WINNING A WAR ON SHAME
Hi! It’s me. I’ve been out of the blog office for a while. Life, you know? But this week, something happened that seemed like it was never going to happen, and I feel like I have to share it with you. Here it is: after ten years of ongoing battles, I am finally winning a war on shame.
Against all my shame?
BAHAHAHAHAHA.
No.
*wipes away tears of laughter and one tear of sadness*
Nope. Just one puny little piece of shame. About 1/3 of an inch if we’re being precise.
But damn, does it feel good to win even a teeny-tiny little war.
Yes, I’ll explain.
SOME CONTEXT
Almost a decade ago, I went to get my first-ever pedicure. (The exact date could only be found by digging through my old journals, but there are some memories I don’t want to revisit right now, you know?)
Actually, I think we need to back up even more than that.
When I was born, I had ten toes.
Too far?
Okay, how about we start here: when I was growing up, I did ballet. I don’t know if you know much about dancers’ feet, but they can get pretty gross. Blisters, bunions, toenails falling off, basically ballet is a really good way to have horribly ugly feet.
I accepted this fact and just went with it. Coupled with the fact that I didn’t go to school and didn’t learn a lot of the “girly” things my friends knew, I never learned to take care of my skin or nails, including my feet.
By the time I got to college, my roommate jokingly said I had “caveman feet.” Which was fair, because you could have sanded would with my heels. I acknowledged the humor of the joke, but something about it stuck with me. I started building some shame.
Was I supposed to have beautiful feet? Was I supposed to know how to take care of them? How to paint my nails pretty colors? Was I not supposed to play frisbee barefoot in the grass, turning the cracks in my skin green for weeks?
Was there something wrong with me?
WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME?
There’s the question, right? That’s what shame says: “There’s something wrong with you.” And we avoid it. We protect it, hide it, and get mad and defensive if anyone gets near the thing that shame says is wrong with us.
To avoid this piece of shame, I just never looked at my feet.
Okay, now we can return to my first pedicure. As you might imagine, I was feeling self-conscious and uncertain. A friend took me to the salon and insisted I get a pedicure. When I took off my socks and got ready to put my feet into the bubbling basin, I looked hard at my feet for the first time in a long time.
And that’s when I saw it.
A tiny, almost insignificant spot of yellow on my big toenail.
I panicked.
The word echoed in my head.
FUNGUS.
MY REACTION TO MY SHAME
You might be laughing. Honestly, I would be. Feel free – I fully recognize that it’s absurd. Some of your shame would probably feel absurd to me.
But somehow, my feet had come to represent how I was failing in life – I didn’t know how to be feminine or beautiful. And now, staring me in the face, was an even more obvious visual representation.
My minuscule piece of shame went from not nice to disgusting in mere moments.
I don’t even remember the rest of the pedicure.
As most of us do, I went back to my original method of dealing with my shame: ignored it.
Every once in a while I would look at my toe, and the very very slowly growing yellowing spot on my nail, and think, “I should do something about that.” But a quick Google search told me that treatments are ineffective and have some wild side effects.
When I thought people might be looking at my feet, I made sure to wear socks and shoes.
For weddings, I painted over it.
I hid it as much as possible, even as it grew, getting more and more difficult to ignore.
For about ten years.
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