To those feeling shame.

Dear You,

You have that creeping feeling of rot festering in your soul. You yearn for an acceptance you struggle to give yourself. Every mistake and negative experience has become formative when describing your intrinsic nature.

But how long must you suffer to feel worthy of redemption? How many years must you carry the burden of being yourself before you are forgiven?

Shame is an ugly feeling, and a powerful one if you let it run rampant. Guilt is short-term, it’s recognizing that you have made mistakes. Maybe you failed yourself or somebody else in some way, but it doesn’t shape your self-perception.

But shame… it’s deeper. It becomes inescapable and deeply intertwined with who you are as a person. It makes you doubt your intentions or goodness.

Those who grow up drowning in shame tend to take on too much blame under the illusion of “accountability”. But is it truly accountability if it’s seen as a punishment rather than a lesson?

Accountability doesn’t mean turning the guilt into a definitive personality flaw or proof that you are fundamentally ruined. It just means recognizing your human tendency to make mistakes while simultaneously striving to work past them. You can acknowledge your shortcomings without letting them dictate how you see yourself or present yourself to others.

People are extremely nuanced: we are beautiful and flawed. We make mistakes, hurt one another, and help those around us. We are constant juxtapositions. There is no one who is entirely without fault, or without virtue.

Without our mistakes there is no room for growth. No room for building who you were meant to be. The person you are becoming will one day thank you for learning from the mistakes you made. But that can only happen when you truly give yourself grace. When you become your own greatest advocate. You don’t need to defend the bad decisions you’ve made, you need only to defend your capacity to exist beyond them.

Shame warps your self perception and convinces you that the only way to pay for a mistake is to suffer, not to learn. It teaches you that to thrive afterward is a betrayal of your intrinsic nature, that people like you must constantly ruminate in their past because no future exists in which you can escape it.

But as you’ve probably heard before: The past is the past.

What’s the point of looking back at it if not to feel gratitude at the chance to be better in the future? Don’t let it be a source of torment or a permanent reminder of who you are. Let it be your motivation, and change so thoroughly that your past self feels like an entirely different person.

Your desperation to be relieved from your shame will not come from other people. It will not even come from reading this. It must come from within.

There will always be people who only remember you as you were in the past. There will be people who associate you with pain. That doesn’t discredit those who remember you with fondness. Just as there are people who remember a careless version of you, there are those who remember you for the times you stood by them or made them laugh. The ways you supported them or helped them grow.

You don’t need to stay frozen in time just because you are frozen in someone else’s memory.

You are so much more than a moment or a pattern. Change can come at any time, if only you are brave enough to embrace it. The hardest part of embracing change is first detangling yourself from the arms of shame, and deciding that despite it all, you choose to move forward and leave it behind.

Learn to seek change not out of shame, but out of curiosity and excitement for the life you could build.

Action Items:

• Make a list of all the things you feel most ashamed about.

• Reflect on who taught you to feel shame about each thing, or what experiences have shaped that shame.

• Stop making the past a defining personality trait and instead start looking forward to the future.

• Surround yourself with people who see the good in you when you can’t see it in yourself.

• Write and repeat affirmations daily that contradict the negativity you feel towards yourself.

• If you truly need to, have conversations with people you have felt shame from. Not out of a need to absolve yourself from guilt, but so you can let go and move gracefully forward.

As always, I’m excited to see who you grow into!

Sincerely,

Me