution is built on a foundation of a million acts of love, and every piece of that foundation contributes to our liberation.
Something I don’t have in common with many white organizers around me, is that I don’t have a specific vision for an ideal world. I haven’t read remotely enough books to have thoughts on that. But, in thinking about my hope last week, I recognized that I’m not hopeful for specific big wins or world structures; I’m hopeful that relationships will get built and love will grow. I’m hopeful for rapidly-expanding networks of care becoming the preconditions for our freedom from tyranny. I don’t particularly care what freedom looks like in particular, because no matter what, love will be necessary in the new worlds we build.
I’m not hopeful for a better world someday far in the future. I’m hopeful because a better world *is already here*. We’re told to expect a world where no one will care for us. We’re told we live in a world where our struggles are results of our individual failings. We’re told we have to work to be deserving of love and we’re told we have to labor to survive. But in these protests, we see the exact opposite of this. We see people commandeering hotels to give houseless folks places to stay. We see people sharing food, shelter, and money on unprecedented scales. We see people eager to make their movements more accessible and inclusive. We see massive, widespread support given without people knowing each other and given outside of people’s home communities. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s here and it’s important, and it’s far better than what we’re told we’re allowed to dream.
A refrain I like from Mariame Kaba is that “hope is a discipline.” It doesn’t come for free. It takes effort. Another piece I realized last week is that hope is social. It makes perfect sense that I can wake up other people’s political imaginations and inspire them even when I’m struggling for my own inspiration. The same acts of love I hope will set us free are the acts of love that bring us hope, and of course I can’t find those in isolation.
So I’ll leave you with a social exercise to find your own hope. Talk to your friends and imagine on a very small scale, what living feels like in the future where we win. Ask yourself simple questions. How does acquiring food work for you all in that world? How do people get around? How do we take care of one another? Answer those questions for one another, and you can generate hope together. If you’re willing, I’d also love to hear (and maybe anonymously publish) some of the stuff you and your friends come up with; you can send it to kid.vidh@gmail.com.
Hope is a social discipline, and as long as we have each other and put in the work having each other requires, I promise we’ll set ourselves free, and there’s plenty to be hopeful for.